The Caddie

by J. Michael Veron

  The practice rounds went well and gave no hint of the problems that lay ahead. Neither did my first two rounds, which I played with a friend from the Nationwide Tour named Olen Corbello and a former Tour player by the name of Pete Pauley. I shot 68–70 on the Nicklaus and Dye courses, respectively, and was on the first page of the leaderboard.

  I started having problems in the third round, which was also on the Dye Stadium Course, when I three-putted the fourth hole. For some reason, I became rattled, which undoubtedly had something to do with my tree-putting the next hole as well. Now I was really hot, not to mention panicking at the thought of my game deserting me.

  Stewart could tell that I had lost my composure. That was never a good thing, especially on a course with more booby traps than the Ho Chi Minh Trail. As we stood on the sixth tee, he leaned over and whispered a single word: “Steady.”

  It didn’t do any good. I had lost the new life composure that Stewart and I had been cultivating ever since he drove me away from the East Baton Rouge Parish Jail. I knew exactly what was happening, because it was an old, familiar feeling, but I felt helpless to stop it.

  I yanked my drive left into deep rough, hacked out with a wedge, and dumped my third shot on the par-four hole into a deep bunker to the left of the green. It took me three more strokes to hole out, giving me a double-bogey six.

  I had gone four over in just three holes. My fall from grace had been so fast it made me dizzy. As we walked off the green, Stewart said in his most reassuring voice, “This is your challenge now, Bobby. We both know what is happening. It’s just old habits coming back to haunt you. Stick with the program. Let go.”

  I don’t know whether it was the soothing tone of Stewart’s voice or the substance of what he said, but I felt the tension begin to dissolve. It reminded me to think about the relaxed way I had learned to play over the past several months under Stewart’s tutelage. My sense of feel began to return.

  I birdied three holes on the way in and managed to salvage what could have been a disastrous round, finishing with a 73. Although I had lost ground to the field, it wasn’t more than I could recover.

  Later, Stewart and I talked about what had happened.

  “It’s scary,” I moaned. “I really thought I was past all that. It felt like I was possessed.” I laughed at the exaggeration. “Maybe I need an exorcist instead of a caddie.”

  Stewart put down the sandwich he was eating. Wiping his mouth with a napkin, he said, “It’s really not that strange when you think about it. You played golf that way for many years, getting mad and throwing clubs, losing your composure and ruining rounds.”

  “Yeah, but I thought that was all behind me.”

  He shook his head. “Even when you put it behind you, it’s always there somewhere, waiting for you to let your guard down. As time goes on, it happens less and less. Stick with the program, and you’ll have nothing to worry about.”

  As usual, Stewart was right. I shot 68 the next day on the Nicklaus course to climb comfortably back into contention for a Tour card.

  We now had two rounds left. The stress of the whole thing was really starting to show on some of the players. As I looked around the putting green on the next-to-last day, it struck me that I’d seen happier faces on pallbearers.

  Stewart must have sensed it, too. Rolling a couple of balls back to me, he said quietly, “Some of these fellows act like the penalty for not playing well is lethal injection. Remember this is just a game. You’re supposed to have fun.”

  His advice was easy to take. We had come with nothing and could leave no worse. There just wasn’t anything to lose. The thought prompted a smile. The next putt was right in the center of the cup.

  It’s a cliché to say that Saturday is moving day in a golf tournament. I wish I could tell you that I went out and had a great round that put me in position to win on Sunday. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen.

  For one thing, none of my approaches on Pete Dye’s dental chair of a golf course seemed to hunt the hole. The ones that did find the putting surface always seemed to be twenty or thirty feet away. And, although I hit some really good putts, none fell. The result was an even-par round of 72.

  As Stewart predicted, the pressure of the occasion had driven scores up faster than a bungee cord in recoil. My 72 was good enough to leave me seven places in the standings (and four shots) on the safe side of a Tour card.

  As we left the course, I told Stewart, “I can’t believe how bad the scores were today.”

  He nodded. “Wait’ll you see what happens tomorrow.” He paused before adding, “That’s why we have such an advantage. We’ll just go out and work the program…”

  I finished the sentence for him: “… and the rest will take care of itself.”

  “Yes, it will,” he said, obviously pleased at my rote recitation of our mantra.

  That night, I thought about the progress I had made with Stewart and marveled at how differently I now acted and felt. I had learned in a psychology class back at LSU how difficult it was for people to change their behavior, so I knew that what had happened to me was not to be taken for granted. Of course, I had to admit it got a whole lot easier after I lost my wife, my friends, my freedom, and what little money I had. I had nothing left to lose.

  All that said, I still wasn’t sure I would have known how to change or what to do if Stewart hadn’t come along. It certainly put the next day’s round in perspective. I had already won something much more important than a Tour card.

  xiii

  MY STARTING TIME on Sunday was 11:44, which wasn’t good. I would have all morning to think about the round. So I slept as late as I could, and then Stewart and I had a leisurely breakfast. By the time we got to the course, it was right at ten o’clock.

  That was still too early as far as I was concerned. I didn’t like to be more than an hour early; that was plenty of time to stretch, go through every club in my bag on the range, and putt for about ten minutes before teeing off.

