Caddies Golf

I feel like a caddie today. This is neither a boast nor a lament. This is just how you feel after walking 45 holes in Tony Lingard's shoes, metaphorically at least, over four soupy days last week during the Buick Open at the Warwick Hills Golf and Country Club.

Amazing, the stuff you can find on EBay. David Diaz's latest acquisition followed him around the Old Course during his British Open debut Thursday the way the sniffles follow a child. Once, it nearly dropped his golf bag. Another time, unsure where to put a head cover, it simply stuck it in its mouth. Several times, it stepped in front of his putts. Then there was the time its weathered cap blew off while it was trying to balance that darned bag. Amazing, the things you can find on EBay.

Chi Chi Rodriguez figures that he is one of the last of a kind--a professional golfer who made it up through the caddie ranks. Rodriguez, Lee Trevino and Mike Hill are among the few left on the Senior PGA Tour who were poor as youngsters and had a chance to learn the sport because they were caddies. Rodriguez fears that poor youngsters are being priced out of the sport he loves. "Lee and Mike and myself are about the last ones," he said recently.

At 14, Michelle Wie has already drawn comparisons to Tiger Woods, but she may seem even closer to him this week when Woods' former caddie Mike "Fluff" Cowan carries her bag during an LPGA event in Virginia. Cowan caddies regularly for U.S. Open champion Jim Furyk but is available because a wrist injury has kept Furyk sidelined since January. Cowan was hired Saturday by Wie's father, B.J. Wie, and will work with her when she plays the LPGA's Michelob Ultra Open at Kingsville in Williamsburg, Va.

Bob Low sat in the shotgun seat for a ride into history Sunday. Well, at the time of Joe Durant's putt that sent Durant to a record-low 36 shots below par, Low was seated on a rock about 15 yards away. But for most of the day, Low was right by Durant's side, toting his clubs, checking the yardage, making suggestions for the critical "right number" of iron selection. That's the fate of a caddie. Their names never get recorded next to the winners.

Miles Byrne is looking for work after breaking the most basic caddie rule of all. Two weeks after costing Ian Woosnam a two-stroke penalty in the British Open when he failed to count the Welsh player's clubs, Byrne was fired Sunday after oversleeping and missing Woosnam's tee time in the Scandinavian Masters. "You know what the circumstances are going to be this time," Woosnam said. "I gave him a chance. He had one warning. That was it." Woosnam teed off on schedule at 7:15 a.m.

As the reigning U.S. Amateur champion, Mitch Voges was automatically invited to play in the prestigious Masters tournament in Augusta, Ga., last month. It was an opportunity of a lifetime and since he was playing the lush Augusta National course with its tricky greens for the first time, he was told he should hire a caddie with local knowledge. Voges, though, had his own priorities, and chose to bring his own caddie, his 13-year-old son, Christian.

At 14, Michelle Wie has already drawn comparisons to Tiger Woods, but she may seem even closer to him this week when Woods' former caddie Mike "Fluff" Cowan carries her bag during an LPGA event in Virginia. Cowan caddies regularly for U.S. Open champion Jim Furyk but is available because a wrist injury has kept Furyk sidelined since January. Cowan was hired Saturday by Wie's father, B.J. Wie, and will work with her when she plays the LPGA's Michelob Ultra Open at Kingsville in Williamsburg, Va.

Among the great golf questions of our age are such timeless treasures as "Ben who?" and "Do you have the keys to the courtesy car?" and "What is it from that sprinkler head?" If you bring caddies into the equation, there can be a whole lot of questions, many of them shading toward the negative, as in assessing blame. "Who goofed?"

MISCELLANY * Approximate number of caddies used per year on the PGA Tour: 300 (Some golfers use different caddies at different events). * How the average PGA Tour caddie earns money: On Thursday and Friday of each tournament, caddies earn a standard wage, usually $500. If the player makes the cut, his caddies get 5% of the winnings. A top 10 finish earns 7% and a win gets the caddie 10%. WORDS TO LIVE BY The caddies' 10 commandments (completely unofficial, of course): 1.

