“You’ll see your daughter again,” I told him. “She’ll want to find you.”
“Aye, maybe,” he said. “But she’ll be grown up. Old enough to see her father’s flaws.” His eyes were fixed on the photograph as he put it back in his wallet.
I wrote an e-mail to Jack about this. “What a damned story. And the way he told it made me understand a little something about the relationship of caddies. I had told him that I was just signing on as a trainee, but apparently this was good enough for him to trust me. And because he trusted me, I had no difficulty telling him that I was very uneasy about the road ahead as a caddie here. He told me that after fifty loops I would know the place like I’d spent my life here.”
When I told Pete that I was most worried about the putting, he walked me to the practice putting green, where he pointed to one hole about fifteen feet from where we were standing and asked me if I could see the break. I saw nothing. “Well, it’s there, right at the hole, a wee hump that will move the ball to the right.” I knelt down and took another look. Nothing.
Thus began my first lesson in reading putts, with Pete saying, “I’m going to tell you everything you need to know.”
In the first place it was not going to be only a matter of me learning the terrain of the 18 greens on the Old Course. On any given day I might be sent to caddie on any one of the other three courses that lay alongside the Old Course—the New, the Jubilee, or the Eden—or up on the cliff to the new Castle Course when it opened. So that means 90 greens to learn. And on any given day the hole will be cut in one of 7 pin positions on each green, meaning I will need to learn how the ball rolls from 630 locations.
Pete’s advice was to focus my mind on the essential truths about reading putts. First, the pros read their own putts and only rarely ask their caddies’ opinion. Why? Because only the golfer knows how hard he will be rolling the ball toward the hole. If he dies the ball into the hole, then it will break dramatically along the contour of the green. But if he rolls it with authority, it will go through some of the break on a straight path. But for us, we are almost always asked by our golfers to read every putt. Meaning it is at best an imprecise science. I will make mistakes. I will misread putts. The important thing is to admit it when I’m wrong. Too many caddies who read the break incorrectly then tell their golfer, “Well, you pushed it,” or “You pulled it.” It’s better to be honest and admit your mistake and tell the golfer you’ll get that stroke back for him if you can. It is all about trust between the golfer and his caddie. Break the trust and you’ll never get it back.
And there’s more to remember. If most of the break is at the beginning of the putt, remember that because the ball is almost always moving faster at the beginning, you don’t want to read in all the break. That’s important.
Next. When the ball rolls uphill, it loses steam and takes more break. Conversely, when it’s rolling downhill, it picks up pace and rushes through some of the break. When the greens are wet and the ball slows down, you have to factor this in. And you do all this in no more than thirty seconds and then deliver the verdict to your golfer in no more than five seconds. If you take longer than this, you are slowing things down out on the course, and this is something a caddie must never do.
Note to myself: One thing Pete said that I really have to remember is to start reading my golfer’s putt long before I reach the green. As soon as I can see his ball on the green from the distance as I’m walking toward it, I must use this perspective to view the contour of the green between his ball and the hole. Never waste this time, because you usually get a better read from the distance as you approach the ball than you ever get standing right on top of it. And do not read anything into the putt that isn’t there. Trust yourself. Eighty percent of the time your first read is the most accurate. Once you start changing your mind, you are in trouble.
And one more thing. If you look at the putt from behind the ball and it breaks one way, and then you look at the putt from below the hole and it looks completely different, treat it as a straight putt. Same is true with a double-breaking putt. Find the straight line through both breaks.
———
Holy Moses. A lot to remember. And here’s the most important thing of all. Try to get your golfer onto the green in a place where he is not putting downhill. Uphill putts are infinitely easier.
So, before I left the Old Course today, I paid my £100 to the assistant caddie master. I am to report for my first class in forty-eight hours. Which gives me all day tomorrow to practice putting and reading putts on my own. I’m going to test everything I learned today from Pete.
