• • •
Our taxi driver is speeding.
The Renault Transport is easily doing eighty, barreling down the motorway toward Dundee. St. Andrews cabdrivers love these trips, because they can charge thirty quid (sixty dollars) each way—more if the kids piling in seem particularly drunk. But to get back quickly for more work, they drive furiously. Our cab’s interior is strangely quiet, considering the speed we’re doing and the corners we’re taking with screeching tires. The roads are tightrope narrow, and every so often, other cars come hurtling past us with only inches between. I’m not loving this.
Soon we’re onto the Tay Bridge, tearing over water that shimmers in the night sky. Across the Tay River, Dundee emerges into view, a city that has seen better days but still provides thrilling nights for surrounding Fife. Its nickname is “Scumdee,” and it features, among other late-night attractions, the Gala Casino, which comps late-night five-course meals to new members, and where my friend Helen almost got beat up last month by a drunk prostitute. Capping off Dundee’s “oeuvre” is a strip club and a disco called Mardi Gras (“the Mardi”). But my friends and I are bound for a different destination: Fat Sams—a nightclub with a reputation for being meaner than Rick Mackenzie. Tonight we’re celebrating.
“This is gonna be fookin’ epic,” Craig firmly announces inside the taxi, mainly to himself. Craig Morris is a tall, stringy twenty-four-year-old Scottish caddie from Dunfermline (“Funfermline”) blessed with good looks and a quiet Scottish swagger to go with it. Craig, it can be said, lives for the weekends. And in particular for Fat Sams, or as he calls it, “Fatty’s.”
“It’s one A.M.,” Patrick McGinley, the Irish caddie, reports, looking at his watch.
“Perrrrrfect,” Craig replies. Greaves and Iain Begg, another caddie mate of mine, are trading slurred caddie stories in the backseat. I’m just trying to not look out the window. We’ve been out since nine o’clock at the Vic, a pub on Market Street that served one-pound drinks all night for some reason. And the night is becoming more and more slippery. I shudder privately as our taxi takes a sharp corner extra sharply and continues thrashing along. Outside, Dundee’s lights pierce their darkened surroundings, exposing a city that was once the shipping capital of Fife and now boasts one of the highest teen-pregnancy and drug rates in Scotland (as well as Europe). Dundee during daytime is a nice place. Dundee at night is a wilderness. A Scottish wilderness.
“We’re here,” our driver barks, and we spill out onto the main drag, outside the club. This is unfiltered Scotland. Not quaint St. Andrews. There are fights outside these clubs, occasional stabbings. The Scottish accents come thick and fast and loud, and the police are out in force tonight. This is a Scotland the tourists don’t see. There’s almost a sense, as I watch our steel-doored taxi disappearing into the night, that we might never make it back to St. Andrews, limbs intact.
Tonight South Ward Road is packed, and the scene is raucous. Hordes of Scottish boys and girls stand in large crowds in the middle of the street. Copious members of hen (bachelorette) parties and Dundee girls’ eighteenth-birthday parties queue up outside the club. The reverberations of techno music spill out past the bouncer-guarded club doors. A boy in a tiger costume is throwing up against a fence.
“Loving it,” Craig announces. “Absolutely loving it.” We head for the entrance.
Inside, Fat Sams is a netherworld. Three levels of garish dance floors rise high above, obscured by smoke billowing out of smoke machines. Pounding techno pulses through the rooms, and hundreds of Scottish youth grind on the dance floors. I am, without a doubt, the only American here. Our group moves through the ground-floor mosh pit, heading for the bar. When I meet anyone and they find out I’m American, they are shocked. Girls whisper into their friends’ ears that I’m from New York, as if I’ve taken part in the last moon landing. It’s all a little surreal. More girls move past us now, dressed in outfits totally different from anything I’ve seen in America. Leopard pants. Short pink skirts. Petticoats. Metallic silver hair. I feel a little like I’ve stepped onto the set of Blade Runner.
