The Caddie

by J. Michael Veron

  I shook my head. “Maybe so, but you seem to have a special reverence for him.”

  He smiled again. “Maybe I just like old things, Bobby. Maybe I’m living in the wrong time.”

  I wanted to know more. “I’m a little surprised Jones never won the Masters himself. It seems like he would have been a cinch.”

  Stewart slowly shook his head. “Once he stopped playing championship golf, he just couldn’t restart his motor, I suppose. Perhaps the fire went out. He was more interested in making sure his friends enjoyed the tournament, and his own playing was more ceremonial than anything.”

  Stewart suddenly seemed sad. “In addition to everything else, Jones started suffering with back problems not long after they started the Masters. He didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of a disease that would cripple and eventually kill him. It robbed him of his skills as a golfer but not his love of the game. This club, and the Masters, allowed him to stay close to the game long after he could no longer play.”

  It was almost dark by then, which meant it was time to go. As we walked to the parking lot, I knew that we had come to the end of a very special day.

  xv

  PLAYING AT AUGUSTA must have inspired me, because I practiced with a new resolve in the last few weeks leading up to our first tournament of the year. In fact, I became so intense that it worried Stewart.

  “Devotion to practice is a good thing unless you get obsessed with the mechanics of the swing,” he warned.

  As usual, I had to return his service. “It worked for Hogan, didn’t it?”

  I watched him suppress a laugh at my irreverence. “Are we modeling ourselves after Ben Hogan, now?”

  “Well,” I began lamely, “not exactly—”

  “Good,” he said, breaking in, “because what worked for Hogan will not work for most anyone else. In particular, it will not work for you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” he said with his usual pluck, “Hogan put complete trust in his mechanics the moment he stepped onto the first tee. From the first shot until he walked off the eighteenth green, he thought only about where he wanted the ball to go. Only someone with his iron will could have made such a complete transition from the practice tee to the golf course.”

  “What makes you think I can’t trust my swing?”

  “I didn’t say you couldn’t. I merely said you shouldn’t become obsessed with the mechanical aspects of the swing. We’ve been working on playing by feel. That’s the way for you to play. Haven’t the last couple of months proven that?”

  That last question clinched the argument. I knew Stewart was right. So much so, in fact, that I now wonder why I ever argued with him. I guess that’s part of crooked thinking, too: Sometimes I had to be right, even when I knew I was wrong. It was another old habit that never truly died.

  After all that had gone before, you’d have thought that it was no longer possible for Stewart to surprise me with anything. Apparently, I was wrong. Just two days before we were to leave for the Hawaiian Open in Honolulu, he took me back to the cow pasture for a practice session. When he pulled my clubs out of the Explorer, I noticed that there was a different set of irons in my bag.

  “What’s this?”

  “These,” he said with great reverence, “are the finest golf clubs in the world. I saved them until I knew you were ready.”

  I had never before heard him endorse any kind of equipment. Yet it was clear from the way he caressed these irons with his hands that he truly believed they were something special.

  I took a closer look. They were old and at the same time new, if that makes any sense. I guess what I mean is that they were a classic design, but they were in mint condition, as if they had hardly ever been used. I noticed, too, that they carried no brand name.

  I asked the obvious question. “Where’d they come from?”

  Stewart continued to look at the clubs with the kind of affection most men reserve for their favorite hunting dog. Finally, he said softly, “They’re a special set, made by one of the greatest clubmakers who ever lived. You’ve never heard of him, but believe me, a golf club made with his hands is a treasure indeed.”

  I meant to ask more, but my attention was drawn to the gleaming clubs. Sensing my growing attraction to them, Stewart pulled one out and handed it to me. That’s when I saw that it had a leather grip.

  “You don’t see that anymore.”

  Stewart appeared momentarily puzzled. Then he brightened. “Oh, you mean the grip? Yeah, I’m afraid few pros know how to wrap them anymore. It’s much faster for them to slip on a rubber grip.” He frowned slightly. “Faster, not better.”

