“Sometimes we have to,” he said. “It’s in the job description. In the fine print.” He gave me a grin, and we walked on.
AUGUST 3, 2008
It has been raining for so many days and I have been walking in wet shoes for so long that the tips of my toes have turned black with some kind of fungus. Big Gary tells me that I should soak them in boiling alcohol while drinking single-malt whiskey. “The only cure,” he says.
Today, a few hundred yards down the 1st fairway my shoes were filled with rainwater again. Even the Gore-Tex waterproofs couldn’t stop the rain, and by the time we reached the 1st green, I was soaked through to my skin and shivering with cold. Rainwater sloshing around in my crotch. Each step is a small agony in this kind of condition. You can feel your bones grinding in their sockets when you climb up the hills. And no matter how you try, rain keeps running down the back of your neck, like a cold spark. It was just survival out there for almost five hours.
When it was over, I walked the half mile to the bus stop in rain so heavy that it had strange properties of light and color, almost like spilled milk, pouring down over my head. The bus driver told me that I had to take a seat. “I can’t,” I told him. “I’m too cold.”
So I stood beside him. The bus lurched forward, and I finally allowed myself to imagine stripping off my wet clothes and stepping into the hot shower. We rolled maybe a hundred yards, just coming upon the gates to Kingsbarns, where one of the boys from the pro shop sat in a buggy waving the bus to a stop with both hands. I asked the driver what time it was. Three thirty, he said. I knew the buggy was for me and that a golfer must have shown up wanting a caddie. By eight thirty tonight I will be finished, I told myself. In five hours I will be back on the bus, heading home. In six hours I will have a hot shower, my bowl of pea soup, and two hard rolls with butter. And then I will sleep in a bed under warm blankets.
AUGUST 11, 2008
Today is my fifty-eighth birthday, and all I have to say is this: a good, hardworking caddie doesn’t complain if his golfer is an ungrateful asshole or if he’s not properly paid or if it is pissing rain for five straight hours or if the wind is at gale force and knocks him back a half step for every step forward or if he spends hours in the rough searching for balls or marching up and down hills to the wrong fairways or if his bag is too heavy or if he’s hot and thirsty and his back is aching or if he has finished eighteen holes and just rolled a cigarette to relax for a few minutes when he is summoned to the 1st tee to begin another five hours with cold rainwater running down the back of his neck or if at the end of a ten-hour day he misses his bus home by three minutes and has to wait an hour in the pouring rain for the next one. It is a point of honor never to complain and in a 180-day season never to call in sick: this is how one earns the respect of his fellow caddies. And in the end, respect is all that matters to a good, hardworking caddie.
I want to earn Jack’s respect out there someday when I caddie for him. His golf team is back at practice again. The start of his fall sophomore season. I hope he has a breakthrough this season and can make the travel squad. He hasn’t written to me more than a few sentences in e-mails all summer. He’s busy, I know. There is a young girl in town here who reminds me of my Cara at home, and I can’t look at her anymore, because it makes me too sad. And the same is true about the golden retriever at the corner who reminds me of Teddy asleep at my side of the bed waiting for me to come back. I’ve been gone five months now, and I miss Colleen terribly. Maybe this is why I have not had a single putt drop for me in the last week. Not one. And I can’t blame it all on the golfers, even though most of them are probably lousy putters. I’m not seeing the lines anymore. I was out with old John the workhorse yesterday, and when I told him that I felt like a blind man and asked him what he sees, he said, “I don’t see anything. I feel it with my feet.” That explains why he walks the length of the putt on each green. He feels the break with his feet.