Craig grabs my shoulder. “Get on it, son!” he shouts before diving into the mass of people on the dance floor. Greaves follows, emitting a loud whoop. I vaguely recall that I have to caddie tomorrow. In fact I think we all do. Early.
A Britney Spears techno remix blares thunderously, thumping upstairs into the second-level corridor, where Patrick and I are heading. Two girls catch our eyes, start giggling. They’re cute, dimpled, and both their shirts read “Happy 18th Burf-day Jen!!” We introduce ourselves.
“I like your accent!” one of the girls says to Irish Patrick.
“I like you,” Patrick says back, not missing a beat. Both girls giggle again.
This is heading in the right direction.
• • •
We’re in a taxi again.
Now the speedometer says ninety.
It is four fifteen A.M., and we’re heading, supposedly, to a pool party—in a town called Auchtermuchty (Uk-ter-muk-tee). I don’t know where that is, but it doesn’t sound very close to St. Andrews. The girls are giggling in the backseat. I look at Patrick.
“What time are we booked again?”
Patrick reaches into the inner workings of his brain. Signs of struggle pass over his face. Then he lights up.
“Six thirty!”
This number sinks in. There’s a troubled silence—which I break.
“Shit.”
Patrick looks out the window. He’s always optimistic.
“It’s grand! It’s grand! At least it’ll be nice weather.”
* * *
I show up for work at six thirty A.M.—sleepless and hung over. It is not nice weather. It is pouring. Trees blow sideways with the wind. Lakes begin to form on the fairways. Although wearing a large sweater and two rain suits, I’m shivering and soaked to the skin after two holes. My player, a middle-aged Swedish doctor named Fritz, insists that I keep his umbrella open, even though the forty-mile-per-hour gusts make such a feat a near impossibility. I remember once playing golf in Ipswich, Massachusetts, with my dad during a hurricane. This seems worse.
You’re an official caddie now, I remind myself as I walk up the blustery sixth fairway, sideways—sort of how a crab might walk if he was cold and deeply unhappy. “You can deal with anything,” I add, aloud this time (my golfer hears and wonders what the hell I’m talking about). The pep talk doesn’t make me feel any drier. My head resumes its spinning. I decide that celebrations from now on should take place only during weekends.
ELEVEN
I’ve got a voice mail waiting. It’s from my dad, and he sounds excited.
“Ollie. Call me right away.”
My parents are here visiting for a week. They’re staying with Uncle Ken and playing golf every day. I’ve just come off the course from a caddie round (loud Austrian banker with the social graces of a mollusk). From behind the eighteenth green, I dial the house. The news is a shock. A good shock. Dr. Jake Davidson, Uncle Ken’s next-door neighbor, has invited Dad and me to be two-day guest members of the R & A. Jake is a famously hard-of-hearing eighty-two-year-old radiologist from Glasgow who has had us round for tea several times over the years. I also cut his hedge a few months ago and badly scratched my arms and legs in the process. This may have helped make Jake feel generous. I run behind the shack to grab my bike, already thinking of whom I can ask for black dress shoes. The two-day membership starts tomorrow.
* * *
The Royal and Ancient Golf Club is one of many semiaffiliated clubs with ties to the Old Course. It’s divided into two parts: the organization that serves as the governing golf body for a vast part of the world—the “equivalent” of the United States Golf Association—and the social golf club, with twenty-five hundred members, preferential times on the Old, and a lot of pink trousers.
The R & A represents, in St. Andrews, the effective pillar of the social pyramid. The crème de la crème. It’s for the w
ealthy and the powerful. Although there are exceptions—not everyone is a duke or a lord—the R & A undeniably represents privilege. Uncle Ken is not a member; he was never invited. His place is the New Golf Club, located about a hundred yards from the R & A but a planet apart; a club for golfers neither royal nor ancient.
I’ve never been inside the R & A, but I did wait tables at their special 250th anniversary celebrations earlier this summer—serving blackberry compote to the white bow-tied. (On my first night, I tripped up a chef. On my second night, I got moved to toilet duty. On my third night, I saw Arnold Palmer. He didn’t see me.) Now I’m fascinated. For two days, I’ll be able to peek inside. And try the compote myself.
