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Nearby Fields of Leisure
- University of Georgia Press
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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. john updike, “Golf” Nearby Fields of Leisure The first week of May my old high school friends Steve Poole and Hamp Lindsey form an early morning gallery. Close by, Foster Chapman, Norman Chapman, and Randy Judy stretch a little, standing just outside the door to the clubhouse, waiting to begin their long-established 8:30 a.m. Saturday morning golf round at the Country Club of Spartanburg. The threesome in front of them with the 8:15 tee time sprays balls all over the course. The first golfer’s hook never climbs more than three feet off the grass and pinballs through the pines. The second golfer shanks his drive, and it bounces high then dribbles down the fairway hill for forty yards. The third hits it solid, but the look on his face shows it’s the exception not the rule. It’s beginning to drizzle a little, and the one whose ball has disappeared into the pines asks, “When do they break the bar open around here?” David Scott, a guest like me, has joined his old friends behind the tees. I’m taking notes a little off to the side, finally ready to 127 walk the club course upstream from our house for the first time. I’m no golfer, but the golf course is a chunk of the circle I’ve drawn and therefore is subject to the long reach of my imagination . I like the idea of spending a Saturday morning walking the hilly fairways and listening to everyone talk. I watch as the carts carrying the 8:15 group pass between where I stand and the abundant pink azaleas still blooming in the distance. The overcast skies deepen the eerie green hue that golf courses get in the spring. I prop my foot on an idle golf cart and take in the whole sweep of north-facing hillside. Below, the first fairway is parklike and verdant. Fifty-year-old loblolly pines dominate the long downhill in front of the tee box, and older hardwoods define the margins of the roughs. Down there, hidden in the trees, Lawson’s Fork meanders past. Until this morning my only other experiences with the elite club a half-mile upstream from our house have been a few dinners in the formal dining room, eight or ten rounds of tennis on the club’s composition courts, and one or two illegal sledding adventures on the seventh fairway back in my youth. I have mixed feelings about clubbiness and the social requirements of golf as I stand around with my notebook and listen to the banter. I’ve never been a member here, but there’s a vague feeling that I know everyone who walks through my field of vision. “Johnny, don’t listen to a thing they say,” yet another face I barely remember from high school yells from a speeding cart. “It’s all based on lies and untruths.” Though club members Foster, Steve, Hamp, Norman, and Randy have made me feel like a welcome guest this morning, there’s still the sense of exclusiveness all around me I can’t shake. That exclusiveness, most would say, is the point of it all. You don’t carve clubs from the raw countryside and make house rules and charge initiation fees and monthly dues if you don’t want exclusiveness to hang in the air. “The history of the American country club is a history of private control over 128 ° Nearby Fields of Leisure [3.235.227.36] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:33 GMT) space,” James Mayo writes on the subject in The American Country Club. In Democracy in America de Tocqueville saw us already as a culture of joiners even in the nineteenth century, and yet so much in our popular culture and literature since then has suggested we prefer “the rugged individual,” those characters at war with membership—Henry Thoreau, Huck Finn, John Wayne. I’m an English professor and a poet, and among my eighty- five colleagues at the college I don’t believe there is a single country club member outside the...