I watch a fair amount of sports. I’m a lifetime baseball junky (baptized a Catholic, but born a Red Sox fan); follow basketball alongside my lifetime Celtics junky husband; and in the last couple of seasons have become a born-again hockey fan, thanks to those Big Bad Boston Bruins. Football I’m bi-polar on – some years, I watch a ton of games, other years I remember that I have a lot of problems with the head-banging, macho, militaristic violence of it and don’t watch any. (For whatever reason, college football doesn’t bother me as much as the pros.)
When the Olympics come around, I’ll find myself colossally absorbed in sports I’ve never even heard of. I’ll watch tennis occasionally; ditto soccer.
So, yeah, I’m a sports fan.
But if there’s one sport you couldn’t pay me to watch, it would be golf. There are few television disappointments in life as keen as turning on the Sunday evening news, only to find that the Waste Management Open has run over, and two boring looking guys in polo shirts and visors are birdying the tie-breaker holes. All narrated by some hush-hush announcer who couldn’t be more solemn if he were in St. Peter’s giving us the play-by-play on when the tiara was going to be plunked on the new pope’s head.
Still, it would be hard to escape all awareness of golf – thanks in part, of course, to the exceptionally hi-jinx-ish hi-jinx of Tiger Woods, which so riveted the celebrity consuming public a couple of years back.
The latest news from the Tiger camp came a few weeks ago, when he fired Stevie Williams, his long-time caddie. Now, I may not be that interested in golf, but there are plenty of those who are. An ESPN article on the Tiger-Stevie Caddiegate had evoked nearly 3,000 comments.
A few weeks later, the story is still in the sporting news because the fellow Williams now carries a bag for someone who just won a big championship – maybe not as big as the Waste Management Open, but right up there – and, in post-match interviews, drew more attention and press than the fellow he caddied for.
Which got me thinking about what a curious profession caddying is.
When I was a kid, the occasional job for girls was babysitting, for boys it was caddying.
Babysitting had the benefit of being year-round, plus it usually came with free snacks. And when you showed up for a job, you knew you had it, as opposed to caddying, where you could show up at the country club, only to find that everyone golfing that day wanted to use a cart or carry their own bag. With babysitting, you also knew what you were going to get paid: $.50 an hour. (No premium scale for number of kids, by the way. One of my regular gigs was for a family with seven boys, yielding a bit over seven cents per kid per hour. Another one of my customers had five kids, but one was a head-banger, so I had to listen to him thumping his head against the backboard all night.) Caddying had guidelines for how much you got paid, plus you got tips, but there seemed to be some sort of golfer discretion. I recall my brother Tom coming home one day from the Tatnuck Country Club all indignant because he’d worked 18 holes doubles (i.e., carrying two bags) and the guys only paid him for one, and stiffed him on the tip. Plus, with caddying, you had to work through the intermediary of the caddy-master, who had the power to assign you to the good, lucrative jobs or not.
Altogether, babysitting seemed a better bargain.
But caddying, as far as I gathered from my brothers, had its charms, chief among which was the opportunity to loll around under trees playing cards and swearing when there were no golfers around.
Caddying is indirectly associated with My First Car Accident.
The first time I got to use the family car was to drop my brother Tom off – at 6 a.m. – at the Tatnuck Country Club. When I dropped Tom off there was one – count ‘em – one car in the parking lot: a canary-yellow Pontiac Grand Prix (or something along that line; the canary yellow I’m absolutely sure of.) As I wheeled Black Beauty, our family’s trusty ten-ton, low-riding Ford Galaxy 500 around the parking lot, I said to myself, “The way you’re heading, you’re going to hit that yellow car.”
There followed an internal monolog in which I argued with myself that this couldn’t possibly be possible. How in the world could I possibly hit the only other car in a large, empty parking lot?
Sure enough…
The canary yellow Grand Prix was owned by non-other than Ron G., the assistant pro and caddy-master.
All I did was scuff up a bit of the paint – I may have been a lousy driver, but I knew enough to drive slowly when it appeared I was going to hit something - but, as Ron G. told me when he said that he would have to file a claim, “I wouldn’t mind so much, but this is the only canary yellow Grand Prix in Worcester County.”
I have absolutely no recall of going home and confessing to my parents, but I must have. And our insurance must have covered what was probably a $50 claim.
I remember Tom being worried about whether the accident would impact his getting decent work from Ron G., but I don’t believe it did.
Tom did not go on to become a professional golf caddie, but some folks do.
And they even have an association or two of their own.
Not to mention an anthem (as sung by Michael Bolton; bet there’s a Kenny G instrumental of it out there, too).
Professional caddies get paid a small weekly amount, plus a percentage of their golfer’s earnings. Most don’t earn huge bucks, but there are a number who earn in the mid-six figures. Stevie Williams, Tiger’s former bag man, rakes in over $1 million a year.
What a curious job.
Obviously, you need to be physically fit enough carry a bag - I don’t watch pro golf, but I do not believe these guys drive around in carts, or even use push-carts, which were the bane of caddies in my brother Tom’s era. You also have to know enough about golf to make an informed recommendation on whether its better to use a Mashie Niblick or a Baffling Spoon for your fourth-hole approach shot at Augusta National. And you have to not mind a lot of travel and hotel meals.
Then you have to be part coach, part shrink, part boon companion, part bodyguard.
All the while carrying someone’s bag in what is, essentially, a servant role.
I mean, why aren’t these guys allowed to use push carts, which would be a bit less servile, no?
Shouldering the bag and physically lugging it around seem to signify that, while you may be part coach, part shrink, part boon companion, and part bodyguard, at the end of the day, you’re all servant. There’s just no getting around this being a tale of two classes. Tiger Woods gets to be Bertie Wooster; Stevie Williams is Jeeves.
But, hey, if you can make over a million bucks a year as Jeeves, what ho?
Given the servile aspects of the job, it must have been fairly liberating for Stevie Williams to just let ‘er rip when interviewed after the recent win he caddied for. Sure, it may have been bad form to talk about himself, rather than about his boss, who’d just won a big tournament.
But haven’t we all had that feeling at one point or another in our professional lives? Just wanting to be noticed and appreciated for what we’ve brought to the table. Sick and tired of being the one preparing the PowerPoints and plans so that Mr. or Ms. Big can deliver them to Mr. or Ms. Even-Bigger and, as likely as not, cadging the credit for your good ideas (and deflecting blame back onto you for the bad ones). Hoping against hope that someone would recognize you as an individual, and not just a fully fungible extension (and an invisible one, at that) of your boss.
Anyway, I hadn’t thought that much about professional golf caddies. And I probably never will again. But as odd jobs go, this is a fairly interesting one on a lot of different levels.
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