Authors: Don J. Snyder
I miss Colleen and poor Teddy, who will spend the next four months waiting for me to come home to take him for his run on the golf course. I’m feeling the dull ache I felt in Scotland when I first
arrived for the season, knowing that half a year would pass before I returned home. Usually at this hour before dawn, the background noise is the dull percussion of waves breaking onto the shore across the cove like thunder. Here the thunder is the freeway traffic. But that’s okay for now; we are going to be all right here. Just as soon as we get to the golf course today and I start concentrating on being Jack’s caddie instead of his father, everything will fall into place, and it will all make sense to me, just as it did in Scotland each day when I stepped onto the 1st tee. But right now, this first morning, I can feel the fear in my hands. A slight tremor. This time it is not just about me. I am not the only one who has wandered so far from home. This time it is my son. Even though he is the one who will play the golf here and he is the one who drove us here in his truck, he has followed me to Texas. I know that we have spoken about this since Jack was ten years old, but in truth this journey was mostly my idea. I’ve been the one telling him all along that he deserved this chance to play on a pro tour, to see how far the game will take him in his life. I’ve encouraged him to chase his old dream, and if this turns out to be an experience that flattens him, I will be responsible for that. And to be honest, there were dozens of moments in the last three months while we prepared for this trip when I thought about backing out. I could have simply told him that my knee was not up to it or that I couldn’t leave Colleen again to fend for herself through another Maine winter. I had any number of acceptable excuses. Yesterday on the road, when we crossed into Texas, I told him that he was now in the land of the great Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan, both Texans who began as caddies. I talked again about the business of dreams and whether it is more difficult to walk away from a dream you cannot reach or to keep holding on. I explained that Hogan never had a choice. Golf was it for him. Here was a kid who at age six or seven witnessed his father shooting himself in the living room. Golf became Hogan’s cure. There was no other road. But the game was both the cure and the illness because for a long time he failed at the game. Nelson was winning on the tour, and he was getting nowhere. He was cursed by
that damned hook. “I think he was on the tour for three years before he had any success at all,” I said to Jack. “But if anyone had ever gone up to Hogan when he was struggling and said, ‘That’s it, walk away, you’re never going to make it,’ I think he would have said, ‘What the hell do you want me to do? This is it for me. I don’t have a choice.’ ”
Jack didn’t say anything. He was steering with one hand and holding his iPhone with the other, trying to follow the path. I let it go.
This morning I am sure he knows that every time I bring up the subject of dreams, I am talking about his dream with golf and I am trying to prepare him for failure here. I am trying to tell him that sometimes you have to walk away. And he wants no part of that, and I don’t blame him. It’s just that I have seen so much misery on golf courses, and it is usually inflicted worse upon those who try to play the game with any degree of perfection. The punishment and the humiliation are out there waiting for Jack. It will come down to the same thing it always came down to on almost every round I caddied in Scotland. Limiting the damage from mistakes. Recovering quickly before the damage ruins you. Everyone in the tournaments will make mistakes on every round; that is a given in this game when you play it competitively. But if you can recover from the mistakes instead of being crushed by them, then you walk on unscarred. The only thing that you can’t recover from is despair, as the great Harry Vardon said. I must remember that this is a serious business for Jack. He will have his game face on this morning as we make our way through our first practice round. He will stop talking with me as his way of claiming some space. In two days, when the real show begins, he will be even more distant. And I must grant him this space.
We went to work today after packing our peanut butter and jam sandwiches for lunch. By habit, I had my waterproofs with me when Jack stopped me as we were leaving our room. “It hasn’t rained here in a year, man,” he said, a little impatient with me. I knew this of course, and he’d already assured me that his iPhone called for another day of cloudless skies with temperatures in the eighties. “It’s just that I never went to work in Scotland without them,” I said as I threw them through the threshold while he held the door open.
“You’re not in Scotland anymore,” he said.
