Walking with Jack (16 page)

What a character! I told him that I was going to remember him as my fugitive golfer. “That’s me,” he said cheerfully. “On the run. On the lam. Tomorrow we’re at Royal Dornoch. Then on to Turnberry. I can’t wait. Maybe Prestwick too if my ticker holds up.”

We skipped the last two holes so he could catch his breath. It was almost growing dark when we sat on the stone wall waiting for Nigel and the others to finish. Burt couldn’t get over how bright the sky was. “That beautiful par-3 where I hit it into the ocean, I sure ruined that hole,” he said solemnly. “I tried to bail out to the left like you said, but I blocked it. What a shame. The one that got away, I guess.”

I was prepared to bribe someone in the pro shop with a tenner, but the assistant pro let me use the buggy and I drove the two of us back down the 9th fairway through the golden sunlight and the long shadows, up the front side of the mounds and down the back, all the way to the 15th tee, where I handed Burt his driver so he could play the beautiful par-3 again.

“You think I need the big dog?” he questioned.

“It’s late,” I said. “The air is heavy, Burton.”

He nodded and held out his hand, palm up. “I’ll take one TNT,” he said.

I gave him the pill, and he slipped it under his tongue. “I think we make our own destiny, don’t you, Don?” he sang as he teed up his ball.

I told him to take aim at the right half of the bunker on the back of the green.

“One hundred and eighty-seven yards will reach the sand,” I said. “Just give me 165, and we’ll be in the mayor’s office.”

“The mayor’s office,” he said. “I like that. I just want to make one pretty swing, and then I’ll tell you about Deidre while we’re driving to the green with my putter in my hand.”

It worked out pretty much the way he envisioned it. He didn’t hit it on the screws, but close enough for the ball to run up onto the front of the green. I handed him his putter (best feeling in the world for any caddie coming off any par-3 tee box), and then he told me that he preferred to walk. So we did while he told me that there was this girl in Palo Alto named Deidre back in the early 1950s when he was there. He and Nigel were both in love with her. “Madly in love” is how he put it. “Intoxicated, to be honest. Nigel thought I was bedding her, and I thought he was. We became mortal enemies. It wasn’t until I found him on Google that we both discovered that neither one of us had ever had her. Can you believe it? We found her on Google too. She lives in Seattle. When we get back to the States, we’re going to look her up, hats in hand, you might say.”

We missed the long birdie putt but captured the par. Burton was describing it to Nigel for the third time while we rode in a taxi to Elie. They had insisted on giving me a ride home. It was ten o’clock, and the moon was floating above the poppy field as we left the course. The taxi driver was talking about the bad economy; his fares were down more than 50 percent from last summer. He’d met a caddie in town who sold his vest to a golfer for twenty quid. He went on and on about the Royal Bank of Scotland—“nottin’ but a pack a thieves.” It was an old story by now. I was grateful for a day’s work, even though I waited seven hours for my loop. We are down from about
130 jobs a day to 30, and it is every man for himself now. The America I left behind seems to be in ruins.

We said our good-byes. I thanked Burton for the good company and the tip and wished him the best of luck with Deidre in Seattle.

He smiled, and nodded thoughtfully. The last thing I heard him say was “Thank God for Google.”

Apparently, the big investment bank Lehman Brothers is kaput, and people are afraid that the stock market is going to fail big-time.

Here is my e-mail exchange with my pal at JPMorgan at 10:00 p.m. my time. Five o’clock his time in New York City.

“Donnie. We might be facing the end of our economy. Make sure you can get your kids home from wherever they are scattered around the world. Send them enough cash. Credit cards will be worthless.”

“What do you mean, ‘the end of our economy’?”

“I mean we will all be growing our food in our backyards.”

“When?”

“Immediately.”

“All my life I’ve been told that there are safeguards in the system to prevent another Great Depression.”

“Forget that. And don’t listen to any of the so-called experts. When the wind blows hard enough, things fall down. You should know that, Donnie—you’re a fucking caddie in Scotland!”

