Noted golfer John Updike is dead

John Updike is one of the men who gave me permission to like golf and still call myself an intelligent person.

"I think I have been asked to write about golf as a hobby," he once wrote. "But of course, golf is not a hobby. Hobbies take place
in the cellar and smell of airplane glue. Nor is golf, though some men turn it into such, meant to be a
profession or a pleasure. Indeed, few sights are more odious on the golf course than a sauntering, beered-up
foursome obviously having a good time. Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly the
landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's
eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be. We should be conscious of no more grass,
the old Scots adage goes, than will cover our own graves."