The Caddie

by J. Michael Veron

  I was more offended than amused by his attempt at humor. “You don’t think I can get there?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not the smart play. If you come up short, you’re in the water. Why give the tournament away?” Tilting his head slightly toward Elkington, he added, “Keep the pressure on him.”

  I knew he was right and reluctantly reached for the seven-iron.

  Stewart said nothing as he pulled the bag out of the way. With nothing but fairway in front of me—and knowing that the pond was not reachable—I made an easy swing with the seven-iron that left us with a full sand wedge into the green.

  That forced Elkington and his caddie to debate the same question that Stewart and I had argued about moments earlier. After a few moments’ deliberation and after tossing grass in the air twice to gauge the wind, he settled on laying up as well. I knew it was the smart play for him, too. If he tried for the green in two and landed in the water, he would be handing the tournament to me.

  He hit his shot about three yards inside mine, so I would be playing my third shot first. It was my chance to apply some real pressure. If I could get my shot close, Elkington would know he had to as well or the tournament would be over.

  The flag was set in the front of the green, on the left side. It wouldn’t be easy to reach. But, I decided, this was no time to be bashful. I was confident enough to aim directly at the hole and made what I thought was a good pass at the ball. I must have pulled my left shoulder out of the swing, however, because when I looked up the ball was drifting right of the hole. It wound up a good twenty feet from the hole, which was a disappointing result.

  In an instant, I knew that I had just given Elkington an opening instead of putting pressure on him. I also knew that a player of his caliber would take advantage of my generosity.

  And that’s precisely what he did, nailing a knockdown sand wedge that stuck like Velcro no more than six feet behind the hole. It was pretty clear that I was going to have to make my putt just to force a playoff between us.

  As Stewart and I leaned over to read the line, he reminded me that it was likely to break toward the pond because that’s where the surface drainage probably went. The question was how much. I couldn’t see much of a slope, but I knew one was there. I had to decide whether to trust my eyes or my brain. Stewart must have been just as uncertain as I was, because he even went and looked at the putt from the other side of the hole.

  When he rejoined me, I told him I thought the line was two balls outside the hole. His reply was short and sweet. “That’s it. Hit it there.”

  I had hoped for a little more input than that. “Are you sure?”

  He shook me off with a sideways twist of his head. “You’re the one who has to be sure. Trust it.”

  I remember thinking it was an odd response, almost as if he was refusing to share responsibility for the putt. I didn’t understand until later he was preparing me for life on my own.

  Anyway, I hit a solid putt that started on the line I had chosen. But speed is just as important to a putt as the line. I must have hit the ball a little too firmly, because it didn’t take the break like I anticipated and just slid past the hole on the high side before finishing nearly three feet beyond. It had come agonizingly close to going in, but we weren’t playing with horse shoes or hand grenades, so close didn’t matter. I marked my ball and waited for Elkington to putt for the win.

  His putt was going to run slightly downhill, which made it more difficult. Still, there wasn’t enough break in the six feet or so between him and the hole to give me much hope that he would miss. Guys like him usually closed the deal when they had the chance to.

  He rolled it right in.

  I made my three-footer to finish second by a shot, which was worth a huge chunk of money but no trophy. I guess I was supposed to be more disappointed than I was. After all, you’re brought up in this country hearing that second place means first loser, that winning is the only thing, and that there’s the winner and there’s everyone else. It’s real easy to get taken in by that kind of nonsense.

  But, despite everything, I was proud of the way I played. I knew that I hadn’t choked or thrown the tournament away. Sometimes the shots aren’t there, and the putts don’t fall. It’s the nature of the game.

  My reaction to the whole thing told me that Stewart had rubbed off on me far more than I realized. Unlike my earlier life, I no longer beat myself up after a less-than-perfect round of golf. I guess I had learned to appreciate the beauty of the game, particularly the part that held me fast in its grip even while disappointing me far more often than not. In the end, golf is more about failure than success, and anyone who takes the game seriously must learn to understand that.

  At different times, the two greatest ball strikers in the history of the game, Bobby Jones and Ben Hogan, recognized that golf perfection was unattainable. After shooting 66 at Sunningdale in England and having golf writers describe it as the most flawless display of golf they had ever witnessed, Jones allowed that he had only hit a handful of shots during the round as well as he wanted to. Hogan said much the same thing when he said that his golfing success was measured by the quality of his misses, because they far outnumbered the shots that came off exactly as he planned.

  As usual, though, Stewart put the whole thing in perspective with just a few words. As we hauled our gear to the courtesy car, he said drily, “Give the man credit. You didn’t lose the tournament, he won it.”

  He was right. Besides, I thought, I had beaten 144 other players and failed to beat only one. There was no way I could feel bad about finishing first and second in my last two PGA Tour events.

  xxv

  AFTER PLAYING FOUR tournaments in a row, it was time for a break. I hated to stop playing in the middle of a hot streak, but I was burned out. So Stewart and I went back to Louisiana to wash our clothes and to get some home cooking.

  Finishing first and second in consecutive tournaments on the PGA Tour will win you a lot of money in a hurry. As a result, I had jumped to the top of the money list. Of course, anyone who wins a tournament early in the year pretty much goes to the head of the class; the trick is to be there at Thanksgiving.