  As with most everything else, Stewart had a view of schedules different from mine. He had obviously cultivated a more casual attitude about how we spent our time before we teed off, which seemed odd, given his attention to all other details. When I questioned him about it, he just gave me that Alfred E. Newman “What, me worry?” look and said, “The only schedule you need to know is your starting time. If you’re even one second late for that, it’ll cost you two strokes. If you’re more’n five minutes late, you don’t get to play at all.”

  “But I get antsy if I have too much time to kill.”

  His face never changed expression. “If you let that make you nervous, what’s gonna happen when you face a tough shot?”

  I refused to give him the satisfaction of an answer, but both of us knew that this discussion had ended like all the rest, with Stewart on top. Without admitting there was any merit to what I had said, he then suggested that we have a soda in the clubhouse and walk through our strategy for playing the course. Counting practice rounds, we had played the Nicklaus Course four times already and knew exactly how to play each hole by heart, but I understood it was just Stewart’s way of delaying the start of my warm-up. He was accommodating me without saying so.

  Our warm-up on the range started out well enough. But it was impossible to ignore the enormity of the occasion, even though I kept reciting our mantra over and over in my head: Let go. Let go. Let go.

  Unfortunately, I was trying to force myself to relax, which is a kind of oxymoron, I suppose, like being in a hurry to slow down. There is no way to relax other than to relax. I was going about it the wrong way.

  So my swing tempo began to quicken, almost imperceptibly at first. And, of course, my ball flight started to become erratic. When my hands got too quick, the ball veered left. When my shoulders got ahead, I blocked the shot to the right. True to my old bad habits, I began to hurry between shots, anxious to hit the next one well so that I could consider the swing demons exorcised. That only led me to swing faster,
with even worse results.

  Stewart sat by quietly, taking it all in. Finally, he said in a low voice, “Let me see that club.” I handed him the five-iron I had been struggling with. He pretended to inspect the club face, as if he had seen something amiss. He just sat there, looking all over it, until it dawned on me that he was just slowing me down.

  I laughed when I realized what he was doing. He had made his point without saying much of anything. I walked over to my bag, wiped my face with a towel, and sat down next to him on the nearby bench he had claimed.

  “It doesn’t take much to get worked up.”

  He just sat there, looking straight ahead. “Nah,” he said in that same peaceful tone of voice, “you can’t force golf. The only way to gain control is to give up control.”

  “That’s kinda hard to follow.”

  Stewart shook his head. “I suppose it is. But you’ve got to let the game come to you.”

  “But I used to play mad, and it always seemed to help.”

  He again rocked his head from side to side in disagreement. “You were playing with a sense of purpose, that’s all. You did that to displace your fear. That’s all right. But you can’t play all tensed up; it just won’t work.”

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure how to “displace fear” any other way. After all, fear was a big part of golf, more so than in other games. A golfer’s fear didn’t go away with the first shot, like butterflies on the first contact in a football game. Instead, it lurked in his consciousness the entire time he was on the course, rearing its ugly head when he least expected it.

  He might be over a four-footer for birdie in a round where he’s been cruising, making every putt he’s looked at. Suddenly, a little voice inside his head says there’s no way he’s gonna make that putt. And sure enough, his hands flinch during the stroke, and the ball doesn’t even hit the hole. Now he begins to wonder if the same thing will happen on the next putt. Before you know it, he’s got a full-blown case of the yips.

  Or, out of the corner of his eye, he spies a little white stake off in the distance, which means the area beyond is out of bounds. The little voice speaks up again. This time it says, whatever you do, don’t hit it there. Tension creeps into his swing, altering his timing almost imperceptibly. He snap-hooks the next shot OB, earning himself a stroke-and-distance penalty.

  Anyone who’s played golf for more than a month knows exactly what I’m talking about. Golf’s the only sport where each player has his own ball, and it’s against the rules for another player to interfere with the way you play yours. Not only that, but there’s no 24-second shot clock or blitzing linebacker to take your mind off those OB stakes on the left. It’s just you, your ball, and the course … and all the time in the world to think of how to screw up.

  I guess you could say that golf’s about reflection rather than reaction. An idle mind may be the devil’s workshop, but a golfer’s mind can be a torture chamber. When Pogo said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” he must have been thinking about golf.

  My point is, that enemy is fear. Some call it fear of failure. Others call it self-doubt. Others use words I’d rather not repeat. Whatever it’s called, it’s very real. Make no mistake about it.

  Serious golfers spend their entire lives searching for ways to control their fear. Some just try not to think about it (the “whistling in the dark” technique). Others pretend not to care whether they play well. Still others think about “cool” colors and pleasant scenes as they walk the course, as if a tranquil state of mind will inoculate them against fear. A few do yoga, although that’s a bit exotic for a group as conservative as golfers. Some even smoke, figuring it’s worth risking lung cancer if it calms their nerves. Some even experiment with beta blockers.

  In the end, the only real cure for fear is confidence. Knowing you can hit a shot, really believing that only good things will happen when you strike the ball, is the surest way to drive away the demons of doubt. It’s what separates champions from the rest of the field. Even when the great ones hit a bad shot, they know how to move on with an unshaken certainty that their next shot will be perfect.

