Until this morning if anyone had ever asked me if the landscape of my made-up writing world could be matched anywhere in the real world, I would have said no. An unequivocal no. But I found it at work today out on the golf course, after I had met my fellow caddies beside the starter’s hut and introduced myself to my golfer. Just as Mr. Scott addressed his ball on the 1st tee, I felt all the sound fall out of the world around me. And when he glanced up the fairway one last time at his target, I began to drop down to the same level of concentration that has characterized my writing world every morning of my life for more than thirty years. I saw Mr. Scott’s eyes narrow. I saw the wind move his hair. I saw the TITLEIST 4 on his golf ball. He seemed to suddenly be cast into slow motion, so that there was plenty of time for me to finish taking in every detail of the ground ahead of us. The light brown fescue down the left and right side of the fairway bending back in the breeze that faced us. The mounds and hollows outlined in shadow and light. I could not see the bunker at 256 yards up the right side, but I knew it was there without having to remind myself. It was no longer just part of the landscape; I had claimed it as part of my known world. Just as the green and the flag blowing in the distance belonged to me. I had laid claim to them in my imagination. I had made them real. And as I took my first steps beside Mr. Scott after he hit his shot, cleaning the face of his hybrid club with my wet towel and then sliding it back into the bag as we began our long walk, I felt the same privilege I always feel in my deep down world of writing. Somewhere in the real world people were driving in traffic or yelling at each other or worrying about the balance in their checkbooks. I was in a deeper world where nothing mattered more than the slant of the ground beneath my feet and the direction of the wind. When I bent down on the 1st green to get a read on our first putt, I was concentrating so deeply that I could see which direction the blades of grass had been cut to form the grain. “What do you see in this, Don?” Mr. Scott asked as he looked down the line of the putt. The truth is I saw nothing. No break at all. I should have trusted this, as Pete had told me. But I was too nervous. And the longer I looked at the line, the more break I saw in it. First right to left. Then left to right. I was lost. Everyone was waiting for me to give a diagnosis; instead, I gave a prediction of sorts. “I think it will break a cup right to left,” I said. The other three caddies heard me. Mr. Scott and the other three golfers heard me. And now there was no place to hide. I held my breath as the ball began rolling toward the hole. It held a perfectly straight line, stopping just short. “Pretty straight,” Mr. Scott said as he tapped it in for par. “I got that one wrong,” I said. “That’s all right,” he said as he handed me back his putter. “It’s never the caddie’s fault. I’m the one with the putter in my hands. I should have seen it straight.”
I was kicking myself as we walked to the 2nd tee. The truth is I never recovered from that bad read. I lost my nerve to the extent that I spent much of the next four hours just following my golfer around as he explained to me how to play each shot. All he really needed me for was to carry his bag. So I was a bag carrier, which doesn’t even come close to being a caddie. I see the difference clearly. A competent caddie walks slightly out ahead of his golfer like the maître d’ at a fine restaurant, leading the way, using the fairway yardage markers to count the paces in his head so when his golfer reaches the ball, the caddie can deliver in about five seconds the distance to the flag on the green, as well as the distance to the front edge of the green, and the back edge of the green, and the distance to any hazards lying between him and the green. Not just the distance to reach the hazards, but equally important the distance to carry them. All this became a jumble in my mind. The one time I tried to be clever was when we were standing in the 4th fairway with the wind blowing steadily. I could feel the wind, but when I looked ahead to the green and saw that the flag was hanging straight down, not moving at all, I volunteered that there was no wind at the green. As Mr. Scott chose his club, he reminded me as graciously as possible that the flag was not moving because it was still wet from the morning dew. Lesson learned for me. I will never again make this mistake. But I wonder how many mistakes there are like this that I might make before I can reach some level of competency. Like, what do you do with your waterproofs when it turns into a lovely, hot summer day, as it did by the time we reached the back nine? I was sweltering, on the verge of a heatstroke, it seemed, before one of the other caddies, new like myself, Jimmy Hughes, kindly showed me how he had tied his around his golfer’s bag. Later, when we were side by side, searching for his golfer’s ball, Jimmy told me that this was his first round as a caddie too. He spent forty years fishing the North Sea, and he’d had enough with waterproofs, which he called “skins.”
As we searched for that ball, Jimmy told me something I am going to remember. When I show up for work each morning, if I see the small boats out at sea, then I know the weather forecast is fair. The small boats won’t go out if there is awful weather ahead.
