In an extract from his new book, Golf Dreams, acclaimed American novelist John Updike celebrates the grace and frustrations of an addictive game
GOLF:John Updike
A CAMPAIGN is afoot to bring back the caddie to American golf courses. In Golf Digest and elsewhere you can read of the many benefits: it is better for the ageing golfer’s cardio-vascular system to walk than to ride, better for the course not to have motorised carts flattening the grass into shiny highways of dying turf, better for the caddie himself to be lugging two 9kg bags than flipping cholesterol-rich hamburgers at McDonald’s.
Furthermore, the pros do it. Where would Lee Trevino be without jolly Herman Mitchell handing him his trusty wedge, or Nick Faldo without the beautiful, albeit hefty Fanny Sunesson murmuring sweet nothings into his ear as they crouch together over the line of a putt?
What is a more swankily golfy feeling than swaggering unencumbered down the fairway with your clubs tagging along on the shoulder of a stout, freckle-faced lad? Arriving at the gleaming ball, the two of you hold a brief, mutually respectful consultation from which emerges a six-iron lovingly polished to a rare lustre by the lad’s ministrations with a damp towel as he strolled in your wake. Then, while this youngster falls into a worshipful silence, you keenly eye the distant green, take a thoughtful waggle or two, and, to the music of a profoundly rhythmic swish and click, swing. “Oh, bravely struck, sir!” the caddie cries, in near-ecstasy. “But for the excessive backspin you imparted to the ball, it would verily have popped into the cup!”
Idyllic though this vision is, some caddie- resistance persists, at least within me. Basically, I want to be alone with my golf. I don’t mind my partner and opponents being there – without them, there is no game, just practice – but to have a couple of youthful (usually) strangers also in attendance turns the game into a mob sport. My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations, and unstable visualisations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble.
“What is the caddie thinking?” keeps running through my mind, to the exclusion of all else. And, “How he must hate me!” Or perhaps, with that last foozled three-wood, I have passed into a netherworld beneath his contempt. My wish to please the fellow, or at least to stop sending him on futile searches in the woods and the wild- raspberry thickets, where the toxins of poison ivy and Lyme tick disease assault his bare shins, becomes obsessive and counterproductive, one of golf’s magic maxims being that, the harder you try, the worse you play.
Come, man, snap out of it, I can hear the caddie-advocates snorting – it’s all in your mind. Yes, but that is just where golf is played; in the mind. You are being over- sensitive and narcissistic: your caddie doesn’t care how well or badly you are playing. Well, if he doesn’t care, why is he following me like a shadow, grunting every time I top the ball? We mean, the caddie-advocates might riposte, that he doesn’t care to the extent that you should tense up. He wishes you well, but in a detachedly friendly, non-involved way; for him this is just a job. You said it. Golf for me is meant to be play, if not bliss and here is this kid making it feel like a job, a job from which I should be fired for flagrant incompetence.
The fact is, most Americans are uneasy with servants. In our democratic fashion we keep thinking of them as people. The French nobles were surrounded by servants through every detail of their morning toilette; this was possible because the servants weren’t people, they were human artifacts, constructed to serve.
Not that golf is quite as private an activity as the morning toilette, but it is toward the intimate end of the continuum, somewhere between making love and writing a poem. Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one – a series of effortless sweet shots engraved on the air, with some crisply tapped putts for punctuation. There is an inner space in which this fabulation must be shaped. Some banter tossed to an old buddy across the fairway doesn’t violate the space, but the gatheringly real personality of a caddie, as he breathes down your neck, does.
Of the last caddie in my experience, I learned, as we strode along together, that (a) he had a degree in business administration and was looking for a job in the depressed Massachusetts market; (b) he had been up until three- thirty the night before, drinking; (c) his girl friend had once read one of my books; (d) he wanted me and my partner to win the match so he could carry our bags for another day of the tournament and “make the moola”; (e) he expected to receive rather more in payment than the posted fees declared. When I mentioned the $20 a round that was the official charge, he couldn’t suppress a laugh right in my face. So, in addition to my golf worries, I had to shoulder concern over his job prospects, his state of fatigue and hangover, his girlfriend’s literary life, and his tip.
Indeed, the caddie’s tip, approaching as inexorably as one’s own death, and sooner, becomes a ruinous preoccupation. I have never had a caddie over 14 years of age who did not look disgruntled when he was paid. Under 14, they are still financially innocent, and grateful for anything green. But in Ireland, once, after a round in a gale that mixed snow with a driving rain, I saw a pack of snarling caddies turn and attack the leader of our golf tour, who stuck to his proposed gratuity at the risk of his life.
The caddies in Scotland and Ireland are not preambling their career; this is their career, pursued day after plodding day under a dark cloud of Celtic stoicism and alcoholic vapours. Standing downwind from one is enough to make your putter wobble. Their intricate expertise often seems gratuitous: they tell you a ball is lost while it’s still in the air, and that a 12m putt will break 3cm to the left at the end. They bet among themselves, evidently, on the outcome of the matches they are caddying for, and some of their advice may be deliberately counter-productive.
Nevertheless, a hard-won wisdom lurks in those crinkly eyes that have smilingly watched so many visiting Yank and Japanese foursomes come to bitter grief in the venerable bunkers and grassy dunes. All an American caddie’s eyes hold is the glaze of a childhood spent staring at a television set. At first, he gives you an eight-iron for 150m, as if you are Fred Couples; by the end of the round, he is handing you a three-iron and telling you to punch it.
Will the back-to-caddies movement succeed, and will its ecological benefits make up for the loss of the Amazonian rain forest? Or will it fail, and those delightfully humming little golf carts, which never expect a tip or emit a snicker, reduce every course between Pebble Beach and Shinnecock Hills to rutted desert? Keep tuned to this station. In my case, until my knees buckle I will carry my own bag; golf is one misery that doesn’t necessarily love company.