Caddies have to put up with a lot of nonsense. Toting staff bags for big-dollar resort golfers whose lack of skill is matched only by their excess of ego, searching for errant drives, reading three-foot putts for double-bogey, etc., they do it all, and have seen it all. It should come as no surprise, then, that the website The Caddie Network should put together an article on the best (funniest, most caustic…) caddie one-liners recorded or overheard on the golf course. Written up by the website’s Director of Content, T.J. Auclair, the article lists the 23 best caddie one-liners they had ever heard, and had me laughing out loud from #23 on.
Funny as the anecdotes are, however, you will notice that some of them are pretty harsh, and indicative of a certain lack of, shall we say, forbearance and perspective on the part of the loopers. I guess that you can’t fault them for developing a cynical outlook, but there are times when the bag-toters themselves deserve a little comeuppance.
Personally, I haven’t had much experience with caddies. I am more of a muni golfer, but through my writing efforts I have lucked into opportunities to play some pretty cool courses—higher-end layouts than my budget would normally support—where caddie service was provided. One such circumstance was when I played Pebble Beach for an assignment—yes, I actually got paid to play Pebble Beach—and had a little run-in with a caddie whose cynical outlook cried out for a response:
In 2014 I was approached by the media company which was producing the Monterey Convention and Visitors Bureau’s guide book—the big glossy magazine you find in hotel rooms with information on restaurants, attractions, etc., in the area—to write an article about playing Pebble Beach for the first time. The project was postponed to the next year because: 1) I had never played Pebble Beach, so it would have been fiction; and 2) there wasn’t time before the publication deadline to arrange a tee time for me.
So, the next summer they approached me again. I was told that a tee time would be arranged, with this proviso—the green fee would be deducted from my payment for the article. I agreed—but not too eagerly, wanting to avoid setting a dangerous precedent—and a week or so later I showed up at Pebble, parking my 15-year-old Volkswagen well away from the Jags, BMWs and Range Rovers arrayed along the road, and presented myself at the pro shop.
I had been slotted in with a threesome, three friends—businessmen from Kentucky and Tennessee—who were out here on a buddy trip. They had hired two caddies between them, and true to my muni-golf roots (and to avoid spending what was left of my fee on a caddy and tip…), I was carrying my own bag.
My round got off to a rough start—first-tee jitters—when I teed the ball up too high for my four-hybrid and hooked my tee shot off of the wall behind one of the houses that use to line the left side of the first fairway (before the new Fairway One development went in.) I found the ball with some help from one of the caddies, but it was not an auspicious start.
I had mixed results over the next few holes—for example, I made par on #2 after getting on in two, and then three-putting, on the first par-5 on the course; and I put down an “X” on #6 after losing the tee shot right and the next shot left.
At # 8, the spectacular par-4 with the well-known second shot over the cove—the “greatest second shot in golf” according to Jack Nicklaus—I pulled my tee shot somewhere into the no-man’s-land between the sixth and eighth fairways, but true to my “Second-Shot Hall of Fame” credentials, after reloading, I pured a 3-wood shot to beautiful position in the left side of the fairway, where I had 175 yards on a perfect line to the friendly, center-of-the-green flag.
One of the threesome’s caddies, the same one who had helped me find my ball on the first hole, came over while I was checking the yardage with my rangefinder, and said, “You know, there’s that nice layup area short of the green. You can hit it there and leave a nice pitch to the flag.”
Now, I know that I hadn’t been showing great chops on the holes we had played so far, but this remark kinda got up my nose, and I might have sounded a tiny bit teed-off when I responded with, “What makes you think I can’t hit that green?” I didn’t wait for an answer, and pulling my Taylormade five-hybrid, I lofted a beauty of a shot (one of my best of the day, if I say so myself…) that landed, and stayed, low on the green, pretty much straight below the flag. I two-putted for a six—net par—but it felt like an actual par despite the lousy tee shot and the lost ball.
That caddie and I got along great for the rest of the round—not least of all because he didn’t offer me any more advice.
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