going out in fifteen minutes. Anybody?”
The older caddies would get real busy with their racing forms, or stare at the ground, or start rubbing their tired backs. Newfeld and Bloch were sons-of-bitches, the worst loop at the club. Legend had it they’d once caused Largeman George—a stellar caddy who’d reportedly carried for Tom Wieskopf at the U.S. Open—to lose his job when, overflowing with anger at the way they were treating him, he’d shrugged their bags off his shoulders in the middle of the eighteenth fairway, and then one at a time, hurled each magnificent over-stuffed trunk into the middle of the pond fronting the green. Then, without looking back, he’d walked off the course directly to the bus-stop.
The story is legendary because the launching of a member’s bag into a pond constitutes a colossal and gorgeous gesture of defiance. It takes a powerful man to hurl a bag of clubs. There’s the grip and heft, the momentum that must be generated to sail something that bulky through the air. The tricky timing of the toss. It’s a feat worthy for competition in a World’s Strongest Man contest, a feat that speaks of a surrounding clamor, a noisy chaos of country and culture that cannot be walled away by high fences and membership fees. Like sleeping with the prettiest girl in the senior class behind her boyfriend’s back and giving her the best orgasm she’s ever had, it’s also the kind of triumph I will never accomplish in this lifetime. While I was getting yelled at during a loop, I liked to imagine what Largeman’s launch might have looked like, the heavy bags soaring upward, individual clubs and balls tumbling into the water before the finality of the great massive splash.
Jonathan Newfeld and Ira Bloch both had high squeaky voices and had been either widowed or divorced. Regardless of the circumstances that ended their marriages, they seemed as socially inept as I was, except older and more venomous. They’d blame their caddies for every lousy shot they hit, which was every shot they hit. Heading out with them meant five hours of searching for balls in the woods and digging into clumps of poison ivy because the bitter bastards refused to ever give up on a ball. You’d troop back in after the loop with your feet blistered from your wet socks, and your legs and pants soaked because they’d made you wade into water hazards to retrieve the balls they’d dunked there, and you spent so much of the round raking sand traps that you felt like a landscaper. They’d yell at you constantly, screech that you were stupid and worthless if somehow your shadow had the temerity to intercept one of their shadows and then one of them shanked a ball into the trees. They were the undisputed kings of the miserable loop, walking cat-claws who never tipped a dime.
In fact, because they didn’t want to feel guilty about never tipping, they successfully lobbied the club to adopt a no-tipping policy so no one else would tip either. Fortunately for us, the adoption of the policy actually increased how much money we made. First, to compensate for the absent tips, the club raised the rates from sixteen dollars a bag to eighteen, and second—except for when a caddy like me was the bungling boob holding the clubs—most of the members, who were generally douchebags of the paternalistic variety, kept tipping anyway. It seemed like they maybe even tipped more because the policy change made it a little illegal, a little naughty for them to dig into their pockets and fish out a billfold, to whisper, Hey, Caddy, here’s for your troubles, and slide us a few bucks as if they were getting away with something.
This surreptitious tipping only further embittered Newfeld and Bloch and hardened their determination to be nasty and demeaning to whomever carried their bags. None of the veterans would do it. Gordon, who could wring a hefty tip out of anyone else, invariably stepped up. “I’ll take ’em,” he’d say, and the
The older caddies would get real busy with their racing forms, or stare at the ground, or start rubbing their tired backs. Newfeld and Bloch were sons-of-bitches, the worst loop at the club. Legend had it they’d once caused Largeman George—a stellar caddy who’d reportedly carried for Tom Wieskopf at the U.S. Open—to lose his job when, overflowing with anger at the way they were treating him, he’d shrugged their bags off his shoulders in the middle of the eighteenth fairway, and then one at a time, hurled each magnificent over-stuffed trunk into the middle of the pond fronting the green. Then, without looking back, he’d walked off the course directly to the bus-stop.
The story is legendary because the launching of a member’s bag into a pond constitutes a colossal and gorgeous gesture of defiance. It takes a powerful man to hurl a bag of clubs. There’s the grip and heft, the momentum that must be generated to sail something that bulky through the air. The tricky timing of the toss. It’s a feat worthy for competition in a World’s Strongest Man contest, a feat that speaks of a surrounding clamor, a noisy chaos of country and culture that cannot be walled away by high fences and membership fees. Like sleeping with the prettiest girl in the senior class behind her boyfriend’s back and giving her the best orgasm she’s ever had, it’s also the kind of triumph I will never accomplish in this lifetime. While I was getting yelled at during a loop, I liked to imagine what Largeman’s launch might have looked like, the heavy bags soaring upward, individual clubs and balls tumbling into the water before the finality of the great massive splash.
Jonathan Newfeld and Ira Bloch both had high squeaky voices and had been either widowed or divorced. Regardless of the circumstances that ended their marriages, they seemed as socially inept as I was, except older and more venomous. They’d blame their caddies for every lousy shot they hit, which was every shot they hit. Heading out with them meant five hours of searching for balls in the woods and digging into clumps of poison ivy because the bitter bastards refused to ever give up on a ball. You’d troop back in after the loop with your feet blistered from your wet socks, and your legs and pants soaked because they’d made you wade into water hazards to retrieve the balls they’d dunked there, and you spent so much of the round raking sand traps that you felt like a landscaper. They’d yell at you constantly, screech that you were stupid and worthless if somehow your shadow had the temerity to intercept one of their shadows and then one of them shanked a ball into the trees. They were the undisputed kings of the miserable loop, walking cat-claws who never tipped a dime.
In fact, because they didn’t want to feel guilty about never tipping, they successfully lobbied the club to adopt a no-tipping policy so no one else would tip either. Fortunately for us, the adoption of the policy actually increased how much money we made. First, to compensate for the absent tips, the club raised the rates from sixteen dollars a bag to eighteen, and second—except for when a caddy like me was the bungling boob holding the clubs—most of the members, who were generally douchebags of the paternalistic variety, kept tipping anyway. It seemed like they maybe even tipped more because the policy change made it a little illegal, a little naughty for them to dig into their pockets and fish out a billfold, to whisper, Hey, Caddy, here’s for your troubles, and slide us a few bucks as if they were getting away with something.
This surreptitious tipping only further embittered Newfeld and Bloch and hardened their determination to be nasty and demeaning to whomever carried their bags. None of the veterans would do it. Gordon, who could wring a hefty tip out of anyone else, invariably stepped up. “I’ll take ’em,” he’d say, and the
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