“How bad is it going to get?”

“We could be talking about this scenario. You go to the bank on Monday and find the ATM is empty. Your accounts have zero
balances—it turns out those figures were only images on a computer screen. Your credit cards are no longer valid. We are cast into a cash-only society overnight. All you have is the cash you have in the coffee can buried in the backyard. When that’s gone, you’re toast.”

“I won’t have anything.”

“Tell your wife to take all your money out of the bank immediately!”

“Are you sure?”

“Call her
right now
. I am here on Wall Street. It’s in the air. Like a plague.”

“Okay. And I’m still sorry about that putt I misread on the 11th at Elie.”

“I should have taken it out of your tip!”

Day of days, Jack. I was in the parking lot carrying my golfer’s clubs to the courtesy car after my round with a Swedish industrialist. There I was walking beside Padraig Harrington and his young caddie. I told him that since you were eight years old, just falling in love with golf, you and I have followed him.

“Before anyone knew me,” he said with his grin.

“Yes,” I said. “My son went off to play college golf in the States, and I came here to be a caddie so he and I can meet up again someday on the tour.”

“Where is he in college?”

“University of Toledo.”

“In Ohio.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Good luck this week.”

He thanked me and we shook hands. As he was walking away, he turned and called to me, “What’s your son’s name?”

“Jack Snyder,” I said.

“Jack Snyder at the University of Toledo,” he said. “I’ll remember that.”

Home. I awoke this morning knowing that I have been away from home long enough and that it is time for me to leave here. For a month I watched the grandstands and the tee box markers being constructed for the Dunhill Links Championship, like a stage set being built in advance of the actors’ arrival. This is what I have looked forward to since early April. And the truth is I never thought I would make it through the season. I have walked about a thousand miles. I turned fifty-eight years old here a few months back. I am going to miss the people I worked with and the ground I walked each day. But I will not miss the waiting. The eight and nine hours of waiting for work.

The world of work seems to be changing now. I have not read a newspaper or listened to a radio or watched the television or surfed the Internet in over half a year, but I have had reports from home in e-mails, and it is clear that America is changing. The news that I hear from golfers has been steady and ominous. Financial leaders from around the world have all told me the same thing all summer long. A real economic collapse could be coming. “Build a shelter,” one South African banker told me. A prince from Brazil told me to take all my earnings and buy gold. He took hold of my elbow and said, “I’m serious. Listen to what I’m telling you.”

———

My last loop was with one of the high-and-mighty rulers of Goldman Sachs who chain-smoked his way around the course and never laughed with his mates, though they kept trying to distract him. Coming off 18 at the end, I asked him how bad things are going to get in the world now, and he answered me in one monotone run-on sentence just above a whisper, as if he were passing on to me a precious secret: “The rats are already running for the exits, if you hold any chips, cash them in now, don’t delay.”

Maybe the world is changing. But it is always changing. It changed for my father when he was a little boy suddenly riding through the Great Depression. He had told me many time how all his cousins, aunts, and uncles moved in together and slept together on the kitchen floor in front of the coal stove riding out the storm of the Great Depression. Every morning his father, my grandfather, left the house and spent the day selling apples on the sidewalks to buy food for the family supper that night and a few lumps of coal for the stove. Twenty-three years ago my first child was born in Iowa City. I remember buying baby things for Erin at a nearby farm that the bank had foreclosed on. A family there was selling everything they owned and losing the farm that had been in their family for four generations. I still remember the father leaning against the fence, watching people carrying away his possessions in the rain. I bought a wicker changing table for our new, first baby. His changing table for one of his babies. In his eyes you could see that he had been shattered and that he would never believe in himself again. He was only a few years older than I, but his life was over, you could tell. My life was just beginning, and his was ending. I wonder whatever became of him. I wonder if we are all going to
be him
next. Perhaps it will all fall down, and then a new and better America will begin. The corporate lawyers and the Wall Street princes will learn to make trousers and coats in the formerly abandoned textile plants. Insurance executives will plow fields, and hedge fund brokers will fire up the steel mills. I hope that
I am a caddie in the new world. I would do this job for nothing, just for the chance to be out on this wonderful ground, walking beside the caddies who have taught me so much this season.