David Scott is what Jack hopes to become someday, a PGA pro. And what I learned from him today as he shot two over par was that he did not play the golf course. Instead, he took possession of it with fierce conviction. I mean, he was smiling and chatting with his pals and giving me pointers, but beneath the pleasantries he was on fire with determination. Tall and lean, he marched in an even, effortless gait, then stood his ground as he took the measure of the next shot with his feet firmly planted like an explorer who had just jumped down from the bow of a ship to claim this land for himself. And each shot was a blunt but poetic assertion of will as he struck the back of the ball with a downward glancing blow, trapping it for a millisecond against the hard-packed ground before it sizzled off into its flight with enough backspin to hold it on a straight line all the way to the target. It was just after eleven o’clock when we made the turn and I had time to take my BlackBerry from my pocket and send an e-mail to Jack, who at that same time was at golf practice:
I’m out here caddying right now for David Scott, the director of golf at Kingsbarns, who is making this course look as simple as the track you’d lay down in your backyard when you have the grandkids over to play with their Fred Flint-stone plastic clubs. Everybody talks about how you have to stay focused ONE SHOT AT A TIME. Well, here’s how you do that, Jack. You break the golf course into pieces. And claim ownership of it one piece at a time. I’ll explain more later. Love, Daddy
What Mr. Scott was showing me today was how to play to safe ground from wherever we stood. This will be my job as a caddie this summer. To take my golfer from one piece of safe ground to the next. “You don’t need to stand on the tee and tell your man that there is a bunker 245 yards up the right side,” he explained. “You tell him if he hits his shot 200 yards up the left side, after it rolls another 40 yards, he’ll be in fine shape to take a mid-iron into the green. All positives. No negatives.”
APRIL 4, 2008
I am not a real caddie. I am only a “shadow.” There are six of us out on the course each day, walking beside the real caddies and their golfers, keeping our mouths closed, trying to stay out of the way and to do no harm when asked our opinion, following the golden rule of caddies, which is “Show up, keep up, and shut up.” “Would you call this a three- or four-club wind!” old Kenny yelled, as I stood behind him and his golfer stood behind me, all three of us holding on to each other to keep from blowing off the tee box on number 13, the wee par-3. “At least four!” I yelled back through the gale. Kenny took the fellow’s driver from his bag. “All we got!” he said, handing it to the man. Then he whispered in my ear, “In wind like this, don’t hold back!”
I may be only a shadow, but I am a shadow in Scotland. And I’ll say this about golf in Scotland. It is such beautiful ground, and the people are modest, clever, and honest. Already I think of eager Jimmy Hughes, the fisherman with his thick shock of white hair, and silent Sean, who caddied on the European Tour, lean and elegant in his movements, and intense Kenny, retired from the army, and laconic Paul, wi
th his salt-and-pepper beard, once a barrister, as some of the finest people I’ve ever met. Kim, who once managed supermarkets, taught me how to light a golfer’s cigar in the wind. A small but necessary talent. But this country is cursed by weather. Absolutely cursed. And if it is true that golf was invented in this country, then it is also true that it was never intended to be more than a test of endurance and a lesson in humility. Try hitting drivers into 145-yard par-3s and not reaching the green! Maybe humility is golf’s greatest lesson. And maybe this is why I never cared for Tiger Woods or raised Jack to emulate him. Instead, I held Ireland’s Padraig Harrington up for Jack when he was a little boy. There was something marvelously humble about the way Harrington walked with that slight limp. We followed him for years, and then like magic he won the Open at Carnoustie right after Jack and I went there and played on those brutal winter days. And as he stood on the 18th green and was presented with the Claret Jug and named the Champion Golfer of the Year, the first words from his mouth were “I was never meant for anything like this.” So, if Tiger Woods is the greatest practitioner of the game and yet he has failed to learn the game’s greatest lesson—humility—then what does this say about him as a man?
Not sure.
Right now humility is not Jack’s problem. He lost another team challenge match yesterday, failing to finish in the top five to play the tournament this weekend. He took two triple bogeys in the final round and finished last. It happens, I wrote to him. It can happen to anyone. I told him to just hang in there. His time will come. This is the spring of his freshman year. I don’t expect him to really come into his own until he’s a senior. He started late in the game. And he doesn’t come from the golf pedigree with parents who could hire coaches to help him with his swing. In the world of golf, Jack is definitely from the wrong side of the tracks. He worked at a gas station to pay for his clubs. In fact, he was scrubbing the floor of the men’s room at that gas station the night before he played his State Championship match. And I always tried to make him see that this was a point of honor. He was not a country-club golfer. I told him about Lee Trevino, who grew up with one club and used it to hit stones because he couldn’t afford a golf ball. “We’re the kinds of guys that the country clubs are trying to keep out,” I always told him. “You’ll be a renegade golfer.”
Over here the game belongs to everyone, including the renegades. There is no country-club golf for the locals. That is reserved for the guys who can afford to fly here to play. For example. A round at Kingsbarns is £150, or approximately $250. But if you are a resident of St. Andrews, you pay £170 a year, and you get to play all seven courses of the Links Trust, including the Old Course, as many times as you like. You could play the Old Course twice a day every day of the week, except Sunday, when it is closed. Golf belongs to everyone here, no matter his station in life. Somehow, when the game was hijacked to America and Japan, it was transformed into a game for the elite. Like the fellow I was out with from Germany the other afternoon. Handsome, arrogant, dressed to the hilt. He listened to none of his caddie’s advice, though Brian, who used to be a chef in Paris, delivered this advice with the greatest respect, as if he were talking to someone on the PGA Tour instead of someone who should have been banned from ever swinging a golf club in public. He made one horrendous shot after another, and each time his ball disappeared into the rough, he turned and glared at his caddie and me, even though he knew I was only a shadow, as if we were to blame. After a few hours of the man’s abuse, Brian whispered to me: “That’s why those boys lost the war. Twice.”
