Authors: Don J. Snyder
Before we turned out onto the main road, he rolled a cigarette. “You don’t smoke out on the course,” he said.
I told him I was trying to stay alive long enough to see my four kids’ weddings. Then I noticed he used two filters. “Two filters?” I said.
“You die slower this way,” he said with a big smile. He sped right past the bus stop and said he would drive me into town. He was going to do some shopping for his wife and daughters at the secondhand shops.
There is a code honored by most caddies that you never talk about what you are paid and you never complain, so I was disappointed with myself for complaining about my R&A wankers.
“Ah, don’t be bothered,” Malcolm said as he pulled into the lane of onrushing cars, floored it, and then power jammed us back into our lane between two trucks. “We’re out there every day, Big D, with billionaires, millionaires, and sometimes the scum of the earth,” he reminded me with another big smile. He told me that in his twenty years he had never walked off the course for being mistreated. He’d had his share of assholes, but he had learned how to treat them. “You work like a dog for them, and that’s okay. But you never let anyone treat you like a dog.”
When he dropped me at my place, he said, “I’ve been watching you out there. You’re a good caddie.” He raised a finger to one eye. “Eyes of a hawk. And they say you know your way around the Old Course.”
“I do.”
“We’ll be out there together someday,” he said. “I’ll follow you around.”
I don’t know why, but for the last seven hours, lying in bed, I’ve been thinking about my father and how modest his life was compared
with the R&A guys I was with today. These people who own the world always make me feel kind of temporary about myself. And about my father, and guys like him. Simple people like my Nana, who did the neighborhood’s laundry for a living and who always said to me, “It’s not honest money if you don’t earn it with your hands.”
A couple of days ago Glen took me aside at the Castle Course and told me that he’s been worried about me. “You’ve been really negative lately,” he said.
I think that I am going to have to let go of my father now, and of my son as well. For a while anyway. I am going to try to live these days here in St. Andrews and to be grateful for them.
Here is the new deal. I now have two jobs, which means that I am the beneficiary of a simple but elegant equation that goes like this: In order to be grateful, you must be calm. And if you are too exhausted at the end of the day to even get undressed or eat a bowl of soup before you get into bed, it is easier to be calm.
It began a week ago when I finished my loop at the Castle Course at three o’clock one afternoon, and instead of walking home after the bus dropped me in the middle of St. Andrews, I strolled down to the Old Course, where I saw something I couldn’t quite believe. Golfers were lined up at the caddie pavilion asking for caddies, and there weren’t any. Actually, I saw half a dozen caddies turn down jobs because going out so late in the afternoon means you’ll miss your supper and you won’t finish until around nine o’clock. I presented myself to the caddie master, and I was on the 1st tee immediately. And so I’ve been coming down every afternoon after I finish my loop at the
Castle Course, and most days because I’m the only caddie on board, I end up taking around a foursome by myself. I carry each man’s bag for four holes, give all the lines, read all the putts, search for all the balls in the rough, and get paid a ton of money. The best part about this night job is the feeling I have when I’m out there working by myself, the last caddie on the Old Course as the wind falls off and the sun goes down with its final burst of gold light, like light through stained glass. There is such a peaceful stillness out there. Walking up 17, you can hear the clinking of dinner plates in the Old Course Hotel. And guests of the Rusacks Hotel are often standing along the white rail fence that borders the 18th fairway, drinking cocktails like passengers on a cruise ship. When the course is busy, it’s like a carnival with the shared greens and fairways, and the caddie’s main responsibility is to keep the traffic moving smoothly and try to see that no one gets hit by a ball. But when you are out there alone at the end of the day, the last person to finish and to swing the door to the museum closed behind you as you walk off the 18th green, you feel the deep sense of privilege, and you know that this is something you will remember at the end of your time when you look back.
