An American Caddie in St. Andrews: Growing Up, Girls, and Looping on the Old Course

by Oliver Horovitz

  • • •

  “The competition’s going to be serious today, you know.”

  Uncle Ken has his game face on. I’ve finished caddying for the day and am now marching into the Leuchars flower show, alongside him and Henry. Several colorful tents are set up outside a church hall, where a small brass band (eighty-year-olds on tubas) bleats out enthusiastic Scottish tunes. It is pouring beyond belief.

  “There’s three pounds sixty, for him too,” Uncle Ken cheerily announces to the bonneted, grandmotherly lady at the ticket desk. “He’s my relation from America,” he adds, handing me my ticket. Henry taps my shoulder from behind, points to the ticket stub. “That gets you two cakes and one cup of tea,” he says, as if briefing me for a space-shuttle launch. As we wait in line, Uncle Ken and Henry saunter around, shaking hands, chatting to other gardeners’ club officers. Politics meets pollen.

  I’ve tagged along for this flower show, partially because Uncle Ken has been bugging me about it annoyingly for the past three weeks, but also because I badly want to hang with my two mates. I’ve got only four more days left in St. Andrews, and I’m realizing how close I’ve grown to them.

  Inside the church hall, it is a gardener’s wet dream. Table after table stretches out before us, flaunting the flower and vegetable entries. All are immaculately presented and labeled by category—best floral arrangement, best perennial, best cucumber. The crème de la crème have won awards and proudly sport “first prize,” “second prize,” or “honorable mention” ribbons on their stems. I spot a few repeat winners: Mrs. Angela Brown, for example, has a first-prize rose, and an honorable-mention collection of potatoes.

  Henry rushes up to us. “Golly, the leeks at that far table are something.” He looks impressed.

  “Hamish has done well with his carrots,” Uncle Ken replies.

  “He always does well,” Henry says in agreement. I could be at a Knicks game, the way this commentary is running. The duo leaves my side to go inspect more leeks. I watch them go. There’s something totally strange about this scene, and I can’t shake it. Uncle Ken and Henry both fought in World War II; both men led soldiers into battle, held real power involving life and death. These same men are now admiring leeks as one might admire a newborn baby. I consider how life can be reductive to the point where a large leek is important. But also how life needs purpose, even in the home stretch.

  A commotion erupts in the hall. The tea and crumpets have been brought out. Looking slightly alarmed, the seven grandmothers carrying these refreshments are swarmed by hungry flower show attendees. Within the swarm, I spot Uncle Ken and Henry. They gesticulate wildly for me to come over.

  “Hurry up, the crumpets are cooling!” Uncle Ken calls.

  “Aye, lad, don’t dawdle!” Henry adds.

  I’m going to miss these guys.

  • • •

  The tee box is ours.

  It’s the next day, the afternoon of our small caddie outing, and all four of us have arrived on the first tee. Our group is comprised of the following: 1) my host, Colin Gerard; 2) Gordon Smith, a small, fiftyish, steadfast St. Andrean, one of many generations obsessed with two things in life: his golf and his garden; 3) Kenny, my former shadow caddie; and 4) me. I’m thrilled to have been included in this group. I’m also catatonic with fear.

  Swarming around by the first tee are several other caddies waiting for jobs. They see us with our clubs, give us confused looks. This makes it even better. Today we’re not playing the Old Course in a “dark time slot”—the day’s final few tee times that guarantee fading light and dampening greens. Today we’re smack in the middle of the afternoon. Prime time. I hope I don’t whiff off the first.

  “Who’s playing who?”

  The guys are picking teams for the match. “I’m off five,” grunts Gordon.

  “I’m eight, you too, right, Kenny?” asks Colin. Kenny nods, stretching with his TaylorMade 3-wood.

  “Horovitz, you’re a one, right?” Gordon asks rhetorically. How does he know my handicap? “One point eight,” I correct, weakly.

