The late author John Updike loved to write about and play golf, and his death this week reminded me of a fine speech that he gave about the game during the United States Golf Association’s Centennial Dinner in New York in late 1994.

Thankfully, the USGA has posted Updike’s speech on its website, the beginning and closing of which is set forth below. The entire speech is a must read for any golfer:

When I was asked to speak to you this evening, my first thought was, "Oh, no – my golf is not nearly good enough!" But then I reflected that one of the charms of the game is that nobody’s golf, not even Fred Couples’ and Nick Faldo’s, is good enough – good enough to please them and their supporters all the time.

Golf is a game that almost never fails, even at the highest levels on which it can be played, to mar a round with a lapse or two, and that at the other extreme rarely fails to grant even the most abject duffer, somewhere in his or her round, with the wayward miracle of a good shot. I am here – I have written so much about the game – because I am curiously, disproportionately, undeservedly happy on a golf course, and perhaps we are all here for much the same reason. [.  .  .]

When did American golf come of age? Some might say in 1904, when Walter Travis won the British Amateur Championship, the first foreigner to do so. Some might pinpoint the 1920s and the international admiration and affection won by the great Bobby Jones. But perhaps most would specify the happy moment in September of 1913 when the unknown 20-year-old Francis Ouimet beat the two foremost British players, Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, for the U.S. Open Championship – an upset that made news, not just golf news. The moment is commemorated by a USGA Centennial logo, based on a well-known photograph.

Look at it; what do we see? Two figures, one of them our heroic golfer, a workingman’s son who happened to live in a modest house across from The Country Club in Brookline, Mass. He picked up golf balls on his way to school, he watched the matches across the street, a member gave his older brother some cast-off clubs, the young Ouimets fell in love with the game. Francis played without fuss; needing, on the 18th green, needing to sink a 5-foot putt to enter a playoff with the Englishmen, he rapped it at the back of the cup without a second look. The next day, he calmly beat Vardon by five strokes and Ray by six. And who is the other figure in our logo, a little figure? He is Ouimet’s caddie, a local 10-year-old called Eddie Lowery, carrying a canvas bag that looks to hold about eight clubs. Think of the caddies in today’s championships – burly yardage technicians toting bags the size of small sofas, loudly blazoned with manufacturers’ names for the greedy eyes of the television cameras.

We have come a long way in American golf, but has it been a journey without a price? Amid the million-dollar tournaments and the $5 million clubhouses, might we be losing the unassuming simplicity of the game itself?

This out-of-doors simplicity, surely, lies at the heart of golfing bliss, as we are reminded by our logo of two New England boys out for a walk on a drizzly September day.

All it takes for a golfer to attain his happiness is a fence rail to throw his coat on, and a target somewhere over the rise.