Recent March: Rabbit, Run

"In avoiding looking at Eccles he looks at the ball, which sits high on the tee and already seems free of the ground. Very simply he brings the clubhead around his shoulder into it. The sound has a hollowness, a singleness he hasn't heard before. His arms force his head up and his ball is hung way out, lunarly pale against the beautiful black blue of storm clouds, his grandfather's color stretched dense across the north. It recedes along a line straight as a ruler-edge. Stricken; sphere, star, speck. It hesitates, and Rabbit thinks it will die, but he's fooled, for the ball makes its hesitation the ground of a final leap: with a kind of visible sob takes a last bite of space before vanishing in falling. 'That's it!' he cries and, turning to Eccles with a grin of aggrandizement, repeats, 'That's it.'"

(John Updike, Rabbit, Run. Alfred A. Knopf, 1960)

Golf is a game of epiphanies, moments of clarity and realisation when the game appears open and essential, when everything falls into place and new trajectories seem not just possible but inevitable. But as fast as this chimera appears, it is gone again, and golf is a place of dread and despondency. John Updike’s Harry Angstrom, better known as Rabbit, comes to golf reluctantly, dragged to the course as he is in Rabbit, Run by the Reverend Eccles, who’s real purpose is the rescue of Rabbit’s marriage to Janice. Rabbit was a high school basketball star first, the ‘champ’ who never recovered from the acclaim he enjoyed and the ease with which he won it. Basketball had come naturally to him and, having been good at something without trying, he struggles with the trying part of being good at anything else thereafter. 

Golf lends itself to fantasy because we are persuaded that its difficulty is explicable by some external force. The lie that ‘isn’t very nice’, a tricky gusting wind, or a pockmarked, slow green. And yet it leads us to dream, to hope, because it is only you that can change how you play (you are not returning a better player’s serve, your competition is with the course and your own temperament); you are pitting your wits and your hands against the land in front of you. And if, like me, you’ve lulled yourself to sleep by plotting your way around your local course (I never get past the 5th hole before I’m out), you think you have spent enough time considering the yardages and approaches and that the next round will be different. Epiphanies, plans, and careful club selections. 

The American Century was good to Rabbit, as he got older he had more time for the game, but golf reminds him more of what he has lost than what he has been given. His declining health, the increasing heaviness of his frame and his sense of his own fattening, burdened vascular system denying him the pleasures (of both sport and the flesh) he feels are his due. Often in Updike’s telling Rabbit is playing in late summer, or in winter under the Florida sun, on long hot days when the heat and the lengthening shadows evoke a closing window of opportunity; that there won’t be much more of this, a waning of the possibility for those ‘that’s it!’ moments.

He [Bernie] doesn’t see what Rabbit sees in the game—infinity, an opportunity for infinite improvement. Rabbit doesn’t see it himself today.

(Rabbit at Rest, Penguin, 1990)

In its bliss and aggravation, golf calls us back with remarkably few moments of joy. In a single round, out in the heat for four or so hours, it will just be a couple of shots that suggest the bliss and infinity that Rabbit enjoys. In all that time, just a few seconds, moments really, when it all comes together. We suffer any number of frustrations and humiliations, unrealistic goals and the dispiriting comparison with a slightly better playing partner, who offers gentle encouragement but seems sceptical that it will help.

March is the month when spring arrives, when for many of us the clocks change and the evenings draw out. Augusta is coming soon to our screens, the single most absorbing and technicolour depiction of golf, perfect in its artifice and human in its drama. Now is the time we can return fully to the course, late into the evening, on and on against the encroaching darkness in search of the infinite. 

The minutiae of my own struggle right now is the dogged pursuit of a score better than 83 at my local course. In the last ten rounds there I’ve had 87, 85, 83, 86, 85, 93, 85, 84, 91. On my handicap history sheet there’s half a dozen 83’s. What would it take to just save a shot here, or to hole a putt there?*

*On the 16th April, as I edit this ‘March’ column a little late, an 82 was achieved.