The Caddie

by J. Michael Veron

  I pulled the 8802 from my bag and began to walk toward the putting clock. Stewart grabbed me by the sleeve. “Bring your eight-iron, too.”

  I must have putted for the better part of an hour. During the entire time, Stewart spoke only sparingly. I don’t think he ever said anything more than “See the line, roll the ball,” over and over. Always standing with his arms folded, kicking the balls back to me with the toe of his sneaker. He didn’t let me quit until I made 25 three-footers in a row.

  We took a short break for water. Then he shared his ideas about chipping with me. “Let’s keep it simple,” he intoned. “Play the ball back, press the hands forward. Then look at the line and make a short stroke down the line.”

  My first attempts were a little stiff. “Don’t grip the club so tight. Remember,” he lectured me once again, “relax and feel the shot. All you really want to do is give the ball a little pinch off the turf.”

  With that image in mind, I was soon rolling the ball smoothly, and each chip seemed to hunt the hole. I even made a few.

  It was finally time to call it quits. In a short period of time, I could see real progress in my game. I was thinking about hitting the ball at the target instead of where my hands should be at the top of my backswing. The game was a lot easier to play without a foot-long mental checklist for every shot.

  We arrived back at the apartment just before five o’clock. There was a message on Stewart’s answering machine from the East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney’s Office. They wanted me to call them as soon as possible.

  Hearing that message reminded me that there were scarier things in store for me than a four-foot downhiller for par.

  viii

  IT WASN’T QUITE 6:30 when Stewart forced me out of bed. “C’mon,” he ordered, “time for some early roadwork.”

  Before I knew it, he was making good on his promise to get me in shape. As we headed down a quiet street that ran behind the apartments, I questioned why our workout had to begin in the middle of the night.

  Stewart only laughed. “If you had ever done this before, you’d know what it’s like to run in the middle of the day in Louisiana. The heat and humidity will kill you.”

  We hadn’t run more than a block or two, and I was already beginning to breathe heavily. “How far are we going?”

  “Judging from the wheezing I’m hearing, we’ll have to take it pretty easy for now.” He looked up the street. “We’ll go only a mile or two today.”

  I groaned. “There’s no way I can run that far.”

  “You never know how much you can do until you push yourself to the limit.” He chuckled softly. “There’s a lot more in your tank than you realize.”

  Somehow, I made it. As we climbed the stairs to the apartment, I was making a lot of noise sucking air in and out of my lungs. “I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” I said between gasps.

  Again, Stewart indulged me. “It gets easier,” he said breezily. I noticed, with some irritation, that he seemed unaffected by the run.

  After a shower and breakfast, it was time to return the DA’s call. Like the meeting with Boo, it was something I dreaded, but there was no avoiding it. I dialed the number and asked for someone named Rhonda Gill. A short time later, a voice came on the line.

  “This is Rhonda Gill.”

  I cleared my throat and said, “Ms. Gill, this is Bobby Reeves. I had a message to call you.”

  There was a slight pause, and I could hear the sound of papers being shuffled. “Ah, yes, Mr. Reeves. I’m the assistant district attorney in charge of your case.” Her tone was very businesslike. “Let’s see, I have your file right around here somewhere.… Okay, here it is. I remember now why I called you. You need to come in and talk to me about this theft charge.”

  “Okay,” I said nervously.

  “Can you make it this afternoon … say two-fifteen?”

  “Sure,” I answered. It wasn’t like I had much choice. Being the son of a lawyer, though, it occurred to me that anything I said in that meeting might be used against me, so I asked cautiously, “Look, do I need to bring a lawyer or anything?”

  Ms. Gill didn’t seem pleased with my question. “You can if you want, Mr. Reeves, but it would probably be a waste of money.”

  I didn’t quite know what that meant and could only mumble “uh-huh” in response. She took that as a cue that our conversation was over.