MARCH 27, 2008
It is just after 2:00 in the afternoon, and I am writing this one letter at a time into the memo file on my BlackBerry inside the clubhouse at the practice center by the Eden Course to get out of the rain, where I have just been putting for more than four hours after taking the bus into town again early this morning. I stopped at the pro shop on Market Street with the blue door, and a gregarious fellow named Jamie sold me a proper set of waterproofs. Gore-Tex. Tops and bottoms. Black pants with a black-and-white jacket manufactured by Callaway, for which I paid just under £300. A lot of money. Setting aside £460 for next month’s rent due on the fifteenth, I have just over £100 left. My goal is to never use credit cards or have money wired to me from home. Meaning I cannot spend a dime outside rent and food. With this in mind, I brought my coffee with me this morning in the small thermos that Nell got me for Christmas from Starbucks. And two peanut butter sandwiches to last me through the day. Breakfast was oatmeal and shall always be oatmeal and a half glass of orange juice. Supper last night was a can of pea soup for seventy pence and two hard rolls for fifty pence. I find that I am not hungry. I think I miss Colleen too much to be hungry.
As for the BlackBerry, I can send and receive unlimited e-mails, and since I arrived, I have kept it in my shirt pocket, right over my heart, so that when it buzzes, I imagine it is a message from someone who cares about me, going straight into my heart. No calls are allowed and no texting because of the prohibitive price. A few minutes ago I wrote to Jack asking him if he could actually believe that in twenty-four hours I was going to be reporting to the Old Course to begin my training as a caddie. I am five hours ahead of him, but he was up for his early class and wrote back, “Sweet, Daddy.” He’s a man of few words, though as a little boy he never stopped talking and he spoke with such enthusiasm that he stuttered. I know that his golf season has begun at UT, but I am not going to ask him how it is going. I don’t want to put pressure on him. When it starts going well, he will tell me, I’m sure. Each Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the team of ten players has challenge matches with only the top five making the weekend tournament. So far, though Jack has been in the top five after every first and second round, he has always collapsed in the final round and finished just out of the running. Whenever he brings this up in an e-mail, I just keep telling him that he will get there. It all takes time.
10:00 p.m. Jack, you won’t understand this for another forty years, but in the hours I spent the past few days at the Old Course, I have felt for the first time in my life that I know where I want to grow old. Standing outside the caddie pavilion with the caddies, I felt like I had finally found my tribe. Hard to explain really. Deep inside, it feels as if I have been returning here my whole life. Enough of that, though. The important thing I wanted to write to you about is that I know I have come to the right place to learn to be a caddie so I can be of use to you when we meet up someday on a pro tour. If you are going to learn to be a caddie in this world, you have to learn here in all the Scottish weather so that you can learn how to play the game in the worst possible conditions that you and I will ever encounter. Truth is, it has rained ever since I arrived, and the wind! Well, you remember the wind at Carnoustie last winter. I was out in a gale the other day playing the Elie Course. I was about 130 yards from the green, dead into the wind. I hit the best five-iron I’ve ever hit, and the ball went on a
straight line to the flag, then, halfway there, started blowing back toward me. Amazing. It reminds me of when I was first learning to sail a small boat in Frenchman’s Bay in Maine. George Shepherd, the old skipper from across the road, told me that the only way I was going to learn to be a real sailor was to take my boat out into the bay when the small-craft warnings were flying and everyone else was coming back to the harbor. I think the same is true for becoming a caddie. I have to learn how to manage my golfer’s game in weather so foul that you just want to dig a hole and crawl into it. Tomorrow is my first day, Jack. My first real step to prepare myself. Wish me luck. I’m five hours ahead of you, so you will be sound asleep when I do my first loop. I love you and miss you tons. Daddy
MARCH 28, 2008
I was much too excited to sleep well, and in order to be certain I wasn’t late for my first day on the job, I took a bus this morning that got me into St. Andrews two hours early. I took a walk out to the farthest point on the course, the 11th green, where Bobby Jones had met his demise. The sun lay in gold bands across the fairways as I made my way back, dreaming about what it was going to be like walking the same ground each day where Jones and all the great players had walked. There was still no one in the caddie pavilion or standing outside, so I killed some time looking in the windows of the handsome gift shop behind the 18th green, deciding what I might buy Colleen and the three girls at the end of my first day of work. I had my face pressed to the glass, searching for some little thing I could send them to mark the beginning of my journey as a caddie, when a reflection appeared. Two people just behind me, walking up to the 18th green, where the white flag was blowing in the rising breeze off the sea. Rather than turn around and face them, I let myself imagine that Jack and I were coming to the green together and it was our reflection in the glass. Not the two of us last winter, but on some day in the near future when I would be carrying his bag. The possibility of this felt so close and real and I was zinging along with it when my BlackBerry zapped me in my heart. It was much too early for anyone from home. That is what I was thinking when I took the phone from my pocket and saw an incoming e-mail from the caddie pavilion. No lights were on there, and no one was standing outside. I clicked open the e-mail and found this message: “This is Rick Mackenzie, the caddie master. If you’re the writer, I cannot take you on as a caddie. I won’t have any writers working for me.”
