Confessions Of A Bad Caddy

It was 8:30 Thursday morning and I was standing on the number one tee-box at Oak Hill Country Club in San Antonio, Texas for the start of the AT&T Championship Pro-Am. The temperature was forty-seven degrees and the wind was blowing twenty-five miles per hour out of the north, gusting to thirty, when D.A. Weibring, a multiple tournament winner on both the PGA and Champions Tours, turned to me and said, “What do you like here, Sam?” It was at that very moment that I knew I was out of my element.

Luckily for D.A., the Champions Tour, Oak Hill Country Club and golf in general, Troy Martin, D.A.’s regular caddy and a terrific golfer in his own right, stood only a few feet behind me whispering, “I like a hybrid three” which I promptly repeated to D.A. as I offered him the three.

“I agree” D.A. said, taking the club from my hand and winking.

Such was the beginning of my career as a caddy. Frankly, I had worried about it all night long; I worried about walking in someone’s line, standing in the wrong place, not knowing the yardage, or handing D.A. the wrong club. The last thing I wanted to do was embarrass D.A. But all my worrying turned out to be for nothing. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t because being a caddy is easy; it was because Troy Martin, D.A.’s real caddy, was never far behind me. He seemed to know the yardage from every tree, every bunker (back and front), and every blade of grass. Just as importantly, he knew D.A.’s swing, his style and his temperament almost as well as D.A. did himself. He knew when to talk and when not to. He had a joke when it was called for and soothing words when necessary. I may have been D.A.’s honorary caddy that day, but thankfully Troy was my caddy and he was not about to let me screw things up.

With the hybrid three that I had recommended, D.A. drove the ball to the top of the hill in perfect position, and then he went to work. On the forward tee D.A. introduced himself to his four amateur partners for the day, Steve Herrera, Barbosa Zaragosa, Mike Newby and Terry McGowan, perhaps not the best golf team in the world, but certainly some of the nicest guys you’ll every meet. As each man teed off in various directions, D.A. was quick with words of encouragement. As the day went on D.A. spent more and more time with each player offering tip and high-fives.

Walking down the first fairway I said to D.A., “Not everybody likes playing in Pro-Ams, but you seem to really enjoy it?”

“I do enjoy it,” he answered. “And I think most of the guys on the Champions Tour do as well. Pro-Ams are the life-blood of our Tour. Maybe it’s because we are getting older and we appreciate everything a little more, but I really do appreciate the fans and the opportunity to continue to play golf.”

As we approached his ball in the middle of the first fairway, D.A. stepped away from me and pulled his glove on, which was my signal to pause the interview. “What have you got, Sam?”

Over my shoulder a familiar voice whispered, “135 to the front, 144 to the pin.” Troy handed me two wedges and a nine iron to offer D.A. and said, “I like a smooth nine,” which I repeated with confidence.

“Sounds good,” D.A. answered, then pulled the nine-iron from my hand and proceeded to hit the ball four feet below the pin. A few minutes later he sunk the putt to birdie the first hole then turned to me and said, “Good job” as if I had actually contributed to his success. Then with his smile still flashing he turned to his Pro-Am partners and shouted, “What do you say we just win this thing, okay?”

As the round continued my admiration for D.A.’s golf skills grew with each swing, but I was even more impressed with his respect for the game; that’s when I realized that perhaps those two things were inseparable. From the middle of the fairways, where D.A.’s ball seemed to always land, we chatted about Oak Hill, a golf course designed by A.W. Tillinghast in 1922 and how this 6,765-yard course was protected by the Bermuda grass rough that surrounded each tiny green. “These Spanish Oaks have been here for more than a hundred years,” he said looking around. “And this golf course has been here more than eighty years and luckily nobody has turned it into a high-rise building or a parking lot.” Then he took a long sip of water and said, “Here’s hoping it lasts another hundred years.”

By the seventeenth hole my feet and back were starting to ache a bit and D.A. was still smiling and shouting out encouragement to his teammates. From the middle of the fairway Troy told me that it was 121 to the carry the bunker that protected the front of the green and 133 to the pin. Interestingly, it looked further to me, which made me ask D.A., “What do you do when your eyes tell you one distance and your caddy tells you something different?”

“The first thing I do is ask for the yardage again just in case I heard him wrong or he read it wrong, then I trust what he says,” he answered. “Everything we do is about trust. Without trust everything is tentative.”

The eighteenth hole at Oak Hill is an unusual 203-yard par 3 through an opening in the Spanish Oaks into the wind. Troy handed me a hybrid three to hand to D.A. Frankly, a three seemed like a lot of club to me and I suspect D.A. saw that on my face when he said, “I guess you noticed how much wind there was above the trees, uh?” As I glanced up to the top of the trees for the first time D.A. launched a perfect hybrid three landing the ball no more than ten feet from the hole then turned to me and said, “Nice call, Sam.”