Authors: Don J. Snyder
For weeks now I have been living like a monk. Up at 4:00 to write with a bowl of oats, a half glass of orange juice, and one cup of coffee instead of the three I normally had because more than one and I have to piss out on the golf course. Pack two peanut butter and banana sandwiches and a thermos of tea. Walk three blocks to the bus. Ride the bus to Kingsbarns. Walk the half mile to the caddie shed. Do my round as a shadow. Walk back to the bus. Ride home. Eat two hard rolls and a bowl of soup and drink one tin of lager. Fall asleep in my chair, reading. Wake up at 4:00 in all my clothes and start in again. I am breaking the pattern tonight, eating mashed and bangers and drinking a pint of Guinness to celebrate what happened yesterday. It was a slow day, only a few caddies went out. Everyone had given up and left by around two. Even Davy had gone home. I had almost an hour to wait for the next 95 bus, so I was sitting at the picnic table outside the caddie shed, typing into my BlackBerry. Before I left for work this morning, I discovered the memo file was just like a file on my Mac, and I was sitting there thinking that maybe I would write a new draft of the screenplay of my father and mother’s love story while I’m here working this season. It will be my sixth draft. I had just typed in the title page—
American Love Story
—when one of the assistant pros appeared and asked if there were any caddies around.
“I’m just a shadow,” I said.
He said that two golfers from San Francisco had just shown up and requested two caddies. He started to turn away.
“I know the course,” I said. “I could take them around.”
He nodded his approval. “Well, then,” he said. “Up you go.”
They were brothers in their thirties, one a little stockier than the other, both very friendly and delighted to be in Scotland playing golf for the first time. I put one bag over my shoulder; the other I pushed on a trolley. I was too nervous at first to descend to the
deep down world
or to forget that this was my first time out on the golf course unsupervised by a real caddie. On the 2nd hole, a par-3 along the sea, I failed to calculate the distance to the hole, giving them the distance to the front of the green instead, and left them both short. I admitted my mistake and then made a worse error on the short par-4 5th hole, giving them way too much club when I failed to see that the wind, which had been out in front of us on the tee box, was now suddenly behind us. They both hit their balls right through the fairway into the rough. I walked out ahead of them at a good clip to give myself extra time to find their balls, but even after they arrived to help me, we found neither. If this had been a strict competition or if I’d been caddying for Jack in a tournament, failing to hit a provisional ball would have cost us dearly. They called it even, both dropping new balls, and we played on from there. They took it in stride, and soon enough I felt myself descending into their story as they told me it was their mother, a champion player, who had taught them the game and who insisted that the only gift they ever gave her on Mother’s Day was a round of golf together.
We spent a while discussing the physicality of the game, as explained by their mother. If you figure that it takes the average player two minutes to execute a shot, this means that in any given round of golf played to even par in four hours, ninety-six minutes are spent just walking. All this downtime is a problem for most golfers. There is just too much time to think about all the things that can impact negatively on your next shot. Meaning the girl who dumped you thirty years earlier because you weren’t quite good enough. Or
the promotion that went to the other junior account executive because he was a little brighter. The bad stuff has a way of creeping in, and by bad stuff their mother meant history. “She believed that out on a golf course was where all your small and large failures in your past were waiting for you. They tracked you down and waited for you even in a place as beautiful as this place,” one brother explained. “You think you’re heading out for a nice, pleasant walk,” the other brother said, “and bingo, you’re ambushed by history instead.” Their mother had taught them to use the time spent walking to observe the natural world around them. Birds and trees. The movement of clouds. To try to become part of the surroundings. “And the way you walk is also of great importance,” one brother said. “Most people are much too stiff when they hit a golf ball. Their arms are like blocks of wood. This starts by the way they march to their ball. You want to teach your son to walk with loose joints, like he’s made of rubber, and with his shoulders relaxed so the tension dissipates. By the time he steps up to his next shot, he should be half asleep!”
