""Hit it with the back of your..." - Quote by John Updike
"Hit it with the back of your left hand" was the first swing thought I ever heard, brusquely bu not unlovingly put to me by the aunt-in-law who had moments before placed a golf club in my virgin grip. I was twenty-five, and had spent my youth in a cloisterd precinct of teh middle class where golf was a rumoured something, like champagne breakfasts and divorce, that the rich did.
More by John Updike
“Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.”
“The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.”
“Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.”
More on Golf
“There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.”
“If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.”
“If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be barred from any public office in the United States and the families of the breed would be shipped off to the white slave corrals of Argentina.”
More on Sports
“Golf is good for the soul. You get so mad at yourself you forget to hate your enemies.”
“The last year I was playing, I asked the stick boy to get me a Diet Coke and he said, "Really?" But I always had one on the bench because that's what I did in 1979 when there wasn't Gatorade. If you needed energy you went and got a Snickers or a Kit Kat. Nobody knew any better.”
“When I played in a 21-team league, there were six or seven goalies who were just average, and the equipment and pads were smaller. I came in the right era. I played for the right team. It was all speed, and creativity and imagination.”