So last night I fell asleep in my clothes again and then woke at 2:00 in the morning with the room filled with light from the moon right outside my window. I walked across the street to one of the greens on the little public course, which was lit up in moonlight bright enough for me to putt. I dropped balls all over the green, then walked the lines and tried to feel the humps and slopes with my feet. I set my BlackBerry at the hole with its lit dial for my target. I missed every putt by a mile until the moon slipped behind clouds and it was then so dark that I had to rely only on what I could feel with my feet. I began doing better. Much better. And at work today I had my confidence back, and the putts started falling again, right from the 1st hole. I was out with an old World War II vet from Illinois whose left hand was shaking badly when he putted, so I told him to rest his left elbow against his body. It worked like a charm for him. We were sitting on the stone wall at the 10th, waiting for the group in front, when he told me that he had built his little manufacturing company from the ground up. For years he had employed 280 people working three shifts. His son took over the company, and two years ago he moved the operation somewhere in Asia where he could pay workers almost nothing. This enabled the son to earn an extra 11 percent profit a year. “For 11 percent more profit, he put those good American workers out into the street, my boy did,” the old man told me. “I don’t blame him for being greedy; we all have our share of greed in us. What I blame him for is being unpatriotic.”
I’m going to remember him telling me this. When we finished and were shaking hands, I said to him, “Thank you for what you did for America.”
AUGUST 22, 2008
I now own the reputation for the biggest caddie fuckup in the brief but elegant eight-year history of the Kingsbarns Golf Links. I am the guy who has lived on a monk’s budget all season so that I could send all my money home. Seventeen pounds a week for my food, not a dime more. Which means eating soup and hard rolls six nights a week and splurging the seventh with a hamburger, which they call mince here. Watching every penny. Never going out with the guys to drink at night. I have my BlackBerry with me all the time. It is in my vest pocket on vibrate so that each time it hums, while I’m working, I have the pleasant thought that Colleen or one of the kids is writing me an e-mail. But I cannot use it as a telephone under any circumstances, because the fee would be way beyond my budget.
So today I was out with the nicest group of guys from Oklahoma. They were down to their final day in St. Andrews and had not been able to get on the Old Course. I told them the local secret, that if they showed up just before the last tee time, the starter might let them follow behind the final group and play what they call the Dark Hours. Then I offered to make a call to the one starter I knew there to see how it looked for today. I made the call standing on the 10th tee and got an answering machine. So I left a message, and we played on.
It wasn’t until an hour ago, just after nine o’clock tonight, that I realized I had somehow failed to hang up the phone. I had left a five-hour-and-twenty-three-minute message. When I called AT&T, they told me it cost $889.45. The math. I am averaging £63 per loop, which means I will have to do eighty-three loops to earn that money back. Impossible.
SEPTEMBER 2, 2008
“I was never much of a church person,” old Burton in his threadbare plaid trousers whispered to me on the 16th green. “My church was always on a golf course.” There were eight of us—four golfers and four caddies—all in hushed silence while one fellow prepared to putt. There is a churchlike nature to the structures and rituals of golf. Kneeling down to line up a putt. Heads bowed over each shot. The searching. The arms opened, eyes turned to the heavens exhorting the gods for some explanation of why we keep thinning our long irons. The dreadful and penitent march to where your ball disappeared hopelessly into the rough, praying for salvation—that you’ll be able to get a club on it, or at least find it. All of these transactions conducted in a peaceful quiet that sometimes seems to enter you.
Today I carried my golfer’s medication in the inside pocket of my vest. A small pl
astic box like the kind fishermen keep their flies in. He handed this to me on the 1st tee. “Dynamite,” he said. “Nitroglycerin for my angina. Not enough blood flowing to the heart.”
He was stooped at the shoulders and he walked with a limp, but he had wonderful, restless blue eyes and a great story. He was stuck in a nursing home by his children somewhere in Missouri where everyone was sitting around waiting to die, and he was just dying to get out and play golf while he still could. “I’d never used a computer in my life,” he told me. “And I didn’t know the Internet from the interstate, but one of the nurses showed me the ropes.” He spent most of a year doing Google searches and Facebook searches, trying to find out if he had any old friends left in the real world. Finally one turned up. “That man right there,” he told me, pointing to his pal Nigel. “We were at Stanford together doing graduate work in the 1950s. I hadn’t spoken to him in thirty years. But he sprung me from the nursing home. Just drove up in his Lincoln and took me the hell out of there one night. And here we are now.” All Burton brought with him were his golf clothes. He was so paranoid his kids would find out and come after him that when they made the reservations for this trip, he used a false name.
