We share a golf match, which is part hike, part contest, part demonstration, and part lesson. The good will induced by the perilous joint venture leads to a mutual solicitude: advice and praise are offered to an opponent as freely as to a partner.  The trend of golfing rules and custom…….is toward elaborate niceness; we repress our coughs while others are swinging, we join in the hopeless hunt for another’s lost ball, and on the green we avoid stepping in another’s putting lines in a veritable Morris dance of exaggerated courtesy.  Our behavior is better here than elsewhere, because we are happier there than elsewhere. Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somewhere together where non-golfers never go.

John Updike

The Camaraderie of Golf-I

Golf Dreams-Writings On Golf