I rode the early bus to work through the morning darkness, watching the fishing boats out on the North Sea as we passed through St. Monans and Pittenweem, thinking of Jimmy Hughes, who fished this sea before he began caddying with me. Jimmy, whom I relied upon for weather forecasts and who became a great reader of putts, much better than I.

At the gate to Kingsbarns, the big blue Dunhill signs waited for me. There hadn’t been a single day in the last six months when I hadn’t looked forward to this, and suddenly there I was, nervous at first, but soon fighting for each stroke with my golfer, marching up the fairways as I had 140 times before, only this time I shared them with Padraig Harrington and Paul Casey, the two pros my son has always admired most. The moment I will always remember came as I walked off the 6th green, making my way through the gallery to the 7th tee, when Glen stepped out of the crowd and shook my hand. He had taken a day off to watch me work my first professional tournament. We didn’t say anything, but when I looked into his eyes, I knew that he understood. I still had a long way to go to measure up to him and the veteran caddies I had worked with all season. But I thought I just might get there.

Logan Airport, Boston. In the Edinburgh Airport before I boarded my plane, I received two e-mails. One from Jack with word that he is in the NCAA Bridgestone Golf Collegiate tournament. His first tournament. It starts on the twenty-seventh.

And an e-mail from Nigel. The name meant nothing until I began reading: “You caddied for my friend Burton earlier this summer. We all took a taxi together.”

Then I remembered. He was writing to say that Burton had passed away a week ago.

I was in line to board the plane when I remembered that Burton and Nigel were going to Seattle to find their old girlfriend, Deidre. I e-mailed back: “Did you find Deidre?”

I had to wait seven hours for the answer. Yes, they had found her.

I am at the Forest Oaks Country Club in Greensboro, North Carolina, standing fifty yards behind Jack, who is competing in his first NCAA Division I event. I drove seventeen hours from Maine to be here, and I am typing the hole-by-hole action into my BlackBerry so that I can e-mail it to Colleen. I want to talk with Jack. I want to carry his bag and tell him that it is okay for him to be wondering now
if his dream of playing D1—that old dream he’s had for so long—has been real or nothing more than a dream all along.

Hole 1—230-yard par-3. He misses green to the left. Misses four-foot putt for par. Bogeys 1st hole. One over after one.

Saved par on 2.

Saved par on 3.

Putting from twenty feet for birdie now on 4. He has his blue Toledo sweater on now. Two feet short. He hit a beautiful drive and wedge on this hole. Makes par.

When he walks past me, I say, “Fight for your team now and you’ll be in this until the last stroke.”

“I will,” he says.

One over after four.

Fifth hole—525-yard par-5. Lovely drive past everyone. Two hundred and thirty-four yards left into this par-5. Here we go. He yells, “GO!” Yes to twenty feet! Eagle putt coming up! He’s taking the long walk with his putter. The other two boys are not even close to being on in two. Beautiful putt. A tap-in birdie. Even after five.

Sixth hole—471-yard par-4. He just blasts his drive 40 yards past everyone right down the heart of the fairway. Eric, on the grounds crew, gives me a package of Fig Newtons. I ask him if he can find me some whiskey. Jack has 110 to the pin on center of green. A choked-down sand wedge for him. Mississippi strikes his second shot to two feet. Here goes Maryland—beautiful shot to eight feet. Here comes Jack. Hits fifteen feet from the pin and spins back to twenty feet from hole. Should be an up and down. But this first putt is a big break five feet left to right and downhill for the final eight feet. I am looking at this from below the hole and it is a tough breaker and he’s going to have to die it at the crest before the final eight feet. Just rolls past the hole. Almost drains it. Thirteen inches for par. In the jar! Even after six—and leading his group right now.