  The teams are chosen, Kenny and me versus Colin and Gordon. I’m hitting first. In the starter’s hut, George knows that we caddies are playing and decides to announce us in dramatic fashion. “From the Uniiiited States of Ammmerica, Oliver Horovitz!” He’s done a Texas accent with my name for some reason. As I set up for my drive, I glance to my right and see five caddies lined up at the near fence, watching me intently. I gulp and try to focus. Don’t screw this up, I say to myself, or you’ll be the laughingstock of the caddie shack. I take a deep breath, and swing. As if by a miracle, the ball shoots dead ahead, 265 yards, rips the middle of the fairway. The other caddies look impressed. I feel giddy with relief. Golf is still my passion.

  “Feels good to be out, huh?”

  Colin is striding down the third fairway next to Gordon. He claps his friend on the back. I’m walking behind them, to my ball (in Cartgate bunker). It’s apparent that this is a rather special day for my caddie partners. Because, in reality, they’re rarely able to play the Old Course. Unlike private clubs, the Old is owned by the town of St. Andrews, which gives caddies no playing privileges whatsoever. For caddies without a links ticket, then, there is a certain irony to working on the Old. Caddies know their course better than anyone but normally can’t afford to play it themselves. Our round today is clearly a big deal. Kenny has even bought a new red sixty-pound Berghaus golf jacket, “Just in time for the day.”

  “Forrrre!”

  As we head toward the seventh green, Alistair Taylor walks past us, coming down 11. He salutes us with a hilarious flourish of his cap. Also in the group is Willie Stewart—the caddie who wouldn’t give me a pin sheet. Willie surveys his three friends, then looks over at me and says with tacit approval, “Ah, Horovitz is a player too.” As afternoons go, this is not a bad one.

  “Good move through the ball, Gordon.”

  We’ve all just driven off the twelfth tee. Gordon, Colin, and Kenny start walking ahead of me down the fairway. Kenny finishes telling a caddie story, and the others roar with laughter. I watch everyone walking past Admiral’s Bunker with their clubs. Suddenly it hits me. This is exactly what these guys want to be doing with their lives. In their way, these St. Andrews caddies are living the life of their dreams. Perhaps Kenny and Colin wanted to be professional golfers, but this is the next best thing. They’re doing what they love, surrounding themselves with golf. There is something pure about this. I’m reminded of dockworkers and fish packers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, who shared childhood dreams of being fishermen and now frequently say, “At least I’m earning my living on the water.”

  I head down the fairway. For the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about what it is I want to do with my life. Honestly, I still don’t know. But this much is now clear to me. You have to do something you love. It doesn’t matter what other people think—you just have to do something that you love.

  “Unlucky.”

  Gordon and Colin murmur consolation as my second shot into 17 (the famous Road Hole) skips up, then over, the smallest green on the course. “Shit,” I mutter. Any ball over the green here is dead. Kenny and I are 1-down going into this hole (a side match between him and Gordon for four beers is already over), so we have no chance of winning the match. Gordon is twelve feet from the cup in two, for birdie. When I reach my ball, it’s over the road, up against the famous wall. A group of spectators look on as I survey my predicament. I’m about to pitch out away from the hole, in defeat, when Kenny walks up to me.

  “Play yuh five-iron, intah the wall,” he tells me.

  How can I ignore this advice? I pull my 5-iron, mumble to myself, “Here goes nothing,” and hit. The ball pops into the wall, ricochets back toward the green, lands in the fringe, and scuttles up the hill onto the green, eight feet from the hole. The tourists applaud. The other three caddies look at me and go, “Watson.”

  I suddenly remember being a kid, watching video of Tom Watson
hitting from the same spot in the 1984 British Open. The others head up to the green, but I don’t want to move yet. I stay by the wall. My grin is from ear to ear. Some moments in life you’ll never forget. This is one of them.

  FIFTEEN

  It’s my final day in St. Andrews. I’ve just finished my first round of the day and, having expected constant rain throughout the morning, decided to wear both rain suits, one on top of the other. As if the golfing gods were paying a cruel joke on me for my lack of confidence in the official Old Course caddie waterproofs, the weather is sunny and baking hot, and I, having nowhere to stash any clothing, am forced to wear all three layers of nylon around the course. (And yes, I had to carry a cart bag. And no, my player didn’t allow me to put any of my clothing in his bag.)