  I knew that Arnold Palmer still played with a leather grip on his driver and was known to take it apart and rewrap it mid-round. Of course, Palmer grew up in the back of a pro shop under the tutelage of his father, Deacon, who was a golf professional at a time when most all golf clubs had leather grips. The young Palmer had no doubt learned how to wrap leather grips before he was old enough to drive.

  Outside of The King, though, I couldn’t recall seeing anyone else using leather grips these days. Nonetheless, as soon as I placed my hands on one of Stewart’s irons, I knew instantly that’s what I wanted on my clubs from then on. The leather was softer than any rubber grip I’d ever used, and it quickly warmed to my touch. It had a tacky feel, too, that I liked.

  I then gave the clubhead a closer look. It was a traditional blade with a solid muscle back extending from heel to toe. In a way, it resembled the old Haig Ultra irons my father had played when I was a kid. But the more I looked, the more I realized the club really reminded me of the irons I had often seen mounted on the walls of various clubs where I’d played. I’m talking about the kind made back in the days when steel shafts were a fairly new thing.

  That’s when it hit me. Eying Stewart suspiciously, I said, “How long have you had these things?”

  “Long enough to see ’em work magic, Bobby.”

  I wasn’t giving up quite so easily this time. “Well, where’d you get ’em?”

  Stewart started that bob-and-weave that was so familiar to me. He was the Muhammad Ali of conversation, always staying just out of reach. “I told you. They were made by an old clubmaker.”

  “Who was he?”

  “You’ve never heard of him. Angus McCreedy was his name.”

  I had gotten a name, but Stewart was right; it didn’t mean a thing to me. Like an old plow mule, though, I continued to drive ahead. “Did he make them for you?”

  Stewart appeared to frown ever so slightly. “You might say that.”

  “Did you ever win anything with them?”

  The hint of displeasure I had observed moments before immediately disappeared from Stewart’s face. Smiling, he said, “I had some very good times with these clubs.”

  “Like what?”

  His smile broadened. “Oh, some very nice things came my way, Bobby.” Then, suddenly, the spell was gone. Straightening up, he said, “Instead of talking about these clubs, why don’t you hit them?”

  He then set my bag next to a pile of Titleists that were nearby. Starting with the wedge, I hit several shots with each club.

  The results were remarkable. I couldn’t miss. The irons were a little heavier than anything I could remember playing. The result was that I could feel the clubhead throughout the swing. In fact, every club felt as if it had been custom made for me.

  “What’s the shaft flex on these things?”

  Stewart rolled his eyes. “Now, don’t be going high tech on me. I hear players on the range nowadays talking about swing weights and flex points, and not one of them understands what he’s saying.”

  “A lot of people think it makes a difference,” I countered.

  He shook his head in mock disgust. “All that matters is how the club feels in your hands when you swing it. If it feels good and the ball goes where you want it to go, why would you care about anything else?”

  I kne
w what he was trying to tell me. Stewart was a throwback to an earlier time—a time that existed before he was born. It was a time when the great players, who had names like Snead, Hogan, Nelson, and Guldahl, learned the game in the caddie yard, not from some swing guru armed with a video camera. They believed in themselves, not their equipment. As Stewart explained to me once, a feel player like Byron Nelson instinctively knew that his five-iron on one day was four yards shorter than usual, just based on his timing. He sensed it and adjusted his game accordingly.

  While I put up a good fight, I knew that Stewart was right, as usual. In the end, I really didn’t care about the swing weight of Stewart’s mysterious irons. All I knew was that I could knock the snot out of the ball with ’em, and that was good enough for me.

  xvi

  MY PGA TOUR debut in Hawaii was an inauspicious one.