If you do enough loops as a caddie at the Old Course, you are going to meet up with an astonishing and varied cast of characters. I’ve been out with a prince and a princess in matching monogrammed shirts with ruffles on the cuffs. (Yes, on his cuffs too.) A corn farmer from Illinois who spoke to me for eighteen holes about the virtues of John Deere tractors as if he were describing old lovers. And the fellow who once trained the royal family’s hunting dogs. It goes on and on. The job is like waiting tables in a Beverly Hills restaurant where the stars eat their meals.
Every day here now I am trying to become Cyrus Dallin’s statue of the Indian
Appeal to the Great Spirit
. That fine Indian on horseback, his arms outstretched, his brave face turned to the heavens. Each morning after I step from the bus and walk across the fairways of the golf course to work, I try to let go of everything that I am afraid of and to surrender to the light and shadows, to the wind, to the scent of the sea, and to the game of golf. I am trying to find peace here in this new world of dreams while I become the best caddie I can be. I treat every golfer with dignity and respect. Most of them are decent people, finally making the trip they have dreamed of making for years, to the home of golf. Fathers with their sons. Old friends. Men trying to get through the death of their wives. I hear it all. And here I am to greet them and to help them play their very best. It is a job that requires such deep concentration that for the hours I am with them I never think of anything else. If your mind wanders even for a moment, you can make a mistake. It begins right on the 1st tee. Which position are the pins today? (They change every day.) What kind of ball is my man playing? What is his name? What are his three mates’ names? What is the yardage from my ball to the front edge of the green? How much room is there behind the pin? Is there trouble off the back of the green? What club should I hit in this wind? From which direction should I approach the green? Are there bunkers left or right? How does the green slope? How far from where we are standing to the bunkers we cannot see? Remember that the wee burn is 54 yards in front of this green, but with the downhill slope of the land it comes into play at 92 yards. On and on it goes. Clean his ball when he reaches the green. Make sure your shadow
isn’t over his ball. I made a list; there are 103 things you can fuck up as a caddie. And at my age I could fuck up at any moment if I don’t concentrate fully. Why do I keep blocking the ball off the tee? How can I hit a wedge off this hard-packed ground with almost no grass? Put your wedges away and I’ll show you how to hit a bump and run with your seven-iron. How do I get out of these pothole bunkers? Do you have any tees? Do you have a pencil? Can you dry my grips in the pouring rain? Do you have a lighter? What ocean is that? It’s the North Sea, sir. Straight over there, you see that long white blur just beyond the shoreline? That’s the big hotel on the 18th green at Carnoustie. Will the wind blow hard today? No, whenever you see the small, open boats out on the North Sea in the early morning, you know the forecast is for only light winds. You say there is wind at the green, but I can see the flag and it’s hanging straight down. Well, sir, that’s because it’s wet from the dew this morning. It goes on and on.
After the universe folds back into itself in an explosion like the one that created it, I wonder how long it will take for someone to invent golf again. Or for a writer to compose an ode to the game. If I were to write the ode myself at the end of this day, I would make it an ode to gratitude, and it would begin with the four grandmothers from Finland whom I took around the Old Course. They couldn’t play the game at all, and yet they laughed their way from start to finish, hugging each other and needling each other with such warmth and generosity. Whenever one of them had to pee, she just marched off into the rough and pulled down her knickers. How badly did they play golf? Well, let’s just say you weren’t safe even standing
behind
them when they hit the ball. But it didn’t matter to them. They loved the game. They were just four old friends taking a long walk together over lovely ground and straight through the paradox that exists in golf: that you can love a game you play so poorly. You can even love the failing once you have lived long enough to learn not to take yourself too seriously. It rained on us and the wind blew hard again and we spent as much time in the rough and bunkers as we did on the fairways, but for five hours while I escorted these ladies around, there was no world except the world we inhabited together. Climbing up the 11th green, I lent my wool cap to the woman nearest me, whose ears had turned bright red from the cold. We stood for a moment looking off into the distance where the wind moved across the estuary and there was a pale moon rising in an opening of pink sky. When I turned to the lady to say something about the next shot, I saw that she was a million miles away, deep in thought, and so I kept silent. We were standing on a hillside in Scotland. She knew nothing about me and I knew nothing about her, and we had no common language, but something passed between us, and I felt privileged to be out there beside her in one moment of time, standing close enough to see the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and the gray in her hair and then to catch an unexpected glimpse of her as a much younger woman and to wonder what she had been like and who she had been before she became a wife and mother and grandmother, and who my own three daughters would become in the world. I think that I was seeing them in her as her beauty became as real to me as the beauty of the place where we were standing. I thought of the great distances we had both traveled in our lives, in every possible direction, on paths separated by continents and oceans and years, to reach this one moment where I was bearing witness to her beauty and her gratitude.
