Authors: Don J. Snyder
I will be starting out up on the cliff, joining a group of twenty-five caddies that includes Glen at the Castle Course, on April 1, which
means I have ten days or so to get my legs working and to familiarize myself with the ground up there.
Not a good start at the Castle Course. I was out walking late this afternoon, planning to catch the bus back into town before it got dark. I was pacing off the distances to the bunkers and studying the slopes in the greens, writing everything down in my yardage book with a mounting confidence. Somehow I made the wrong turn coming off the 12th tee, and before I knew it, I was lost out there, as the green hills vanished in the fog. No matter which direction I turned, it seemed that the North Sea was still in front of me washing rhythmically onto the shore.
By the time I found my way to the main road, it was dark, and I could see the red taillights of the bus off in the distance heading the wrong way, and another sleet storm was on top of me with freezing-cold wind off the sea. I stood by the side of the road for maybe half an hour waiting for the next bus. I couldn’t feel my face or hands when I dropped down behind a rock wall to block out the wind. Lying there beside the road, I thought about my father and the screenplay of his love story that I was writing here two summers ago and of the thousand new pages I have written since then that are still not good enough. I have written the hundred-page script over and over so many times that I can now recite each scene from memory. That is what I was doing as I rode the bus into town. I bought two macaroni and cheese dinners for £2 at Tesco and ate them sitting on the floor, shivering, while I tried to figure out how to turn on the heater in my flat. I pushed every button on the panel five or six times in different
combinations until it finally kicked on. I’ve got heat now to dry out my clothes, which are draped over my chairs, but somehow I disengaged the hot water. Tomorrow I’ll try to figure that out.
I just lost a month of my life to unrelenting storms of the mind that weakened me to the point where each night as a cerulean darkness settled over the tall stone spires of this town and gathered along the narrow streets, I carefully considered walking into the North Sea with my mouth open. Either it was going to be that quick death by drowning, or I was going to take a swim and then lie down in the dunes soaking wet and perish from hypothermia before morning. In either case I planned to wear my Links Trust caddie bib so that when my body was discovered, it would just be assumed that I had gotten drunk and made a wrong turn. No harm, no foul.
The truth is I made a bad mistake coming back here. In the first place there’s the bloody volcano in Iceland that has emptied the golf courses and left all of us sitting around the caddie room staring at the floor like great idiots. A procession of dull, empty hours turning into more empty hours like cells dividing. And I can’t fill the emptiness with my old dream the way I could two summers ago. And the math doesn’t work for me unless I do at least one loop a day for £60, 7 days a week, for 187 days so that I can send home at least $11,000. So, there’s the money, which is even more complicated now that there isn’t enough work to go around. What am I doing here taking work from the local lads? I worried about this two summers ago, but I had a story then: I was working as a caddie to prepare to one day caddie for my son, blah, blah, blah. I don’t have that story anymore
to believe in. I have this new story: I’m working as a caddie again to show my son that I haven’t given up on him. But I can’t believe in that story enough to tell it to anyone here except Glen. And each time I tell him, he winces, and I see a flash of sorrow in his eyes. And there’s also my right knee, which is swollen and feels as if someone were driving a nail under the kneecap ever since I stepped into a hole just below the bunker on the right side of number 12 while staggering beneath the weight of an exceedingly heavy golf bag owned by a Russian mafia pig who treated me like a dog. Not having my BlackBerry this season means that I can’t get e-mails from Colleen and the girls, so I am completely cut off unless I walk to the pub at night with my laptop. And then there’s the cherry pie at Tesco. I discovered that at 9:00 p.m. they mark it down to £1, and for the last three nights that’s what I’ve eaten for my supper. A whole cherry pie each night. Everything has felt wrong here from the start when I did my first loop at the Castle Course with big Kenny, who grew up caddying at Turnberry, and Alan, who spent five seasons at Seminole. These guys are at the top of their game, polished and professional; if they had decided to become college professors instead of caddies, they would be deans by now sitting in leather chairs with their feet up on their desks in some ivy tower. On the 3rd hole I watched my golfer’s ball fly into a bunker, and then I spent five minutes searching for it in the
wrong bunker
, cursing myself under my breath, before Kenny very discreetly waved to me and pointed. A rookie mistake caused by a lack of concentration. Since I arrived, I have not been able to drop through to the deep down world, where individual blades of grass and the lettering on a golf ball have meaning. The trouble is nothing seems to mean anything anymore.
