Loops & Rounds

WHEN I WAS A BOY, I was never happier than when I would set out, with a bag of rattling clubs on my shoulder, for the nearby municipal golf course. On the course I was on my own. There I belonged to a group of boys. Each had his own swing and a little money to bet. We challenged adults as equals, and we took special pleasure in defeating them. I remember a skins game with two older men when my friend and partner, Ron Helveston, purposely missed a four-footer so I could make a three-footer to win the hole. I did it with a birdie 3. I felt a lot of pride in having hustled the two menand more pride in not having missed a three-footer. Chandler Parka modest municipal course on the east side of Detroitwas my home course, and where we played our high school matches. We knew the course, the small clubhouse, and the holes in the chain-link fence that we could sneak through when we were short of the thirty-five cent greens fee. We knew each hole like the back of our hands. I still remember the hedge-lined first and tenth holes and the 250- yard par-three third. I remember the second hole, where a fellow hit a ball in my bag on the fly and, when he approached me and asked where his ball went, I simply emptied my bag out and his ball fell in front of him. I clearly remember the fourth and ninth holes. In one round, the shots of my friend, Donnie Sam, hit the same guy on each of these two holes. At Chandler Park I played out the first passion of my life, my desire to be a great golfer. On that humble course, reduced by a few hundred yards in length in the mid-1950s by construction of the crosstown throughway I-94, I confess that I suffered my first adolescent doubts about my ability to command my own future happiness. I was twelve in the late summer of 1950 when my friend Ron took me to caddie at the Country Club of Detroit in Grosse Pointe Farms. I had no idea of just how exclusive the country club was when I turned off Morross Road (“Seven Mile Road”) at the small, old cemetery and followed winding tree-lined Country Club Lane for a few hundred yards. Then I entered the club’s large parking lot, over which towered the immense clubhouse, three stories high. Built in the late twenties in the English country home style, the interior (which I was not to see until much later) included galleries, a great hall, high oak-beamed ceilings, and a grill, a restaurant, recreation rooms and a bowling alley in the basement. Its roof was many-gabled and covered by a wonderful black and blue slate, which added solemnity to this place where members ate, drank, played cards, tennis, paddle-tennis, polo, went swimming or ice skated. Its long, elevated, front stone porch looked directly down on the green of the difficult par-four eighteenth. Its molded fairways traversed by bunkers and deep roughs, and its bunker-framed and elevated greens made me feel I had come to work in a magic garden. So much grass, so much care, such an elaborate place to playat first glance the course defined for me (a boy from the working classes) the meaning of wealth. Before I went to the country club to caddie, I knew that Grosse Pointe Farms was where the rich, “the really rich,” people of Detroit lived. Our family had taken many Sunday drives from our home at Harper and McNichols (a new working- and middle-class neighborhood) out to Lake St. Clair. We would follow Jefferson Avenue out for approximately three miles to see the great estates with their immense lawns and servants’ quarters along the lake. As a matter of ritual, we passed each with an “ooh” and an “ah.” Each mansion seemed even greater and more opulent than the preceding one. The lives of the people who lived in these mansions exceeded our imaginations. Having passed the beautiful yacht club, also built in the twenties, we would finish our tour at the long stone wall of Ford’s estate, where the only entry was a roadway that passed beneath a large servants’ gatehouse. Because this was Ford’s mansion and it was invisible from the road, we assumed it must be the greatest mansion of all. This beautiful area on Lake St. Clair had grown up to serve the expanding pleasures of Detroit’s multiplying industrialists. It belonged originally to the Native Americans and then to French farmers, who worked traditional long, narrow strips of land that went from the lake inland. In the middle of the nineteenth century, it became the site of roadhouses and summer resorts for increasing numbers of the wealthy from the nearby booming industrial city of Detroit. (Detroit’s population grew from 9,000 in 1840 to 285,000 in 1900 to 993,000 in 1920.) Detroit’s rich, like the rich everywhere in the industrial Western world at that time, sought to escape “the dust and din” they themselves created. They built factories in one selves as best we could. Sitting on the long-slotted blond benches, we smoked, caught flies in flight with our hands, pitched pennies, and played cards. Often we went out back and shot baskets, pitched horseshoes, watched members hit balls on the adjacent driving range, went down to the old hole (a remnant of an earlier course) to hit some balls, or hung out under the trees along the side of the range and wise-cracked with fellow caddies. Caddies were graded B, A, and Master Caddies, a ranking that determined how much we would be paid. B’s received, if I recall correctly, $1.75 for eighteen, A’s $2.00, and masters $2.25 and the rate was twice as much if you carried doubles. Also, your rank, in combination with Caesar’s inscrutable judgment, determined whether you got the members who tipped well, a comparatively rare breed at our club. Guests almost always tipped better than our own members. Before a caddie could get on the course, he was taught a number of things. Our long instruction list included these rules: Be quiet and stay still; always face the member when he is addressing the ball; replace divots and repair ball marks on the green. A caddie had to be especially sure to loosen the pin before the member struck his shot. He also had to avoid casting his shadow over the golfer’s line of play. There were also rules of golf whose infraction by a caddie might cost players two penalty strokes, the loss of a hole, or even disqualification. This added seriousness to the job. Beyond this, a good caddie also learned other skills. He familiarized himself with each hole. He estimated distances, judged the likely consequences of different types of shots off certain types of lies, grasses, and sands, and read greens. And he had to match this knowledge with an assessment of his player’s ability and temperament. Caddies who played the game themselves were more likely to master the higher skills
of caddying. However, there was a tendency on their part to make their player play their game. A caddie needed strength and endurance. Nothing was as hard for us young boys, when, weighing barely more than a hundred and twenty pounds, we carried “doubles,” the bags of two long-hitting and long-striding players. Invariably, when we had doubles, one player would hit hooks, while the other hit slices. The heavy leather bags of the period always had a bothersome umbrella attached to the side and were commonly filled with dozens of balls, a coat, sweater, two hats, and whatever else a member happened, over the course of several seasons, to jam into his bag. Caddies formed a community of their own. At its crudest level, the caddie community was based on who you could beat up in a fight. A pecking order determined that the weakest caddies were “Spooks” and “Spiders.” For one season, the caddies were terrorized by Mean Jack, an older, pale blue-eyed, muscular, angry kid. Everyone skirted him. He was rumored to carry a knife. To get better tips, Mean Jack would step on opposing players’ balls to insure his own player’s victory. Mean Jack once lifted a member, who accused him of stealing balls, off the ground and held him up against a tree and kept him there until the member apologized to Jack for accusing him of what Jack had actually done. Caesar got rid of Mean Jack. Of course, fights (and the likes of Mean Jack) were exceptions. We all came mainly from the working classes and we all heeded Caesar’s call. We did have, as probably every caddie house did back then, two old winos, “Old John” and Al, both in their late forties or early fifties. They frequently celebrated the end of their day’s work by finishing off a bottle of Mogen David in the shade of a large tree at the end of the driving range. Later, I was reminded of them in the company of the Page 7 old Scottish caddies of