What a character! I told him that I was going to remember him as my fugitive golfer. “That’s me,” he said cheerfully. “On the run. On the lam. Tomorrow we’re at Royal Dornoch. Then on to Turnberry. I can’t wait. Maybe Prestwick too if my ticker holds up.”
We skipped the last two holes so he could catch his breath. It was almost growing dark when we sat on the stone wall waiting for Nigel and the others to finish. Burt couldn’t get over how bright the sky was. “That beautiful par-3 where I hit it into the ocean, I sure ruined that hole,” he said solemnly. “I tried to bail out to the left like you said, but I blocked it. What a shame. The one that got away, I guess.”
I was prepared to bribe someone in the pro shop with a tenner, but the assistant pro let me use the buggy and I drove the two of us back down the 9th fairway through the golden sunlight and the long shadows, up the front side of the mounds and down the back, all the way to the 15th tee, where I handed Burt his driver so he could play the beautiful par-3 again.
“You think I need the big dog?” he questioned.
“It’s late,” I said. “The air is heavy, Burton.”
He nodded and held out his hand, palm up. “I’ll take one TNT,” he said.
I gave him the pill, and he slipped it under his tongue. “I think we make our own destiny, don’t you, Don?” he sang as he teed up his ball.
I told him to take aim at the right half of the bunker on the back of the green.
“One hundred and eighty-seven yards will reach the sand,” I said. “Just give me 165, and we’ll be in the mayor’s office.”
“The mayor’s office,” he said. “I like that. I just want to make one pretty swing, and then I’ll tell you about Deidre while we’re driving to the green with my putter in my hand.”
It worked out pretty much the way he envisioned it. He didn’t hit it on the screws, but close enough for the ball to run up onto the front of the green. I handed him his putter (best feeling in the world for any caddie coming off any par-3 tee box), and then he told me that he preferred to walk. So we did while he told me that there was this girl in Palo Alto named Deidre back in the early 1950s when he was there. He and Nigel were both in love with her. “Madly in love” is how he put it. “Intoxicated, to be honest. Nigel thought I was bedding her, and I thought he was. We became mortal enemies. It wasn’t until I found him on Google that we both discovered that neither one of us had ever had her. Can you believe it? We found her on Google too. She lives in Seattle. When we get back to the States, we’re going to look her up, hats in hand, you might say.”
We missed the long birdie putt but captured the par. Burton was describing it to Nigel for the third time while we rode in a taxi to Elie. They had insisted on giving me a ride home. It was ten o’clock, and the moon was floating above the poppy field as we left the course. The taxi driver was talking about the bad economy; his fares were down more than 50 percent from last summer. He’d met a caddie in town who sold his vest to a golfer for twenty quid. He went on and on about the Royal Bank of Scotland—“nottin’ but a pack a thieves.” It was an old story by now. I was grateful for a day’s work, even though I waited seven hours for my loop. We are down from about 130 jobs a day to 30, and it is every man for himself now. The America I left behind seems to be in ruins.
We said our good-byes. I thanked Burton for the good company and the tip and wished him the best of luck with Deidre in Seattle.
He smiled, and nodded thoughtfully. The last thing I heard him say was “Thank God for Google.”
SEPTEMBER 9, 2008
Apparently, the big investment bank Lehman Brothers is kaput, and people are afraid that the stock market is going to fail big-time.
Here is my e-mail exchange with my pal at JPMorgan at 10:00 p.m. my time. Five o’clock his time in New York City.
“Donnie. We might be facing the end of our economy. Make sure you can get your kids home from wherever they are scattered around the world. Send them enough cash. Credit cards will be worthless.”
“What do you mean, ‘the end of our economy’?”
“I mean we will all be growing our food in our backyards.”
“When?”
“Immediately.”
“All my life I’ve been told that there are safeguards in the system to prevent another Great Depression.”
“Forget that. And don’t listen to any of the so-called experts. When the wind blows hard enough, things fall down. You should know that, Donnie—you’re a fucking caddie in Scotland!”
“How bad is it going to get?”
