The Caddie

by J. Michael Veron

  The first hole at Pebble Beach is a par-four that’s only 380 yards in length. It’s straightaway off the tee and then bends about twenty degrees to the right for the approach. Sutton and I both hit three-woods that found the middle of the fairway, and he was the first to hit his second shot. Like most of the greens at Pebble Beach, the first green is fairly small. For that reason, most players hit their approach to the middle of the green regardless of the hole location, especially under Open conditions when missing on either side means playing your recovery from deep rough. So Sutton dropped an eight-iron onto the center of the green, no more than twenty feet from the hole.

  My tee shot had finished only a few yards past Sutton’s and slightly to the right. I was probably only seven or eight yards closer to the middle of the green, but it put me right between my eight-and nine-irons. It wasn’t the kind of decision I wanted to make on the very first hole. I was wondering what club Stewart would recommend when LaCava suggested the nine: “We’d rather be below the hole.” He didn’t say it, but we both knew that getting up and down from behind the green was a tough play. Better short than long.

  I hit the nine-iron solidly. The ball finished in the front middle portion of the green, about the same distance as Sutton from the hole. LaCava had begun to prove his worth on just the second shot of the day.

  After reaching the green, we determined that Sutton was away. Although he had a different line, LaCava studied Sutton’s putt as well as ours and took note of its speed and break. Although the ball ran by the hole on the high side, my new caddie had learned something. As I squatted to replace my ball in front of its marker, he leaned down and whispered over my shoulder, “Greens’ve dried out a bit; they’re a little faster’n this mornin’. But they’ve grown a little, too, so the grain’s toward the ocean. It’s gonna run to the right. I got it two balls out.”

  I nodded, then plumbed the putt myself by holding the putter in front of me and sighting down the shaft at the hole. This supposedly revealed any slope in the line. I found the “plumb-bob” method to be wrong as often as not and rarely relied on it to read the break of a putt. But old habits die hard, and it had been a part of my routine for so long that I did it without thinking, even when I had already decided how the putt would break. I then stepped around to the side of the ball, took two quick practice strokes, and gave the ball a solid start toward the hole.

  I still don’t know how the putt stayed out of the cup. I hit it right on the line that Joe and I had read, and it began to take the break just as we figured. However, U.S. Open greens can get crusty and bumpy late in the day, so maybe the ball hit something we didn’t see. Anyway, it caught the high side of the hole and spun out, leaving me a yard or so for par.

  I gave Joe a pained look, not so much because we hadn’t made the birdie, but because I didn’t want a three-foot test of my manhood on the very first hole. That’s when his experience showed. He just shrugged and said, “Good stroke.” Then he walked over to look at what remained for our four.

  LaCava seemed as confident and businesslike as Stewart as he surveyed the short putt and said, “Straight in.” His nonchalance had an immediate calming effect. I got right down to business, rolled the ball into the center of the hole, and began thinking about my next shot, which was our tee shot on the second hole, while we waited for Sutton to finish. Only one shot mattered, I reminded myself, and that was the next shot I had to play. I could ponder where Stewart had gone later.

  Even though it was the most important round of my life, I still can’t recall much about the rest of the front nine that day. None of it was very spectacular, but success in the Open has never required spectacular golf. As Andy North proved in winning in 1978 and 1985, U.S. Open conditions reward the old “fairways-and-greens” kind of golf that can be decidedly unspectacular.

  Looking back, I’m amazed that the whole fiasco with Stewart wasn’t more distracting. I suppose some would say I was in a state of denial about Stewart’s disappearance, but I really think I couldn’t deal with that and the U.S. Open at the same time, so subconsciously I just shoved Stewart’s disappearance aside for the time being.

  In any event, I now understand why so many guys can play in tournaments even in the midst of family tragedies. Tournament golf absorbs your attention so completely that it affords you a momentary escape until you’re ready to deal with the larger problem.