A few minutes later at the window of the pavilion, the assistant confirmed this and handed me back my £100. So much for my life here as a caddie.
MARCH 29, 2008
I was on the 4th tee at Elie yesterday playing my final round before I packed to return home when, to make matters worse, I got an e-mail from Jack telling me that several members of the Inverness Club whom he has gotten to know are coming to St. Andrews to play the Old Course this summer and they plan to look me up to caddie for them. I wrote back and said nothing to Jack about what has happened. He doesn’t need any bad news from me.
I played fifty-seven holes of angry golf today trying to get it out of my system. Out on the course I sent Rick Mackenzie an e-mail telling him about Jack and me and our dream and asking if he would reconsider. He wrote back immediately with two words: “Sorry. No.” I birdied the next hole and the one after that while my blood was boiling. Something about anger focuses the mind, I suppose. I felt as if there were no hole on the course I couldn’t birdie. Until I made a bogey.
MARCH 30, 2008
My plan was to take the train to London today, spend the night there, and get the cheapest flight out tomorrow. This morning I walked to the maintenance shop off the 3rd tee and presented the head of the grounds crew with a quart of Jameson whiskey as a thank-you gift. I explained what had transpired at the Old Course and said that I was going home. When I delivered the news, there was a look of sorrow in his eyes, as if this reversal of fortune had happened to him. He took a deep drag on his cigarette, and then he told me that he knew the caddie master at Kingsbarns Golf Links, just outside St. Andrews. “His name is Davy Gilchrist,” he said. “I’ll ring him just now on my mobile if you want.”
Ten minutes later I was running to the bus stop to catch the 95, which dropped me in the center of the village of Kingsbarns. From there I walked about half a mile, along the main road for six hundred yards, then down the long curving entrance road through a farmer’s fields. I was so nervous that I kept counting my paces just under my breath. When I walked through the stone pillars, past the practice range, and got my first glimpse of the place, it stopped me in my tracks. The golf course lay along the sea in a kind of splendor most golfers will never see in their lifetimes. Out in front of me for as far as I could see were pale green fairways sweeping through wild, honey-colored dunes with the kinds of dramatic elevations that are uncommon in links courses anywhere in the world. My first glimpse of the place was breathtaking. Like something from a dream. If caddying at the Old Course was going to be like working every day in a museum, Kingsbarns was an art gallery.
I met Davy Gilchrist in the small stone cottage just behind the parking lot that served as the caddie shed. When he shook my hand, he narrowed his intense blue eyes as if he were trying to see inside me. I told him in one breath why I had come to Scotland and what had happened to me at the Old Course. He told me about his own kids and his grandkids, who all lived within fifty yards of his house. “They’re fantastic! They rob me blind,” he said with a wide grin. He told me that Kingsbarns trained the best caddies in all of Scotland. Then he outlined the terms of employment. He had around seventy caddies, and I would be starting at the bottom of the list, meaning I wouldn’t go out each day until all of them had. But he gave me his word that he would get me as much work as he could, and because I was living in Elie and was familiar with the course there, he would send me there as well when there were requests. Until I learned my way around, I would be a “shadow” walking beside one of the real caddies and paying that caddie £2 per round for the privilege of learning all that I could from him. The season opened in three days and would run for six months, and I was expected to be there every day.
