The day after he graduated from high school, Bruce bought a plane ticket and headed for Charlotte, North Carolina. Lotz had a full-time caddy by then, but he had put Bruce in touch with David Graham, a twenty-seven-year-old Australian who had already won once on tour and was looking for someone to work for him at the Kemper Open in Charlotte. On Lotz’s say-so, Graham hired Bruce for the week. His pay would be the standard pay for a tour caddy at the time: $15 a day plus 3 percent of any money Graham earned for the week.
“It was a good news, bad news week,” Bruce remembered. “I really liked the work and I really liked David. That was the good news. The bad news was he made a late bogey on Friday and missed the cut by one.”
So much for the 3 percent or working on the weekend. Graham wrote Bruce a check for $100—$70 more than he owed him—handed it to him, and said, “Bruce, you’re too nice a kid to be living this life. You should go home and go to college.”
Bruce took the extra money but not the advice. Lotz had already lined up another bag for him the following week in Philadelphia with Bob Shaw, another Australian, although not a player with Graham’s skills or pedigree. That didn’t matter to Bruce. He was traveling and working and he had $100 in his pocket, more than enough to pay for a ticket to Philadelphia. When he arrived at Whitemarsh Valley Country Club and checked the Thursday-Friday pairings, his eyes went wide. Shaw was paired with none other than Jack Nicklaus. That was when he sent his first postcards home—to Crandall and Leahey.
“Paired with Nicklaus this week,” he wrote. “Plenty of work out here. When are you coming?”
Leahey, who had just finished his sophomore year of college, was already making his plans to get out there. Crandall was impressed, maybe a tad jealous, but not quite ready to make the commitment. When Bruce called home that week to tell his parents he was okay and paired with Nicklaus, even Jay had to admit that was pretty cool.
Bruce still remembers the two days with Nicklaus. He remembers how deliberate he was and how competitive he was and how far he hit the ball. Nicklaus was at his zenith at the time. He had won the Masters and the U.S. Open the previous year en route to winning seven tournaments. That year, he had already won three times and would win the PGA Championship before summer’s end. Being that close to the world’s greatest golfer was an awe-inspiring experience. The only downer was that Shaw missed the cut. Like Graham, Shaw wrote Bruce a check for $100. Unlike Graham, he didn’t tell Bruce to go home and go to college. Instead he told him to meet him in Milwaukee in three weeks, after the U.S. Open and the Western Open, both tournaments where tour caddies were not allowed.
Bruce could have gone home for a few days, seen his family, and taken things easy before heading to Milwaukee. But he didn’t want his parents to think he was homesick, and he was afraid his father would reopen the whole college issue. So he went straight to Milwaukee and encountered his first welcome-to-the-road experience when he got off the bus. There was an older man standing in the waiting area when Bruce and his friend Tom Lovett arrived early on a Sunday morning.
“Look at you,” the man said to Bruce. “You’re so pretty you should be in Hollywood.”
“I thought, ‘Oh boy, here we go,’” Bruce said, years later.
The man was persistent. Where did they need to go? he asked. When Bruce told him the name of the motel where they were staying, he told them it was a good twenty miles away, a long, expensive cab ride or a tough hitchhike. He would give them a ride. Bruce and Lovett figured at worst it was two against one. They accepted the offer. When they got to the car, they found that their new friend had a friend of his own. Now it was two-on-two. Still, they were young, athletic, and, if necessary, fast.
“We get to the motel and we start to get out and the guy says, ‘Why don’t you come and go sailing with us on Lake Michigan?’” Bruce said. “I knew it was time to cut this cord, so I just said, ‘Listen, thanks a lot for the ride, but this is it, we’re leaving.’ He never actually offered us money or anything, but it was pretty clear that’s where it was going, so we got out of there. It was kinda scary, but it never got really bad. We probably should have just hitched. It wasn’t as if we had anything to do that day.”
Of course if Jay and Natalie had heard the story, they probably would have flown to Milwaukee to bring Bruce home that day. He did not include it in his report the next time he called home.