I believe that I turned a corner today. By my count I have now walked just under two hundred miles on a knee with no cartilage. I have taught myself to walk a different way, to throw all my weight onto my good, left knee, and to come down on my heel so that the
spark of pain with each step is dulled. I’m going to make it all the way to the end of the season, I can tell. And while I’m no longer taking the pain in my knee seriously, I’m going to start
not taking myself
so seriously. I’m going to bear witness to the beauty instead.
I may never be able to convey to anyone exactly what it is like to work a succession of doubles—ten hours of caddying—day after day after day, to walk off the 18th green exhausted, and before you can even sit down and have a cigarette, you are sent straight to the 1st tee to begin again, to walk for another five hours before you finally catch the 9:30 bus home and fall asleep in all your clothes and then wake up and do it again. There is no Saturday or Monday here. No June or April. Time has no edges or borders. Each day is the day before and the next day.
I think about Colleen every morning in the wee park where I sit, waiting for the bus, and I feed the same little family of sparrows, crusts from my peanut butter sandwiches. There are five of them and they seem so eager to see me each morning and I love watching them and talking to them. I have become an old man who feeds the birds. And I have also become a caddie, which means that from day to day I get to disappear from my own story and become a part of someone else’s. It was about a week ago now or a month when I caddied for a father and son from California. The golf trip to Scotland was a graduation present for the son, who had just finished grad school, earning his MBA. In a month he would be leaving his father behind in California and moving to New York City to work for an investment bank. They were close, best friends. And the father had been
knocked down by multiple sclerosis, so he could barely walk. I had to drive him in a buggy around the course, and he had to hold my arm to steady himself as we walked onto the greens. The disease was progressing. He was losing the control of his right hand and could barely hit the ball, though he had once been a college golfer himself and had played a fine game with a plus-two handicap. On the 4th hole he told me that he didn’t know how he was going to get through each day after his son moved away. His son could hit the ball a mile like Jack, and he and I were cheering him on all the way around the course. At one point the father said to me: “I just love seeing my son play the game so well. It was different with my old man; he taught me to play, but once I began beating him, he would never play with me again.”
When we finished, the two of them stood on the 18th green while I took their photograph. I was standing maybe twenty paces from them, and I was looking at them through the lens of the camera when I saw the son lift his hand to his father’s face. It took me a moment to realize that his father had begun to cry and that he was wiping away his tears.
Being away from Colleen for so long often leaves me feeling as if I am falling down inside. She knows what this means to me to try for all I am worth to fulfill my pledge to our son, and she has told me again and again not to worry about anything and just to learn as much as I can, and to be calm about things. We can’t talk by telephone because of the cost, but her encouragement in letters and by e-mail is constant.
But now I will get to remember Colleen here in her striped skirt and her ruffled blouse. She surprised me and flew over a few days ago, and she and I and Glen are now sharing the flat since the Open is in town. He and I are looping doubles every day in the rain up at Castle Course, leaving the flat at 5:30 in the morning and hitchhiking up the hill in the darkness. When we return home in the evening, Colleen puts supper on the table while we hang up our soaking-wet clothes. Life for caddies can’t get much better than this, though I have only two hours a day when I’m not working or sleeping to spend with Colleen. I don’t want to even think how lonely this flat will feel when I’m alone here again.