  I’m exhausted, my body feels like I’m in a sauna, and I’m hungry. I grab some lunch from Tesco and plop myself down on the caddie bench outside the shack—chicken sandwich, liter carton of orange juice, and cookie in hand. I have ten minutes before my next round and know from experience that if I scarf down my lunch in three to four minutes, I’ll be fine. I’ve unpacked everything and have just started moving sandwich to mouth when an uncomfortably loud, high-pitched, piercing voice jolts me out of my small revelry.

  “Oh my gahd, are you a caddie!?”

  I turn and behold a fifty-year-old woman, replete with fanny pack, too-short cargo shorts, an “I Chicago” T-shirt, and a throwaway camera tied around her neck with string.

  “Yeah, I’m a caddie.”

  The voice, by some miracle, manages to rise to an even higher pitch. “Oh my gahd! And you’re American!” To which she adds, “Me too!”

  “Really? Great.” I’m not enjoying this.

  Lady who hearts Chicago continues. “Can I take your picture?”

  I mumble an answer in my most irritated tone: “Yeah, sure, go for it.”

  She snaps a photo of me glaring at her as darkly as possible. She is obviously delighted with her souvenir. As she leaves, I realize that for the first time, I actually feel like an Old Course caddie. I watch a Japanese golfer duck-hook his opening drive across the eighteenth fairway. It careens off a car and bounces up the road toward Uncle Ken’s house—where I know he and Henry are planning an attack of large leeks for their upcoming St. Andrews flower show. I smile. And then all thoughts return to my chicken sandwich.

  SIXTEEN

  “Seriously, this is a fuckeen disgrace. This was an A paper!”

  Dritan Nesho, one of six guys in my Harvard freshman dorm room, is working himself into a frenzy. He’s sitting on our futon, wearing a rumpled gray Calvin Klein T-shirt, Wallabee shoes, and boxer shorts adorned with tiny blue and yellow fish. His paper sits beside him, marked on top in red. “A/A-.”

  “I’m definitely going to the government department tomorrow to complain!”

  From this rant (which has brought me out of my room), I glean that Dritan has spent the better part of eight days in near-hibernation on this paper. I’m not surprised. Dritan writes all of his drafts in Albanian first (by hand), then translates them into English. Dritan is deliberate. Dritan is also the son of Albania’s ambassador to the United Nations.

  “Yeah, I guess just sort it out tomorrow,” I say, sidestepping uneasily over the half-empty gallon of chocolate milk that Dritan has been guzzling. There’s a pizza box farther along the floor that’s been there for at least five days, and around it, a trail of ants are getting seriously involved. Every so often, Dritan will cull their ranks by pumping air freshener directly into their swarm for thirty seconds. It might be easier to just throw out the pizza box, but I’m not asking questions.

  I head for the door. I have to get my own paper—on Stanley Milgram’s 1963 obedience experiment—finished (as well as started). I also need to get out of this room. Zipping up my jacket, I throw open the door to Weld Hall. A blast of arctic December air hits me in the throat as I head for Lamont Library.

  Harvard has begun. Already, I can tell that I’m in a different world. Harvard’s libraries are open twenty-four hours a day—several offering free back massages to stressed-out students. Harvard’s dorms house gymnasiums, libraries, grand-piano rooms, wood shops, plus tutors in every academic subject, always on call for homework help. Winthrop House has squash courts. Lowell House has a rock-climbing wall. In Annenberg (the freshman dining hall resembling Hogwarts from the Harry Potter novels), waffle irons imprint Harvard’s insignia onto every single waffle.

  “What up, Ollie!”

  I pass a group of four freshmen—two guys, two girls, heading in the opposite direction. Both guys in the group are named Alex. Alex #1 is Alex Blankfein. His dad is the CEO of Goldman Sachs. Alex #2 is Alex de Carvalho. His family owns Heineken. I think one of the girls’ family owns Marriott. I do fist bumps with my classmates and keep walking. It’s a little weird, all this. The kid on the floor above us, Matthew Blumenthal, is the son of Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), and a seventh-generation Harvardian. His roommate is the son of Cadbury Schweppes’s CEO. When my friend Alex Hubbell checked into Weld Hall for freshman orientation, everyone just assumed his family invented the telescope. (They didn’t.)