I told him about the five-day gale in Scotland when the wind never fell off. You couldn’t escape the sound, and after a while it seemed as if it were blowing inside your mind, so I began taking my iPod and headphones with me everywhere just to drown out the noise with music. Here in Houston it’s not the wind; it’s the hammering of the freeways. As soon as I stepped outside into this new day, it was there again. “Where the fuck is everybody going?” I said miserably as I gazed across ten lanes of north- and southbound cars.
“Relax,” Jack said.
Easier said than done when your heart is racing. For my sake he agreed to a compromise: he drove eighty miles an hour along with everyone else, but with two hands, while I held his iPhone and shouted out the directions to him. I have never in my life been on ten-lane freeways that narrow with astonishing suddenness into one-lane exit ramps that soar straight up into the sky and are held there by what appears to be a rather haphazard collection of cantilevers, flying buttresses, and hundred-foot-tall concrete stilts and then bend like a roller-coaster track at breathtaking angles so you feel as if you
were going to be catapulted to a terrifying death. I used to be able to relax on the way to work in St. Andrews as my bus crept along the North Sea, stopping on the way to pick up pensioners with their folded grocery carts. I should have spent the last two months at home borrowing my daughter’s iPhone and learning how to use it as a navigational tool. Too late now.
It began with my asking Jack a caddie question standing on the practice range at Hearthstone Country Club: “Okay, Jack, so if you were thrown off a train in the middle of nowhere with one club that you had to hit 220 yards, straight, every time, what club would it be?”
“Six-iron,” he said as he stretched.
“All right,” I said, pointing to a flag in the distance. “That flag is about 200 yards.” He took his electronic scope out of his bag, and I cringed. “You don’t need that thing. I know 200 yards when I see it, don’t you trust me?” I said.
He scoped it anyway and nodded. I asked him to drop ten balls and hit them all 20 yards past the flag. “Don’t you trust me?” he asked.
It hit me then. We had known and trusted each other for years as father and son, but the trust we would need between us now as golfer and caddie had to be earned.
“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” I said. “It’s just that I was lied to so much as a caddie.”
It turned out he was telling the truth. We worked through all his clubs while I took notes in my book. In all my rounds in Scotland, with all the golfers I saw there, I never saw a single shot with the trajectory of Jack’s. Miles high. Each ball sizzling off the ground with a small explosion as it took flight—as if it had been fired from a gun. I thought to myself, my Lord, I am into a whole new ball game here.
This Hearthstone course that winds through a subdivision with houses lining the fairways is probably what we are going to get down
here all winter. It offered its own menu of distractions you don’t find on any course I ever worked, which includes babies crying in their cribs, dogs barking, kids playing in their swimming pools, and women in short-shorts bent over their flower gardens. “Hit her and we’re both heading home,” I said to Jack on the 1st tee when I noticed he was looking at the lady too.
After the long drought, the fairways were baked hard with almost no grass, exactly like those on the Old Course when the Royal & Ancient stopped watering them in the weeks leading up to the Open when I was caddying there. They wanted the fairways to be hard so that balls would roll forever and reach pothole bunkers that were normally not in play. This made me feel at home until we reached the 1st green. Neither Jack nor I had ever played greens with Bermuda grass. They were as hard as rock, and we expected the ball to release and roll forever, and we held to that understanding with mounting confusion until we walked onto the 220-yard par-3 after hitting a six-iron downwind and discovered that the ball had stopped inside ten inches from where it landed. “All right,” Jack said, “we get the message. We can go at every pin.”
