The Caddie

by J. Michael Veron

  That simplified my job. All I had to do was hit the ball on-line. Of course, with all that was riding on these last seven holes, that was easier said than done. All I could do was trust my routine, which I followed automatically.

  The ball started on the correct line, just inside the left edge of the hole. About halfway to the cup, though, it hit a spike mark and bounced just slightly to the left. Now it was headed directly at the edge, and there was a chance that I would have a second straight spinout at the hole. At the last second, however, the ball took the break and caught just enough of the hole to fall in.

  I could feel my heart thumping in my chest from the stress. Thank goodness Sutton had a two-footer after me to finish for his par. That gave me an extra minute or two to calm myself before we headed to the thirteenth tee.

  The thirteenth hole at Pebble Beach is a 406-yard par four that requires players to thread their way past bunkers that protect the right side of the landing area from the tee and the left side of the green on the approach. The putting surface is supposed to be the slickest on the golf course, though I didn’t see how anything could be worse than the twelfth hole.

  I had been hitting the three-wood here, because direction was more important than distance on the hole. You have to hit the fairway to have any chance of holding the green on your second shot. LaCava understood this as well, because he was pulling the cover off my three-wood before I said anything. While he was cleaning my ball, I happened to glance over at a scoreboard just as they were posting Duval’s score at eleven. He had made bogey and had fallen back to six under. With six holes to play, I was leading the U.S. Open all by myself.

  The crowd saw what I saw and turned as one to look at me in a new light. People were starting to call out my name. “You’re the one now, Bobby!” “Make it real, Reeves!” “It’s yours to win, Bobby!”

  The devil in me whispered that it was also mine to lose. I actually shook my head as if that would chase the demon away. LaCava sensed my unease and moved quickly to get me back on track. Leaning toward me, he said, “Middle of the fairway’s all we want here.”

  I came out of the swing a little quickly, which opened the clubface and pushed the shot to the right. For a while, I thought I might catch the bunkers on that side, but the ball landed just inside them. It wasn’t pretty, but we were on the short grass.

  Sutton played the three-wood as well, but hit his solidly and finished in the middle of the fairway about ten yards past me.

  Whatever momentum I might have had from moving to the top of the leaderboard seemed to end moments later. As we were walking from the tee down the fairway, the greenside gallery broke out into a roar, and I could see a red-shirted Tiger Woods doing his patented fist-and-arm pump. Another birdie. He was now at six under par, only one behind and much too close for comfort. I knew all too well what he had done in the past on this very golf course.

  By the time we reached our ball, I had reminded myself again that it was the only one I was allowed to play. Any worry over anyone else’s ball was a waste of energy. So I was ready to get back to business when Joe looked up from his yardage book and said, “Buck fifty-two to the front edge; one-sixty-four to the hole. Smooth six or hard seven, whichever feels best.”

  Under the circumstances, it was easier to think of hitting something hard than smooth. I opted for the seven-iron, and LaCava acted as if that was his choice all along. Since the pin was set on the left side of the green, I set up to draw the ball to the hole.

  I must have really been juiced, because the ball took off, as David Feherty would say, like “hot snot from a chrome nostril.” It sailed past the flag and rolled down the back of the green onto a closely mown chipping area. While I was glad not to be in the rough, we would be facing a delicate chip back down to the hole. Getting up and down from there was going to be tough.

  While we waited for Sutton to play his approach, I started to whine a little about our bad luck. LaCava would have none of it. “I think you can chip in for birdie from there.”

  I couldn’t suppress a laugh.

  He acted as if he was offended. “Hey, I’m serious. All you gotta do is get it started on-line; you know it’s gonna get there.”

  It was, of course, exactly the right thing to say. After Sutton hit the center of the green with his second shot, we began to walk toward the green, and my only thought was to make that chip.

