A farewell to the writer and the Rebel

IT’S BEEN a tough week for the greats. John Updike passed away a few days ago at the age of 76.

He might be well known as an unfeasibly prolific essayist and reviewer, to say nothing of a couple of dozen novels, but Updike was also a sports fan and an accomplished sportswriter.

One of his novels, ‘Rabbit, Run’, features the best description of a golf shot this column has ever read (“Very simply he brings the clubhead around his shoulder into it. The sound has a hollowness, a singleness he hasn’t heard before”). The title character, Rabbit, has made perfect contact, and watches the ball ” . . . recede along a line straight as a ruler-edge. Stricken: sphere, star, speck”.