Bruce then made the second mistake of his caddying career. When he had parted company with Shaw in Philadelphia, Shaw had said something about calling him prior to Milwaukee. Bruce had assumed Shaw meant he should call if there was any problem, otherwise he would see him there. Shaw had meant the opposite: Call to confirm that you can work for me. “In those days he probably figured there was a chance a kid like me would just go home and not show up again,” Bruce said. “But I got it confused and didn’t call.”
As a result, not having heard from Bruce, Shaw showed up on Tuesday with another caddy. Bruce was upset. Shaw, who felt bad, told him of another player, Ron Cerrudo, who was looking for a caddy. “That’s what was so different in those days,” Bruce said. “There were so few full-time caddies that you could almost always show up at a place and get a bag. Now, because there’s so much more money to be made and there are so many more caddies, it’s much, much harder.”
This was 1973—$15 a day and 3 percent of purses that averaged about $150,000 (total) per week, as opposed to 2003, when most full-time caddies work on an annual salary and get 5 percent when their player makes a cut, 7 percent when he top-tens, and 10 percent for a win. That’s on a tour where the average weekly purse is now $4 million. Back then losing a bag was both common and hardly upsetting. Bruce found Cerrudo and worked for him that week. They missed the cut, making Bruce three-for-three. Cerrudo was as generous as Bruce’s first two employers, paying him $100 and telling him he could work for him the following week when the tour went to Robinson, Illinois, for the Robinson Shriners’ Classic.
He still hadn’t caddied on a weekend, but Bruce was proud of the fact that all three players he had worked for had paid him far more than they had to and that two of them had asked him to work again. He was having fun and Leahey had now joined him, having worked in Milwaukee for a local pro who had missed the cut. The two of them headed for Robinson, Bruce with a bag for the week, Bill without one.
Three weeks and $300 into his caddying career, Bruce figured he was doing okay.
3
“We’ll Try It for a Week”
WHEN ONE LOOKS AT THE PGA Tour and what it has evolved into today, it is sometimes hard to imagine what it was like only thirty years ago. Purses were one-thirtieth of what they are now week in and week out. Most players traveled from event to event by car, flying only when the drive would take more than a day and buying the cheapest airline ticket available whenever that occurred. Caddies also drove, often driving a player’s car when he chose to fly. If the trip took more than a day, sleeping was usually done by taking turns in the car or pulling over to a rest stop and finding a comfortable patch of grass to curl up on.
The tour back then played a lot of small and midsized towns, more often than not avoiding the big cities because there was too much competition from the mainstream sports there. Towns like Greensboro, North Carolina; Jacksonville and Tallahassee, Florida; Columbus, Georgia; and Hartford were as likely to host tour events as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, more likely to host them than places like Atlanta, Washington, and San Francisco, to name three major cities that didn’t have tour stops. Robinson, in southern Illinois, was one of the smaller towns on the circuit, the home of the annual Robinson Shriners’ Classic, which tells you who put the tournament on. In those days there were almost no corporate title sponsors and only a handful of tournaments were seen on live TV.
Robinson followed Milwaukee on the calendar in 1973, the tour taking a midsummer swing through the Midwest, with St. Louis on the schedule after Robinson. Bruce Edwards and Bill Leahey, having both missed the cut in Milwaukee, h
eaded down the road to Robinson and began looking for a place to stay. In most towns on tour, caddies would usually split a room four ways, breaking down the beds in a double room so that two guys could split a mattress and a box spring between them.
“We never went into a place if the room cost more than twelve dollars a night,” Bruce remembered. “We’d get into a room and the first thing we’d say was, ‘Break ’em down,’ and we’d take the beds apart. Sometimes when we were in a big city where the room might cost more, we’d have six guys in a room.”
Some of the smaller towns on the circuit offered the caddies housing with local families. It was common in those days for players to stay with families, because few of them were wealthy enough to afford a luxurious hotel room for an entire week. It wasn’t that difficult to find families willing to put up a golf pro, but in most places people didn’t exactly line up to house caddies.
