John Updike - Golf Quotes

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The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.

John Updike
... golf appeals to the idiot in us, and the child. … Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.

John Updike
Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.

John Updike
Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways; we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.

John Updike
The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.

John Updike
[Harry having drawn at golf] The shape of his collapse clings to him. Who says the universe isn't soaked in disgrace?

John Updike
As in marriage, there is sharing [in golf]; we search for one another's lost balls, we comment helpfully upon one another's defective swings, we march more or less in the same direction, and we come together, like couples at breakfast and dinner, on the tees and on the greens.

John Updike
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 makes golf an even apter mirror of reality.

John Updike
Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.

John Updike