A Slice of Golfing Literature /Part 19: Gary Moran recounts John Updike's love affair with the game of golf, which he began playing at age 25

You cannot say with certainty which sport has spawned the best sportswriting. There is no final score, no world series, no objective measure. It is almost certain, however, that proponents of golf in such a debate wouldn't be long in mentioning Pulitzer Prize-winner John Updike, who fitted in some brilliant work on golf amid a prodigious output of novels, poems, short stories and literary criticism.

Updike didn't touch a club until he was 25 years old in 1958 and he never played the game with any great skill, but he started writing about it almost immediately with many pieces in Golf Digest and The New Yorker. Thirty of the best - or as he calls them, "thirty written evidences of an impassioned and imperfect devotion" - are collected in his 1996 anthology Golf Dreams and it should find a place on any golf-reader's shelf. Among the first is Drinking From A Cup Made Cinchy in which he lampoons golf instruction articles with a comic treatise on how to accept and drink tea. "Address your cup by sitting erect, your chest at right angles to the extended arm of the cup-offerer. In seizure, first touch, with feathery lightness, the rim of the saucer with the pad of the index finger of the right hand. . ."

That article may have been inspired by his failure to play decently despite a torrent of well-meaning technical advice. In Swing Thoughts he laughs at his lack of success with any thoughts involving odd bits of the body such as "Glide your right knee toward the hole" or "Rest your right ear on an imaginary pillow at the finish".

He sums up with what most of us know to be the truth: "The difficulty with swing thoughts is that they decay like radium. What burned up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday."

In a piece on putting, Those Three- Or Four-Footers, Updike admits: "Choking is the one aspect of golf that, from the start, came naturally to me. Given even a paper-thin opportunity to let my side down and destroy my own score, I will seize it. 'It's all on you, partner!' is a sure-fire battle-cry to swing extra hard and dribble the ball into the flowering weeds. The muttered hint 'Remember, you have a stroke here' freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia."

To a large extent, it is the camaraderie of the game that keeps him coming back. "Like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, it is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somewhere together where non-golfers never go."

His observations on the game are not all positive. He writes of "interchangeable, square-jawed young pros who clutter the tournament circuit with their competence".

In his speech at the USGA's centennial celebration, he asks "Would American golf fall into irremediable melancholy if manufacturers ceased coming up with new lines of ever more ingeniously weighted and shafted clubs, with which pro shops can churn their clientele into an annual lather of technology-based hope?"

Nonetheless he concludes in Is Life Too Short For Golf? that "for the hours and days it has taken from me, golf has given me back another self, my golfing self, who faithfully awaits me on the first tee when I have put aside the personalities of bread-winner and lover, father and son". A few hours spent reading Golf Dreams should similarly absorb you.