Today is the opening round of the United States Open golf tournament. This year it is being held at what the pros are calling the toughest golf course they have ever played. I play the game and my home course here in Maine is certainly challenging enough. Golf is a difficult game but despite rising frustration and disappointment with how I play, I take exception with Mark Twain. Golf for me will never be a good walk spoiled.

What follows is a story I wrote years ago for a magazine edited by a high school classmate that’s devoted to the history of where we grew up in Pennsylvania. It’s about the day I spent with a man who was perhaps Berks County’s most famous person until a teenage girl started composing songs about how miserable she was in junior high school there. Her father was my parents’ financial advisor. His name was Scott Swift.

John Updike died in 2009. I met him twice. The first time was when I was in prep school near his home north of Boston. He came to speak to our literary club in 1964 and I wanted to know if his fictional Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom— a character who appears in four of his novels and a novella —was based on a real person.

I was curious because Rabbit’s fictional city of Brewer was a cover for Reading where Updike and I both grew up and Mt. Judge, where Rabbit had been a high school basketball star, was in reality Mt. Penn, a village where I rode my bike to get a haircut.

Updike told me Rabbit was a composite of people he knew and later I discovered what I feel is a more concise portrayal of Updike’s of someone like Rabbit whose youthful glory days had become a nostalgic noose. It’s a poem I’ve provided a link to titled Ex- Basketball Player and the last stanza tightens the loop…

Ex-Basketball Player by John Updike

The second time I met Updike was 30 years later for work and here’s my account of that day…

Golf has spawned as many books on how and where to play it as any sport I can think of and among the writers who have attempted to explain why so many of us love such a difficult game is John Updike.

Updike once described the ups and downs of a round of golf as being like islands of ecstasy in a sea of misery and I won't disagree. In my opinion he wrote as well as anyone ever has about the mysterious allure of golf and in my “office” here in Maine there’s a frame on the wall with three postcards Updike wrote to me in 1994 that chronicle my getting him to play golf for television.

The initial correspondence represents a courtship on my part and a dance on his. I was a producer for ABC News and wanted to convince Nightline to let me do an entire program about golf— certainly not their usual subject matter.

Nightline’s anchor Ted Koppel was not much of a sports fan but ABC was the broadcaster of the United States Open golf tournament back then in 1994 and at night, after the first two rounds of the event on Thursday and Friday, a short highlights package of each day’s competition aired at 11:30 and delayed the starting time for when Nightline regularly began.

Koppel was not pleased about being forced to defer to a sports event for even fifteen minutes and my pitch was, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” I reasoned that since golfers would already be watching the U. S. Open highlights, a Nightline devoted to their sport might keep them tuned in.

Koppel’s staff bought the idea, although I don't think he was at all enthused and I knew I had better come up with something special. This was Nightline after all and the broadcast was considered the class act at ABC News.

I found three amateur golfers to profile who had unique stories to tell about their passion for the game. I lined up quick commitments to participate from two of them— One being Ely Callaway who had revolutionized the technology and marketing of golf equipment with his best selling Big Bertha driver and the other a bank president from New Orleans named Pat Browne who was the best totally blind golfer who ever lived.   

John Updike was to be my third act. I greatly admired his occasional essays about the game and his love for it that I’d read in golf magazines and I assumed he was a golf addict/fanatic like me. I contacted his publisher and pitched my request. Shortly afterward the first of his typed postcards arrived in the mail.

It began… Dear Mr. Imber: Your thoughts and mine on golf agree in every regard… If you could come to this area, I’d be happy to talk with a camera. 

That was great news of course but then a couple sentences further on Updike demurred… Or we could skip it – there are so many mightier presences in golf than my own.

Updike and I did share some common opinions on how the game should be best enjoyed. He was a walker like I am; riding in a cart was out of the question for him and so were caddies. Updike carried his own bag, having written once that a caddy handing him a club for every shot would be like someone over his shoulder handing him a different pencil for every sentence he wrote.

Certainly, he sounded interested in participating in my Nightline project and I was confident I’d get him to sign on. I hadn’t yet used the “Imber card.”

I grew up close to where Updike had. My grandfather had a store downtown in Reading, Pennsylvania that bore our family name. That John Updike might know who I was if I reminded him wasn’t because of the store, however. It was a bit more intimate than that.

My father’s brother was a physician and just happened to have been Updike’s father’s doctor. My uncle was known to be an outstanding internist but in Updike’s first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, there is a less than flattering description of the fictional interior of a doctor’s office that was detailed just enough that it upset its real life decorator who also happened to be my aunt.

