I just read the last word in John Updike’s speech delivered during the centennial celebration of the USGA. This oration is beautiful. Not just beautiful, but insightful to the extent that it created a somber realization that I nor anyone else in today’s golfing generation will ever truly understand the game of golf. It’s no one’s fault, except maybe the ticks of time. It would have been a real treat to be in the audience for this one.
It was a winter night in 1994 at the Met in New York City and Pulitzer Prize winning author John Updike was about to make his remarks to a room of golf enthusiasts and ambassadors of the sport. The following are excerpts from the speech and my commentary beneath each excerpt. Remember, this is the centennial celebration of the USGA. This isn’t a once-a-year occasion.
When I was asked to speak to you this evening, my first thought was, “Oh, no – my golf is not nearly good enough!” But then I reflected that one of the charms of the game is that nobody’s golf, not even Fred Couples’ and Nick Faldo’s, is good enough – good enough to please them and their supporters all the time. Golf is a game that almost never fails, even at the highest levels on which it can be played, to mar a round with a lapse or two, and that at the other extreme rarely fails to grant even the most abject duffer, somewhere in his or her round, with the wayward miracle miracle of a good shot. I am here – I have written so much about the game – because I am curiously, disproportionately, undeservedly happy on a golf course, and perhaps we are all here for much the same reason.
I love how Updike levels the playing field by relating everyone’s unsatisfactory performance versus the Game. This is one of the core fundamentals of any true golfer. Regardless of skill, everyone has their personal battles with the game and through that commonality, bonds are built, triumphs are achieved, and character flaws are unmasked…all within an afternoon.
Primordial golf was a rough and ready game, wherein nothing but a club touched the ball between tee and holing out; you took the terrain and your luck as they came. But in the New World, the ideal of human perfectibility favored medal play over match play, and precise and faithful scorekeeping encouraged ever more perfect golf course conditions.
He faults the “New World” for the alteration from the original intent of the sport. This is the point of the speech where the realization came that the game of golf will never be played or understood by future generations of American golfers. The advances in technology permeated throughout all aspects of our sport have created something foreign to golf’s original founders. I am still trying to decide if that is good or bad and to what extent. Every sport has transformed from its original form but golf is likely the one that’s morphed the most.
When did American golf come of age?
I’m going to preface his excerpt and my commentary with the 5th reason on why one should join the USGA.
But perhaps most would specify the happy moment in September of 1913 when the unknown 20-year-old Francis Ouimet beat the two foremost British players, Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, for the U.S. Open Championship – an upset that made news, not just golf news. The moment is commemorated by a USGA Centennial logo, based on a well-known photograph. Look at it; what do we see? Two figures, one of them our heroic golfer, a workingman’s son who happened to live in a modest house across from The Country Club in Brookline, Mass. He picked up golf balls on his way to school, he watched the matches across the street, a member gave his older brother some cast-off clubs, the young Ouimets fell in love with the game. Frances played without fuss; needing, on the 18th green, needing to sink a 5-foot putt to enter a playoff with the Englishmen, he rapped it at the back of the cup without a second look. The next day, he calmly beat Vardon by five strokes and Ray by six. And who is the other figure in our logo, a little figure? He is Ouimet’s caddie, a local 10-year-old called Eddie Lowery, carrying a canvas bag that looks to hold about eight clubs. Think of the caddies in today’s championships – burly yardage technicians toting bags the size of small sofas, loudly blazoned with manufacturers’ names for the greedy eyes of the television cameras.
Updike takes the grandest American golf moment in history, the purist form of the Americanized sport, and puts it in context to some of the predominant values displayed in the game we know today.
The full speech can be read here.
