SPECTATOR SPORT
Caddies come to the fore
Frank Keating
WIMPS held in lowest esteem of all by Wodehouse were 'slugs, poets, and caddies who hiccupped'. Not any more the last. Caddies are respectable. I daresay a couple of them could be on Wogan on Monday, hotfoot from all the drama on the scrubby Lancashire seashore this weekend. When I first started going to the Open, the players called caddies 'the rats'. They would sleep in bunkers, or in tents, and never be allowed near the clubhouse portals.
This week at Birkdale they have their own roped-off carpark, full of swish Sierras and wide BMWs. When Bernhard Langer had his putting traumas a couple of years ago and never won anything, his caddie, Pete Coleman, was forced to sell his Porsche.
Caddies have always been more than simply humpers, mere beasts of burden. But only now are they acknowledged as comrades, travelling companions, almost father confessors. An hour in the caddies' but at the Open is still, as always, worth two in the clubhouse with a cloned college boy in check trews whose name is on the bag. The golfers, mind, can still be abso- lute shits to their faithful porters. When the bluff Yorkshireman Ian Wright was asked to 'carry to' (they never say 'for') Seve Ballesteros, his friend Coleman warned him, 'You'll have to take the blame for every single thing, even when the wind rustles the grass near his ball.'
Only since around the start of colour television have caddies even been addres- sed by their real names. When I first covered golf the Runyonesque roll-call at the top tournaments would answer to Irish Joe, Laughing Boy, Punch, Tosher. one- eyed Jimmy-One-Blank, Binocular Bill, or famous Mad Mac, who would study the lie of the land with glassless opera-glasses before pronouncing 'an eight, sir', a seven or whatever. Now they have real names, mortgages, fast German cars, and travel agents who book them round the world in Club Class.
The most famous caddie remains Skip (Daniels) who, almost 70, carried the bag to Gene Sarazen (himself a former caddie urchin at Apawamis GC, New York), when he won the Open at Sandwich 60 years ago next summer. Sarazen had mis- givings about taking on the sick old man. But he was a triumph, physically and spiritually. In golfs best ever player's memoir, Thirty Years of Championship Golf, Sarazen touchingly wrote that before the winner's presentation, 'I asked if Skip could stand beside me as I received the trophy, since it had been a "team" victory. They said it was against tradition. I scan- ned the crowd looking for Dan so that I could at least take him down front. I couldn't find him. Then, just as the offi- cials were getting impatient, I spotted him coming down the drive on his bicycle, carrying a grandson on each handlebar. On with the show.'
I used to think of wizened Skip when I watched Jimmy Dickinson, a venerable, hunched, knobbly stick of a man who used to hump for his adored (and adoring) Jack Nicklaus here in the 1960s and '70s. Though probably the man who did the cause of baggage-handlers more good than anyone was one of Jimmy's contempories, the wiry, gnarled and nut-brown old Lan- castrian, Alfie Fyles. 'Caddying's not just listening to the weather forecast like this new breed think,' he'd say, 'it's "eyeball- ing" your man round every inch of the course.'
Alfie 'eyeballed' the brilliant US new- comer, Tom Watson, to his first Open at Carnoustie in 1975. After the prize-giving, he went to the golfer's hotel room to get his pay. He looked at the cheque. It was far less than the norm. Alfie threw it on the floor and left in disgust. Next year, Watson brought his US caddie to help defend the title at Birkdale. He missed the cut. He made it up with Alfie, pronto and with apologies, in time for the 1977 Open at Turnberry. Together they won the finest Open in history. And after that a record three more.
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