  I think I only missed one green on the first nine holes, when I pulled my tee shot on the par-three fifth hole, but I made a five-footer there for par. Throw in birdies at the third and sixth holes, and we turned the front two under for the day. We were still two down to Duval, who had made two birdies behind us, but we had caught Harrington. Sutton had only one birdie and was now three strokes behind us.

  The real story, though, was Tiger Woods. Up to this point, the Open had been a huge disappointment for him, especially since his earlier romp in the 2000 Open had been the main reason the USGA had brought the Open back to Pebble so soon. A combination of sprayed drives and missed putts had left him five shots behind as we began play that Sunday.

  We could tell from the roars of the crowd ahead of us, however, that something was going on with him. As we headed to the tenth tee, we got word that Tiger had indeed caught fire, making birdies on four of the first six holes, and that he was looking at another possible birdie at the green up ahead. If my math was right, he was now only one behind me and Harrington and three behind Duval, with a chance to pull even closer.

  That wasn’t welcome news. If there was any player in golf I didn’t want hunting the same trophy as me, it was Tiger Woods.

  I felt a sinking sensation but only for a moment. Just as quickly I caught myself. Hadn’t Stewart told me time and time again that the only game I could control was my own? Woods was going to do whatever he was going to do. Unless they were going to let me take his ball and hide it from him (which was unlikely), all I could do was play my ball.

  As I was addressing my tee shot, a Mach-Two roar at the green up ahead told us that Tiger had made his putt for birdie. Before Stewart’s intervention, something like that would have affected me. This time, though, I backed away, collected my thoughts, and quickly went back to work. If there was ever a time to answer Woods, this was it.

  While the time was right, the location could have been a whole lot better. The tenth hole at Pebble Beach is a 446-yard par four that’s the last of four consecutive spectacular (but quite difficult) holes along the Pacific Ocean. From the tenth tee, the player is faced with bunkers on the left and Carmel Bay on the right, and not nearly enough fairway in between. Needless to say, it’s not a shot you look forward to.

  As I had each day, I aimed just inside the fairway bunker. The plan was that, if the ball went straight, the worst that could happen was that I’d be playing from the bunker, which had a low enough lip to allow a decent approach shot to the green. If it slid right, I’d be in either light rough or the fairway. In either case, I wasn’t going near the water.

  I nailed it. The ball took off straight for the inside edge of the bunker. I don’t know if it caught a ride from an unexpected trade wind or what, but instead of landing at the bunker it cleared the whole thing by a good ten yards. Even the crowd oohed at that one, and they had just seen Woods tee off in the group ahead of us. I looked at LaCava and arched my eyebrows in surprise. He crooked the corner of his mouth into a half smile, half smirk and returned my driver to the bag.

  “We won’t have more’n eight-iron from there,” he chirped as we started off down the fairway. Truth is, it turned out to be a nine. To give you an idea of how far we had driven it, we were ahead of Sutton—the game’s purest driver in my opinion—by damned near thirty yards.

  Even with a nine-iron, the approach shot at the tenth is scary. The green is small and sits precariously on the edge of a cliff above the beach, like it’s ready to slide down into the ocean the minute the next tremor hits. I wasn’t surprised, therefore, when Sutton put his approach in the left
bunker. That was a helluva lot better than losing your ball in the Pacific Ocean on the right.

  It was now our turn to play. As if he could sense my apprehension, LaCava spoke with confidence as he handed me my club. “Dead center of the green. Nothing else.”

  I’ve hit more than a few nine-irons just as well as I hit this one, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never hit a good one that counted as much. The ball jumped off the club, whizzing as it flew, and headed straight for the middle of the green. It landed almost dead center, and then it kicked right toward the flagstick. When it came to rest, the explosion from the gallery at greenside confirmed that the ball was close to the hole.

  “You got game, Chief,” LaCava said with a big grin as he toweled off the nine-iron. He then pulled my 8802 from my bag, handed it to me, and hustled off to retrieve my divot.