  “So I’ll expect you here at two-fifteen this afternoon,” she said before hanging up without saying good-bye.

  I turned to Stewart. “They want me to come in this afternoon. What do you think that means?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. It really doesn’t matter. They’re holding all the cards at this point. Just go and see what they have to say.”

  There wasn’t much point in trying to practice that morning. Stewart could tell that much. I spent the hours leading up to the appointment pacing around the apartment. At one point, Stewart took me for a drive while he ran errands, I guess just to keep me from wearing out the carpet.

  I finally persuaded him to go with me to meet John Law. At first, he resisted. “You didn’t need me to go see Boo, did you?”

  “This isn’t like that,” I argued. “I knew Boo. I don’t know these people. They can put me back in jail for a long time. I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”

  “You still don’t have enough faith in yourself, Bobby,” Stewart countered. “Like I told you this morning, you are capable of more than you realize.”

  Eventually, however, he agreed to go along if being there helped relax me.

  We arrived at the East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney’s Office at 2:05. At 2:15, give or take thirty seconds, a young secretary escorted us from the waiting room down a long hall to Rhonda Gill’s office. As we walked in, an attractive woman with auburn hair, smartly dressed in a suit, was seated at a desk holding a file in her hands. Without getting up, she pointed to two chairs across from her desk.

  “Sit down, gentlemen.” Looking at both of us, she asked, “Which one of you is Mr. Reeves?”

  I raised my hand slightly. “I am.” Pointing to Stewart, I said, “This is a friend of mine, Stewart Jones.”

  She frowned slightly. “I wasn’t expecting you to bring anyone.” She closed her file and put it down in front of her. “Mr. Reeves, I’ve been reviewing your file. You’re in serious trouble.”

  I tried to remain impassive but squirmed in my seat.

  Continuing, she said, “This is what we call a ‘lay-down hand.’ All of the evidence needed to convict you of felony theft is right here. You were even caught with the stolen money still in your possession.” She paused and gave me a hard look. “Under the Louisiana Criminal Code, you can get up to twenty years at hard labor for this.”

  Frankly, I was close to tears. How on earth, I thought, could I have been so stupid as to do something like this?

  Ms. Gill must have been thinking the same thing. “I understand that you played golf at LSU and that you were pretty good at it. Apparently, the person you stole from, Mr. Boudreau, was on the team with you.” Her eyes narrowed. “You have a funny way of treating your friends.”

  I looked down, awash in shame.

  She sighed heavily. “You’re damned lucky. Mr. Boudreau is a much better friend to you than you are to him. For some reason that eludes me, he has signed an affidavit of nonprosecution in your case.”

  In my emotional state, I wasn’t sure what she was telling me. I stammered, “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. What does that mean?”

  She seemed irritated by my question. “It means, Mr. Reeves, that the victim of your theft does not want to see you prosecuted.” She held up my file and pointed at me with it. “It means that, even though we have you dead to rights, we will defer to his wishes and not charge you if you agree to certain conditions.”

  I moved forward to the edge of my chair. “Like what?” I asked eagerly.

  “We’ll put you on what we call ‘DA’s
probation.’ It means we’ll hold this charge for a year. If you stay out of trouble, we’ll dismiss the charge at the end of that time, and everything will go away as if nothing ever happened. But,” she added, almost glowering at me, “if you get into any more trouble, we’ll charge you with the new crimes and this felony. Is that clear?”

  I swallowed hard. “Yes.”

  She dropped the file on her desk, obviously disappointed at being deprived of the opportunity to prosecute me. “You may go.”

  As we turned and hurried out of her office, I happened to notice Rhonda Gill’s law school diploma on the wall. The name of the school caught my eye. Rhonda Gill had been graduated from Tulane Law School. It struck me as ironic that an LSU golfer would receive clemency from such an unlikely source as our biggest rival.

  When we got outside, I looked at Stewart. “I feel like a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders,” I told him.