* * *
The next day our R & A membership begins. At six A.M. caddie sign-in, however, I discover that I am booked to loop two rounds for an English guy who hits short and right. He plays with the speed of an injured snail, and each round takes four-plus hours. I completely miss R & A day one. My father goes alone, brings his laptop, and spends the day working in the R & A’s library. He confesses to me that, during the day, he snuck upstairs and peeked into the R & A’s most private rooms.
“What was it like?” I ask.
He smiles and answers quietly, “I’ve been to church.”
The next day is possibly my last chance ever to be an R & A member. My game plan: I will caddie a morning round and have lunch with Jake and my dad. At six A.M. I get my number but discover I’ve been rebooked by the guy who hits short and right for an eleven A.M. tee time on Jubilee. If I don’t get him through his round by two thirty P.M., I won’t get to the R & A (in a jacket and tie) by three P.M., and I will miss lunch. I give this guy reads the likes of which he’s never dreamed about. He holes his (fourth) putt on 18 at two forty-five P.M. I Lance Armstrong it to my flat and get to the R & A at 3:03. On my way in the door, I’m spotted by three caddies who know me well, giving me the blankest of stares. The table captain knows I’m coming. He also knows I’ve looped seven rounds in four days. He personally serves my meal, loading my plate with enough food for a foursome. We who live to serve grow to understand each other’s pain.
The R & A is like a time capsule. Any member of over forty years gets his locker in the main coffee room—the room with the huge bay windows looking out over the first tee. The ceilings are miles high, and the walls are covered with elegant paintings of past R & A captains, most of them with multiple honors following their names. Any member of over sixty years (as well as many professional golfers) gets their locker in the lobby. Thus, there are lockers practically everywhere within the R & A. Coat and tie are required, as are dress shoes, which I’ve had to borrow from a friend. They are two and a half sizes too small, which I think will be fine, since I don’t anticipate much walking around. However, Jake gives us a grand tour. There’s the collection of ancient golf clubs on the walls. There’s the reading room. There’s the bathroom with fully functioning scales. There’s the 1920s barometer, still working perfectly, which traces out the Old Course’s air pressure for the past week. The tour concludes, and Jake decides we’re having coffee. My toes are now bleeding.
R & A members spend lots of time in the main room, either staring out the window at the first tee and making fun of Japanese golfers’ swings or having tea while reading the papers. Many peruse the large books called Who’s Who in Scotland, pointing out their biographical sketches to one another. Many also look at “The Red Book,” on the cover of which is written, “For R & A Members’ eyes only.” This contains, I’ve heard, the list of all potential R & A members around the world currently under consideration. Actual nominations have to be unanimous, and if any one R & A member doesn’t want a nominee, that nominee is blackballed. According to club policy, if “The Red Book” is ever left open on a table, staff members have to shut it. Floating around the room, waiters in starched white jackets serve drinks from “the tankards”—big expensive serving pitchers that keep drinks extra cold, because their insides are literally gold. I kind of feel like I’m on board the Titanic.
There is an overwhelming sense of satisfaction within this clubhouse, as members smilingly look out over other members in equally posh jackets and ties. A feeling that—simply by being inside these walls—they’ve made it. And maybe, in a way, they have. The rich and the richer gather in this clubhouse. Members we meet are eager to provide the pedigrees of all their hallowed members. It’s a different kind of gen.
Jake is hilarious within this setting. He holds court in the middle of the big room expertly. Being nearly deaf, he screams. When he moves, he kind of just leans to one side and takes off, moving slowly and steadily like a ship. There’s no stopping him. There’s also no stopping him when he decides that we’ll be joining a rather shy and standoffish member, David, for coffee—despite the man’s many vigorous protestations. We all take our seats for coffee (David looks like he’s been captured in battle), and after calling the waiter, Jake points out a large painting on the right side of the room. It depicts a scene from the 1800s of an R & A captain taking office by striking a ceremonial first tee shot. All of the R & A members from that era are pictured near the captain, their faces realistically captured for posterity.