I practiced it myself as the afternoon wore on, walking with a rolling gait while they shared their personal history with the game. Both of them had always believed they would try for the pro tour. They’d played in junior competitions and set their sights on the big D1 college programs, but things hadn’t worked out. We were on the 14th tee when they showed me a drill their mother used to work on with them. “Where is the worst place you can drive the ball from here?” one asked me. It had to be down over the steep embankment into the fescue on the side of the hill running along the 12th fairway, I explained. After he hit his first drive up the middle, he hit a second one right into all the trouble. As we walked through the deep grass searching for the ball, he told me that his mother had taught him one of the most important lessons for Jack in competition and for me as his caddie. “Okay, here we are,” he said, after we were standing over the ball. “Now is the point in time when you have to give up
the idea of getting on the green in regulation. Actually, the instant you hit this drive, you should have given up on that.” His point was you are in trouble now and trouble is part of this game. No one gets through a round without encountering trouble. The players who end up at the top of the leaderboard are the ones who deal with trouble better than the rest.
“So, all I want to know from here is where to hit this shot to give myself a decent chance to make my par. This is one of the paradoxes in the game; we all know that we are supposed to concentrate on one shot at a time, the shot right in front of you. But here is one of those exceptions. I have already conceded the second shot. I’m not even thinking of trying to get to the green in regulation. All I’m doing now is setting up the third shot.”
It made perfect sense to me. I asked him what he considered his strongest shot into a green. “One-hundred-and-fifteen-yard pitching wedge,” he said. I walked back up the hill and out onto good flat ground that distance from the flag. He hit an eight-iron to that spot, then took out his pitching wedge and landed the ball ten feet from the hole. We missed the putt for par, but he had made his point, and it was a point that I will remember. We took a disaster out of the equation by playing for a bogey. My job is to limit the damage.
When we finished, we grabbed one of the groundskeepers to shoot a photograph of the three of us outside the clubhouse. Then they paid me, and we said good-bye in the parking lot. I took the bills in my right hand and stuffed the money into my pocket as I turned away and began walking to the bus. I didn’t look at it until I had reached the bus stop. Two fifties and two twenties. It was the first money I’d earned as a caddie.
I had my last smoke of the day outside my back door under the stars. A sky swept with stars. I am now a caddie in Scotland, I said
just above a whisper. I am here learning what I need to learn for Jack, and I am also
making money
to send home to my family. One hundred and forty pounds at the current exchange rate is about $250. Not bad for a day’s work. Not bad at all for a nice four-hour walk with those two fine young men, who played the course at four and seven over par.
Then sometime in the night I awoke with rain lashing the windows and a terrible feeling in my head. It took me a moment to comprehend that in my sleep I was being reprimanded by Davy, my caddie master. Gone were his bright eyes and quick grin. He was pissed and letting me know in no uncertain terms that there would be consequences for what I had done. First, I had posed as a real caddie instead of telling the golfers that I was only a shadow. This, in Scotland, he explained as his eyes narrowed with contempt, was akin to impersonating an officer, and it carried a penalty. Second, by pretending to be a real caddie, I had earned £140 that should have gone to one of his real caddies.
Unable to get back to sleep, I took a shower and dressed. It was three in the morning when I started drinking coffee, seated at my kitchen table, waiting for the first bus to Kingsbarns at 6:03.
I arrived in the downpour with no place to get out from the rain until the milkman showed up half an hour later and led me to an unlocked garage bay where he leaves his deliveries. “You look like you’re lost,” he remarked. When he heard my Yankee accent, he asked the standard question: “On holiday?” Which made me wonder what line of logic could possibly have led him to the conclusion that an American on holiday would be standing outside soaking wet in the rain waiting for a golf course to open. There was a certain tone to his voice that annoyed me. I had heard the same tone from one bus driver. It was the spiteful tone reserved by some Scots for the ugly Americans. Their way of telling us to get the fuck out of their country. They were never going to get the opportunity to turn their contempt on Donald
Trump, who had recently bought up a hunk of their country for another golf course, so any Yank would do.
