Once Upon a Texas Green

by Turk Pipkin

(Originally Published in Texas Monthly.)

I was eight years old when my Dad took me to the sun-drenched links of West Texas and taught me how to caddie. Though his golf bag practically dragged the ground as it weighed my shoulder down, somehow I slogged around eighteen holes without falling too far behind. That night, completely exhausted, I fell heavily asleep, dreaming of my day in the company of men as we walked on playing fields of green.

Caddying became a glorious summer job: toting bags, fixing divots, and tending pins, not even knowing how much I would make for the round until the golfers settled all bets and I cleaned the clubs and replaced them in the spacious trunk of a big Lincoln or Cadillac. I’d wait with eager anticipation as either a five or a ten was peeled off a money clip and handed over. Ten bucks meant I’d done a good job, that I’d been part of a team. After I finished caddying, I usually played a few holes myself, experimenting with what I had seen. Somewhere along the way I learned about the sweet mysteries of golf, gambling, profanity, and bad jokes well-told. My skin was tan to the bone (“like a wild Indian,” my friends used to say), a badge of honor that proved I was in training to a way of life I would come both to love and to miss. Never again would the sky seem so blue.

As we all know, life is no longer so simple, and neither is golf. Vast golfing hordes now ride electric or gasoline powered carts which often must be kept on curbed cement paths. The golfers park and rush to the far reaches of the hole like nervous lemmings. Not knowing the yardage to the green, they take with them a jumbled assortment of clubs, none unfortunately the right one. The price of participating in this ridiculous comic spectacle is a tiring five hour round, instead of the invigorating three hours that it would takes to walk with a caddie, if one were available. Unfortunately, the only caddies left in Texas are lifers who eke out a modest living at the most private and expensive courses in the state. The once proud tradition of young caddies who earn while they learn has long since fallen victim to financial operations dependent on cart revenue, increasingly lazy golfers, and to generations of kids who’d rather watch TV than work for modest wages.

Not that long ago, carrying a bag was perhaps the best introduction to the game. All of my current golf buddies started as caddies. Wearing shorts and hi-top sneakers with laces untied, we carried for a grand assortment of golfers: kindly men who bought us hot dogs, show-offs who tipped for every piece of good advice, beer-hounds with a six-pack and a bag of ice stuffed into their monstrous bags, and cheats who slipped us an extra five and said “make sure I get good lies.” There was even a crazed club-tosser who was fond of quoting Lord Balfour's theory that “it is better to smash one's club than to lose one's temper.” I have never met a former caddie who does not look back with great fondness upon their days as a learned beast of burden.

Legendary Texas golf instructor Harvey Penick started his 80 year career in golf as a caddie at the Austin Country Club in 1914. “I was eight years old,” says Penick, taking a break from signing numerous copies of his new ‘Little Green Book.’ “The bigger boys would’ve chased me off if it hadn’t been for my brother Tom who was caddie #1. Any boy who caused trouble for me would’ve had to whip Tom, which they couldn’t do. We made twenty cents for nine holes, fifty cents for eighteen if you did a good job. With only six to eight clubs the bag wasn’t too heavy, and we didn’t read the greens because they were all level and made of sand. The main thing, because the rough was so bad, was to watch that ball.”

Penick and his fellow caddies were only allowed on the course with someone else’s bag on their shoulders. “One day my buddy Charlie and I decided we had fifty cents and we went out and played. We were on number eight when Mr. Mackenzie, the pro, raised up out of the bunker and wanted to know what we were doing. He told us to leave the course right then and go get our money back. After that we played in Heffler’s Pasture and teed the ball up on cow dung.” To this day Penick refers to himself as a grown caddie still studying golf.

Former PGA, Masters, and U.S. Open champion Byron Nelson, now 82 years old, started caddying in Fort Worth when he was twelve. "I was going to school, of course, and I asked some of the kids where they got their dimes and quarters, and they said they caddied over at Glenn Garden Country Club.

“The caddiemaster at Glen Garden was Harold Eakey and he taught me what I needed to know; then he told the first guy I caddied for that I was new. The guy said that if I don't lose a single ball, I’d get an extra quarter. I was very excited about that, but then he sliced his very first tee shot into the left rough and I lost it. I never did get that quarter.” Byron Nelson’s fellow caddie at Glen Garden was a tough young kid named Bennie Hogan. Between the two they would go on to win 115 PGA events, remarkable proof that they learned how to do much more than just find golf balls while they worked out of Mr. Eakey’s caddie shack.