“There’s a modern version of this painting hanging across the street, Izzy!” Jake announces loudly. He’s been shortening Dad’s name from Israel to Izzy, for some reason. “I think it’s rather good. In fact, it’s got all the current R & A members depicted.” There’s a pause in which Jake suddenly remembers something. “Well, in fact, not everyone. I didn’t hear that I had to pay to be in the painting, so I never sent in my check.” Our host suddenly looks very unhappy. The waiter arrives, perking Jake up just enough to order our coffee. He gives one last wistful glance at the R & A painting, then looks over to me. “Maybe someday, Ollie,” Jake says, “you’ll be a member as well.”
After lunch, Jake heads home for an important game of bridge with his wife, Edith, leaving us free rein of the clubhouse for our final hour of membership. My dad and I play three rounds of snooker, a game with seemingly as many rules as golf. My dad calls his brown-ball shot but accidentally pots the pink and the yellow. He steps next door to the library and asks a gaggle of Yahs (twenty-first-century British yuppies) for a ruling. I hear a voice tell my father to give me points for the brown and the yellow. I hear my father’s voice say, “Thank you.” I hear another voice tell my father, “You should be disqualified and lose the game.” I hear my father say, “I didn’t ask you, I asked him!” Then I hear dead silence. My father reappears in the snooker room with a worried look. He whispers, “I just made a joke, but nobody laughed.”
TWELVE
I spot her as I’m walking down to the shack.
Brunette. Petite. Probably nineteen. Definitely European. She wears a stylish white golf sweater and mega-tight royal-blue corduroys. She is, immediately and unmistakably, drop-dead beautiful.
“Morning, guys.”
I plop down on the caddie bench, next to Jim Napier, Bill Bucelli, and Grant Fisher. It’s nine in the morning, and most of the guys are already out on the course.
“You all right?” Grant grunts, in the typical Scottish equivalent of “How’s it going?”
“Yeah, fine,” I say back. I place my caddie bib beside me. A few moments pass. I look around. I realize that everyone on the bench is staring at this girl.
“You see the ass on her?” Bill asks, practically licking his lips.
“Should be illegal,” Napier replies.
“Think she’s French?”
“Spanish.”
“Ach no, she looks Dutch.”
“What the fook does Dutch look like?!”
“She looks fookin’ hot, whatever she is!”
There’s something about the caddie bench that encourages otherwise rational men to act out like construction workers whenever cute girls play on the Old. For one thing, it doesn’t happen that often. We usually see fifty-year-old men. But I think there’s another issue at pl
ay. Girls like Little Miss Corduroy, in this setting, seem so totally unattainable. Too rich. Too young. Too well-traveled. They’re here with husbands, and fiancées, and boyfriends with bottomless pockets. The fact that, as caddies, we’d never be able to get close to these girls is probably the greatest motivator of our animal behavior.
“Hey, look, there’s no young guy in the group,” I observe.
“She’s gotta be here with her parents,” Jim replies.
“Those two?”
“Yeah, I bet.”
“I bet she’s totally bored here.”
“Aye! She wants ta be shown a good time!”
Our bench snickers. We’re like sixth graders sneaking into a XXX video store.
The girl and her parents move to the practice green with their Scotty Cameron putters and start stroking putts. The girl’s stroke looks silky-smooth. So does her body. Totally unaware that she has an audience, the girl turns away from us and extends her perfect rear end outward—which shoots another shock wave of excitement down our bench.
“I can’t believe none of them are taking a fucking caddie!” Jim says.
“Cheap bastards,” Bill adds.
I disagree with Jim. I think it’s almost better this way. I’ve seen similar situations play out, in which other caddies get put in groups like this and make everyone else feel totally jealous all round the Old Course. For the outsiders, it’s almost too much to bear. The girl turns to leave, and I nod my head. Yeah, it’s probably better this way.
“Ollie Horovitz.”
An American Caddie in St. Andrews: Growing Up, Girls, and Looping on the Old Course Page 6