At this point communicating with John Updike progressed to using the telephone and it was time to pull out the “Imber card.” As soon as I mentioned my uncle— the doctor —Updike agreed to do an interview.

There was just one last hurdle to jump over. He’d do it but said he didn’t want to be shown actually playing golf. For me and for television of course that was a major problem— all but a deal breaker —since I needed to enhance at least some of what he had to say with video of him in action. In the end he relented… “How can I turn down Dr. Imber’s nephew.”

As someone once said, “it’s never over until it’s over,” and on the day my crew and I arrived at his golf club, the Myopia Hunt Club on Boston’s North Shore, John Updike announced that he only had an hour to spend with us on the shoot, admonishing that... “I'm still a working writer after all.”

Fortunately, once we got started out on the golf course his reserve vanished. Updike turned out to be a total ham and gave us more great material than I could have dreamed of. After lofting a shot into a pond he turned to the camera and asked, “I hope you got all of that.”

Later, when looking for a ball in the woods he found instead a piece of a glass bottle and shuddered theatrically as he examined it before tossing it away. And when at last he hit his best shot of the day he proclaimed with as much irony as exhilaration, “There is life after death!”

When I reminded him that we had used up our one hour of his time, he merely asked me if we should continue so I would have what I needed. Any earlier hesitation had turned into total and exuberant cooperation.

I had at first considered doing a straight interview with him but instead asked Updike to read my favorite short essay of his about the game titled The Bliss of Golf. I feel it's the equivalent of a hymn to the sport and its splendor as well as a lament on the anguish its mere mortal acolytes more often endure.

While he was seated comfortably on the lawn in front of the clubhouse and about to begin reading, a gust of wind blew over one of the metal stands and the heavy light mounted on it, almost striking him in the head. That explained why a few days later Postcard #2 arrived and began...

Dear Peter Imber: That was fun, especially catching the light pole in an instant of Harry-Angstrom-like reflex.

Updike's mention of his most recurring character “Rabbit” Angstrom brought back a memory of my own. I had been an extra in the movie of Rabbit Run that was shot on location in Reading years before. At the time my father and I had played golf with the movie Rabbit, the actor James Caan. The film was… well, aside from its premiere in Reading, it never had a general release by the studio.

Like most any golfer you’ll meet, Updike’s second postcard also filled me in on the state of his game.

I finally broke 90 yesterday on the Myopia Links and have high hopes for the rest of the season. If I am ever in Berks County with my golf clubs, I will give your father a call. 

That was an offer I’m sure my dad, who played golf well into his 80s, would never have refused.

I traveled to the ABC News offices in Washington to put my golf show together. I would have four days to work there and complete my three golfers’ stories to be ready for broadcast on the Friday night of the U.S. Open.

There was no correspondent attached to my Nightline program. So, other than Ted Koppel’s introductions, the entire narration of the segments came from the three participants I had interviewed in their own words. I confess I always loved doing stories without a correspondent where the only ego I had to deal with was my own.

In the television news business four days were just enough time to edit a polished version of a half hour show like mine. But there had been an horrific double murder in Los Angeles the previous week and on Wednesday my golf program was moved up a night so that Nightline could use Friday to air its first reporting on what was quickly becoming the most sensational news event in years.

The rescheduling tightened my deadline but would prove to be an exceptionally lucky break. My show aired Thursday night and it was to be among my favorite pieces of work in my 26 year career at ABC News.

Postcard #3 was dated the day after the broadcast and read...

Dear Peter: I underestimated how late the show runs and my taping ended when I plunked the ball in the water. So could I accept your offer and you send me a tape? My wife and stepson loved it, and the interweave of images and words was very artful. But I did look my age, and moved as if underwater. Good thing it wasn’t on Friday night; Juice’s Last Ride would have ousted it from the airwaves.

Best,

John

I had already returned to my base in Los Angeles on that Friday. The helicopter shots of O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco making its surreal freeway odyssey filled nearly every television screen in the country that evening. Updike was right, the golf program would have never made it.

For me the O.J. Simpson story was what I would be assigned to work on daily for the next year. It was a grueling challenge and as I would think back on what a pleasure it had been to spend an afternoon with John Updike on the links, I’d remember that just like golf, the news business had its islands of ecstasy in a sea of misery— of course most of the time other people’s but in this case my own as well.

Updike published a collection of his golf stories and essays titled Golf Dreams two years later in 1996. I don't know if that was his plan before making his television golfing debut. If I helped prompt him in any way to do it, then getting him on the golf course for Nightline ranks easily as my greatest contribution to the game.

Here's a link to the Nightline segment and John Updike reading The Bliss of Golf...

John Updike on Nightline