Walking with Jack

by Don J. Snyder

  By the time we stood on the 11th tee box, the empty blue sky had been replaced by clouds so thick and black that it felt as if night were descending. Our golfers were playing like piss, losing two or three balls on every hole (balls we were no longer even trying to find) but laughing and drinking whiskey and apparently having the time of their lives. I wanted to do something to help my two fellows, and I was trying my best, but as soon as I had one of them straightened out and back on the fairway, the other was in trouble again in the rough or a bunker or a river. It was as if I were babysitting two rambunctious toddlers in a fine house filled with priceless antiques. Every time I turned my back, there was another catastrophe. One moment they were knocking over the Ming vase in the foyer. The next they were banging the keys on the Steinway. Suddenly a hailstorm was upon us, and we all went trotting after Johnny, who led the way to a ditch beneath a tree where we pulled our jackets over our heads and curled up in the fetal position. The hail was large enough to feel as if someone were throwing rocks at us. All we could do was curse and then laugh. One of the Spaniards passed around his flask. When I declined, Johnny told me he had noticed that I never went to the pub after work with the boys. I had hoped that my absence was going unnoticed. When we all sat outside the caddie shed, there was always a lot of banter about what had happened or failed to happen the night before in the pub. It was common for caddies doing two loops a day to spend all the money earned from one loop in the pub that night. The other morning I’d heard one senior caddie say, “I had a hundred quid with me when I went to the pub. Then I woke up this morning with only eight quid left.” There was no accounting for this; at £1.50 for a pint, he would have had to drink sixty-six pints. I had already taken my pledge to send all my earnings home and to never spend a dime in the pubs, and I had my wee white lie ready for Johnny, the one lie that would excuse me in a country where so many men had wrecked their lives with the drink. “I’ve had my troubles with booze,” I said. Johnny nodded immediately with understanding. “I hear you, mate,” he said. He worked for a while to roll his cigarette inside his jacket to keep it dry. When he had it lit, he looked up at the sky and said, “Lovely spring we’re having. Whenever you’re out here in shite like this, you want to pray that it gets worse, not better, so the blokes will quit.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said. Then I remarked that when we were all following him off the fairway into the ditch under the tree, we looked like ducklings following their mother. “It’s a matter of trust, isn’t it? I mean, a golfer has to trust his caddie?”

  “If you want to get philosophical about it, yes, it is about trust,” he said. “I suppose that’s why I do this job year after year. Each time out is the chance to earn the trust of a complete stranger. And in this world where nobody trusts anybody, that counts for something. We know the ground and the weather. These blokes would have followed you and me right off a cliff.”

  I thought about this for a while as we lay in the ditch until the storm had passed. I wondered if Jack would trust me as his caddie. And what it would take to earn his trust.

  The sky clears. The wind falls off. And there is a moment on the long par-5 12th when it all becomes clear to me. One of my golfers wore a red porkpie hat, the kind I remember seeing Bing Crosby wear when I was a kid. Through the round, he was often wandering off by himself, and on several occasions I found him just looking around, taking in the surroundings thoughtfully as if he were trying to memorize the course. He was the last to drive on number 12, and he was so deep in thought that he forgot to hand me back his driver after the shot and began walking down the hill from the elevated tee box following the flight of his ball. It took a while for the other three golfers to convey to me that he had been here before. He had played this course before, soon after it first opened, with his wife, who had recently died. His friends had brought him back to Scotland on this trip to try to help him get through his grief. When I caught up to him, he said to me, “I love this hole.” His ball had traveled almost two hundred yards, then caught the right-to-left slope of the fairway and rolled to a stop just before the thick dune grass that ran along the shore all the way up the left side to the green. “We should make a birdie here,” I said to him. He laughed off this suggestion, but when I told him that I was serious, our eyes met and I could see how much the idea appealed to him.

  I handed him back his driver and showed him how to play the ball back in his stance. The goal here was to keep the ball low, maybe two or three feet off the ground, so that it would roll forever if we caught the slope of the ground just right. Then I showed him where to aim. And he did it. Not once, but twice. The first shot with the “driver off the deck” went almost as far as his drive from the tee. We made the same shot again, only this time with his rescue club, catching the right-to-left slope off the mound on the right of the green. When the ball came to a stop, it was fourteen feet from the hole. By now the other three men understood what was at stake, and they huddled with Johnny while I lined up the putt. Using my hand, I explained that the ball was going to break right, maybe half a foot in the first half of the putt, before turning back the other way for the remainder. “Just hit it straight at the cup,” I said. “Concentrate on your pace.”

  So he makes the birdie putt. The ball rolls one final revolution in slow motion, collapsing into the hole, his arms go up to the heavens, his three pals surround him in a solemn victory celebration, and I realize this is going to be the highlight of their trip. As we walk to the next tee, he puts his arm around my shoulders and thanks me and insists that I try one of his black cigarettes. The tobacco is so strong that on the first drag my knees buckle, which gets a laugh out of everyone.

