Caddy for Life (7 page)

Robinson was one of those rare tour stops that offered the caddies free housing with a family. When Bruce and Bill arrived in town, they were directed to the home of Kenneth and Donna Freed. They were not the only caddies sent to the Freed house. In fact a total of nineteen caddies spent the week at the Freeds’, most of them sharing space in the basement, which was just fine with them, because the cots they slept on were, for the most part, more comfortable than the beds they broke down in motels and the price was right. The local paper ran a story that week on the Freeds and included photos of the nineteen caddies. It was Bruce’s first brush with publicity.

One of the caddies bunking at the Freeds’ that week was a college kid from Philadelphia named Neil Oxman. Like Leahey, Oxman was on summer break, having just finished his junior year at Villanova. Like the Wethersfield guys, he had caddied as a kid and had met some good amateur players who had invited him to work for them at top-drawer amateur events around the state. He had enjoyed the experience and the previous year had spent the summer on the circuit after a pro named Jimmy Hardy had offered him the chance to work for him at the Cleveland Open. Hardy had played a local event in Philadelphia, Oxman worked for him, and the two hit it off.

Much like Bruce, Oxman found the air inside the ropes intoxicating. “I tell friends of mine today that if you are a sports fan and you ever caddy at a PGA Tour event it will change your life forever,” Oxman said. “There is absolutely no other way to be that close to a sport without actually playing it. You can’t go on the field at a baseball game. You can’t chat with Mike Schmidt”—Oxman is a Philly guy, so when he thinks baseball he first thinks of Schmidt—“just before he goes up to hit and ask him what kind of pitch he’s looking for. When you caddy you are on the field. You are part of the rules of the game, in fact. Which means you can screw up quite easily. But it is an amazing feeling to be there.”

Oxman is now fifty, a wildly successful Democratic political consultant in Philadelphia with a staff of twenty-five. He still finds caddying intoxicating and sneaks out onto the Senior Tour three or four times a year to caddy for old friends. In 1973 he had just been elected president of the senior class at Villanova and was planning on going to law school and then to follow his passion for politics. He had first worked in politics at the age of fourteen, when he stuffed envelopes at Bobby Kennedy’s campaign headquarters in Philadelphia. He had grown up in the southwest portion of the city, and politics had been his first passion. His parents were both immigrants, his father from Russia, his mother from Poland, and the family—Oxman has a younger brother—often sat around the dinner table intensely discussing the political issues of the day. “I remember it was a great thrill, when I was first old enough to drive, to take the family car on Saturday night, drive down to Thirtieth Street Station, and pick up the bulldog [early] edition of the Sunday
New York Times
and read it cover to cover before I went to bed,” he said.

When Oxman was seventeen his father died of cancer, leaving a hole in his heart and in his life. He filled the life part of the hole by being a campus activist when he got to college, by helping his mother take care of his brother, and by spending his free time caddying. He was an old tour hand, working for a pro named Mike Reasor, when he and Leahey first met in Milwaukee. He was outgoing and friendly and quickly hit it off with Bruce and Leahey, especially that week in Robinson, when they spent a lot of time together at the Freeds’ house. “It isn’t like there are a lot of places to go out and party in Robinson, Illinois,” Oxman remembered.

It was Leahey who caught the first real break of the summer. Standing outside the clubhouse on Monday, he saw Lou Graham approaching, bag on his shoulder. Leahey recognized Graham because at the time, Graham was part of the Select 60. The current tour rules, which make the top 125 players and tournament winners from the previous two years fully exempt—meaning they can enter any tournament they want—didn’t go into effect until 1982. Prior to that only the top 60 players on the money list (and tournament winners) had exempt status. Everyone else had to play in Monday qualifiers to get into that week’s field. Players outside the top 60 were known as “rabbits,” because they were constantly hopping from place to place trying to get into tournaments. If a rabbit made the cut in a given week, he was automatically in the field the following week.