  I don’t care about all this stuff. I’m digging in here. This semester, I’m studying George Orwell’s writing, social psychology, and filmmaking under Ross McElwee, who directed Sherman’s March. I’m writing and directing episodes of Harvard’s TV soap opera Ivory Tower—spending late-night coffee-fueled hours in an alcove with six other writers, hashing out scandalous subplots for our TV coeds (this week’s episode: Haley gets seduced by her teaching assistant, Sudbay!). I’m also dating a cute girl named Vanessa from my film animation class. And I ran for student council last week. And lost. Well, technically, I was disqualified for “excessive postering.” My campaign poster featured a photo of me wedged between images of Bush and Kerry, with a caption reading, “There is another choice. Let’s put Harvard on the map!”

  I see Emerson Hall up ahead. Just last week, I was there for a lecture given by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. I’ve also been to talks this month at the Kennedy School with Ralph Nader and Jesse Ventura. Whenever I have free time, I’ve been “comping” (Harvard-speak for “trying out at”) Harvard’s humor magazine, the Lampoon. And I’m crewing on as many shoots as possible in the film department. In short, I’m doing everything an eager freshman should be doing here. Especially someone who’s waited a year to arrive. I’m forcing myself into the flow. Telling myself that I should love it here.

  But somehow I don’t.

  Truthfully, I miss St. Andrews. A lot. Harvard kids seem, quite frankly, a lot less cool than St. Andrews kids. SAT scores from high school are discussed with alarming frequency. And life is different here. I’m thirty minutes from where my dad was born (Wakefield, Massachusetts), forty-five minutes from where I was born (Gloucester, Massachusetts). Relatives are mere miles away, in neighboring Newton, Brookline, and Danvers. I’m back in my safe zone. But I miss the sense of adventure. I miss what it was like to be three thousand miles away from home, and to be an American abroad—and how cool that was to people. I miss taking Claire, my St. Andrews girlfriend, up to the Isle of Skye for Valentine’s Day weekend, whizzing past lochs and Scottish wilderness. (And then privately playing back the trip’s photos on my computer in “slideshow mode” over the corny Braveheart theme song.)

  I miss every accent, every slang word, and every weird food. I miss being known as the American who has a good short game. I miss the Old Course. I miss my university friends. I miss the caddies. I miss Uncle Ken and Henry. Actually, I miss everything about last year in St. Andrews.

  I speed-walk through Tercentenary Theater, the huge lawn with elm trees towering overhead, and climb the stairs toward Lamont Library. I think more about this school year at Harvard. Maybe I’m being crazy. I mean, this is what I wanted. This is the thing that got me through a million Saturday nights studying AP U.S. history in high school. This is the goal I jotted on all those emb
arrassing notes taped to my bedroom wall for motivation. And come on, I am happy here. I’m having fun. I’m working hard. I’m learning new stuff every day. It’s just that something doesn’t feel right here in Harvard Yard. Something’s missing. And I don’t think it’s just the black pudding . . .

  I didn’t grow up in a tough neighborhood; I grew up in Greenwich Village. But I’m a New York City public school kid, and I grew up with other public school kids. And now I’m suddenly surrounded by legacies and crew team members from Andover and Choate and Collegiate. I’m in a world of money and privilege. A social scene ruled by exclusive Final Clubs. Are there exceptions here? Sure. Is this the Harvard of the 1950s? Definitely not. But the sense of privilege, the sense of elitism, it’s all still here. And somehow I can’t quite synchronize the world I’m living in with the caddie world that I just came from. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m in college with the very R & A guys whose bags I just carried.

  Maybe if I’d gone straight from Manhattan to Cambridge, from high school to Harvard, this might not feel so uncomfortable. Maybe if I hadn’t lived as a caddie first. But I did. And it sounds crazy, but something in me changed last summer. I mean, I earned a living with my own legs and four A.M. wakeups and soaking rain pants. I did that. I worked alongside sturdy blokes for sixteen hours a day who didn’t care what anyone else thought about their life choices, guys who just loved golf and wanted golf to be their lives. And maybe it sounds corny, but there was something so totally pure about that world. To me, that world made sense. And now it’s making life at Harvard even more difficult to take in. Now I’m seriously asking myself, what do I want? Or more important, what the hell am I doing here?