Caddy for Life (6 page)
Needless to say, when Bruce came home on a visit from school and announced this plan, it was not greeted enthusiastically. Jay and Natalie didn’t blow up and scream and yell and tell him the plan was unacceptable. “For one thing,” Jay said, “if we had, we would have lost him. I wasn’t happy, but it was a fight we weren’t going to win. I told him, though, that I wasn’t going to make it easy for him, that I didn’t want him calling me from the road for money. If he wanted to do this, okay, but he was going to be on his own.”
“We thought if he did it for a year, he would get it out of his system,” Natalie said. “Once it was a job and he had to work at it week after week, it wouldn’t seem quite so glamorous. He would come home and go to college after a year and that would be that.”
To some degree that was also the way Bruce was thinking. Even though he had battled his parents—particularly his father—throughout his boyhood, he was still very much their son. Jay Edwards, with his Philadelphia roots, had always been a fan of all Philadelphia teams—“Hell, I still root for the Athletics because they’re originally from Philly,” he said—and was especially passionate about the Phillies and Eagles. To this day, Bruce is passionate about the Phillies and Eagles, far more so than any of his siblings. Brian grew up rooting for the New York Mets and the Green Bay Packers (“He’s a front-runner,” Bruce likes to point out. “They were both at the top when we were kids.”), but Bruce adopted his father’s teams and took on his passion for them.
And being Jay and Natalie’s son, there was part of him that figured college
was
what you did after high school. He had been the only member of the thirty-nine-man Marianapolis class of ’73 who had not applied to college and was not going to college. When he presented his plan to his parents he told them it was just for a year. He wanted to travel, see places he had never seen, have some fun as an eighteen-year-old away from home for the first time (without his boarding school jacket and tie), and learn more about the golf tour, a place that fascinated him. Jay and Natalie knew they had no choice. They would suck it up for a year and wait for him to come home, go to college, and find a real job.
One person who did try to talk Bruce out of pursuing caddying was the person most convinced he would be an excellent caddy: Dick Lotz. “It had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the lifestyle,” he said. “There just wasn’t very much money to be made out there at the time unless you got very lucky. Most guys were like me, they couldn’t afford to pay that much. I knew Jay and Natalie wanted him to go to college, and I thought it was the right thing to do too. But he was absolutely determined and asked me if I would help him. When I realized he was going out there one way or the other, I told him I would.”
The day after he graduated from high school, Bruce bought a plane ticket and headed for Charlotte, North Carolina. Lotz had a full-time caddy by then, but he had put Bruce in touch with David Graham, a twenty-seven-year-old Australian who had already won once on tour and was looking for someone to work for him at the Kemper Open in Charlotte. On Lotz’s say-so, Graham hired Bruce for the week. His pay would be the standard pay for a tour caddy at the time: $15 a day plus 3 percent of any money Graham earned for the week.
“It was a good news, bad news week,” Bruce remembered. “I really liked the work and I really liked David. That was the good news. The bad news was he made a late bogey on Friday and missed the cut by one.”
So much for the 3 percent or working on the weekend. Graham wrote Bruce a check for $100—$70 more than he owed him—handed it to him, and said, “Bruce, you’re too nice a kid to be living this life. You should go home and go to college.”
Bruce took the extra money but not the advice. Lotz had already lined up another bag for him the following week in Philadelphia with Bob Shaw, another Australian, although not a player with Graham’s skills or pedigree. That didn’t matter to Bruce. He was traveling and working and he had $100 in his pocket, more than enough to pay for a ticket to Philadelphia. When he arrived at Whitemarsh Valley Country Club and checked the Thursday-Friday pairings, his eyes went wide. Shaw was paired with none other than Jack Nicklaus. That was when he sent his first postcards home—to Crandall and Leahey.
“Paired with Nicklaus this week,” he wrote. “Plenty of work out here. When are you coming?”
Leahey, who had just finished his sophomore year of college, was already making his plans to get out there. Crandall was impressed, maybe a tad jealous, but not quite ready to make the commitment. When Bruce called home that week to tell his parents he was okay and paired with Nicklaus, even Jay had to admit that was pretty cool.