  He smiled back at me. “Good things happen to you when you straighten your life out, Bobby. You were honest and direct with Boo. He responded in kind, that’s all.”

  I didn’t say anything more, but I was beginning to understand that my change of fortune was not fortuitous. It really did seem related in some way to the new lifestyle that Stewart was teaching me. At any rate, on the drive home he proposed a small celebration. Since the charge was being put on hold, Stewart would be getting back the bail money he had posted for me. He thought a good way to spend part of it was to celebrate my liberation with a nice steak dinner.

  My ecstasy was short-lived. When we drove up to the apartment, there was a man waiting for us. As we walked up the stairs, he came over and said, “Which one of you is Bobby Reeves?” I said I was.

  He smiled and handed me some papers. Betsy had filed suit for divorce.

  I read as much of the papers as I could. Handing them to Stewart, I said, “Even when you know it’s coming, it still hurts like hell to get something like this.” Uncharacteristically, he seemed to be without any soothing wisdom to offer me at the moment. I needed some time alone, so I went for a walk.

  It’s hard to describe all the emotions that get mashed together at a time like that. As the hurt I was feeling receded ever so slightly, I felt surges of anger course through me. I have no idea why I felt that way; if anyone had a right to be angry, it was Betsy, not me.

  Even minor-league golf has groupies, and I had played late-night games on the road with more than one or two of them. I think Betsy had suspected as much for a long time, but didn’t want to believe it. She had no choice, though, when one of them called looking for me and got her instead. That’s when I came home two days later and found my clothes dumped on the front steps of our apartment.

  But anger has its own logic, so I was briefly tempted to call my soon-to-be ex and remind her that I still had some old Polaroids that would be posted all over the Internet if she didn’t back off. Fortunately, I realized that was too low even for me and decided against it. (Besides, she had some Polaroids of her own. I wasn’t quite ready for my own website just yet, either.) Needless to say, I was no longer in the mood to celebrate after my emotions had run their course, so Stewart and I postponed our steak dinner.

  I didn’t actually read the entire pleading until a couple of days later. As it turned out, Betsy wasn’t really asking for much of anything, just a divorce. Of course, in view of my economic circumstances at the time, it wouldn’t have done any good to ask for alimony, and we had no property to divide except some furniture. As the saying goes, you can’t get blood from a Titleist. Not that it mattered; I would gladly have given whatever she wanted to get her back. I knew, however, that wasn’t going to happen.

  As Stewart watched me pore over the divorce papers for perhaps the tenth time, he tried to offer some solace. “You know, Bobby, everything happens for a reason. You may not be able to see it now, but something good will come of this.”

  “I want to believe you,” I said gloomily. “But that’s not how I’m feeling at the moment.”

  Getting back into our practice routine helped me to start the process of letting go of Betsy. As each day passed, I became more focused on the future. Stewart was right; I couldn’t undo the past. All I could do was improve the future by not repeating the mistakes of the past, both on and off the golf course. Once I accepted that, I began to feel better.

  After a month or so of hitting balls in the morning and chipping and putting in the afternoon, Stewart booked a starting time at a good local course known as the Santa Maria Golf Club. It was to be our first round together, and I couldn’t remember when I had gone so long between rounds of golf.

  We played fairly early in the morning on a Wednesday. There was hardly anyone else on the course. It was a pretty day, and the two of us just walked along, playing a shot at a time, focusing on where we wanted the ball to go and how the swing should feel.

  I had never before considered any caddie to be much more than a bag carrier. Even when I let one of them read putts for me, it was more to humor him than anything else. But with Stewart, for the first time in my life I really let go and trusted someone else with my game. I didn’t concern myself with the score, managing the course, or anything else but following his lead. I had that much confidence in him.

  I shot 66 that day without so much as breaking a sweat. In my first try at Stewart’s program, I knew we were on to something.

  ix

  THERE WERE BOTH spiritual and physical benefits to Stewart’s program. All that running had melted my beer gut. I was rounding into the best shape of my life.