  Although Stewart had done his best to prepare me for opening-night jitters, I found it impossible not to be nervous. And even though the field was missing some of the bigger names on Tour, the thought of finally teeing it up with the best players on the planet was stuck in the recesses of my brain and couldn’t be pushed away.

  We arrived early enough to play three practice rounds at the Waialae Country Club in Honolulu, where the Hawaiian Open was being played. Since this was the first full-field event of the year, I expected a line of players at the gate to enter the tournament, all eager to spend a week in beautiful Hawaii with the wife and kids. For some reason, however, the tournament didn’t draw a particularly strong field, and I was able to get in.

  I played my first practice round with Dave Timpa, a guy I knew from college golf, and Kirk Triplett, a Tour veteran who had a much better game than his relatively obscure identity would suggest. Both were genuinely friendly and welcomed me to the Tour.

  At first, I was so jittery I thought I wouldn’t be able to take the club back. It wasn’t just that I wanted to make a good impression on my fellow competitors, either. Hell, there were more people in the gallery just watching us practice than I had ever seen at any mini Tour event.

  I learned quickly though that practice rounds are pretty loose deals on the Tour. Players are normally allowed to hit as many shots as they like at each hole, provided it doesn’t hold up play. Triplett had played in Hawaii several times before and showed us where the holes would probably be located during the four rounds. If no one was waiting behind us, we’d hit several putts at each of the likely pins to get an idea of how they would break.

  I noticed Stewart paying especially close attention to all this. He knew, as I did, that there was nothing more important than getting the correct read on a putt. More than once, I saw him penciling notes in his yardage book about the contours and grain in different greens as we putted.

  I felt good about my first time around the course as a PGA Tour regular. Both Timpa and Triplett complimented me on a number of my shots, which served to remind me that I was perhaps as capable of impressing them as they were me. Both of them, it turned out, were also curious about my irons. Apparently, one of the favorite pastimes of Tour players was scoping out one another’s equipment. Everyone seemed to be looking for an edge, and they didn’t hesitate to look for it in another player’s bag. In fact, I was surprised to see players routinely swinging each other’s clubs on the range and comparing notes on them.

  Of course, I didn’t know what to tell these guys when they asked where my irons came from. All I could say was they were a custom set that my caddie had given me. That didn’t satisfy either one of them; they wanted to know swing weight and shaft flex, and naturally I couldn’t tell them. I didn’t know whether they thought I was holding out on them or just plain dumb.

  At any rate, I played again with Triplett on Tuesday. Timpa had other plans, but we picked up Mark Calcavecchia and another rookie named Dave Frazier, who had finished two spots ahead of me at La Quinta. This would also be my introduction to four-ball competition on the PGA Tour. We tossed up the balls on the first tee, and Triplett and I took on Calcavecchia and Frazier. The stakes were twenty bucks a hole, with an extra twenty for winning either nine and forty for winning the eighteen.

  Nothing ever got my attention faster than playing for money. And I suspect that having another rookie in the group helped settle my nerves. For whatever reason, I played pretty well, but Calcavecchia made seven birdies by himself, and we lost sixty bucks apiece.

  On Wednesday, they put me in the pro-am at the last minute to fill in for Davis Love, who pulled his back working out in the fitness trailer. I was a little uncomfortable about replacing such a prominent player. For one thing, I knew that my amateur partners would feel bad getting an unknown rookie after being told they were playing with one of the biggest names in golf.

  I did my best to entertain the three guys who had each paid $2,500 to play one round of golf with a “real live” PGA Tour player. I basically gave them all a playing lesson, clubbing them on shots, reading their putts, and searching for their balls in the rough. Despite my best efforts, though, we didn’t come close to winning anything. Needless to say, I didn’t get much out of the round to prepare me for the start of the tournament the next day, but I considered it part of my duty as a fledgling player. (Again, as Stewart would say, it was all part of climbing the learning curve.)