Among the ranks of celebrated former caddies are Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, and even Bill Murray who drew upon his own “Caddyshack” memories to steal the heart of the best movie ever made about the game. Texas Songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker refers wistfully to his golden days as a caddie at New Jersey’s Oneana Country Club, a wooded and hilly tract where he learned to love nature as well as how to replace a divot. Caddies were allowed to play every day after six, and, with his fellow loopers, Jerry Jeff often played till it was too dark to see the ball, racing daylight, desperate to use every last second of the sun.

There seems to be a move afoot to revive some of that young passion before it is lost forever. Both the United States Golf Association and Golf Digest magazine have been touting caddie crusades intended to reinvigorate the game in its finest form. Participants in caddie training programs are taught a basic understanding of the game and such basic life lessons as punctuality and “professional demeanor.” Caddie shacks are now referred to by the USGA as caddie houses, wholesomely free of drugs, alcohol, tobacco and profanity.

In my caddie days, “professional demeanor” meant helping your employer win his match--period. No one cared if we pitched pennies or turned green smoking Swisher Sweet cigars behind the pumphouse; no one cared, that is, as long as we knew the yardages and repaired the ball marks on the green. Jerry Jeff--hardly a model of professional demeanor in his adult years--doesn’t think he picked up his bad habits at the caddie shack. He has, however, indentified one hint of his future compulsive behavior: he once drank so many Pepsis at the golf course--thirteen in one day--that they cut him off cold turkey.

In many parts of the country, the ultimate caddie payday is selection for one of 800 Chick Evans Scholarships which provide full tuition and housing to former caddies at fourteen Universities. No Texas courses participate, but River Oaks Country Club in Houston is now recruiting caddies sixteen years and older at local churches and schools. One common theory why Texas lags behind in the caddie revival is that our scorching weather discourages golfers from walking during the summer when kids are available to caddie.

Maybe that’s why a good hat and gallons of ice tea were among my first lessons when my Dad taught me to caddie. I was just tall enough to reach the flag when he showed me how to keep it from flapping in the wind when I tended the pin, being careful all the while to keep my feet and my shadow off the line of the putt. My father felt the caddie’s most important job was to keep your eye on the ball, mark its location, and be able to walk straight to it--not an easy task since he often hit it out of sight. He also taught me how to read the greens in case my opinion was asked and, of course, how to keep my mouth shut at all other times.

The players I caddied for were doctors, oil men, ranchers and a few hot shot golfers who supported themselves by modest tournament prize money and gambling on the side. Again it was my Dad--a good judge of character and a man who seemed to know everyone--who taught me how to find this gainful employment, just as he had taught me to address these men as "Sir," and most importantly to walk tall when I had that bag on my shoulder, no matter how much it weighed. Of course, what he was teaching me was not simply how to be a caddie, but rather how to get along in life.

While I have been writing this story, my father has been lying very ill in the hospital. He had been having trouble walking and had gone in for knee surgery. Complications followed and as I stood by his bed, all I could think is that he’d just wanted to play a little more golf. And I, of course, just wanted to caddie for him one more time.

I still remember how he used to switch all his clubs from his heavy tournament bag to a plaid canvas carry bag that had once belonged to his father. He paid me five dollars a round, often depositing it directly in my bank account. I don't remember how I ever spent the money; the important part was that I had earned it.

My legs grew long and I learned to carry double, though I never learned to like it. I caddied for colorfully clad West Texas crooner Don Cherry, but knew nothing of his victory match for the American team in the 1955 Ryder Cup competition at St. Andrews. I only marveled how any mortal could both swing and sing so sweetly. The best swing of all, I thought, belonged to semi-professional golfer Don Addington who is now a regular on the Senior PGA tour.

It was while working for these and many other great players that I grew from caddie into golfer. Thirty years later I can honestly say that--despite thousands of rounds and countless hours or practice, reading, and instruction--most of what I know about golf, I learned with someone else's bag on my shoulder.

As for my Dad, when I sit by his bed in the hospital, somehow I sense that he still sees me as a young boy carrying a big bag. And to me, he will always be the longest hitter I have ever seen. We don’t know yet if he’ll ever again make it onto the green links of West Texas, but in our dreams, the game goes on.