  I know now what my job will be out here caddying for strangers, and then one day caddying for my son. The governing dynamic in golf is the same as it is in love, or life itself. In order to love and to be loved, you must believe in yourself. In order to live a full life, you must believe in yourself—at least enough to keep going one more day. In golf you must believe in yourself enough to make the next shot. Doubt will destroy you. And so I will be a confidence man. I will convey confidence in a calm manner, never showing any doubt or fear. In addition to reading greens, and tending flags, and carrying bags, and pointing the way to the safe, good ground, and knowing the weather, and keeping his clubs clean and his grips dry, and moving him along to keep the pace going on the course, and lighting his cigar, and keeping his score—I will believe in my golfer, and I will make him believe that he can make the next shot, no matter how difficult.

  I tried this out on Johnny as we were coming up the 18th fairway, and he disagreed. “No, mate,” he said. “I don’t get that involved. If they make the putt or miss the putt, it’s all the same to me.”

  Not me, I thought. I am going to make my name out here as the caddie who fights for every single shot with my golfer whether he’s Tiger Woods or Caspar Milquetoast. Because, to me, every golfer out here will be my son.

  APRIL 27, 2008

  For weeks now I have been living like a monk. Up at 4:00 to write with a bowl of oats, a half glass of orange juice, and one cup of coffee instead of the three I normally had because more than one and I have to piss out on the golf course. Pack two peanut butter and banana sandwiches and a thermos of tea. Walk three blocks to the bus. Ride the bus to Kingsbarns. Walk the half mile to the caddie shed. Do my round as a shadow. Walk back to the bus. Ride home. Eat two hard rolls and a bowl of soup and drink one tin of lager. Fall asleep in my chair, reading. Wake up at 4:00 in all my clothes and start in again. I am breaking the pattern tonight, eating mashed and bangers and drinking a pint of Guinness to celebrate what happened yesterday. It was a slow day, only a few caddies went out. Everyone had given up and left by around two. Even Davy had gone home. I had almost an hour to wait for the next 95 bus, so I was sitting at the picnic table outside the caddie shed, typing into my BlackBerry. Before I left for work this morning, I discovered the memo file was just like a file on my Mac, and I was sit
ting there thinking that maybe I would write a new draft of the screenplay of my father and mother’s love story while I’m here working this season. It will be my sixth draft. I had just typed in the title page—American Love Story—when one of the assistant pros appeared and asked if there were any caddies around.

  “I’m just a shadow,” I said.

  He said that two golfers from San Francisco had just shown up and requested two caddies. He started to turn away.

  “I know the course,” I said. “I could take them around.”

  He nodded his approval. “Well, then,” he said. “Up you go.”

  They were brothers in their thirties, one a little stockier than the other, both very friendly and delighted to be in Scotland playing golf for the first time. I put one bag over my shoulder; the other I pushed on a trolley. I was too nervous at first to descend to the deep down world or to forget that this was my first time out on the golf course unsupervised by a real caddie. On the 2nd hole, a par-3 along the sea, I failed to calculate the distance to the hole, giving them the distance to the front of the green instead, and left them both short. I admitted my mistake and then made a worse error on the short par-4 5th hole, giving them way too much club when I failed to see that the wind, which had been out in front of us on the tee box, was now suddenly behind us. They both hit their balls right through the fairway into the rough. I walked out ahead of them at a good clip to give myself extra time to find their balls, but even after they arrived to help me, we found neither. If this had been a strict competition or if I’d been caddying for Jack in a tournament, failing to hit a provisional ball would have cost us dearly. They called it even, both dropping new balls, and we played on from there. They took it in stride, and soon enough I felt myself descending into their story as they told me it was their mother, a champion player, who had taught them the game and who insisted that the only gift they ever gave her on Mother’s Day was a round of golf together.

  We spent a while discussing the physicality of the game, as explained by their mother. If you figure that it takes the average player two minutes to execute a shot, this means that in any given round of golf played to even par in four hours, ninety-six minutes are spent just walking. All this downtime is a problem for most golfers. There is just too much time to think about all the things that can impact negatively on your next shot. Meaning the girl who dumped you thirty years earlier because you weren’t quite good enough. Or the promotion that went to the other junior account executive because he was a little brighter. The bad stuff has a way of creeping in, and by bad stuff their mother meant history. “She believed that out on a golf course was where all your small and large failures in your past were waiting for you. They tracked you down and waited for you even in a place as beautiful as this place,” one brother explained. “You think you’re heading out for a nice, pleasant walk,” the other brother said, “and bingo, you’re ambushed by history instead.” Their mother had taught them to use the time spent walking to observe the natural world around them. Birds and trees. The movement of clouds. To try to become part of the surroundings. “And the way you walk is also of great importance,” one brother said. “Most people are much too stiff when they hit a golf ball. Their arms are like blocks of wood. This starts by the way they march to their ball. You want to teach your son to walk with loose joints, like he’s made of rubber, and with his shoulders relaxed so the tension dissipates. By the time he steps up to his next shot, he should be half asleep!”

