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

by Oliver Horovitz

  It’s hot inside the church. We’re all crammed into every available pew, sweltering in the heat, waiting. As required, everyone’s in their caps and gowns, although for today, you can wear whatever you want under your gown. In the row behind me, a friend of mine named Ben is wearing a black and yellow MILF HUNTER T-shirt (referencing a porn website) underneath his gown. Ben has always kept it classy.

  Drew Faust arrives at the podium. The chatter from our pews dies down, replaced by a quiet(ish) rustle of significantly divided attention. Everyone’s politely thinking the same thing: Not another fucking speech. I sit next to my roommates Jake and Jordan, awaiting, along with everyone else, the obligatory “go out into the world” sermon. We’ve been hearing them all week, and they’re all slowly blending into one long inspirational corn-fest. Drew Faust looks out at us and begins speaking. Her opening is unexpected.

  “I’m worried that so many of you are going into I-banking and consulting.”

  The rustling stops. Our class goes quiet. Suddenly, 1,656 people are listening. Really listening. As if, at the exact same moment, everyone’s had the same microsecond flicker that an adult is actually talking to us. Everyone seems shocked. I watch from the balcony, staring down at Harvard’s president. I’ve sort of been thinking the same thing.

  * * *

  All of my friends are going into consulting. Senior year at Harvard has been a never-ending stream of unfamiliar names. Bain. McKinsey. BCG. Oliver Wyman. Deloitte. Names I’ve never heard of. Names that are suddenly tossed around the dining hall with reverence, as if the firms are a new feather in your identity cap. “Bain’s like the party consulting group,” I overhear a girl in the Eliot dining hall telling her friends.

  They’re calling it the magic option. The industry for which everyone’s qualified. You could study English. Religion. Ancient Greek. Ancient Greek religion. The firms still want you. On paper, it seems sensible. A two-or-three-year stopgap in which you can make $60,000 your first year (plus $5,000 in moving expenses) and figure out what you want to do later. They’ll train you. They’ll send you places. Shit, they’ll even pay for you to go to business school afterward! Like the British Open into St. Andrews, the firms have all swooped into Harvard’s campus, throwing splashy evening events at Harvard Square hotels, opening their warm welcoming arms to the entire Harvard class of 2008. Friend after friend of mine comes back to Eliot House bearing gifts of the newly converted—new Bain foam-ball globes, shiny McKinsey pens (the kind Viagra used to give out), bright red Deloitte brochures. Everyone, it seems, has drunk the consulting Kool-Aid. No one, it seems, will tell me what you actually do in consulting.

  The kids who aren’t going into consulting are heading to Wall Street. Lehman Brothers. Goldman. Morgan Stanley. Here, the starting salaries are higher; $140,000 for an “all-in comp” (including bonuses) is fairly typical. I know maybe thirty kids from my class heading to Goldman Sachs in New York. My freshman intramural basketball team roster reads like a who’s who in rookie-year investment banking.

  Flying even higher than the investment bankers are the hedge fund kids. People know even less about the hedge funders, except that these seniors tend to be the bookish econ majors, the quieter ones, who have now been head-hunted by small boutique hedge funds in downtown Manhattan or Westport, Connecticut. Cerberus. D. E. Shaw. Sankaty. This world is even more mysterious, even more removed, except for the salaries, rumors of which are throttling through our classrooms and libraries and Harvard gyms. The English major who will be making $400,000 next year. The kid who’s being flown to Dubai for final interviews. Together, the hedge funders and the I-bankers are full of heady enthusiasm. It’s mid-2008. It’s still a good time to be on Wall Street. The hedge fund faucet is flowing. Signing bonuses could buy you a car. Life, as they say, is good.

  And in the middle of all this, I am instantly a lost cause.

  I know I’m not a fit for Wall Street—I have no interest in finance, the only econ class I took was in sophomore year of high school, and the last time I tried to calculate splits on a restaurant bill, I overcharged my friends for sushi by $35. Instead, throughout much of senior year, I’ve thrown myself into my thesis film, as if by burying myself in that, I’d be able to put off the question of my own future. While prepping my film, I also prepped an application for a Fulbright scholarship. I’d go back to Paris, apprentice to a French filmmaker, then shoot my own film in the second half of the year. It all sounded good, and I wrote a fistful of Fulbright essays, had my Fulbright interview in September, found out in December that I’d advanced to the final stage, and then, two weeks ago, discovered that I hadn’t been picked.