  While we sat out the Tour stop at Atlanta, the media tracked us down in Baton Rouge and began banging on the door of our little apartment (we could now afford better digs, but there didn’t seem to be time to move) every day for more interviews. It was clear that the second-place finish at San Diego hadn’t tarnished my image as the rising star du jour of the PGA Tour.

  After the third interview on Tuesday of our week off, I commented to Stewart that we needed to get back out on the road in order to get some peace. He just shrugged. “You don’t have to say yes to everyone, Bobby. You’ll run yourself ragged if you do.”

  I could tell he was right. I just wasn’t accustomed to being newsworthy. Even though most of these reporters asked the same questions (how did it feel, what’s it like, etc.), this interview business was taking some getting used to.

  In the meantime, my success had eliminated any concerns about getting into the Florida tournaments. As a Tour winner, I could pick and choose where I wanted to play. Stewart and I talked about it, and we decided that I would play Doral, skip the Honda, and then play Bay Hill (after all, it was Arnold Palmer’s tournament), and The Players’ Championship at the TPC Sawgrass. The hope was that, somehow, I could play my way into the Masters, which would take place in early April.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. When I came back out, the putts stopped falling. My scoring slipped only a stroke or two in each round, but that’s enough on the Tour to drop you so far off the leaderboard that you might as well be playing for matchsticks.

  As I fell in the standings, I started to press, trying to get each approach shot so close that I could kick it in the hole for birdie. Of course, that’s exactly why they put sucker pins out there, tucked in places where you’ve got as good a chance to get it close as Martha Burk has of playing in t
he member-guest at Augusta National. I paid the price for my reckless play by missing the cuts at Bay Hill and The Players’ Championship.

  That’s when I learned how fickle the media are. I went from being their darling to the subject of “what’s wrong with Bobby Reeves” articles in every golf publication across the country. To make matters worse, in the process I had destroyed any chance of being invited to the Masters.

  Through it all, Stewart tried to be supportive. He counseled me that golf was by nature a game of change and that the rhythm and feel that came so naturally one minute could be gone the next. He even likened golf to a cat. Both, he said, tended to be fickle creatures that came and went on their own schedules and without any explanation.

  I knew, of course, that he was right, but I still wasn’t prepared to fall back so quickly after all the progress we had made, and I wasn’t taking it well. I even tried to rationalize that missing the Masters wasn’t that big a deal. After all, I told myself, it was probably the weakest test of golf’s four major championships. For one thing, it had the smallest field, so there were fewer players to beat. Moreover, because winners received a lifetime invitation to play, many invitees were past their prime and had no real chance of winning. In addition, the course itself was wide open, with no real rough to speak of. In contrast to the other championships, where thick rough or heather and gorse stood ready to swallow any shot that wandered off-line, contestants at the Masters often weren’t penalized for spraying the ball, particularly off the tee. For that reason, some critics charged that the tournament was little more than a putting contest.

  No matter how often I went through this little exercise, though, it didn’t work. For one thing, the Masters was the most charming of golf’s major tournaments. It was the only major that returned to the same place year after year and that had built tradition in a way that rotating to new sites could not. It helped, too, that the April playing date of the Masters marked the advent of spring, with blooming azaleas and other flowers spread in all their glory over an exquisitely manicured golf course. Beyond that, the competition itself had developed an allure of its own. If the truth be known, the Masters has never pretended to be the championship of anything. From the beginning, it was—and remains—just an invitational tournament held by the Augusta National Golf Club, which alone decides who is allowed to play. Despite this autonomy, everyone associated with the event from Bobby Jones on down has always displayed a knack for making the right decisions about how to run their tournament.

  For instance, even though exempting past champions for life arguably watered down the field, Masters patrons came to enjoy seeing old favorites return and compete year after year, even when their games had begun to fade. This same nostalgic sentiment eventually inspired the Senior Tour some forty years later, and it could be argued that Augusta National played a significant role in bringing that about.

  For those reasons and more, the Masters was and is a very special part of golf, and my efforts to pretend otherwise proved to be unsuccessful. It hurt not to go, and there was just no denying it.

  Partly because of the funk I was in, the next few weeks were kind of a blur. I had lost my confidence and with it my belief in what I had learned from Stewart. Without realizing it, I had also lost the easy, relaxed feel that I had first captured under Stewart’s tutelage. Almost imperceptibly, the timing of my swing had changed.

  It’s an occupational hazard. Every player knows that golf timing comes and goes. That’s when it’s critical to be patient and rely on your short game to keep your scores down while you wait for your timing to return.

  Of course, that’s easier said than done. Every golfer’s instinct is to swing hard in order to generate distance, and it takes discipline to trust that a slow, easy swing works best. Some of the so-called golf psychologists say that this is what makes golf “counterintuitive.” I just call it mind over matter. Whatever it is, it’s a large part of what makes golf so challenging.

  It was certainly getting the better of me at that point. I started swinging too fast to control the club and began hitting it everywhere. The crazy part was that, as I began to spray the ball, I tried even harder to force it on-line, which only created more tension and made me swing even faster, making things worse.