  When we got to the ball, I saw that it had settled about seven or eight yards past the green at the bottom of an incline. We would have to chip or pitch the ball back up (or over) the incline, and then it would run down the other side toward the hole. I felt more comfortable bumping the ball into the hill and letting it trickle over the top. There was more margin for error in that shot as opposed to a pitch, which had to land precisely in the right spot.

  I took an eight-iron and played the ball back in my stance. Using a putting grip, I tried to chip the ball just past the crest of the incline. Gravity would take it to the hole from there.

  I hit it a little too hard. It had entirely too much speed as it swept down the other side of the hill toward the cup. From the looks of it, I was going to be lucky if it stayed on the green. As it turned out, I was lucky alright. The ball hit the flagstick and stopped about three feet away.

  I rolled my eyes, grateful for our good fortune. LaCava just laughed and said, “I can’t believe that ball stayed out of the hole.” When he pulled the flagstick, he pretended to check it to see if it was bent.

  After Sutton tapped in his second putt for par (his birdie putt ran just by the low side of the hole), I stroked the three-footer squarely in the hole for a four that I was grateful to have.

  As you might expect, players on both sides of us were having their own final-round adventures as well. Behind us, another gallery outburst was our first hint that David Duval had recovered the stroke he lost at eleven with a birdie of his own at twelve. Another eruption a moment later told us that Padraig Harrington had matched it. That brought Duval back to seven under and put Harrington at six under. In the meantime, big Mike Heinen eagled the par-five fourteenth ahead of us by cutting the dogleg and was back to five under after a couple of bogies had dropped him down the leaderboard. Tiger Woods, playing with Heinen, somehow buried his second shot under the lip of the front bunker, took two shots to escape, and had to make a twelve-footer to save par. It was only the third time all week that he had failed to birdie a par five. That meant that Tiger remained a stroke back at six under and, with only four holes left, was running short on birdie opportunities.

  As we stood on the fourteenth tee, I could see from a nearby scoreboard where we all stood:

  If there’s any tournament in which par is supposed to be a good score, it’s the U.S. Open. But from what I knew of the closing holes at Pebble Beach, not to mention the caliber of the players at the top of the leaderboard, I found it hard to believe that parring in would be enough to win, even under Open conditions. Although I was trying not to think ahead, I felt pretty certain that I needed another birdie or two.

  Of course, that’s dangerous thinking in an Open, where overcooking any shot can put you in rough that’s so penal you’d swear it was grown at Alcatraz. In fact, it’s safe to say that the USGA staff selects hole locations with the deliberate intent of tempting the field into mistakes of aggression. There’s a reason that a bandito like Seve Ballesteros, who regularly stole par at other major championships by getting up and down from concession stands, bleachers, and Port-o-Lets, never once seriously threatened to win the U.S. Open. It’s the same reason that a fairways-and-greens guy like Andy North never won anything except the U.S. Open. (Okay, he won the Westchester Classic, too, but it’s the one Tour event that’s played under Open-like conditions.) The point is, you’re supposed to think about par at the Open and let others fall by the wayside with bogies.

  But you have to give credit where credit is due: Tiger Woods changed all that when he lapped the field by an embarrassing margin at the 2000 Open. Si
nce then, settling for par—even at the U.S. Open—probably ain’t gonna be good enough. No one’s gonna shoot four straight 65s or go twenty under on any course set up by the USGA, but unless Tiger becomes a Buddhist monk, the days of winning the Open at even par are probably over.

  So I was thinking that I needed to make a birdie at the fourteenth hole as we set up for our tee shot. The fourteenth is a 573-yard par five that plays much shorter if you cut across the sharp dogleg that bends the hole to the right at a near ninety-degree angle. (You better clear the dogleg, though; everything inside it is out of bounds.) As a result, it’s possible to have a second shot to the green of 230 yards or so. The best play from there is to bounce the ball on the green or leave it in the front bunker. Unless you get Tiger Woods’s bad luck, you’re usually on an upslope so that the bunker shot is not particularly difficult. It’s a hole that had given up a lot of birdies already that week.

