Walking with Jack (11 page)

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.

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.

By the time we stood on the 11th tee box, the empty blue sky had been replaced by clouds so thick and black that it felt as if night were descending. Our golfers were playing like piss, losing two or three balls on every hole (balls we were no longer even trying to find) but laughing and drinking whiskey and apparently having the time of their lives. I wanted to do something to help my two fellows, and I was trying my best, but as soon as I had one of them straightened out and back on the fairway, the other was in trouble again in the rough or a bunker or a river. It was as if I were babysitting two rambunctious toddlers in a fine house filled with priceless antiques. Every time I turned my back, there was another catastrophe. One moment they were knocking over the Ming vase in the foyer. The next they were banging the keys on the Steinway. Suddenly a hailstorm was upon us, and we all went trotting after Johnny, who led the way to a ditch beneath a tree where we pulled our jackets over our heads and
curled up in the fetal position. The hail was large enough to feel as if someone were throwing rocks at us. All we could do was curse and then laugh. One of the Spaniards passed around his flask. When I declined, Johnny told me he had noticed that I never went to the pub after work with the boys. I had hoped that my absence was going unnoticed. When we all sat outside the caddie shed, there was always a lot of banter about what had happened or failed to happen the night before in the pub. It was common for caddies doing two loops a day to spend all the money earned from one loop in the pub that night. The other morning I’d heard one senior caddie say, “I had a hundred quid with me when I went to the pub. Then I woke up this morning with only eight quid left.” There was no accounting for this; at £1.50 for a pint, he would have had to drink sixty-six pints. I had already taken my pledge to send all my earnings home and to never spend a dime in the pubs, and I had my wee white lie ready for Johnny, the one lie that would excuse me in a country where so many men had wrecked their lives with the drink. “I’ve had my troubles with booze,” I said. Johnny nodded immediately with understanding. “I hear you, mate,” he said. He worked for a while to roll his cigarette inside his jacket to keep it dry. When he had it lit, he looked up at the sky and said, “Lovely spring we’re having. Whenever you’re out here in shite like this, you want to pray that it gets
worse, not better
, so the blokes will quit.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said. Then I remarked that when we were all following him off the fairway into the ditch under the tree, we looked like ducklings following their mother. “It’s a matter of trust, isn’t it? I mean, a golfer has to trust his caddie?”

“If you want to get philosophical about it, yes, it is about trust,” he said. “I suppose that’s why I do this job year after year. Each time out is the chance to earn the trust of a complete stranger. And in this world where nobody trusts anybody, that counts for something. We know the ground and the weather. These blokes would have followed you and me right off a cliff.”

I thought about this for a while as we lay in the ditch until the storm had passed. I wondered if Jack would trust me as his caddie. And what it would take to earn his trust.

The sky clears. The wind falls off. And there is a moment on the long par-5 12th when it all becomes clear to me. One of my golfers wore a red porkpie hat, the kind I remember seeing Bing Crosby wear when I was a kid. Through the round, he was often wandering off by himself, and on several occasions I found him just looking around, taking in the surroundings thoughtfully as if he were trying to memorize the course. He was the last to drive on number 12, and he was so deep in thought that he forgot to hand me back his driver after the shot and began walking down the hill from the elevated tee box following the flight of his ball. It took a while for the other three golfers to convey to me that he had been here before. He had played this course before, soon after it first opened, with his wife, who had recently died. His friends had brought him back to Scotland on this trip to try to help him get through his grief. When I caught up to him, he said to me, “I love this hole.” His ball had traveled almost two hundred yards, then caught the right-to-left slope of the fairway and rolled to a stop just before the thick dune grass that ran along the shore all the way up the left side to the green. “We should make a birdie here,” I said to him. He laughed off this suggestion, but when I told him that I was serious, our eyes met and I could see how much the idea appealed to him.

I handed him back his driver and showed him how to play the ball back in his stance. The goal here was to keep the ball low, maybe two or three feet off the ground, so that it would roll forever if we caught the slope of the ground just right. Then I showed him where to aim. And he did it. Not once, but twice. The first shot with the “driver off the deck” went almost as far as his drive from the tee. We made the same shot again, only this time with his rescue club, catching the right-to-left slope off the mound on the right of the green. When
the ball came to a stop, it was fourteen feet from the hole. By now the other three men understood what was at stake, and they huddled with Johnny while I lined up the putt. Using my hand, I explained that the ball was going to break right, maybe half a foot in the first half of the putt, before turning back the other way for the remainder. “Just hit it straight at the cup,” I said. “Concentrate on your pace.”

So he makes the birdie putt. The ball rolls one final revolution in slow motion, collapsing into the hole, his arms go up to the heavens, his three pals surround him in a solemn victory celebration, and I realize this is going to be the highlight of their trip. As we walk to the next tee, he puts his arm around my shoulders and thanks me and insists that I try one of his black cigarettes. The tobacco is so strong that on the first drag my knees buckle, which gets a laugh out of everyone.

I know now what my job will be out here caddying for strangers, and then one day caddying for my son. The governing dynamic in golf is the same as it is in love, or life itself. In order to love and to be loved, you must believe in yourself. In order to live a full life, you must believe in yourself—at least enough to keep going one more day. In golf you must believe in yourself enough to make the next shot. Doubt will destroy you. And so I will be a confidence man. I will convey confidence in a calm manner, never showing any doubt or fear. In addition to reading greens, and tending flags, and carrying bags, and pointing the way to the safe, good ground, and knowing the weather, and keeping his clubs clean and his grips dry, and moving him along to keep the pace going on the course, and lighting his cigar, and keeping his score—I will believe in my golfer, and I will make him believe that he can make the next shot, no matter how difficult.

I tried this out on Johnny as we were coming up the 18th fairway, and he disagreed. “No, mate,” he said. “I don’t get that involved. If they make the putt or miss the putt, it’s all the same to me.”

Not me, I thought. I am going to make my name out here as the caddie who fights for every single shot with my golfer whether he’s
Tiger Woods or Caspar Milquetoast. Because, to me, every golfer out here will be my son.