Bruce still remembers the two days with Nicklaus. He remembers how deliberate he was and how competitive he was and how far he hit the ball. Nicklaus was at his zenith at the time. He had won the Masters and the U.S. Open the previous year en route to winning seven tournaments. That year, he had already won three times and would win the PGA Championship before summer’s end. Being that close to the world’s greatest golfer was an awe-inspiring experience. The only downer was that Shaw missed the cut. Like Graham, Shaw wrote Bruce a check for $100. Unlike Graham, he didn’t tell Bruce to go home and go to college. Instead he told him to meet him in Milwaukee in three weeks, after the U.S. Open and the Western Open, both tournaments where tour caddies were not allowed.
Bruce could have gone home for a few days, seen his family, and taken things easy before heading to Milwaukee. But he didn’t want his parents to think he was homesick, and he was afraid his father would reopen the whole college issue. So he went straight to Milwaukee and encountered his first welcome-to-the-road experience when he got off the bus. There was an older man standing in the waiting area when Bruce and his friend Tom Lovett arrived early on a Sunday morning.
“Look at you,” the man said to Bruce. “You’re so pretty you should be in Hollywood.”
“I thought, ‘Oh boy, here we go,’” Bruce said, years later.
The man was persistent. Where did they need to go? he asked. When Bruce told him the name of the motel where they were staying, he told them it was a good twenty miles away, a long, expensive cab ride or a tough hitchhike. He would give them a ride. Bruce and Lovett figured at worst it was two against one. They accepted the offer. When they got to the car, they found that their new friend had a friend of his own. Now it was two-on-two. Still, they were young, athletic, and, if necessary, fast.
“We get to the motel and we start to get out and the guy says, ‘Why don’t you come and go sailing with us on Lake Michigan?’” Bruce said. “I knew it was time to cut this cord, so I just said, ‘Listen, thanks a lot for the ride, but this is it, we’re leaving.’ He never actually offered us money or anything, but it was pretty clear that’s where it was going, so we got out of there. It was kinda scary, but it never got really bad. We probably should have just hitched. It wasn’t as if we had anything to do that day.”
Of course if Jay and Natalie had heard the story, they probably would have flown to Milwaukee to bring Bruce home that day. He did not include it in his report the next time he called home.
Bruce then made the second mistake of his caddying career. When he had parted company with Shaw in Philadelphia, Shaw had said something about calling him prior to Milwaukee. Bruce had assumed Shaw meant he should call if there was any problem, otherwise he would see him there. Shaw had meant the opposite: Call to confirm that you can work for me. “In those days he probably figured there was a chance a kid like me would just go home and not show up again,” Bruce said. “But I got it confused and didn’t call.”
As a result, not having heard from Bruce, Shaw showed up on Tuesday with another caddy. Bruce was upset. Shaw, who felt bad, told him of another player, Ron Cerrudo, who was looking for a caddy. “That’s what was so different in those days,” Bruce said. “There were so few full-time caddies that you could almost always show up at a place and get a bag. Now, because there’s so much more money to be made and there are so many more caddies, it’s much, much harder.”
This was 1973—$15 a day and 3 percent of purses that averaged about $150,000 (total) per week, as opposed to 2003, when most full-time caddies work on an annual salary and get 5 percent when their player makes a cut, 7 percent when he top-tens, and 10 percent for a win. That’s on a tour where the average weekly purse is now $4 million. Back then losing a bag was both common and hardly upsetting. Bruce found Cerrudo and worked for him that week. They missed the cut, making Bruce three-for-three. Cerrudo was as generous as Bruce’s first two employers, paying him $100 and telling him he could work for him the following week when the tour went to Robinson, Illinois, for the Robinson Shriners’ Classic.
He still hadn’t caddied on a weekend, but Bruce was proud of the fact that all three players he had worked for had paid him far more than they had to and that two of them had asked him to work again. He was having fun and Leahey had now joined him, having worked in Milwaukee for a local pro who had missed the cut. The two of them headed for Robinson, Bruce with a bag for the week, Bill without one.
Three weeks and $300 into his caddying career, Bruce figured he was doing okay.