And I must write to Jack. He was the last person I talked to from Logan Airport before I flew across. I was going to let his mother tell him—she understood why I was returning to Scotland—but I decided to call him just before I boarded the plane. “I’m heading back to Scotland to caddie,” I said. There was a pause. Then he asked, “Are you ready for that?” Before I could answer him, my phone conked out.
Am I ready for this? I guess we’ll find out soon enough. For now let me fall asleep dreaming that I can feel Colleen beside me as I listen to her heart beating like Morse code.
A small, good thing happened today. I was out with Malcolm, a caddie with nineteen years’ experience at Gleneagles before he came to the Castle Course. He introduced himself to me with a strong handshake. “There are four Malcolms here,” he said. “Think of me as Malcolm X.” In his early forties with a wife and two daughters, he’s got the rugged good looks of a movie star in a 1950s Western and a mischievous sparkle in his eyes. We were on the 1st tee when his golfer drove his first ball out of play. Then he teed up a second and nailed it right up the center of the fairway. He turned to Malcolm, handed him his driver, and said, “Same guy.” To which Malcolm replied: “But more experienced.”
I was suddenly laughing along with everyone else. Laughing for the first time since I got here.
Glen is the elder statesman in the crew at the Castle Course, and completely at ease regaling the boys with stories from his days on
the Canadian Tour and the Nationwide Tour, while he deals hands of poker like a riverboat gambler. The eternal optimist, whenever the chatter turns back to the subject of twenty caddies sitting around with no work and people start grumbling, Glen lights up the room with another story about one of his forty-two trips to Las Vegas. “It’s too early in the season to be discouraged, boys,” he said at one point. “We sound like a bunch of poltroons. There’s a word for you, Donnie,” he exclaimed. “What’s a poltroon?”
I was staring out the window at the guy delivering rolls to the back door of the pro shop, thinking I could do that job. “An utter coward,” I replied.
“That’s right!” Glen said merrily.
We were all sent home after five hours, and Glen rode the bus into St. Andrews with me to see my flat. He’s going to need to move out of his place and bunk in with me for two weeks during the Open in July so his landlord can rent the flat for top dollar. We moved around the chairs to get an idea of how he would fit on the floor. “I’ll be fine right in the corner there,” he said. “In the old days when you were out on the tour with your golfer and you could only afford one bed at the motel, the golfer got the mattress and the caddie got the box spring. I’ll find an air mattress somewhere.”
We were poking around the golf shop on Market Street, looking at the waterproofs the way caddies always do, and trying to kill what was left of the afternoon, when his phone rang. I heard him say, “I’m in St. Andrews with Don. Yes. When?” He closed his phone and said, “We’ve got ten minutes to get to the 1st tee of the Old Course.”
We were already out of the store. Turn right and we were five minutes from my flat, where we had our bibs and towels and clothes and my hole-by-hole notes of the course. We started that way but then realized there wasn’t time. We ran through the streets of St. Andrews, straight for the caddie pavilion. As we were charging down
the road beside the R&A, the caddie master saw us from his window and held up two bibs. My God, I thought, I’m about to caddie on the Old Course. At last I felt myself dropping to the deep down world. On the 1st tee I took photographs of our four men from Norway as if it were something I did every day of my life. They couldn’t speak a word of English, and it took us a while to explain that with the wind blowing twenty knots from straight behind us, driver could end up in the river at the front edge of the green.
Glen and I walked ahead of them, side by side, talking our way up the fairway. “I did a couple spins here last summer,” Glen said, “but I don’t really know my way around.”