  Like many Tour caddies, Joe LaCava was in surprisingly good shape. I was no more than twenty yards or so down the fairway before he had caught back up with me. “You know, we should have a straight putt from there; everything breaks to the water.”

  I nodded. “I had a putt in the opposite direction on Friday and left it short.”

  “Yeah. That’s ’cause you were going up the hill. We’re sliding down it this time. All you’ll have to do is get it started on the line. It’ll get there on its own.”

  When we arrived at the green, I noticed for the first time that the gallery’s support for us had swelled. I guess it had been building all along, but I was too engrossed in each shot to pay much attention. The applause and cheers this time, though, were too loud to ignore. It gave me chills, to be honest. Confidence, too. It’s hard not to get pumped up when you’ve got that many people yelling your name in an encouraging way.

  It got a whole lot louder when I rolled that twelve-footer right in the mouth of the cup.

  xxxii

  WE WERE NOW six under for the Open. According to the scoreboard we passed on the way to the eleventh tee, we were sandwiched between Duval at seven under and Woods at five under. On top of that, Padraig Harrington was tied with Woods, and Mike Heinen, playing with Woods, was a stroke behind them at four under. Then I saw a scoreboard volunteer post a “2,” showing that Steve Pate had made an improbable birdie up ahead of us at the twelfth hole, which was a bitch of a par three, and was now four under as well. It was getting crowded near the top.

  And if that didn’t make things interesting enough, the wind was starting to pick up.

  Wind is good for sailing, but it ain’t worth a damn for golf. It makes club selection almost impossible. I know exactly how far I hit a seven-iron when things are calm. But if the wind starts blowing from any direction while my ball is in the air, all bets are off. In the wind, a golf ball can, and often does, do funny things. When the wind blows, it can make even the best players look very silly.

  As we reached the eleventh tee, I noticed that the top branches of the trees lining the right side of the fairway were bending back and forth as the wind danced across them. The wind didn’t feel so strong down where we stood, but the trick was to figure out what it would do to the ball once it got above the protection of the trees. If that wasn’t bad enough, the narrow landing area in the eleventh fairway can’t be seen from the tee and therefore requires a blind tee shot. We would be hitting the ball at something we couldn’t see in wind we couldn’t predict.

  I was just starting to feel sorry for myself when LaCava gave me the “glass half-full” version of things. “Thank God we cleared the water holes,” he said, referring to the oceanside stretch from seven through ten. Obviously, the wind was stronger near the ocean, so LaCava was saying that we had gotten past the worst of it and were headed inland into more benign conditions. The thought comforted me, and I momentarily forgot that we would finish our round playing the seventeenth and eighteenth holes directly alongside the ocean.

  I picked out the same target for my tee shot that I had used for the previous three rounds, which happened to be the chimney of a house in the distance. I shaded my line slightly to the right to allow for the wind. Arnold Palmer once said that the best way to counteract the wind was to just hit the ball solid, and that was my only swing thought.

  It worked. The ball took off on a low trajectory and headed down the right side of the fairway. Either because of a draw or the wind (it didn’t matter to me which), it gently turned back toward the middle of the fairway and finished in what I expected to be perfect position. If the ball was where I thought it was, we might have as little as a wedge to the green.

  I was right.

  We had no more than 110 yards or so to the flag. As he handed me the gap wedge, LaCava offered a simple instruction: “Just knock it down.”

  There are times in golf when thinking and doing become one. These rare states of grace don’t last long, but they have the power to transform a remarkably difficult game into child’s play. I had somehow found my way there for the moment, and so I didn’t give the first thought to how to hit a “knockdown” wedge. I just did it, and the ball took off on a low trajectory with more spin than a Bill Clinton deposition.

  By staying under the wind, the ball’s flight stayed true. We could see that it was headed straight for the flag. Over my shoulder, I heard LaCava plead, “Baby, if you’re ever gonna be right, this is the day for it.”