  It started getting pretty ugly. If Stewart was telling me to relax and accept the bad shots, I wasn’t listening. Over a period of weeks, I walked myself through a cafeteria of swing theories, hoping for some magical mechanical solution to my game. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had abandoned Stewart and everything he had taught me since that night he rescued me from my jail cell in Baton Rouge.

  For some reason, Stewart appeared to withdraw from me as I floundered with my game. I guess he was hoping I would come to my senses on my own and return to our program. But I wasn’t letting go of anything. It was vintage Bobby Reeves, trying to force my golf game back together.

  Needless to say, I wasn’t exactly brimming with confidence when it came time to try and qualify for the U.S. Open in early June. The qualifier was set for a wonderful old golf course, Scioto Country Club in Columbus, Ohio. Designed by Donald Ross in 1912, Scioto was a classic and owned an important chunk of golf history, having hosted the 1926 U.S. Open won by Bobby Jones. It was also the course on which Jack Nicklaus learned to play. Because of its proximity to Muirfield Village Golf Club, where Nicklaus’s pet tournament, the Memorial, was held, Scioto was also a convenient site to hold the thirty-six–hole qualifier after the Memorial.

  I missed the cut at the Memorial, my fourth one in a row. With the weekend off, Stewart suggested that we go over and play a couple of practice rounds at Scioto. I was so disheartened with my play that at first I declined. Eventually, though, I decided that I had nothing to lose and agreed. Of course, as always, Stewart was able to arrange for us to play.

  Our starting time was set for early Saturday morning, before the members were scheduled to start. That furnished me with another excuse not to play, as I would have preferred to sleep in. Stewart was insistent, however, that we play. It was clear that he regarded Scioto with special affection, and he seemed especially determined to get me out on the course.

  Once we were there, it was easy to understand why. We see a lot of well-maintained courses on tour that are pleasing to the eye. But it doesn’t take long to see the difference between the hard-edged modern designs and the more natural-looking classics. Donald Ross’s design at Columbus looked more like he discovered a golf course in the land, much like the original links courses were discovered by sheep herders. In contrast, most modern courses seem manufactured, with artificial features imposed on an incongruous landscape.

  I’m no golf architect, but I’m not sure I understand why this is so. From a player’s perspective, the practice of forcing radical changes on what Mother Nature has put down certainly isn’t necessary to make a golf course challenging. Nothing that Pete Dye has done is any harder than Winged Foot, Pinehurst No. 2, or any of the other traditional venues where golf’s major championships are so frequently held.

  Besides that, the softer lines of a Tillinghast green or Mackenzie bunker—not to mention the subtle but treacherous challenges of a Ross green and surrounds—are infinitely more pleasing to the eye than a false waterfall in the desert or an artificial island in an artificial pond. Faced with such garishness, it’s easy to see why the Scots sometimes wonder if Americans know the difference between Scott Simpson and Bart Simpson.

  I was reminded of all of this as soon as we walked onto the first tee at Scioto. There’s a feel to a classic course that is hard to describe. Perhaps it’s knowing that great players from Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen to Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson have played the same game over the same course there. For whatever reason, Scioto had a smell and feel that I never got at a TPC.

  Stewart was obviously quite happy to be there, too. He was strangely quiet much of the time, looking around at the landscape like a soldier returning to an old battlefield. Then he woul
d get that faraway look in his eyes that I had seen before, and I knew he was off in another place and time.

  As we were walking onto the third green, I asked him, “Has the place changed much since you were here before?”

  He didn’t even question what I meant. Shaking his head, he said, “No. It’s pretty much as I remember it.”

  “You said they played the Open here a long time ago.”

  He just smiled. “Yeah. Nineteen twenty-six.”

  “You were there, weren’t you?”

  He smiled again. “Now how could I have been there?”

  I gave him a serious look. “Stewart, you’re the closest friend I have on this earth, but there’s a whole lot about you I ain’t ever gonna understand.”

  He cocked his head and smirked ever so slightly, as if I had said something nonsensical. It was an attempt to disarm me, one of his favorite tactics.

  Undeterred, I pressed on. “You have a connection with this game that’s way beyond anything I’ve ever seen. You seem to know things about the past that aren’t written down anywhere. How come?”

  I had come to the end of what I had to say before he expected it, and I could tell by the way he stiffened ever so slightly that my question had apparently caught him by surprise. He was not one to be cornered so easily, however.

  “What do you mean?”

  I could tell it was going to be another one of those conversations in which Stewart repeatedly returned my serve with questions of his own. I knew where this was headed, and I was determined to make it come out differently just once.

  “You know, you always turn things around with a question. Isn’t that why the Greeks made Socrates take poison?” (I had taken a classics course my sophomore year. It was the only thing I remembered from the course.)

  He laughed. “Now who’s the history student?”

  I was becoming exasperated. “See what I mean? Always a question. Never an answer.”

  Before I could say anything more, Stewart pointed back up the fairway. There was a group approaching. “We’d better putt out.” He barely looked at my line before adding, “If memory serves me correctly, it’s a cup left.”