“Caddying was a relatively new profession at the time,” Bruce said. “Most people thought of caddies as drunks or people who were down and out or people you couldn’t trust or long-haired kids like me who you probably didn’t want hanging around your house for a week.”
There hadn’t really been caddies on the PGA Tour before the 1960s. The first group of professional caddies to work on tour came from Augusta, caddies who got to know the pros during the Masters and then made their way to tour stops to find work once Augusta National Golf Club closed for the summer each May. Some players brought friends on tour with them on occasion, but for the most part, players used caddies from the clubs—like Bruce and his friends at Wethersfield. When a small cadre of full-time caddies began to work the tour—notably Angelo Argea, who worked for Jack Nicklaus, and Creamy Carolan, who worked for Arnold Palmer—many clubs wouldn’t allow them to work at their events.
“One year at Wethersfield Nicklaus was coming to play and wanted to bring Angelo,” Bill Leahey remembered. “We didn’t want to set the precedent of letting the tour caddies work, so we ‘protested’ against the tour caddies. Nicklaus finally agreed to use one of our guys. Little did we know we’d be on the other end of that argument a few years later.”
By the time Bruce and Leahey headed for the tour, there were about forty full-time caddies, which meant there was a bag for everyone every week. Most of the full-time caddies at the time were black, some of them from Augusta, others friends of the Augusta caddies who had gotten involved because they heard it was a decent way to make money. The base pay wasn’t much—$15 a day and 3 percent of prize money—but the potential to make serious money was there if you could hook on with the right guy. Even though a win only paid 5 percent (it is 10 percent today), first prize most weeks was $30,000, and 5 percent of that sounded like a fortune. Bruce and Leahey arrived as part of the first wave of younger, white caddies who came out on tour, although they came with different agendas. Leahey was there because he was looking for something to do during the summertime and because his buddy Bruce said it would be fun. Bruce was mentally committed to spending a year on tour. At least.
“I knew two things when I first went out,” he said. “I didn’t want to go to college and I did want to travel. This was a way to travel, try to make some money, and get that rush I had felt caddying in tournaments when I was still a kid. I told people it was for a year, and in my mind that’s what it was. But it wasn’t as if I had done any planning beyond that.”
Robinson was one of those rare tour stops that offered the caddies free housing with a family. When Bruce and Bill arrived in town, they were directed to the home of Kenneth and Donna Freed. They were not the only caddies sent to the Freed house. In fact a total of nineteen caddies spent the week at the Freeds’, most of them sharing space in the basement, which was just fine with them, because the cots they slept on were, for the most part, more comfortable than the beds they broke down in motels and the price was right. The local paper ran a story that week on the Freeds and included photos of the nineteen caddies. It was Bruce’s first brush with publicity.
One of the caddies bunking at the Freeds’ that week was a college kid from Philadelphia named Neil Oxman. Like Leahey, Oxman was on summer break, having just finished his junior year at Villanova. Like the Wethersfield guys, he had caddied as a kid and had met some good amateur players who had invited him to work for them at top-drawer amateur events around the state. He had enjoyed the experience and the previous year had spent the summer on the circuit after a pro named Jimmy Hardy had offered him the chance to work for him at the Cleveland Open. Hardy had played a local event in Philadelphia, Oxman worked for him, and the two hit it off.
Much like Bruce, Oxman found the air inside the ropes intoxicating. “I tell friends of mine today that if you are a sports fan and you ever caddy at a PGA Tour event it will change your life forever,” Oxman said. “There is absolutely no other way to be that close to a sport without actually playing it. You can’t go on the field at a baseball game. You can’t chat with Mike Schmidt”—Oxman is a Philly guy, so when he thinks baseball he first thinks of Schmidt—“just before he goes up to hit and ask him what kind of pitch he’s looking for. When you caddy you are on the field. You are part of the rules of the game, in fact. Which means you can screw up quite easily. But it is an amazing feeling to be there.”