The bag of a top-60 player such as Graham was a major get for a caddy. Leahey knew that and was fairly certain Graham had a caddy. But seeing Graham carrying his bag, he figured he had nothing to lose by asking. As luck would have it, Graham’s caddy had just quit to take a job in California as an assistant pro and Graham
was
looking for a caddy. Leahey asked, Graham said fine, and Leahey suddenly found himself hooked up with a top player. “Second week out and I luck into that,” he said. “I was thrilled.”

Bruce already had a bag for the week—Ron Cerrudo. Cerrudo wasn’t a top-60 player and he had missed the cut the previous week, but he had been given a sponsor’s exemption, one of several spots typically allocated to a tournament director to use as he pleased. Cerrudo was a young player with potential, and the Shriners were pleased to have him in their field.

Nowadays caddying is quite sophisticated. When a caddy arrives at a tournament site today, the first thing he does is buy an orange yardage book that is put together by a man named Gorgeous George Lucas. Lucas travels the country in advance of the tour, checking yardages from almost every conceivable spot on a golf course, looking for hidden hazards while using lasers to get his distances exactly right. He also includes funny comments and asides. When he points out a hazard that is way off line or gives the yardage from a far-flung spot on the golf course, he will often include the notation ICYFU: In Case You Fuck Up. The book costs $15 and tells the caddy almost everything he could possibly need to know about the golf course. Most caddies will double-check distances during practice rounds and will make note of all the pin placements in their yardage books, then pull the book out the following year so they’ll have an idea where they think the pins might go.

It wasn’t like that in 1973. There were no yardage books, and most of the time the players paced off their own yardages. (Many still do today, at least double-checking at key moments.) Caddies would arrive at the golf course early each morning to walk the course and learn where the pins were and would mark their location on the greens on their scorecards so they could tell the players where the holes were as the round proceeded. Bruce tried to leave nothing to chance, walking the course by himself—or with Leahey or another caddy—early in the week to check yardage markers (usually on sprinkler heads) to make sure they were accurate and to look for hidden hazards. He was one of the first caddies to do what is now standard procedure for caddies—walking the golf course without player or bag early in the week.

“The only problem was, I had to make all my notes on the scorecard so everything was in one place when we played,” he said. “Sometimes it was hard to read my own writing because I had so much stuff written down.”

The other problem was the rather arcane rule which said that caddies could not actually walk on the greens. The rule existed in part to keep greens pristine for play, but also because walking on the greens was, in a sense, testing them—for firmness, for break around the flagstick—almost as if the caddy were out practicing on behalf of his player. “We would have one guy walk on the green to check around the pin for ridges or slopes you couldn’t see,” Bruce said. “Everyone else would fan out and keep an eye out for a rules official. If you saw a cart coming, you would scream, ‘Rules!’ and the guy would run off the green. We weren’t trying to cheat, we just wanted to know what was around the hole, and you couldn’t see it from the fringe.”

Once, out walking by himself, Bruce got caught. The rules official put him in a cart, drove him from the seventh green back to the first tee, lectured him there on not walking on greens, and then made him walk back to where he had initially been found. “That was my punishment for being a bad boy,” Bruce said.

His not always legible scorecard scribbling became a problem for the first time on Friday at the Robinson. Cerrudo was lingering around the cut line when he got to the 17th hole. This was before electronic scoreboards, so most players made educated guesses at what the cut would be. “You always knew it to within a stroke, two at most,” Bruce said. “We were right on it.”

As Bruce remembers it, Cerrudo hit his tee shot in the fairway and had 140 yards to the front of the green, which was elevated just enough to make it impossible to actually see exactly where the pin was located. Looking at the scribblings on his scorecard, Bruce thought he had written down that the pin was in the back of the green, 22 paces (or yards) from the front. So he told Cerrudo the total yardage was 162 yards. Cerrudo nodded, took out a six-iron, and “he hit it exactly 162 yards,” Bruce said. “Perfect shot.”

Perfect shot if the pin had been 22 paces from the front. As it turned out, the pin was 12 paces from the front—a difference of 30 feet. Instead of a short birdie putt, Cerrudo found himself putting from 35 feet—downhill. “I was sick to my stomach when I saw it,” Bruce said. “There was nothing I could say to him except that I had misread my notes.” It didn’t help that Cerrudo three-putted for bogey. It helped even less when he ended up missing the cut by one shot.

