Years ago we discovered the exact point, the dead center of middle age. It occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up to the net.

Franklin P. Adams (1881–1960) was a prominent American newspaper columnist and humorist, best known for his long-running New York column “The Conning Tower.” The remark belongs to his characteristic vein of urbane, sports-inflected comedy, using golf and tennis as shorthand for age-coded leisure and athleticism in early-20th-century middle-class life. In that milieu, golf was often treated as a “settling down” pastime taken up as vigor waned, while tennis—especially charging the net—suggested youthful quickness and risk. Adams’ line plays as a wry, observational epigram about the social and bodily thresholds people associate with “middle age.”

The joke defines “the dead center of middle age” not by a number but by a felt contradiction: you’re no longer spry enough for the aggressive, reflex-driven style of tennis, yet you’re not ready (psychologically or socially) to accept the supposedly sedate identity implied by taking up golf. Adams turns aging into a problem of self-conception as much as physiology—caught between two narratives of who you are allowed to be. The humor depends on the arbitrariness of such markers, suggesting that “middle age” is less a precise stage than an uneasy negotiation between declining capacities and resisted labels of maturity.