That was good enough for me. We shook hands again, and he said, “I can always use a hardworking caddie.”
I walked back into the village in the rain and was soaked to my skin by the time I got under the roof of the bus stop. I didn’t care. I couldn’t have been happier if I had just been elected the mayor of Kingsbarns. Inside the little hut was a guy sitting on the bench with boots caked in mud. A middle-aged man, he was hunched over, smoking a cigarette and looking out at the rain with a baleful expression. “Are you a farmer?” I asked. He gave me a sideways glance, then resumed glaring at the weather without answering my question. “I feel sorry for the farmers in this country, working outside in this weather,” I said a little too cheerfully. He got a pained look on his face as if my tone of voice had offended him in some way.
Then without looking back at me, he muttered, “Try working as a bleedin’ caddie.”
MARCH 31, 2008
Opening day is tomorrow. In four hours I will be caddying my first loop at Kingsbarns for the management of the course. Davy told me that I would be carrying the bag of David Scott, the director of golf operations. I won’t be paid, but I will be given my tea (lunch, I suppose) in the clubhouse after the round. Fair enough. I’m taking one of Jack’s University of Toledo golf balls to present to Mr. Scott on the 1st tee. And I’ve been awake since 4:00 a.m. studying my yardage book. I walked the course once, taking notes, and I’ve written those notes into the book. But when I close my eyes and try to picture the holes, it is all just a blur to me. A pale green field of mounds and valleys rolling beside the blue sea. I am going to pretend that I am caddying for Jack today and that we are trying to qualify for an important tournament. And no matter how nervous I am, I’m not going to forget the hazards you can’t see—the hidden stream at the back of the 6th green and the hidden bunker up the left side of the 14th fairway. And the stream behind the 16th green. And the only out
of bounds on the whole course, up the right side off the tee on number 11. Since I woke up this morning, I have been trying to think of the worst thing that might happen to me today.
I think the other caddies in my group are also new. I think that’s what Davy told me. Many of the experienced guys are still in Florida, where they work during the winter months. They won’t be back for another few weeks. Something I didn’t realize until yesterday is that we host the last event on the European Tour, the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship. So if I make it through the next 187 days in good order, I will have a chance to caddie with the pros, and Jack will be able to watch on TV.
MARCH 31, 2008
10:00 p.m. In my thirty-one years of living a writer’s life, I have inhabited the world on one level with everyone I’ve ever known, including the lady at the fruit and vegetable shop in Elie across from the bus stop who sold me my banana this morning and the people who rode the bus through the fog with me. I belong to this world just as they do, and I endure my share of the same joys and hardships, pleasures and sorrows that they do. But for the hours when I write each day—normally from 4:00 a.m. until 10:00—I inhabit a different world, on a layer of existence maybe three levels below the real world. From the very first time I ever wrote, it has been this way. The moment I close my eyes and wait for the first words to come, I can feel myself dropping down the elevator shaft to the world that awaits me. It is a world of made-up stories and invented characters, a world that feels more real to me than the real world outside my door. And on the mornings when I am writing particularly well, all the reference points that lead back to the real world have vanished. The coffee cup beside me is part of the made-up world. So is the lamp. There is no way back. And I have the grand illusion that I have become a citizen of this made-up world with a passport that can never be revoked, granting me the right and the privilege to travel there until the end of my time. The important word here is “privilege.” From the first page of fiction I ever wrote almost exactly thirty-one years ago living in a cabin in the mountains of Maine, I have felt privileged to occupy what I have always called the deep down world. It is a world of stillness and extreme contrast, so that colors and emotions and sounds are dramatically defined. All I have to do is turn and face them, and there they are waiting for me to absorb and then to find words to describe. It is also a world of surprises and stunning reversals of fortune, where roads take unexpected turns without warning and blizzards blow in from nowhere, and so I must always be alert and on my toes.
Walking with Jack Page 7