  Through it all, I can’t stop thinking about St. Andrews. I’ve been speaking to Uncle Ken once a week by telephone, and I also check in with Greaves, who’s bagged a job as a junior assistant producer with European Tour Productions (the UK equivalent of the Golf Channel). And from my Harvard dorm room, back in November, I followed Lydia’s progress in Ladies European Tour Qualifying School. As I tracked her live hole-by-hole results on my laptop, the nineteen-year-old girl who everyone told not to go to Q-school shot 8 under in her first round, 6 under through the next four rounds, and out of 150 players, finished second. Lydia’s on the tour.

  Now I don’t know what to do next. It’s great to hear from my St. Andrews mates. But back in Cambridge, all I’m hearing about is consulting firms. As if it’s, like, expected that you’ll follow the crowd. And maybe this is the smart track to follow. I just don’t see where I fit into all of this. I feel stupid for passing judgment on my friends. What right do I have to criticize their choices? What am I doing that’s so revolutionary? I don’t have an answer. But I do know that this whole undertone of senior year has just felt . . . wrong. Like a mass sell-out. Like all of us have shifted our priorities from learning, from figuring out our world, to how much our signing bonus is going to be compared to those of our roommates.

  * * *

  “Please consider what I’ve said. Thank you.”

  Drew Faust has finished speaking. The message is over. The moment has passed. Students are filing out the doors now, back into the morning sun, to Widener Library, their families, and their lives. As I exit Memorial Church, my smile goes back up. I’m playing out my role as the happy graduate—for my family, for my friends, and for myself. But it’s a fraud. I have no job lined up. I don’t know what I want to do with my life. I feel lost.

  • • •

  Graduation comes and goes. Mainly goes. I take a job as a teaching assistant in Harvard’s film department. I’m a TA in VES 50: Fundamentals of Filmmaking—the ten-person class I took as a sophomore, in which you shoot docs on 16 mm film, edit on Steenbecks, cut using splicers. It’s the same classroom in which I spent sophomore year, the same basement in which I spent my college career. All my friends move to New York, to $2,500-a-month apartments in Manhattan. They’re in the real world. And I’m teaching sophomores. I really shouldn’t complain. It’s a good job. It’s more than a good job. I love the professors that I’m TA-ing for—Ross McElwee, Robb Moss, Alfred Guzzetti. They were my favorite guys in the department. I get to hang out with Pete and John too, my old buddies in the equipment room, and now we have time to really shoot the shit after work. I’ll grab them coffees from down the street, before classes, and we’ll talk films, or music, or how exactly John can unstick lenses using Scotch tape. And I like teaching. It’s cool. The students are really nice. But something’s missing. Deep down in my mind, I know that I was supposed to move away from here when I graduated. But I’m still here. It’s safe, it’s secure. But I can’t really say that it excites me like caddying used to, like being in St. Andrews used to. Which is to say, truthfully, that I still miss St. Andrews.

  New England fall turns to New England winter. New England winter turns to much-more-miserable New England winter, then stays that way until every Massachusetts resident has seriously contemplated a move to Phoenix. Then it gets even colder. I spend the winter calling b
ack to Uncle Ken frequently, in St. Andrews. For the most part, he sounds good—but I know he’s had more falls. He’s gone down twice in the past month, once not too badly, once much too badly. The second fall, on the front steps outside his door, ended in a broken pelvis and a stay in the hospital. As always though, Uncle Ken’s upbeat on the phone. But he sounds like he misses me. And although he won’t admit it, he sounds disappointed that I won’t be back this summer to caddie.