  I knew the line I had to take. During one of our practice rounds, Stewart had pointed out a house on the side of a hill in the distance. It had become our mark. Seeing the house made me think again of my lost caddie, and I briefly felt a knot in my stomach. But thinking of Stewart also reminded me of his frequent advice to play the game like I did as a kid, before drinking dulled the joy I got from it.

  I shook off any negative thoughts, teed the ball high to make sure I cleared the closest trees, took a big swing, and let it rip. John Daly would have been proud. I caught the ball solidly on the upswing with my driver, and it took off like a rocket directly at my target, which was some stranger’s bedroom window. A murmur of concern went through the gallery, indicating that many of them thought I had pushed my drive out of bounds to the right. They didn’t know, as I did, that the ball was safely in the fairway well on the other side of the trees.

  When we arrived at my ball, a marshal there commented that the only person who had hit it farther that day was Heinen, and he had made an eagle. Joe LaCava said we were 218 to the front right bunker, 227 to the front edge of the green, and 236 to the hole. What little wind there was at this point favored us. Conditions were right to go for the green.

  I settled on a five-wood. Joe wanted me to hit the three-iron so that the ball could land in front and either run on the green or into the bunker. He didn’t like the five-wood because the ball would come in at a steeper angle and maybe plug in the bunker à la Tiger Woods.

  But that’s the reason I liked the five-wood: By coming in high rather than low, it was more likely to stay on the green. I just had to land it on the green instead of in the bunker. Being experienced, Joe was smart enough to know that I had to swing the club that felt right at the moment. After I told him why I wanted the five-wood, he said, “It’s the right club. Let’s hit it straight at the flag.”

  I caught it a little out on the toe and figured it would miss the green short and to the right. However, like a lot of shots hit that way, the ball began to turn back to the left at the end and finished in the fringe just to the right of the front bunker. Two putts from there, and we had our birdie. We were now eight under. Sutton made a fifteen-footer for birdie, too, and moved to three under.

  Once again, we had moved a shot ahead of Duval. Of course, being behind us he had yet to play fourteen. I figured he would make birdie there, too, so I wasn’t done.

  I still had to go low on at least one more hole.

  xxxiii

  THE FIFTEENTH HOLE is less than 400 yards and offers only a narrow fairway as a defense against par or birdie. The smart play there is to hit a long iron or fairway wood off the tee to assure a second shot from the short grass. I hit a three-iron, which ordinarily wouldn’t have been enough club to get me to a mid-iron or better into the green. However, one of the few advantages of the low cuts the USGA gives Open fairways is that you get lots of extra roll. I figured to gain an extra ten yards.

  I hit the three-iron down the right side of the fairway. Although it leaked a bit, it finished a club length or so inside the right edge of the short grass. Sutton bombed a three-wood down the middle, well past me. While I would have something like a six-iron to the green, he was looking at a nine-iron or better.

  As we arrived at our ball, LaCava gave me the yardages to the front of the green and to the hole and confirmed that the six-iron was the right club. I had a good lie and a good angle to the hole. I just needed to make a good swing.

  I hit it as well as any shot I had hit all day, and the ball took off straight for the hole. I was thinking, perhaps a big smugly, that “it ain’t how you drive, it’s how you arrive,” when the ball began to drift right. Whether it was the wind or not, I don’t know. Perhaps I cut across the ball without knowing it. At any rate, it bounced once in the fringe and kicked right into a greenside bunker.

  Joe LaCava’s expression of surprise matched mine. He quickly recovered his confident demeanor, though, wiped off my club, and shouldered my bag. “Ball landed soft. We’ll have a good lie.” With that, we walked ahead and then waited for Sutton to hit his approach. He took full advantage of having a shorter club into the green and landed his ball within ten feet of the hole.