Somewhere in the dunes on the right side of the 16th fairway I was searching for his ball after he insisted we try to find it, even though Brian had already delivered that great Scottish aperçu with a “Sir” at the beginning: “Sir, Lassie wouldn’t find that ball if you wrapped it in bacon.” The German was only a few feet from me taking a piss when he called out, “Are you not a little too old to be a trainee in anything?”
True, I thought. “I’m training to caddie for my son on his first pro tour,” I replied. “So you see, I’m out here with you right now, but really I’m with my son. And that’s why it’s so important that we find your ball.” All this was true. The only part I left off was the last wee bit: “Personally, I couldn’t give a flying fuck if we ever found your ball, and my best advice for you is that you give up this sport and take up some equestrian event.”
The great thing about this job is that in four hours (five on an exceptionally long round) it is over. I think of each round as a blind date. Perfect strangers meeting up on the 1st tee. And if things work out, best friends, hugs, and photographs four hours later. It is really quite something to observe. The other day I stood beside big Gary as he and his golfer eyed a shot of approximately 170 yards. Gary was recommending a five-iron. His golfer was unconvinced. “Trust me, sir,” Gary said softly. “We’ll need all of the five-iron to get there.”
“But this is only the 3rd hole,” the man objected as his voice rose in an arc of incredulity. “How can you know my game already? I haven’t even hit a five-iron yet.”
With utmost diplomacy, and a self-deprecating little shrug of his big shoulders, Gary replied, “Well, sir, I watched your seven-iron on number 2. You struck it well. We’re going to need a five-iron here.”
With that, Gary handed him the club he had already withdrawn from the man’s bag. The five-iron. And then Gary stepped aside. When he had my attention, he silently pointed his finger to his eyes and then to the man’s ball. While the golfer took his practice swings, Gary’s eyes remained fixed on the ball. Right through the man’s shot, his eyes never moved until after the ball had taken flight. The three of us watched as the ball rolled up onto the green. “You were right,” the man said. “Good call.”
Gary just nodded. Then he put his hand on my shoulder, and we waited until the golfer had marched out ahead of us and joined his buddies. “I like to let my man enjoy a good shot without me,” he said. “God knows there’s enough misery in this game.” Then he asked me if I had noticed his practice swing. I confessed that I hadn’t noticed anything really, and he pointed out that the man had taken two miserable practice swings but the third was spot-on. His clubhead came down and brushed the grass. That practice swing is what set up the good strike. “When you’re out here with a golfer who is really struggling, show him the importance of a good, solid practice swing. And the other thing is I watch the club hit the ball so I can tell if it was a good shot that got us 170 yards or a poor shot. If it was a poor shot, then I gave him too much club, and I know if he’d hit it pure, he would have airmailed the green and sawed my head off for it.”
I have a lot to learn.
APRIL 7, 2008
Today I was out with wry, lanky Johnny from London, who might be in his mid-forties but still has the build and the face of a boy in his twenties. He led around four Spaniards who were trying to save money and could hire only one caddie. This happens from time to time. Instead of each man paying sixty quid for his own caddie, the four of them will pay twenty each, making it a good payday for the caddie and a real savings for the golfers. So there I am on the 1st tee, really bearing down, dropping down to the deep down world. George, the starter, tells us the pin positions so we know exactly where the holes are cut today. I’ve got the four men’s names in my head, and which golf ball each is using, while I follow their tee shots across the sky and mark their landings in my mind. The golfers don’t speak any English, and Johnny and I know about ten words of Spanish between us, but somehow Johnny conveys that two of the drives are in deep trouble, we might not find them, so it would be best to play a provisional. They do. Now I have six golf balls in my mind.
Up the fairway we go. Johnny will take the two who have sprayed their drives to the right, and I’ll take the two who have hit hooks. “Keep them moving,” Johnny tells me. “We’ve got foursomes right behind us.”
This is a problem. I find five golf balls in the crap, but none of them are the balls these
fellows have hit. Everywhere I turn I keep stepping on golf balls in the thick fescue. No luck. Both men are happy dropping balls in the fairway and playing on, but I feel like a failure. If I am out with Jack in a tournament, that is a penalty for a lost ball.
On we went. Things are a bit more complicated with the Spaniards because they need their distances in meters instead of yards. You do the simple math in your head, deducting 10 percent. So a 150-yard shot turns into a 135-meter shot. On the 4th green Johnny tells me it’s my turn to tend the flag. This is the caddies’ main performance. Center stage. Tending the flag if the golfer is so far away with his putt that he needs it in the hole to find the hole. Pulling it out and holding it so that the flag doesn’t blow in the wind. Standing so that your shadow doesn’t fall in anyone’s line. A shadow without a shadow. You sort of dance around the green, and if you are doing your job correctly, no one notices you. That’s the key, to blend in and disappear. I read both putts perfectly and watched both balls drop into the center of the hole. “Well done,” Johnny said to me. I thanked him and then, in my excitement, proceeded to march halfway to the next tee still holding the flag.
Walking with Jack Page 8