There is a lot to learn about reading putts on Bermuda grass, and we were really grinding away all afternoon. Unlike bent grass or the fescue grass in Scotland, which grows up and down, Bermuda grass grows along the ground, meaning you have to know which way the grain is going in order to putt well. And you can’t always see the grain. Experienced caddies will take a look at the sun in the sky when they begin a round because they know that the grain will always run toward the west, where the sun sets. I’ve even heard of caddies carrying a compass for that purpose. The other way of determining the direction of the grain is by looking carefully at the hole itself. When the hole is cut in the morning, the edges are fresh. But as the day goes along, the edge of the cup that is worn is the direction the grain is growing. When you line up a putt, it is basically going to turn with the grain, even more than with the slope. On two greens today we had putts break
uphill
with the grain. And we were astonished how
hard you had to roll the ball when you were against the grain. This is going to take a lot of practice, but we gained a little confidence when we sank a fifteen-footer for a birdie on 12. Officially, we weren’t keeping score today in this first practice round. Meaning that Jack wasn’t, but I was. We hit sixteen greens in regulation and then made hash of the putting. I had us at seven over par after eighteen.
I was beginning to feel comfortable when we finished, but I realized today that caddying for Jack on the tour is going to be completely different from caddying for tourists in Scotland. I’m going to have to quickly learn to be a silent observer rather than a chamber of commerce booster. This isn’t vacation golf. It’s work, and that is how Jack approaches it.
We had a moment today at the turn when we walked inside the clubhouse for a cold drink, and on the TV above the bar the Golf Channel was playing a rerun of the Dunhill Links Championship from St. Andrews. The moment I spotted the 2nd hole of the Old Course from across the room, it was as if someone had called my name. I wandered over to the bar, where I fell into a dream until Jack joined me there after a few minutes. “Your old track,” he said. I was remembering playing that hole with him when he hit a nine-iron from Cheape’s bunker that carried straight through a thirty-knot wind and landed two feet from the flag over 150 yards away.
When we finished up, I sat off to the side of the practice green while Jack rolled some more putts. I was worrying about the ride back to our place in the rush-hour traffic, something I am going to have to stop worrying about. While I watched Jack, it struck me that if I keep my head up here, I am going to discover some new truth about life almost every day this winter. Here is something that I never
knew before today. If you are fortunate enough to have a little boy in your life for those few years when all he wants is to be with you and when he stands before you in his footed pajamas, begging you to play knee football with him before he gets into bed at night just because he wants you to tackle him softly so he can feel your arms around him, if you get that in your life, then you are going to spend the rest of your life looking everywhere for that little boy. I realized today that in the last four years since Jack left home for college, whenever I’ve seen him, I’ve had this gnawing disappointment that I couldn’t explain. Now I know its point of origin; I’ve been looking for the little boy he once was.
There must be no more of that this winter. My son is now a young man who is trying to become a professional golfer, and I must get to know him on his terms. This is one of the new rules I must abide. On the range today, from the moment he took his first practice swing, I felt myself dropping to the deep down world that always served me so well when I worked as a caddie. We both have a job to do here, I told myself. We have to make shots. One shot and then the next shot, one hole and then the next hole, for two rounds in twelve tournaments, 432 holes across the next four months while Colleen keeps the woodstove going through the winter. And I must learn to stop talking so damned much.
Back in our room tonight after we ate microwaved lasagna while watching Toledo play Northern Illinois on ESPN, Jack disappeared as I was reading what the experts had to say about Bermuda greens online and writing SOS e-mails to Glen in Canada and to Ray, who was at the moment caddying for Ricky Barnes at a PGA event somewhere in Malaysia. When Jack hadn’t returned in half an hour, I was concerned. Our part of Houston is called Greenspoint on the maps and Gunpoint by the locals.
I walked down the long corridor outside our room, and when I got to the window at the far end, I looked down and saw him sitting
by the pool with his laptop, Skyping his girl. I could see Jenna’s face on the screen.
I smiled to myself, walked back to the room, and fell asleep on the couch.
When I awoke at 4:00 a.m., I was already wondering if Jack’s iPhone has a compass I can use to find west at every green so we know which way the grain is running. There was thick fog when I walked outside at 7:00 a.m. My first thought was if we have an early tee time tomorrow in round one, we are going to have to give ourselves an extra hour to get to Hearthstone. Maybe two hours. Something else to worry about, I thought as I was telling myself to stop worrying about everything.