  Of course, that’s not something you can just manufacture out of thin air. It’s the old chicken-and-the-egg thing. You have to be confident to play well, but you have to play well to become confident. I didn’t have the answer for that riddle, at least not yet. I was beginning to think that Stewart had the answer, but he was going to reveal it in his own time.

  I exhaled heavily in an effort to shake the remaining tension from my body. Moving slowly, I pulled another club from my bag and resumed hitting balls. This time, my swing tempo returned, and each shot flew straight and true. After I busted five drives straight down to the far end of the range, we picked up my bag and moved on to the putting green.

  As I rolled the ball back and forth at various hole locations, I tried not to think about the fact that I was about to begin the most important round of golf I had ever played. A good round here meant I’d soon be signing autographs at Pebble Beach, Riviera, and Castle Pines. If not, I’d be signing hotel registers in Paducah, Montgomery, and Shreveport.

  It was impossible not to think about the difference this one round of golf would make. I just wondered why I had to be thinking about it while I was standing on the first tee waiting to start the round.

  Stewart must have sensed my unease. He set my bag down beside me and put his elbow on my shoulder. Feigning a casual attitude, he pointed down the first fairway of the Nicklaus Private Course and said, “You know, you’ve been a little left both times before. I think we ought to try the right side this time. The green sets up better to us from there.”

  He didn’t fool me for a second. The hole was straightaway, and it really made no difference which side of the fairway we were on. Stewart was simply trying to distract me.

  For some reason, the whole situation suddenly struck me as silly. I laughed and said, “Jesus, is it that obvious that I’m nervous?”

  He grinned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m just trying to figure out how we can best shape our tee shot.”

  “Right,” I shot back. But his efforts had produced the desired result. I was loose again.

  I suppose that I’ve played better golf; in fact, I know I have, more times than I can count. But I’ll never play a round I’m prouder of than the 71 I shot that final day to earn my Tour card.

  Stewart and I were headed to the PGA Tour. The PGA Tour. The PGA Tour. The Hot-Damn PGA Tour. I said it over and over on the flight home. It got to the point where Stewart was rolling his eyes in mock disgust.

  He put up with it for the better part of an hour. Somewhere over El Paso, though, he finally turned to me. “Did you ever hear the story about what Joe Paterno said to a Penn State running back who celebrated in the end zone after a touchdown?”

  “No,” I said, puzzled at the relevance of this anecdote.

  “Well, when the player finally got back to the bench, Joe Pa called him over, put his arm around him, and said to him quietly, ‘Son, try to act like you’ve been there before.’”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Get used to the idea of being out there. You belong on the PGA Tour, so act like it. You earned it, okay?”

  I wish I could say that was the last time I acted silly about the whole thing. Unfortunately, waves of childlike glee swept over me at odd moments over the next several weeks as I would think about it. Like, for instance, when I received my Tour credentials in the mail. Like a kid sleeping with his new baseball glove, I kept the player’s badge on the nightstand next to where I slept and looked at it at least a half dozen times throughout the night. It brought a wide smile to my face every time.

  For a while, every day seemed to bring mail from the Tour’s office. Instructions on how to register for tournaments. Forms to fill out for depositing purse checks. Information about fitness trailers, equipment repairs on site, Tour policy about autographs and range use. Suggestions for managin
g travel. Special insurance packages. As Stewart reminded me, the Tour was big business.

  There was a very special piece of mail among all the Tour stuff. It was a note from Boo. Typical Boo: Short, sweet, and to the point. “Bobby,” it read, “Congratulations on getting your card. It proves as much about you as a person as it does about you as a golfer. Boo.” I was surprised and very pleased that he knew and had taken the time to write.

  I showed the note to Stewart. He smiled and said, “He sees in you what you must learn to see in yourself.”

  I laughed. “You sound like a fortune cookie.”

  I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth. It was an old, bad habit, deflecting anything serious with a sarcastic joke. The problem, of course, was that it came off as a put-down. At one time or another, just about everyone I’ve ever been close to, including Betsy, Boo, and my brother Mark, has blasted me for it. But as they say, old habits die hard. Old habits in an addictive person never die; they only go into remission. I’d just had a relapse.

  “I’m sorry,” I said hurriedly.

  Stewart didn’t blast me, though he would have been justified if he had. Instead, he said quietly, “Maybe you’re just not comfortable with compliments, and that’s your way of keeping others at a distance.” He paused. “Keeping people out is a way of maintaining control … and avoiding change.”

  Once again, we were back to letting go. But now Stewart seemed to be saying it was more than just a cure for three-putting.

  As the days passed, I found that I couldn’t wait to start playing on some of the best playgrounds on the planet. Of course, I knew that being on the Tour didn’t necessarily mean I could play in every tournament. There were more cards than slots in any given tournament field. The more popular tournaments drew more entrants than they could accommodate, so the Tour devised a pecking order to determine who got in. As a brand new Q-School graduate, I was pretty low in those rankings. It seemed like there were even a couple of caddies who were ahead of me.