He was hard to miss, but not because of the firetruck red shirt he wore or the snow-white sleeveless vest. He was hard to miss because Bruce Edwards was the only caddie signing autographs Wednesday at every hole of Sonoma Golf Club in the pro-am round of the Charles Schwab Cup Championship. Edwards successfully navigated an ocean of caps and visors and pairing sheets and photographs and T-shirts, signing each one. Then Edwards would pose for a quick snapshot as he sat in his golf cart.

Sure, it's a noble profession, but first you have to overlook the bad parts, such as having to wipe mud off a bunch of stuff, letting abuse roll off your back, getting blamed for all things great and small and lugging the equivalent of a steamer trunk on your back as you trudge up and down hills for about five hours every day. It's hard to shake the romantic notion about the profession of caddie, partly because of the equally romantic notion that golf is a metaphor for life.

At first glance, the StarCaddy appeared to be the most promising golf gadget since Rodney Dangerfield's bag spit clubs into the air, played tunes and served draft beer in "Caddyshack." A gadget that relies on global satellite positioning and golf course maps loaded into an attached hand-held computer, the StarCaddy allows you to measure precise distances to a green's center from anywhere on a hole. In my testing, I could see where it might help knock a few strokes off someone's game.

Miles Byrne is looking for work after breaking the most basic caddie rule of all. Two weeks after costing Ian Woosnam a two-stroke penalty in the British Open when he failed to count the Welsh player's clubs, Byrne was fired Sunday after oversleeping and missing Woosnam's tee time in the Scandinavian Masters. "You know what the circumstances are going to be this time," Woosnam said. "I gave him a chance. He had one warning. That was it." Woosnam teed off on schedule at 7:15 a.m.

Greg Puga, the Bel Air caddie who played in this year's Masters, understands life from both sides of the bag. So it was that he shouted and shuddered Sunday upon watching his two worlds collide. It was the final round of the British Open. It was the second hole. It was a blunder as big as all Bill Buckner. Ian Woosnam, a co-leader, discovered he had 15 clubs in his bag, one more than the maximum allowed. He was given a two-stroke penalty. He never led again.

A father teaches his son to play golf. Tries anyway. The son is hard-headed. Many years later the son instructs the father, who is all ears. Strange, considering the father is Larry Nelson, the hottest player on the Senior PGA Tour. Yet it's part of the reason he won eight tournaments in less than a year, including six of 10 in one stretch. Nelson listens. He adjusts. He improves. And often the results are dramatic.

The world's most famous smiles: 1) Mona Lisa, 2) The Joker, 3) Matt Kuchar. OK, so maybe Kuchar's smile isn't that famous yet. But he does have the most famous smile in the U.S. Open. Correction: He has the only smile in the U.S. Open. Golf is not known for its smiley faces. All you have to do to know the players who have one is read a leaderboard. They have names like Fuzzy and Chi Chi.

This time, the flag from the 18th hole was tucked safely away in his bag in the crazy moments after Billy Mayfair won a playoff at the Nissan Open. The other time--the only other time--Montana Thompson was the caddie for a tournament winner, the flag got away after John Inman won a five-man playoff in the Southern Open in 1993. It wouldn't happen twice. But the most prized possession in Thompson's hands wasn't a flag. It was his orange yardage booklet.

Bob Low sat in the shotgun seat for a ride into history Sunday. Well, at the time of Joe Durant's putt that sent Durant to a record-low 36 shots below par, Low was seated on a rock about 15 yards away. But for most of the day, Low was right by Durant's side, toting his clubs, checking the yardage, making suggestions for the critical "right number" of iron selection. That's the fate of a caddie. Their names never get recorded next to the winners.

Old Tom Morris, one of golf's early figures at historic St. Andrews in Scotland, concluded more than a century ago that caddies required stricter rules than had governed them previously. So, in what was really a suggestion more than an edict, he announced that caddies should "appear for work clean and moderately sober." Old Tom, apparently, was fed up with carrying the game, the bag and the caddie.