December Golf

Golf is a game of letting go.

— John Updike

Among the countless magazines where John Updike placed articles—pieces that earned him ten cents a word or less—Golf Digest may seem the oddest, until you realize the writer had a lifelong love for the game.

That love is on full display in "December Golf," a 1,000-word essay that ran in the December 1989 issue.

Its title alone signals Updike's theme—finales—and its opening two paragraphs make clear you're not in for run-of-the-mill sports writing.

You're in for an elegy. 

Through most of the piece, indeed, Updike lingers over closings (the clubhouse, pro shop and regular greens, for instance), the "savor of last things," and the abundant reminders that the golf season is at its bittersweet end.

Just as a day may come at sunset into its most glorious hour, or a life toward the gray-bearded end enter a halcyon happiness, December golf, as long as it lasts, can seem the sweetest golf of the year. 

The sweetest, Updike says, because in December "golf feels, on the frost-stiffened fairways, reduced to its austere and innocent essence."

There are no tee markers, no starting times, no scorecards, no gasoline carts—just golf-mad men and women, wearing wool hats and two sweaters each, moving on their feet. The season’s handicap computer has been disconnected, so the sole spur to good play is rudimentary human competition—a simple best-ball Nassau or 50-cent game of skins, its running tally carried in the head of the accountant or retired banker in the group. You seem to be, in December golf, reinventing the game, in some rough realm predating 15th-century Scotland.

In December golf, Updike says, excuses abound and rules are forgotten, freeing the players at last to compete on equal footing.

John Updike

Excuses abound, in short, for not playing very well, and the well-struck shot has a heightened luster as it climbs through the heavy air and loses itself in the dazzle of the low winter sun. Winter rules, of course, legitimize generous relocations on the fairway, and with the grass all dead and matted, who can say where the fairway ends? It possibly extends, in some circumstances, even into the bunkers, where the puddling weather, lack of sand rakes and foraging raccoons have created conditions any reasonable golfer must take it upon himself to adjust with his foot. A lovely leniency, in short, prevails in December golf, as a reward for our being out there at all.

That leniency compensates for the havoc the untended course and chilly air wreak on Updike's swing, a gnawing irritant both to him and his partner.

It is with a great effort of imagination—a long reach back into the airy warmth of summer—that I remind myself that golf is a game of letting go, of a motion that is big and free. “Throw your hands at the hole,” I tell myself. But by then the Nassau has been decided, and dusk has crept out of the woods into the fairways. 

As early night falls, the December golfers are ready to call it quits, for the day, for the season. And why not? They've discovered how to let go—the secret to the game.

Time to pack it in. The radio calls for snow tomorrow. “Throw your hands at the hole.” The last swing feels effortless, and the ball vanishes dead ahead, gray lost in the gray, right where the 18th flag would be. The secret of golf has been found at last, after eight months of futilely chasing it. Now, the trick is to hold it in mind, all the indoor months ahead, without its melting away.

You can read more of Updike's reflections on golf here.