“We could be talking about this scenario. You go to the bank on Monday and find the ATM is empty. Your accounts have zero balances—it turns out those figures were only images on a computer screen. Your credit cards are no longer valid. We are cast into a cash-only society overnight. All you have is the cash you have in the coffee can buried in the backyard. When that’s gone, you’re toast.”
“I won’t have anything.”
“Tell your wife to take all your money out of the bank immediately!”
“Are you sure?”
“Call her right now. I am here on Wall Street. It’s in the air. Like a plague.”
“Okay. And I’m still sorry about that putt I misread on the 11th at Elie.”
“I should have taken it out of your tip!”
OCTOBER 1, 2008
Day of days, Jack. I was in the parking lot carrying my golfer’s clubs to the courtesy car after my round with a Swedish industrialist. There I was walking beside Padraig Harrington and his young caddie. I told him that since you were eight years old, just falling in love with golf, you and I have followed him.
“Before anyone knew me,” he said with his grin.
“Yes,” I said. “My son went off to play college golf in the States, and I came here to be a caddie so he and I can meet up again someday on the tour.”
“Where is he in college?”
“University of Toledo.”
“In Ohio.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Good luck this week.”
He thanked me and we shook hands. As he was walking away, he turned and called to me, “What’s your son’s name?”
“Jack Snyder,” I said.
“Jack Snyder at the University of Toledo,” he said. “I’ll remember that.”
OCTOBER 14, 2008
Home. I awoke this morning knowing that I have been away from home long enough and that it is time for me to leave here. For a month I watched the grandstands and the tee box markers being constructed for the Dunhill Links Championship, like a stage set being built in advance of the actors’ arrival. This is what I have looked forward to since early April. And the truth is I never thought I would make it through the season. I have walked about a thousand miles. I turned fifty-eight yea
rs old here a few months back. I am going to miss the people I worked with and the ground I walked each day. But I will not miss the waiting. The eight and nine hours of waiting for work.
The world of work seems to be changing now. I have not read a newspaper or listened to a radio or watched the television or surfed the Internet in over half a year, but I have had reports from home in e-mails, and it is clear that America is changing. The news that I hear from golfers has been steady and ominous. Financial leaders from around the world have all told me the same thing all summer long. A real economic collapse could be coming. “Build a shelter,” one South African banker told me. A prince from Brazil told me to take all my earnings and buy gold. He took hold of my elbow and said, “I’m serious. Listen to what I’m telling you.”
———
My last loop was with one of the high-and-mighty rulers of Goldman Sachs who chain-smoked his way around the course and never laughed with his mates, though they kept trying to distract him. Coming off 18 at the end, I asked him how bad things are going to get in the world now, and he answered me in one monotone run-on sentence just above a whisper, as if he were passing on to me a precious secret: “The rats are already running for the exits, if you hold any chips, cash them in now, don’t delay.”
Maybe the world is changing. But it is always changing. It changed for my father when he was a little boy suddenly riding through the Great Depression. He had told me many time how all his cousins, aunts, and uncles moved in together and slept together on the kitchen floor in front of the coal stove riding out the storm of the Great Depression. Every morning his father, my grandfather, left the house and spent the day selling apples on the sidewalks to buy food for the family supper that night and a few lumps of coal for the stove. Twenty-three years ago my first child was born in Iowa City. I remember buying baby things for Erin at a nearby farm that the bank had foreclosed on. A family there was selling everything they owned and losing the farm that had been in their family for four generations. I still remember the father leaning against the fence, watching people carrying away his possessions in the rain. I bought a wicker changing table for our new, first baby. His changing table for one of his babies. In his eyes you could see that he had been shattered and that he would never believe in himself again. He was only a few years older than I, but his life was over, you could tell. My life was just beginning, and his was ending. I wonder whatever became of him. I wonder if we are all going to be him next. Perhaps it will all fall down, and then a new and better America will begin. The corporate lawyers and the Wall Street princes will learn to make trousers and coats in the formerly abandoned textile plants. Insurance executives will plow fields, and hedge fund brokers will fire up the steel mills. I hope that I am a caddie in the new world. I would do this job for nothing, just for the chance to be out on this wonderful ground, walking beside the caddies who have taught me so much this season.
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