“We’ll Try It for a Week”
WHEN ONE LOOKS AT THE PGA
Tour and what it has evolved into today, it is sometimes hard to imagine what it was like only thirty years ago. Purses were one-thirtieth of what they are now week in and week out. Most players traveled from event to event by car, flying only when the drive would take more than a day and buying the cheapest airline ticket available whenever that occurred. Caddies also drove, often driving a player’s car when he chose to fly. If the trip took more than a day, sleeping was usually done by taking turns in the car or pulling over to a rest stop and finding a comfortable patch of grass to curl up on.
The tour back then played a lot of small and midsized towns, more often than not avoiding the big cities because there was too much competition from the mainstream sports there. Towns like Greensboro, North Carolina; Jacksonville and Tallahassee, Florida; Columbus, Georgia; and Hartford were as likely to host tour events as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, more likely to host them than places like Atlanta, Washington, and San Francisco, to name three major cities that didn’t have tour stops. Robinson, in southern Illinois, was one of the smaller towns on the circuit, the home of the annual Robinson Shriners’ Classic, which tells you who put the tournament on. In those days there were almost no corporate title sponsors and only a handful of tournaments were seen on live TV.
Robinson followed Milwaukee on the calendar in 1973, the tour taking a midsummer swing through the Midwest, with St. Louis on the schedule after Robinson. Bruce Edwards and Bill Leahey, having both missed the cut in Milwaukee, headed down the road to Robinson and began looking for a place to stay. In most towns on tour, caddies would usually split a room four ways, breaking down the beds in a double room so that two guys could split a mattress and a box spring between them.
“We never went into a place if the room cost more than twelve dollars a night,” Bruce remembered. “We’d get into a room and the first thing we’d say was, ‘Break ’em down,’ and we’d take the beds apart. Sometimes when we were in a big city where the room might cost more, we’d have six guys in a room.”
Some of the smaller towns on the circuit offered the caddies housing with local families. It was common in those days for players to stay with families, because few of them were wealthy enough to afford a luxurious hotel room for an entire week. It wasn’t that difficult to find families willing to put up a golf pro, but in most places people didn’t exactly line up to house caddies.
“Caddying was a relatively new profession at the time,” Bruce said. “Most people thought of caddies as drunks or people who were down and out or people you couldn’t trust or long-haired kids like me who you probably didn’t want hanging around your house for a week.”
There hadn’t really been caddies on the PGA Tour before the 1960s. The first group of professional caddies to work on tour came from Augusta, caddies who got to know the pros during the Masters and then made their way to tour stops to find work once Augusta National Golf Club closed for the summer each May. Some players brought friends on tour with them on occasion, but for the most part, players used caddies from the clubs—like Bruce and his friends at Wethersfield. When a small cadre of full-time caddies began to work the tour—notably Angelo Argea, who worked for Jack Nicklaus, and Creamy Carolan, who worked for Arnold Palmer—many clubs wouldn’t allow them to work at their events.
“One year at Wethersfield Nicklaus was coming to play and wanted to bring Angelo,” Bill Leahey remembered. “We didn’t want to set the precedent of letting the tour caddies work, so we ‘protested’ against the tour caddies. Nicklaus finally agreed to use one of our guys. Little did we know we’d be on the other end of that argument a few years later.”
By the time Bruce and Leahey headed for the tour, there were about forty full-time caddies, which meant there was a bag for everyone every week. Most of the full-time caddies at the time were black, some of them from Augusta, others friends of the Augusta caddies who had gotten involved because they heard it was a decent way to make money. The base pay wasn’t much—$15 a day and 3 percent of prize money—but the potential to make serious money was there if you could hook on with the right guy. Even though a win only paid 5 percent (it is 10 percent today), first prize most weeks was $30,000, and 5 percent of that sounded like a fortune. Bruce and Leahey arrived as part of the first wave of younger, white caddies who came out on tour, although they came with different agendas. Leahey was there because he was looking for something to do during the summertime and because his buddy Bruce said it would be fun. Bruce was mentally committed to spending a year on tour. At least.
“I knew two things when I first went out,” he said. “I didn’t want to go to college and I did want to travel. This was a way to travel, try to make some money, and get that rush I had felt caddying in tournaments when I was still a kid. I told people it was for a year, and in my mind that’s what it was. But it wasn’t as if I had done any planning beyond that.”
