Walking with Jack (10 page)

Then without looking back at me, he muttered, “Try working as a bleedin’ caddie.”

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.

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.

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:

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.”

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, with 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.”