  • • •

  I teach at Harvard the next year too. Another twelve months pass. Now students who crewed on my thesis film as freshmen and sophomores are roaming the halls as upperclassmen. I share an apartment in East Cambridge with a couple of MIT grad students in physics. I watch a lot of movies and wonder what I’m going to do next. Time is speeding up just as I want to slow it down. During winter break, I spend a huge chunk of my savings and go with three friends to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania. It’s exactly what I need—it’s an adventure, it’s different, it’s thrilling. But then I’m back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in midwinter. By the spring, as my second year wraps up, I know what I need to do. Not what others think I should do or what’s logical for me to do. What I want to do. I call the caddie shack and tell them I’m coming back. I book flights with the rest of my savings. I call Uncle Ken. My roommates are surprised. My friends are surprised. My parents are surprised. I’m just excited. I’m heading back to St. Andrews.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  “One second, one second! Hee-hee-hee.”

  The high-pitched giggle has never sounded so sweet as footsteps draw nearer to the door. As I wait outside with my suitcase, I think about how strange it feels to be back. And how awesome it is.

  The door is unlocked. And opened. And then I’m hugging my eighty-nine-year-old uncle. And I can’t believe I’ve been gone for so long. It’s as if I’ve just woken up from a long, deep sleep.

  “I’ve pumped up all the tires on your bike!” Uncle Ken says proudly, beckoning me in.

  “That’s brilliant. Thanks!” I say.

  “Oh, pleasure!” Uncle Ken replies Englishly. “Did you have a good trip over?”

  “Sure, yeah, it was fine.”

  I walk down the hallway. Everything’s the same. I run my hand along the wallpaper, hear the grandfather clocks ticking. I’m back with my best friend.

  • • •

  There are some differences down at the shack.

  The ballot has gone “digital.” Instead of a paper copy of the ballot hanging outside the shack, there’s now a computer monitor, enclosed behind glass, displaying an electronic version. Caddie badges are now electronic ID cards—swiped before each round when you get your pin sheet and entered into a computer database. There’s also a new system for allocating caddie jobs. Caddies are now assigned to one of four (creatively named) lists: List 1, List 2, List 3, and List 4. Now, during the week, there is no first come, first served policy. Instead, everyone calls into a special caddie voice mail each night and finds out what time their list should be down in the morning, or who the first fifteen names on each list are for the following day. List 1 is the new top-thirty group. They have to double every weekday, but they’ll be off the course first each afternoon. Next out on the course is List 2. List 2 is for people who still want doubles most days but want a little more flexibility in their schedules. List 3 is for guys who mainly want singles. List 4 is the seniors list. The most obvious effect of this list system is that things are calmer. During the week, no one has to get down at four A.M. anymore to get a good number. The caddie day has a more officelike structure. Saturday is still a free-for-all, however, with some caddies getting down at two A.M. to be first for sign-up.

  There are other changes too. The shack now has two bathrooms instead of one (the other used to be Rick’s personal toilet). There’s a flat-screen HD TV now mounted on the wall (the remote is still missing). There are new cubbyholes for bags. There are new caddie caps (in baby blue, which I’m not crazy about). There are new caddie waterproofs (now Gore-Tex, and now actually waterproof). And there are new caddies. Lifers from Gleneagles and Kingsbarns who have made the switch to St. Andrews. Characters who seem to have arrived via Pluto. There’s Naci Karsli, a Super Mario–looking Turkish guy, who’s lived in Scotland for years (he used to own his own Turkish food joint called the Hungry Horse) and who makes a point of always barking extra-Scottish phrases, like “Ach, this young laddie! You’re a good laddie!” or “Ach, this fucker! This wee shit!” There’s the “Stirling Mafia”—the raucous fifty-year-old duo of Malcolm Cowan and Rob McCormick, who race their Vauxhall Carlton and Peugeot 306 each morning at 90 miles an hour, from their shared house in Anstruther to St. Andrews (along tightrope-narrow roads), then back again at the end of the day. And there’s Gordon McIntyre, an eccentric sixty-year-old Zimbabwean with a large white beard and farmer’s hat, who spends each winter on an Israeli vegetarian kibbutz and greets me in the shack each Friday with “Shabbat Shalom, young man.”