  When we got to the bunker, we found that my ball was closer to the lip that we would have liked. I’d have to get the ball up quickly to clear the lip, which meant that it would come down at a steeper angle and not roll as much. I immediately worried that I’d have to land it close to the hole, and there’d be less margin for error.

  While I was tempted to become a little distressed at all this, LaCava remained upbeat. Handing me the sand wedge, he said confidently, “The green runs away from us a little, so just pop it over the lip and land it past the fringe. It’ll get to the hole. Easy shot.”

  There’s an old saying that you have to be lucky to win a golf tournament. My luck held out on this shot, because the ball did what Joe said it would and rolled just past the hole. I had a tap-in for par. We wouldn’t make a birdie here, but we had escaped without losing a stroke to par.

  Sutton made his putt for a second straight birdie and was now four under.

  As we walked off the green, the scoreboard there showed that Duval had carded a four at the par-five fourteenth hole, just as I expected he would. We were tied again, at eight under par. We had no further word on Tiger Woods or Padraig Harrington, but I figured they would be heard from soon enough.

  The sixteenth hole is a par four that is reported to be only 403 yards long, but it doesn’t need length to protect itself. Because the fairway bends to the right for a second shot over a ravine of sorts to a small green, if you hit driver off the tee your ball will run through the turn in the fairway into the deep rough. Most players hit a long iron to a shelf just short of the dogleg that offers them a flat lie for their approach. From there, the green at the sixteenth presents a small target that is surrounded by trees and tilts pretty severely to the left. In order to miss the trees and leave yourself with a decent uphill putt, you have to land your ball on the putting surface in an area that’s roughly the size of a bath towel.

  Sutton had the honors by virtue of his second straight birdie. He hit a three-iron straight down the middle and would have the ideal second shot. It was obvious that he had found a groove in his swing and was intent on making a move. His only problem was that he didn’t have many holes left.

  I chose a three-iron as well. I would have preferred to hit my five-wood, because it was less likely to run once it landed, but there was too great a chance that it would fly too far and end up down in the depression or in the rough. I hit the three-iron well enough, and we were safely where we needed to be.

  From tee to green, the sixteenth hole doesn’t accommodate a lot of spectators. But with so few groups remaining on the course, and with this being the final round, the entire gallery was now squeezing itself into the last three holes, which didn’t cover a lot of real estate. As a result, there were thousands of people lining the fairway as we walked from the sixteenth tee.

  Although I wasn’t a total unknown in the golf worl
d, winning at Phoenix hadn’t made me a household name, either. I realized that the gallery was still regarding me more out of curiosity than anything else. Besides, the spectators here probably figured they couldn’t get a good view of Woods or Duval because of the huge crowds already following them. So they decided to get a look at this no-name who was taking them on.

  You have to understand, too, that the gallery at the U.S. Open is a little different from the galleries at the Masters, British Open, or PGA. There’s a reason for that, although most people don’t think about it. But you feel it if you’re a player inside the ropes.

  You see, the Masters belongs to the Augusta National Golf Club, which may be the most exclusive golf club in the world. The PGA Championship is the property of the Professional Golfers’ Association, which is open only to certified golf professionals. And the British Open, which is the oldest championship in golf, is conducted by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, Scotland, also a very private club. But the U.S. Open is America’s national championship, and since its inception in 1895 it has been run by the U.S. Golf Association. The USGA consists mainly of volunteers (called “committee members”), who are assisted by a paid staff. These are people who are driven by their love of the game, not their ability as players. (In fact, some USGA folks I know are outstanding players, but a lot them can’t play a lick and don’t seem to mind.) None of them is a professional golfer. The USGA’s guardianship of the game includes responsibility for its rules, the equipment with which it is played, the amateur status of the weekend golfer, the handicap system that allows amateurs to compete against one another regardless of ability, and the conduct of its national championships. Thus, in the eyes of the USGA, the worst amateur hacker stands on equal footing with the best professionals in the world.