All those hours I spent caddying at the Springhill Country Club back in the 1950s could have been preparing me for a lucrative profession, but I took a wrong turn on the career path.
Some caddies on the PGA Tour are making millions of dollars hauling bags of clubs around plush golf courses for the pros.
Caddies apparently get a fixed salary, expense money and then a percentage of their player’s winnings. The more a player makes on the tour, the higher the percentage goes for the caddy.
Tiger Woods has earned over $120 million just for tournament victories during his career. That does not include those many other millions for sponsorships and endorsements.
So his caddies have probably picked up $12 million or so, which works out to an average of several hundred thousand a year. They kept their energy up with a lot of free country club buffet dinners.
Coach Billy Baucum told me one day in a physical education class that he wanted me to caddy for him at a golf tournament the following Saturday. He said he would pay the “going rate.”
When I met him at the club that morning, it was the first time I had ever stepped foot on the perfectly groomed golf course that I had admired from the road for years.
I did see it up close a couple of times from the picture windows of the clubhouse. That’s where we went in our white coats and patent leather shoes for high school proms. There were shiny floors and chandeliers, and we felt like we were at the Taj Mahal.
Playing golf and hanging out at the clubhouse seemed to be mostly for rich folks. My dad and most of the other men at the paper mill didn’t fit the mold of country club types.
Changing their attire from khakis, overalls and steel-toed boots to golf pants and polo shirts would have been dressing up for them.
The bankers, business people and professional folks who wore coats and ties to work dressed down to get sweaty playing golf.
On my first day as a caddy, I recognized most of the golfers from football banquets and Quarterback Club events. Mr. Schultz from the phone company, Mr. Waters from the bank, Mr. Gray from the insurance company, Mr. Gayle and Mr. Campbell from the front office at the mill.
They seemed livelier and looser at the golf course than in those other settings. Maybe it was the refreshments and getting their circulation back when they took the neckties off.
I lugged an overloaded golf bag all day, scraped mud out of golf shoe cleats and searched for misdirected golf balls in gullies, ditches and briar patches.
We learned to throw a new ball down and pretend to find the one that had been mishit. That saved us from snakes, thorns and poison ivy and kept our golfers from having to take penalty strokes.
They let us rest under shade trees at lunch time and had folks bring us chicken salad sandwiches and Cokes in green six-ounce bottles from the clubhouse.
At the end of my first day as a caddy, I got a dollar bill. Coach Baucum said that was the “going rate.”
Economists say the dollar would be worth $9.76 in today’s money. It was enough to put a couple of gallons of gas in my old car and get a hamburger at the Dothl House.
It took us caddies all day to make that dollar, but we would not have been doing much those summer days anyway except riding bikes and batting rocks.
A career in caddying passed me by, but it would still be fun to do it again even for that “going rate” instead of the big money those guys are making now.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES