Thanks Tony.
And thanks to the USGA Museum (
http://www.usgamuseum.com/) for publishing "The spirit of the game" from John Updike :
"I never feel more happily American than when on a golf course. Golf is a game of space, and America is a spacious land - even more so one hundred years ago when the USGA was founded. Nor for the U.S., once the pawky old game took root here, the thrifty Scots’ use of waste linksland by the sandy shore. Forests and farms went under to the shoveling crews and horse teams and then the bulldozer and the front loader to make space for the booming drive, the elevated tee, the glimmering water hazard, the cunning dogleg. This largeness of scale, the epic earthworks that carve a winding green firmament beneath the firmament of cloudy blue, is one of the powerful charms that strikes a newcomer to golf, and that continues to entrance the duffer heavy with years. The tennis court is a cage by comparison, and the football field a mirthless gridiron. Only baseball also consecrates a meadow to play, and not one so wide and various, besprinkled with flowers, studded with trees, haunted by wildlife - a giant humming odorous piece of nature. The same course, played ninety times a summer, is never the same; the wind, the wetness of the soil, the thickness and tint of the foliage all affect the flight of the ball and the condition of the lie. Playing golf, we breathe natural vastness, and reclaim Adam’s Edenic heritage.
The tools of the game answer to this vastness - the little ball, engagingly dimpled all over, and the hawk-faced clubs, with their wooly hoods. When else does a person move an object so far and high with mere musculature, as mystically leveraged by the mechanics of the swing? What a beautiful thing a swing is, what a bottomless source of instruction and chastisement! The average golfer, if I am a fair specimen, is hooked when he hits his first good shot; the ball climbs into the air all of its own, it seems - a soaring speck conjured from the effortless airiness of an accidentally correct swing. And then, he or she, that average golfer, spends endless frustrating afternoons, whole decades of them, trying to recover and tame the delicate wildness of that first sweet swing. Was ever any sporting motion so fraught with difficulty and mystery?
The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many items - if we remember to keep our heads still, we forget to shift our weight; if we remember to shift our weight, we lift our head, or stiffen the left knee, or uncock the wrists too soon. A playing partner of mine has had great luck with the four-part formula, “low, slow, inside-out, and finish high.” But this is one too many thoughts for me to hold in the perilous two seconds or so between the stately takeaway and the majestic follow-through. The swing thought that worked so well last Wednesday flies out of my head on Sunday. “Arms like ropes,” “soft from the top,” “turn your back,” “hit with your feet,” “throw your hands at the hole,” “keep the right elbow close to the body,” “touch first the left shoulder with your chin and then the right,” “think oily” - all have worked for me, if only for a spell. The excitement of hitting the ball and seeing where it will go are too much for me. Of all sports, golf at least favors an excitable disposition. You don’t have to look as sleepy as Fuzzy Zoeller, or be as expressionless as Davis Love III, but it takes more than a dash of phlegm to apply one’s talents steadily over the length of eighteen holes.
This, too, this drawling quality of good golf, seems well suited to our national character. Laconic, cool, easy in the saddle, eyes dryly squinting at the distant horizon - these attributes belong equally to the cowboy and the good golfer. Who is more American, Gary Cooper or Sam Snead? Our champions, from Francis Ouimet to Ben Hogan on up to Fred Couples, tend to be terse types who let the clubs do the talking. Once American golfers, basking in the electronic sunshine that Arnold Palmer turned on, became personable on television and productive of gracious on-the-spot interviews, the underexposed Europeans began to win our championships.
Among the benisons golf bestows upon its devotees is a relative hush. One says “good putt” or “too bad” or “two up and three to go” and there is no obligation to say much more; a worshipful silence attends the long walks between shots, the ignominious searching of the rough, the solemn, squatting appraisal of a treacherous, critical putt. Golf is a constant struggle with one’s self, productive of a few grunts and expletives but not extended discourse; it is a mode of meditation, a communion with the laws of aerodynamics, a Puritan exercise in inward exhortation and outward stoicism. Since its rules can be infracted in the privacy of a sand bunker or a sumac grove, it tests the conscience. And it is the only professional game that, under the stress of ever-bigger bucks and crowds, hasn’t lost its manners.
How much poorer my sense of my native land would be if I had not, at the age of twenty-five, fallen in love with golf! Many landscapes have been engraved in my consciousness by the pressures of this or that golf shot. The magnificent view, for instance, from the fourth tee of the Cape Ann public course in Essex, Massachusetts - of salt marshes interwoven with arms of a steel-blue tidal inlet, cottage-laden peninsulas, and strips of glowing white beach - takes fire in my mind’s eye from the exaltation of a well-struck drive drawing into the leftward curve of the fairway, taking a big bound off the slope there, and winding up in fine position to set up a birdie on this scenic patsy of a par five. In Florida, where we can no longer draw close to the original landscape, so thoroughly paved over and air-conditioned, but on a golf course, as one strives to retrieve the ball from the edge of a mangrove swamp or hit it cleanly out of a nest of dried-up palm fronds. The secrets of a locale declare themselves in the interstices of a golf game: the sun-baked spiciness of Caribbean underbrush, the resiny scent and slippery lie beneath a stand of Vermont pines, the numerous anthills of Pennsylvania, like so many cones of spilled coffee grounds. And I am not a golf tourist - the same course day after day holds adventure enough for me, and strangeness, and inexhaustible matter for thought. Until I played golf, for instance, I scarcely knew what grass was - its varying lengths, breadths, resilience, and greens of resistance, glossy uprightness, and just plain friendliness, as it sits your ball up or snuggles it down, and it returns your stare as you trudge the length of the long fifteenth fairway to the pot bunker where your errant three-wood, in an ocean of grass, has found a single lonely island of depressed, depressing sand.
People, too, yield up their nuances to golf. As it happened, several of my early, formative playing partners were women: my first wife’s aunt, who first put a club into my hand and gave me my first tips (hit the ball with the back of your left hand, she said, and take the putter back as many inches as the putt is feet long); a Japanese widow, somewhat my senior, who told me, after an adequate but unsweet shot, “Not you, Not fly like bird”; an Englishwoman, as smart and spiky as her kiltied shoes, who kept the ball stolidy in the center of the fairway and beat me hollow on her green and soggy layout in suburban London. It was a lesson in feminism to pace the course with these determined females. In the seaside Massachusetts town where I spent my masculine prime, my faithful partners were a local druggist, a pediatrician, and the Baha’i owner of an automatic car wash. Reduced each Wednesday to the same innocence and ineptitude, we loved one another, it seems not too much to say; at least we love the world we shared for those four hours, a common ground outside of whose bounds we had little to communicate to one another. A priest without his collar, a movie star without his agent, and a Martha’s Vineyard hippie without his shoes have been some of my other playing companions, all enjoyable, as the differences between us were quickly subdued to the glories and frustrations of the sport of golf.
No other game, to my knowledge, provides so ready and effective a method of handicapping, which can produce a genuine match between gross unequals. On the ski slopes, the son quickly outspeeds the father; at the backgammon table, the mother consistently outsmarts the daughter; but on the golf course, we play our parents and our children with unfeigned competitive excitement, once the handicap strokes are placed on the card. Golf is a great social bridge, and a great tunnel into the essences of others, for people are naked when they swing - their patience or impatience, their optimism or pessimism, their grace or awkwardness, the very style of their life’s desires are all bared. Like children trying to walk and bear cubs trying to climb a tree, they are lovable in their imperfection and then all the more lovable in their occasional triumphs of muscle and will. The putt that wobbles in, the chip that skids up close, the iron that climbs like a rocket and sinks like a plumb line - we cheer such momentary feats as if they were our own. Golf is a competitive experience, yes, but also an aesthetic one - a mutual appreciation that burns away the grit of selfish aggression, or sublimates it, alchemically, into a hovering bonhomie.
On a golf course, I feel free - free of my customary worries, left back at the clubhouse and in the parking lot, and free even of the physical limits placed on my body, as I try to imagine this or that soaring, unerring shot. In Michael Murphy’s mystical yet practical “Golf in the Kingdom,” the acolyte-narrator relates of his critical midnight lesson with the guru Shivas Irons: “As I fell into the focus Shivas wanted, my body widened until it embraced the ball all the way to the target. He had said that the club and the ball are one. ‘Aye, ane fiedle afore ye e’er swung’ [all one field before you ever swung]...and sure enough I became that field.” The spirit of golf is transcendental and free. Americans are not the only people to treasure freedom - all people treasure it, even when they dare not name it - but here above all is freedom proclaimed as a national ideal. After the game’s slow start a century ago (our first golf course, St. Andrew’s in Yonkers, was founded in 1888, fifteen years after Canadians formed the Montreal Golf Club), the United States took to golf with such a vengeance that, between the Age of Jones and the Age of Nicklaus, it seemed an American game. A curious number of that long era’s stars (Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, Jimmy Demaret, Lee Trevino, Ben Crenshaw) came from Texas, the American superstate, with the widest open spaces and a superabundance of those hot days that bring out golf’s subtlest juices. Now, the Europeans are in the game, and not just our old cronies the English and the Scots; even Germany has produced a superstar. In golf, as in every other international activity, the United States must prove itself anew, and this is a good thing. On the first tee, all men, and all nationalities, are equal, and after the eighteenth green, there is no arguing with the scorecard.
Complexity and simplicity: in the tension between them lies the beauty of the real. Golf generates more books, more incidental rules, more niceties of instruction, and more innovations in equipment than any other game, yet it has a scoring system of divine simplicity: as all souls are equal before their Maker, a two-inch putt counts the same as a 250-yard drive. There is a comedy in this, and a certain unfairness even, which make golf an even apter mirror of reality. But its reflection is a kindly one, with some funhouse warps and waves in the glass; it is life without the weight. Or so it has seemed to me, on many a dewy morning and many a long-shadowed afternoon spent in those pretty pieces of America set aside for this grand and gracious form of play. "