You can’t blame them really, though I lit a cigarette and waited silently for the milkman to grow bored with me and leave.
Davy was the next person to arrive. I watched him park his small car in the empty parking lot, then sprint through the rain to the caddie shed. The lights went on inside the low-slung stone building, which looked as if it had stood on the land for centuries.
I’ve been on Oprah’s lit-up stage. And the
Today
show. And
Good Morning America
. But I was nervous now in a way I hadn’t been before. Here I was a foreigner without a work visa, because caddies are never asked for them, who had overstepped the dividing line separating myself from the real caddies.
I had the money in my left hand as I shook Davy’s hand. “I think I made a mistake yesterday,” I told him. He cocked his head slightly and looked straight into my eyes. I explained what had happened, then handed him the money.
He looked at it, folded the bills carefully, and handed them back to me.
“I heard what you did for us yesterday, Don,” he said. “You helped us out, and I’m grateful.”
It was the kind of relief you feel when the cop who has pulled you over tells you he’s going to let you off this time with just a warning. “I don’t think I should keep the money,” I said. “I’m just a shadow, and I made some mistakes out there.”
“Aye,” he said. “But you dinna make any new ones! And you’re not a shadow anymore, Don.”
We talked for a while. He gave me the best advice: “Someday you will be caddying for your son when every shot will count. What you want to do now is learn something each time you are out on the golf course. Keep your eyes open and your head up and you will always learn something new.”
———
So here I am in the Chariots pub celebrating with mashed and bangers. And I’m wearing my new handsome vest, dark blue with the gold Kingsbarns crown over my heart. I feel as if I belong here.
Let it be noted here what a well-trained caddie working in Scotland will carry for himself and his golfer: tees, divot tool, small coin for marker, pencil, extra scorecard, lighter, wool cap for when the wind howls off the North Sea, sunscreen (seldom needed), large towel with one end kept wet to clean clubs and ball, wee towel kept dry at all costs beneath his clothing and used only for grips (often needed), sandwich for when he is sent straight from the 18th green back to the 1st tee for a second loop, small bottle of water he can refill around the course as needed, waterproofs top and bottom, a pharmacopoeia of drugs for aches and ailments because it is a point of honor
never
to call in sick in the 180-day season, pin sheet, and yardage book, though he knows the ground by heart. In addition, of course, he carries his golfer’s clubs, and because the game can wreak havoc inside a player’s mind, there are those times when he carries his golfer as well and learns what it really means to be a caddie.
These last three days I made a friend for life in a sixty-year-old investment banker from JPMorgan. It began on a windswept hillside just off the par-5 9th tee. He had blocked his drive high into a left-to-right gale, and by the time I climbed down the hill and found his ball,
we were so far off course that he was just going to pick up and skip the hole. I persuaded him that we still had a chance. “A chance for what?” he said. “For par,” I told him. I handed him his eight-iron. “If you can just get the ball up in the air and over my head, we’ll be able to play from there.” He agreed to give it a try. I climbed back up the hill to the edge of the fairway, then positioned myself in a spot that took the bunkers out of play. It had taken us so long to reach his ball that his three pals were way off in the distance, already approaching the green. I put my hands over my head like a football referee signaling a touchdown. “Right at me!” I yelled down at him. He sort of shrugged, then settled into the swing. He swung so hard his hat flew off, and though it was not a great swing by any means, it was decent enough for his ball to clear my head by a few feet and land harmlessly in the fairway. When he reached me, he was winded from the climb. “We lie two,” I reminded him. “Three strokes left to save par.” We missed that par but had two even more remarkable par saves on the back nine, and as we were walking up 18 together, he asked me if I would caddie for him the next two days, when he and his pals played at Elie and the Torrance Course. “Why didn’t you give up on me?” he asked as we walked to his car. I gave him my stock answer, every word true, telling him that someday I would be fighting to save par with my son when we were playing on a pro tour somewhere.