Club Rules: No Mistakes Are Permitted

Among the great golf questions of our age are such timeless treasures as “Ben who?” and “Do you have the keys to the courtesy car?” and “What is it from that sprinkler head?”

If you bring caddies into the equation, there can be a whole lot of questions, many of them shading toward the negative, as in assessing blame.

“Who goofed?”

Here is why this happens: When you have players under pressure so intense it could suck the air out of your lungs and they’re trying to hit tiny golf balls into the air and land them in only slightly larger holes in the ground with thousands of dollars and job security at stake, there could be some bad feelings if things go wrong.

Players make mistakes, sure. Caddies make mistakes too, and because they are the hired hands, the blame tends to run downhill and splash all over their sneakers.

At this year’s Honda Classic in Coral Springs, Fla., Mark Brooks played several holes with 15 clubs in his bag. That 15th club resulted in a four-shot penalty for Brooks and cost his caddie his job.

It’s up to the caddie to make sure the golfer is carrying the right number of clubs, which is 14, and, oddly, the same number of miles away that Brooks’ screams could be heard.

Caddies often use nicknames, possibly as aliases, to protect their true identity in case of blunders. Or maybe they’re just colorful guys. Most of the time, you can catch a glimpse of their personalities through their nicknames.

There are caddies named Six Pack Jack, Bad Luck Chuck and Golf Ball. One was called the Wanderer because he walked everywhere. Another wore a hooded sweater and horned-rim glasses and looked like a police sketch, so naturally he was called Unabomber.

There is a famous story, probably apocryphal, about golfer George Burns quizzing his caddie about the yardage to the green for an iron and, as the ball sailed through the television towers, yelling “You’re fired!”

Good caddies simply must not fail to carry out two primary duties. They must haul the bag filled with the right number of clubs and they must know the yardage to the front of the green and to the hole. Nothing else is acceptable.

Every so often, there is a caddie goof for which the player takes responsibility. Brian Barnes did that last month at the U.S. Senior Open at Riviera Country Club. Barnes had marked his ball and moved it out of Jose Maria Canizares’ line on the green but failed to put it back in the original position before putting out.

That’s a two-shot penalty, which ultimately cost Barnes a second-place finish, perhaps the victory. Luckily for Phil Rimm, Barnes’ caddie, Hale Irwin hadn’t yet birdied the last hole to beat Barnes by three shots and Barnes isn’t the homicidal type.

“I’ve never blamed a caddie for my mistake in 30 years and I’m not going to start now,” Barnes said.

Nevertheless, Rimm took the blame himself. Now that’s an honorable caddie. There have been plenty who didn’t exactly lean in that direction.

There was a European PGA Tour event sponsored by a car company. In Europe, tournament organizers tend to be much more sympathetic to caddies than those in the United States, so two caddies felt comfortable asking officials for a ride in a courtesy car to the train station, where they could catch a train to the next week’s event in another country.

The transportation official gave them the keys to a courtesy car and told them to leave it in the parking lot at the station. The caddies took the car, expressed their thanks, then drove it all the way to the tournament in the next country.

They got suspended for a while. And when they came back, what do you suppose they were known as? Bonnie and Clyde.