Oxman is now fifty, a wildly successful Democratic political consultant in Philadelphia with a staff of twenty-five. He still finds caddying intoxicating and sneaks out onto the Senior Tour three or four times a year to caddy for old friends. In 1973 he had just been elected president of the senior class at Villanova and was planning on going to law school and then to follow his passion for politics. He had first worked in politics at the age of fourteen, when he stuffed envelopes at Bobby Kennedy’s campaign headquarters in Philadelphia. He had grown up in the southwest portion of the city, and politics had been his first passion. His parents were both immigrants, his father from Russia, his mother from Poland, and the family—Oxman has a younger brother—often sat around the dinner table intensely discussing the political issues of the day. “I remember it was a great thrill, when I was first old enough to drive, to take the family car on Saturday night, drive down to Thirtieth Street Station, and pick up the bulldog [early] edition of the Sunday New York Times and read it cover to cover before I went to bed,” he said.
When Oxman was seventeen his father died of cancer, leaving a hole in his heart and in his life. He filled the life part of the hole by being a campus activist when he got to college, by helping his mother take care of his brother, and by spending his free time caddying. He was an old tour hand, working for a pro named Mike Reasor, when he and Leahey first met in Milwaukee. He was outgoing and friendly and quickly hit it off with Bruce and Leahey, especially that week in Robinson, when they spent a lot of time together at the Freeds’ house. “It isn’t like there are a lot of places to go out and party in Robinson, Illinois,” Oxman remembered.
It was Leahey who caught the first real break of the summer. Standing outside the clubhouse on Monday, he saw Lou Graham approaching, bag on his shoulder. Leahey recognized Graham because at the time, Graham was part of the Select 60. The current tour rules, which make the top 125 players and tournament winners from the previous two years fully exempt—meaning they can enter any tournament they want—didn’t go into effect until 1982. Prior to that only the top 60 players on the money list (and tournament winners) had exempt status. Everyone else had to play in Monday qualifiers to get into that week’s field. Players outside the top 60 were known as “rabbits,” because they were constantly hopping from place to place trying to get into tournaments. If a rabbit made the cut in a given week, he was automatically in the field the following week.
The bag of a top-60 player such as Graham was a major get for a caddy. Leahey knew that and was fairly certain Graham had a caddy. But seeing Graham carrying his bag, he figured he had nothing to lose by asking. As luck would have it, Graham’s caddy had just quit to take a job in California as an assistant pro and Graham was look
ing for a caddy. Leahey asked, Graham said fine, and Leahey suddenly found himself hooked up with a top player. “Second week out and I luck into that,” he said. “I was thrilled.”
Bruce already had a bag for the week—Ron Cerrudo. Cerrudo wasn’t a top-60 player and he had missed the cut the previous week, but he had been given a sponsor’s exemption, one of several spots typically allocated to a tournament director to use as he pleased. Cerrudo was a young player with potential, and the Shriners were pleased to have him in their field.
Nowadays caddying is quite sophisticated. When a caddy arrives at a tournament site today, the first thing he does is buy an orange yardage book that is put together by a man named Gorgeous George Lucas. Lucas travels the country in advance of the tour, checking yardages from almost every conceivable spot on a golf course, looking for hidden hazards while using lasers to get his distances exactly right. He also includes funny comments and asides. When he points out a hazard that is way off line or gives the yardage from a far-flung spot on the golf course, he will often include the notation ICYFU: In Case You Fuck Up. The book costs $15 and tells the caddy almost everything he could possibly need to know about the golf course. Most caddies will double-check distances during practice rounds and will make note of all the pin placements in their yardage books, then pull the book out the following year so they’ll have an idea where they think the pins might go.
It wasn’t like that in 1973. There were no yardage books, and most of the time the players paced off their own yardages. (Many still do today, at least double-checking at key moments.) Caddies would arrive at the golf course early each morning to walk the course and learn where the pins were and would mark their location on the greens on their scorecards so they could tell the players where the holes were as the round proceeded. Bruce tried to leave nothing to chance, walking the course by himself—or with Leahey or another caddy—early in the week to check yardage markers (usually on sprinkler heads) to make sure they were accurate and to look for hidden hazards. He was one of the first caddies to do what is now standard procedure for caddies—walking the golf course without player or bag early in the week.
Caddy for Life Page 5