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This summer, I’m determined to not take John Updike’s lament of the “sometimes sportsman” lying down. Updike, a golfer, begins his poem about the occasional athletic competitor greeting the spring with these words: “When winter’s glaze is lifted from the greens/ And cups are freshly cut, and birdies sing/ Triumphantly the stifled golfer preens/ In cleats and slacks once more, and checks his swing. Tom Putnam is a retired museum director.

He lives in Cape Porpoise. “This year, he vows, his head will steady be/ His weight-shift smooth, his grip and stance ideal/ And so they are, until upon the tee/ Befall the old contortions of the real.” I’ve only golfed a few times; at age 11, I discovered a love of tennis.



Now, at 61, I experience “the old contortions of the real” when returning to the courts each April. As Updike describes: “So, too, the tennis-player, torpid from/ Hibernal months of television sports/ Perfects his serve and feels his knees become/ Sheer muscle in their unaccustomed shorts. “Right arm relaxed, the left controls the toss/ Which shall be high, so that the racket face/ Shall at a certain angle sweep across/ The floated sphere with gutty strings – an ace!” Updike does not let himself (or us) off easily, concluding his verse with this dose of reality.

“The mind’s eye sees it all until upon/ The courts of life the faulty way we played/ In other summers rolls back with the sun./ Hope springs eternally, but spring hopes fade.” Si.

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