  All this time, Stewart was taking notice of my fidgety behavior and doing his best to keep me grounded. More than once, he reminded me that I had earned my way on Tour and belonged there. Of course, I knew he was right, but it was still unsettling to eat lunch in the locker room between Paul Azinger and Mark O’Meara or warm up on the range next to Ernie Els and Hal Sutton. I figured I’d eventually be comfortable enough to ask Sutton how he liked the potato salad on the players’ buffet but not anytime soon.

  I won’t put either of us through the painful details of my short-lived experience in the tournament. However, I will tell you that I liked the Waialae Country Club and was disappointed that I didn’t score better on it than I did. It’s an old course, designed by Seth Raynor in 1926, and plays short by today’s standards. I’m not one of those, however, who believe that a course can’t be a good test of golf unless it measures 7,200 yards from the tips.

  While Waialae does give up a lot of birdies when the Tour’s in town, its list of past champions includes Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Hale Irwin, and Ben Crenshaw. Any course producing such an illustrious group of winners doesn’t have to prove anything more to me.

  It’s taken me awhile to admit all that. Frankly, if you had asked me about the place right after I shot 72–73 to miss the cut, I wouldn’t have had very nice things to say about it. I certainly couldn’t fault my ball striking for the high scores. If the truth be told, I hit the new irons as well as I could—so well, in fact, that I noticed Dan Forsman staring into my bag while we were waiting to hit on the eighth tee on Friday.

  “Where’d you get these things?”

  “My caddie got them for me. They were custom made in Scotland.”

  Forsman raised his eyebrows. Fortunately, before he could ask any more questions, the fairway ahead cleared, and our attention turned to our tee shots. I realized, however, that the professional curiosity about my clubs was not going to go away. There would be more questions as other players saw my clubs.

  The real problem with my scoring at Hawaii, as you might imagine, was that I couldn’t buy a putt. In hindsight, I suppose I was pressing a bit. Stewart later said as much, but told me not to worry about it. He said that part would come as we became more accustomed to being out on Tour.

  David Feherty, the Irish player whose outrageous sense of humor had earned him an escape from the world of gut-wrenching six-footers to that of television headsets and magazine columns, recently told me that my first time out was pretty typical. In fact, he gave me a passing grade just for keeping breakfast down each day.

  Stewart’s assessment was pretty much the same. He assured me that, for every player like Ben Crenshaw who won his very first Tour event,
there were thousands of others like me who missed the cut. The important thing, he said, was to take something away from the experience.

  I almost winced when he told me that. I figured out a long time ago that people only talked about learning experiences when something crappy happened. Let’s face it, no one ever said to the guy who just won the lottery, “Now, what do you think we can learn from this?”

  Despite Stewart’s consolation, it was a long flight from Hawaii. My expectations had been high, and I was disappointed. Still, I soon discovered a wonderful thing about life on the PGA Tour: There’s an opportunity for redemption each week. We were headed for Bermuda Dunes and the Bob Hope Desert Classic, and I would have a chance to make up for the disappointment in Hawaii.

  Not only that, but it would be my first encounter with the most popular player of all time, Arnold Palmer. I would never have expected him, of all people, to give me my biggest clue to date about Stewart’s true identity.

  xvii

  THE BOB HOPE Desert Classic is different from most PGA Tour stops for several reasons. For one thing, like Pebble Beach, the entire tournament is a pro-am. For another, it runs ninety holes instead of the usual seventy-two. And it’s played over three courses rather than one.

  Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Palm Springs tournament, however, was its host and namesake, Bob Hope. Like his old friend Bing Crosby, Bob Hope had a lifelong love affair with golf and was genuinely committed to making his tournament a success. Everyone associated with the Desert Classic always knew that he was no mere figurehead and that his hands-on involvement put the event in a category separate from other Tour stops.

  Hope liked golfers as much as he liked the game, and they responded to his affection. Among other things, the Desert Classic was the last regular Tour event that Arnold Palmer won, in 1973, and he continues to play in it to this very day.