  I noticed several benefits as the weight dropped off. I felt better, for one thing. And I had more energy. But the biggest surprise was that I gained ten yards off the tee and about a half club with my irons.

  I was feeling better from the neck up as well. Stewart noticed it even before I did. I was smiling again, and I had regained a sense of humor.

  Our practice sessions together became more playful. Stewart reminded me over and over again that playing golf should be fun, even at the professional level. He believed that I would play my best only if I recaptured the spirit I had when I played the game as a boy.

  One day he asked me during the middle of a session, “Do you remember how you felt after a bad hole when you were a kid?”

  I had to think for a moment. “Yeah,” I said finally. “I just pulled my ball out of the cup and hurried to the next tee. I couldn’t wait to play the next hole.”

  “Exactly,” Stewart said, nodding. “You were so happy to be playing that you wouldn’t allow a bad hole to ruin your fun. That’s the spirit you need to play well.”

  I understood what he meant. After what I had been through, I was learning to count my blessings. Making double bogey wasn’t nearly as big a deal as it had been before I saw the inside of a jail cell. I knew now that there were a lot worse things that could happen to me than three-putting.

  As a result, I was able to recall how simply I had played the game before the fear of failure and other adult misgivings crowded into my life. Back then, I approached every game involving a ball with the same carefree attitude. Just show me where to hit it, and I was off and running. Golf was no different. I played it well from the very beginning, with no thoughts of swing angles or other distractions. It wasn’t until later, when I attached my ego to whatever score I happened to shoot, that I lost much of the unadulterated joy that golf can bring to those who play it. That’s when I started to press, and that’s when my game (and my life) developed the ragged edges that eventually landed me in jail.

  In the short time I had known Stewart, he had shown himself to be a man of uncommon wisdom and spirituality. He also had a good head for golf and understood that I needed to return to a childlike way of playing the game. What I didn’t know was that he was every bit the player that I was.

  I discovered that fact, much to my surprise, one afternoon at the cow pasture. We were just about done for the day. After I made a couple of sloppy swings, Stewart m
ade a critical comment about my lack of effort. Without thinking, I popped off, “I’d like to see you do better.”

  He gave me a queer look and fell silent for a moment. Without saying a word, he reached into my bag and pulled out my seven-iron. His hands assumed the classic Vardon grip on the club, and he made a couple of practice swings. It was the first time I had ever seen him swing a golf club.

  He then looked out at the middle flag, which was right at 150 yards from where we stood. Pointing to it, he said casually, “How about closest to the hole?”

  “You’re on,” I said.

  He rolled a ball over from the nearest pile, stood next to it, and made one of the smoothest golf swings I’d ever seen. As he came to the ball, he literally flicked his wrists through the hitting area. The ball took off high and slightly left of the flag. Just as it reached its apex, it rolled over to the right and fell softly to the earth, no more than eight feet or so from the flag.

  I was stunned. When I recovered, I stammered, “That was no caddie’s swing.”

  He laughed in my face. “You don’t think caddies can play golf?”

  “Not like that,” I countered. “At least not any caddie I’ve ever known. I don’t know when or where, but you’ve been a player. That was no amateur swing.”

  He notched his eyebrows in slight disdain. “Are you disparaging amateur golf?” Handing me my seven-iron, he added, “Bobby Jones was an amateur, you know, and he whipped the stuffing out of the professionals of his day.” Just in case I was thinking of challenging him, he added, “You can check the record for yourself if you doubt me at all.”

  I started to argue the point, but somehow I knew he was right. Besides, I still had a shot to play. Getting inside Stewart’s ball was going to be tough.

  I set a ball in a nice lie, settled into my address, and pulled the trigger. It was a good swing but a little off. I had come over the top ever so slightly, and the ball drifted left of the flag. It ended up about twenty-five feet away.