  In matters of caddie finance (read: the matter that matters most), the caddie fee has risen. It’s now forty-five pounds plus tip for full caddies. This makes sixty quid an almost guaranteed minimum and slides the Hawaii-Five-0 into new, previously unfathomable strata of offense. Caddies also now have a seventh course on which to ply their trade—the Castle Course, built in 2008, and instantly proving the most brutal course to caddie on that I’ve ever seen. The Castle has its own (smaller) caddie department, and on slow days, caddies from the Old will sometimes shoot over for jobs at the Castle. (The guy who designed the Castle clubhouse also designed our Old Course caddie shack.) Behind the eighteenth green, Hamilton Hall has now been sold. Sadly, it’s no longer a University of St. Andrews dorm, and Herb Kohler, the new owner, is turning it into luxury apartments called the Hamilton Grand. Apparently the price tag is around three million dollars per apartment (a slight change in ambiance from when I was a student, walking along one of the Hamilton hallways at night, when a room door was suddenly flung open and a student projectile-vomited into the hallway).

  There are changes inside the shack office too. Ken has retired as assistant caddie master and now works part-time up at Kingsbarns as an on-course ranger (I see him up there one day, with his binoculars proudly around his neck, clearly loving it). Helping to run things now are the new assistant caddie masters, both former caddies: Dave Hutchison (Loppy) and Paul Ellison (Switchy). Both have hung up their bibs and stepped into “the office,” a change I’m sure they find just as weird as their friends find it.

  But of all the changes in the shack, one is the most dramatic, by far.

  Rick Mackenzie is no longer the caddie master.

  Yep. Rick is gone. There was some kind of incident—something happened, and although nothing’s been proven, Rick has been removed from the job. I am absolutely shocked by this news. In his place is Rob, Rick’s former assistant. An even-keeled thirty-year-old from St. Andrews, Rob worked for the Links Clubhouse before moving into the shack. Of greater importance, Rob caddied on the Old as a sixteen-year-old. Rob’s hardworking, intelligent. He has a desert-dry sense of humor. He’s also levelheaded, the Mikhail Gorbachev to Rick’s Stalin. While Rick ruled by fear and terror, Rob has instantly created a calmer, more predictable work space. The daily threat of firing is gone. There’s a sense that things are more, well, fair. I can’t help feeling glad for the change. And yet, I also can’t help remembering Rick’s shockingly honest speech to me years ago, about how the shack was his life. I realize now that that life has been taken away from him. And I can’t forget how, amid everything else, Rick always took me back, year after year . . . always had a bib ready for me . . . even prompted my first razor blade shave. Bizarrely, I can now only feel terribly sorry for this man who used to strike terror into my heart. I didn’t think I would ever feel this way, but my heart goes out to him.

  Other than that, most of the guys are still here. Gordon Smith. Andy Black. Big Malcky. John Rimmer. Big Eck. Dougie. Jimmy Reid. Coynie. Neil
Gibson. Bruce Sorley. There are new trainees of course (there always are . . .), and I find that in the shack, to my amazement, these new kids are now looking to me as a veteran caddie. A fifth-year guy who was caddying “back when Mackenzie was here!” It’s weird. And I can’t say I hate it.

  * * *

  I’m in the shack today, my second day back, when Gardner walks in.

  “What the fook . . . Horovitz!?”

  Gardner is wearing his knit caddie hat fully unfolded, so that it now extends at least a foot above his head. In the space for his caddie card, there’s a picture of a brown Labrador and the name “Gardner’s Revenge.” Nathan bends down to his gym bag, from which he inexplicably pulls out a teakettle and toaster, then plugs both into the wall. Above him, tacked to the notice board, I observe two fresh newspaper articles that have been tacked up, side by side. One headline reads: SUPREME SCRAP. The other reads: I WORK WITH NUTTERS.

  “Hi, Nathan.”

  Gardner looks pleased. “Couldn’t fookin’ stay away, huh?”

  I nod, with a hesitant smile you might give to your older brother’s lunatic friend, who is about to either joke around with you, or beat you up. “Actually, yeah, pretty much.”

  Gardner digests this reply, and grins. I think he approves. Outside the open shack door, up on the first tee, some Americans are driving off. The first guy hits a low burner and screams, “Run like an open sore!” Everyone else in the group winces.

  Gardner looks over at me. It hits me that over the years, these guys have come to know me as I’ve grown up. From an eager-eyed eighteen-year-old to the twenty-four-year-old standing before them now. Each summer that I come back, I’ve still got a place here.