“We’ll be fine,” I told him. “This is home to me.” I pointed up at the third-floor window of the Rusacks Hotel, where I had spent the winter writing my novel. “When I brought Jack here, I reserved the same room,” I said. “I’ll tell you this, Glen, if anyone had ever told me then that one day I would be caddying here, I would have thought they were crazy.”
“Well, Donnie,” he said, “you never know, do you?”
We had some rain of course, and without our waterproofs we got soaked to the skin. And we couldn’t really speak with our golfers. But we made our way around in fine shape, converting all the yardages into meters and leading them to the good ground. We each looked after two of them and ran a silent competition on the greens, where I had the chance to confirm my theory that you could avoid three-putts on the Old Course by treating all long putts as essentially straight and concentrating only on pace and by never leaving yourself a downhill second putt.
Standing off to the side of the 14th tee, I glanced at the place at the base of the stone pillar where Jack and I had buried his golf ball. The sun was breaking through the clouds, and the ground ahead of us—running all the way back to the center of town to the stone shops
and pubs and hotels bordering the 18th green—was painted with gold light. “It doesn’t get much better than this, my friend,” Glen said to me.
“Maybe we should celebrate,” I said. “Buy a steak and cook it at my place.”
“I like that idea,” he said. “A few pints in the pub first. And I’ll make my pear salad.”
“Everyone plays their second shots to the left into the Elysian fields,” I said. “But there’s a passageway up the right side of Hell bunker that I like better.” I pointed up along the stone wall on our right.
“Why don’t we take two of them left and two right and see which works out better?” he suggested.
It turned out that one man in both groups made par and the other made hash of the hole, proving nothing at all. We just shook our heads. “I still favor the right,” I told Glen.
We took pictures of our golfers on the Swilcan Bridge, then walked out ahead of them up the 18th fairway, where I glanced at the third-floor window of the hotel again. I didn’t say anything, but when I turned back, I saw that Glen was looking at me.
We finally talked about it outside the Chariots pub, where we sat at a picnic table with our pints of ice-cold Tennent’s. I began by saying that there was a symmetry to life after all. Two years ago, when the two of us walked this course for the first time the day Glen arrived in Scotland, he had just buried his father, and he had told me the story of their long-running battle that began when he lost his basketball scholarship in college. “Now we’re back here,” I said. “I’ve just buried my old man, and Jack has lost his chance.”
“Well,” he said, “you have to move on. You know that.”
I told him that it was going to be hard. “It’s not just that he lost his chance for a scholarship,” I reminded him. “We were going to be on a tour together someday.”
“I know,” he said.
Of course he knew; of all the people I’d ever talked with about this dream of ours, Glen was the one who understood best exactly what it meant to me.
“You have to rise above it,” he said. “And you will. You’ll get up every morning and go to work here every day, all season long. We’ll be standing here watching the Open in two months. Life goes on, Donnie. It just goes on.”
The secret to growing old, I have decided, is to be calm. Calm enough to be grateful for all the chances that you had in your life. That is what I have been telling myself lately. But I fell off the wagon after today’s round, and though I told myself again when I got into bed at 8:00, I was still telling myself at 3:00 a.m., when I finally gave up. I’m sitting on my back stoop under the stars writing this now to try to get beyond what happened today. I was out alone, caddying for two R&A fellows in their seventies. All caddies live in dread of these R&A members because they tend to be arrogant assholes. When I walked up to the 1st tee to meet my gentlemen today, the one with big ears said to the one with bushy white eyebrows, “Well, at least he’s presentable.” It never got much better. They treated me as if I were invisible except each time when ears handed me his ball and said, “Wash this.” And when eyebrows asked me how long I had been caddying, I told him that I was the new guy at the Castle Course. “You look a little too old to be new,” he said. I took a lot of crap from both of them. It was one of those rounds where you just say “yes, sir,” “no, sir” for five hours and keep your head down.
I was walking to the bus when Malcolm sped up behind me and hollered out his window, “Get in, Big D.”