  The golf gods answered my caddie’s simple prayer, bringing the ball down in the shadow of the flagstick. It spun back dramatically, barely missing the hole as it zipped past, and finished less than six feet below the cup. The crowd exploded.

  For the first time since we teed off, Sutton’s stony demeanor softened as we walked toward the green. Offering a smile of encouragement, he patted me on the shoulder and said quietly, “Let’s make ’em proud back home.”

  Getting that kind of support from one of my golfing heroes should’ve pumped me up big time, but it must have distracted me instead. I started thinking about what my friends back at the country club in Lake Charles must be saying as they were watching on television. Then I wondered whether Stewart was aware of what was happening. And then I thought about my father and hoped he was proud. Basically, I let myself think of everything but what I was supposed to be thinking about, which was the next shot.

  I guess that’s why I did the unthinkable. On a day when everything was riding on every putt, I left a simple six-foot uphill birdie putt oh-so-barely short. I stood there frozen in disbelief that I had done something so stupid. The crowd’s loud groan as the ball sat there, hanging on the lip, was nothing compared to the silent cursing going on inside my head. I knew that there weren’t a lot of birdie opportunities on the back side, and I had just blown one when I really needed it. I looked back down at the ground in front of me, as if the grass at my feet would somehow explain what had happened.

  That’s why I didn’t understand at first why the crowd suddenly erupted into such a loud cheer. I looked up and, when I didn’t see my ball, went into a momentary panic. For whatever reason, the first thought I had was that some dog or streaker had run off with it. Then I saw Joe LaCava walking happily to the hole and realized that it had fallen in. I had my birdie after all.

  We were now seven under and tied with David Duval for the lead in the U.S. Open Championship.

  Our joy was short-lived. We were now at the twelfth hole, a 200-plus-yard par three from hell. The challenge here was to land a long iron on a smallish green guarded by deep bunkers front and right and have it stay there. To make things more difficult, the twelfth green was so hard you could swear it had been poured rather than planted. To get the ball to stop on the green, we were going to have to hit it real high so it would come in at a steep angle. On top of that, we needed to cut the ball so it would land softly. With a three-or four-iron, that was no easy shot.

  Of course, as Sandy Tatum might say, it wasn’t supposed to be easy. This was, after all, the U.S. Open.

  I told LaCava that the shot was a three-iron, especially since I had to cut it. He shook his head and held
up four fingers. I guess he figured I was pumped up from the birdie. Also, there was less trouble from the front bunker than from the rough behind the green. I knew he was right and hit the four.

  I never figured it would clear the bunker. But it did, just barely, and stopped about eighteen feet from the hole. I was pleased. Anything on the green at the twelfth was a good play.

  I damned near made the putt. In fact, I missed it too closely, because it caught the lip. That’s the last thing you want on U.S. Open greens. They’re fast enough as it is, but a ball that catches the sharp edges of the hole and spins out really runs away from the hole. If my putt had missed altogether, it would’ve stopped no more than three feet from the hole. However, because of the “slingshot effect,” my ball ended up a good five feet away.

  The last thing I wanted to do was to give back my birdie at eleven with a bogey at twelve. My buddies back home called that a “PBFU,” which is short for “postbirdie foul-up.” (Okay, they used another word beginning with f for foul.) The putt I had left looked like the longest five feet I had ever seen. And it was a right-breaking putt, which is harder for me than a putt breaking the opposite way.

  I was bent down squinting at the line when I heard LaCava say quietly in my ear, “It’s no more’n half a cup. Don’t give the hole away. I’ve got it inside left edge.”

  This was a perfect time, I decided, to leave the driving to my caddie and just hit the putt where he said. One way to avoid the indecision that infected even the steadiest putting stroke was not to think about things like that and just accept the caddie’s read on faith. I figured LaCava probably read these greens better’n I did anyway.