Golf Dreams

John Updike has been writing about golf since he took the game up at the age of twenty-five. In the nearly forty years of pleasurable bafflement that have followed, he has composed essays for Golf Digest and short stories for The New Yorker concerning the sport; he has contributed to tournament programs and walked such fictional characters as Rabbit Angstrom and Tom Marshfield (of A Month of Sundays) through the details of a round. Golf is neither work nor play, he asserts: "Golf is a trip.". Golf has been the subject of many books and the province of many experts, but few have written as…