“The amazing thing is he didn’t fire me,” Bruce said. “It was certainly a firing offense. But he didn’t. He just said, ‘I’ll see you Monday in St. Louis.’”

Having missed the cut in Robinson and without an exemption the next week, Cerrudo would have to play in the Monday qualifier. Bruce told him he would be there. He and Leahey made it to St. Louis late Sunday night and Bruce went to the golf course where the qualifier was being held first thing the next morning, since he didn’t know what time Cerrudo would be teeing off. He went straight to the locker room to check the tee times and couldn’t find Cerrudo’s name. He double-checked the list, then went into the pro shop to see if there had been a mistake. No mistake, he was told, Cerrudo had called over the weekend and withdrawn. It was only later, when he saw Cerrudo again, that he found out that Cerrudo had called to ask how many golfers would make it from the qualifier into the St. Louis field. When he was told there were only six spots available, he decided to take the week off. But he didn’t have any kind of contact number for Bruce—imagine
that
happening today—so there was no way to let him know he was withdrawing.

Disappointed, Bruce hunted around and found a bag that day with a local pro who failed to make it into the field. He went to bed that night a bit unnerved. For the first time in his five-week career as a caddy, he was starting a week without a bag. He decided to head for the tournament site, the Norwood Hills Country Club, next morning and hope he could find a job. “I wasn’t that nervous about it,” he said. “I figured I would find someone. But even though I hadn’t made a cut yet, the guys I had worked with had all been legitimate players, guys who were all on tour. I really didn’t want to spend the week working for someone who had no chance to make the cut. But I figured I would just show up and see what happened.”

July in St. Louis is always hot—except when it is blazing hot. Everyone who was there that week says the temperature never once dipped into double digits during the daytime. “It was about a million degrees,” Bruce always says when retelling the story.

“More like nine million,” Oxman insists.

Tuesday morning, July 17, 1973, was as blazing as one might imagine, the temperature hovering between one million and nine million degrees. Oxman and Leahey arrived at Norwood Hills Country Club knowing they had work for the week. Leahey had survived his trial the week before with Graham and was pretty confident he had the bag for the rest of the summer. Oxman’s guy, Mike Reasor, had missed the cut in Robinson and, like Cerrudo, had been consigned to the Monday qualifier. He failed to qualify, leaving Oxman to search for a bag for the week. By nightfall he had run into Labron Harris, whom he had met the previous summer, and asked him if he had a caddy for the week. Harris said he didn’t, so Oxman got the job.

There’s a big oak tree outside the clubhouse at Norwood Hills, and that was the lingering place for caddies during the week. In those days caddies were never allowed in the clubhouse—some pro shops would put up signs during tournament weeks which said
PUBLIC WELCOME, NO CADDIES ALLOWED
—so everyone looked for shade when they weren’t actually working.

Late that morning Bruce thought he had caught a break. He spotted Dale Douglass, bag on his shoulder, walking into the clubhouse. Bruce knew Douglass because of his friendship with Dick Lotz. He ran over to Douglass and asked him if he could work for him that week. Douglass’s face fell. “I just told a guy a few minutes ago he could work for me,” he said. “I’d love to have you do it. If you can find him and convince him to get someone else, I’ll hire you in a second.”

Bruce soon learned that the guy Douglass had hired was Mike Boyce, another young caddy whom Bruce had become friends with. “There was no way I was going to ask him to give up the bag,” he said. “He had talked to Dale first, he got the job. That was it.”

Douglass would have seemed like the perfect guy for Bruce. It certainly helped that he knew him, but beyond that Douglass was established as a top-60 player and as one of the solid players on tour. He was thirty-seven, had won three times on tour, and had been a member of the Ryder Cup team in 1969. Plus he had a reputation as one of the truly nice people in golf.

But Bruce had missed out by about fifteen minutes. He returned to the tree, sitting with Oxman and Leahey, who were waiting for their players to arrive for their practice rounds. Bruce was getting just a little bit nervous. He had missed his best chance, he thought, for a good bag for the week with Douglass. Morning became early afternoon, and Bruce was beginning to think he might not work at all that week.