  I practiced it myself as the afternoon wore on, walking with a rolling gait while they shared their personal history with the game. Both of them had always believed they would try for the pro tour. They’d played in junior competitions and set their sights on the big D1 college programs, but things hadn’t worked out. We were on the 14th tee when they showed me a drill their mother used to work on with them. “Where is the worst place you can drive the ball from here?” one asked me. It had to be down over the steep embankment into the fescue on the side of the hill running along the 12th fairway, I explained. After he hit his first drive up the middle, he hit a second one right into all the trouble. As we walked through the deep grass searching for the ball, he told me that his mother had taught him one of the most important lessons for Jack in competition and for me as his caddie. “Okay, here we are,” he said, after we were standing over the ball. “Now is the point in time when you have to give up the idea of getting on the green in regulation. Actually, the instant you hit this drive, you should have given up on that.” His point was you are in trouble now and trouble is part of this game. No one gets through a round without encountering trouble. The players who end up at the top of the leaderboard are the ones who deal with trouble better than the rest.

  “So, all I want to know from here is where to hit this shot to give myself a decent chance to make my par. This is one of the paradoxes in the game; we all know that we are supposed to concentrate on one shot at a time, the shot right in front of you. But here is one of those exceptions. I have already conceded the second shot. I’m not even thinking of trying to get to the green in regulation. All I’m doing now is setting up the third shot.”

  It made perfect sense to me. I asked him what he considered his strongest shot into a green. “One-hundred-and-fifteen-yard pitching wedge,” he said. I walked back up the hill and out onto good flat ground that distance from the flag. He hit an eight-iron to that spot, then took out his pitching wedge and landed the ball ten feet from the hole. We missed the putt for par, but he had made his point, and it was a point that I will remember. We took a disaster out of the equation by playing for a bogey. My job is to limit the damage.

  When we finished, we grabbed one of the groundskeepers to shoot a photograph of the three of us outside the clubhouse. Then they paid me, and we said good-bye in the parking lot. I took the bills in my right hand and stuffed the money into my pocket as I turned away and began walking to the bus. I didn’t look at it until I had reached the bus stop. Two fifties and two twenties. It was the first money I’d earned as a caddie.

  I had my last smoke of the day outside my back door under the stars. A sky swept with stars. I am now a caddie in Scotland, I said just above a whisper. I am here learning what I need to learn for Jack, and I am also making money to send home to my family. One hundred and forty pounds at the current exchange rate is about $250. Not bad for a day’s work. Not bad at all for a nice four-hour walk with those two fine young men, who played the course at four and seven over par.

  Then sometime in the night I awoke with rain lashing the windows and a terrible feeling in my head. It took me a moment to comprehend that in my sleep I was being reprimanded by Davy, my caddie master. Gone were his bright eyes and quick grin. He was pissed and letting me know in no uncertain terms that there would be consequences for what I had done. First, I had posed as a real caddie instead of telling the golfers that I was only a shadow. This, in Scotland, he explained as his eyes narrowed with contempt, was akin to impersonating an officer, and it carried a penalty. Second, by pretending to be a real caddie, I had earned £140 that should have gone to one of his real caddies.

  Unable to get back to sleep, I took a shower and dressed. It was three in the morning when I started drinking coffee, seated at my kitchen table, waiting for the first bus to Kingsbarns at 6:03.

  I arrived in the downpour with no place to get out from the rain until the milkman showed up half an hour later and led me to an unlocked garage bay where he leaves his deliveries. “You look like you’re lost,” he remarked. When he heard my Yankee accent, he asked the standard question: “On holiday?” Which made me wonder what line of logic could possibly have led him to the conclusion that an American on holiday would be standing outside soaking wet in the rain waiting for a golf course to open. There was a certain tone to his voice that annoyed me. I had heard the same tone from one bus driver. It was the spiteful tone reserved by some Scots for the ugly Americans. Their way of telling us to get the fuck out of their country. They
were never going to get the opportunity to turn their contempt on Donald Trump, who had recently bought up a hunk of their country for another golf course, so any Yank would do.

  You can’t blame them really, though I lit a cigarette and waited silently for the milkman to grow bored with me and leave.

  Davy was the next person to arrive. I watched him park his small car in the empty parking lot, then sprint through the rain to the caddie shed. The lights went on inside the low-slung stone building, which looked as if it had stood on the land for centuries.

  I’ve been on Oprah’s lit-up stage. And the Today show. And Good Morning America. But I was nervous now in a way I hadn’t been before. Here I was a foreigner without a work visa, because caddies are never asked for them, who had overstepped the dividing line separating myself from the real caddies.

  I had the money in my left hand as I shook Davy’s hand. “I think I made a mistake yesterday,” I told him. He cocked his head slightly and looked straight into my eyes. I explained what had happened, then handed him the money.

  He looked at it, folded the bills carefully, and handed them back to me.

  “I heard what you did for us yesterday, Don,” he said. “You helped us out, and I’m grateful.”

  It was the kind of relief you feel when the cop who has pulled you over tells you he’s going to let you off this time with just a warning. “I don’t think I should keep the money,” I said. “I’m just a shadow, and I made some mistakes out there.”