CARRYING ON

A caddie from East Los Angeles will play in the Masters.

Is there any other way to start this kind of story?

Greg Puga, a 30-year-old Boyle Heights guy who humps bags at the Bel-Air Country Club, will tee off today at Augusta National.

Something this nuts, you know a better way to begin?

We could try a narrative lead, open with a boy who discovered cobwebbed clubs in a classroom closet and started a golf team at Roosevelt High so he could play on it . . . then switch to him walking wide-eyed into Amen Corner.

Nah. There are far too many spike marks in Greg Puga’s 16-year journey to fit neatly into four paragraphs.

We could use a little humor, maybe, begin with the caddie who discovers the most difficult thing about playing the Masters is learning to use another caddie.

But, indeed, this will be the first time Puga will use another looper. It will be a stranger. He already wonders. What if he tips too much? What if he listens too closely? It’s not all that funny.

We could, of course, strive for pathos, introducing the vision of the green jacket through the eyes of a guy who doesn’t wear a golf glove because he preferred to spend his money on range balls.

But it’s not about the jacket. Greg Puga has already won a jacket.

A red jacket.

That was his prize for winning a Mexican American Golfers Assn. tournament in Palm Springs. Friends draped the coat around his shoulders with a plea.

“Wear this to Augusta, stand up for East L.A., show those fellas a real jacket.”

Real jacket. Real golfer. Smack in the middle of the fairway of the most prestigious tournament in the world.

Maybe we’ll start here.

*

The story appeared in the Times sports section last year, on Sept. 15, although it wasn’t really a story.

It was a note. The 14th note in a 16-note roundup on Page 16. Under the heading of “Miscellany.”

It read: “Greg Puga, 29, became the youngest winner in the 20-year history of the U.S. Mid-Amateur golf tournament with a 3-and-1 victory over Wayne Raath at Hot Springs, Va. Puga is a caddie at the Bel-Air Country Club.”

Miscellany to us, the break of a lifetime for Puga.

In honor of its amateur founder Bobby Jones, the Masters invites five amateur champions to compete each year. The Mid-Amateur tournament is open to amateurs 25 and over.

Some people stick these sorts of invitations in drawers. Puga stuck his in a drugstore frame.

“This is like an out-of-body experience,” he says.

His real body had never before won a national tournament. He has been little more than an agate-type golfer, his name found in tiny letters on back pages and pro-shop bulletin boards.

You probably know a golfer like Puga.

If you have scuffed balls rolling around your trunk, and tees stuck between the cushions of the front seat, and fall out of bed on a Saturday morning to drive the heap to a chunked-out public track to compete in a kegger scramble, you are a golfer like Puga.

Seven years ago, he became a caddie, not only because he needed the money after leaving college, but because it allowed him the flexible hours to improve his game.

Yet because he must carry bags three or four days a week to pay bills, that improvement comes slowly.

This Masters invitation would appear to be his first clean shot from the rough. Then again, maybe not.

Buoyed by the Mid-Am victory, Puga sent a letter to Nissan Open tournament officials, requesting an amateur slot at Riviera.

More than a month after the completion of the event, he is still waiting for a reply.

“Maybe the letter got lost in the mail,” he says with a grin.

Puga is sitting at the bar at Brookside in Pasadena, one of his public-course haunts. It is growing late on the night before he is scheduled to leave town, but he talks slowly and smiles often, sipping beer from a long-necked bottle and playing with the bill of his tan Bel-Air Country Club cap.

“Got all the time in the world,” he says, shrugging. “Enjoying this while I can.”

He will wear that Bel-Air cap at the Masters, and why not? The bosses there gave him free golf.

The conversation turns to his get-acquainted trip to Augusta in February. He and buddy Danny Garcia, a teaching pro at Montebello Country Club, flew down.

For four rounds, Puga played, Garcia walked, and a caddie gave them directions. At times, they were the only ones on the course.

“It was amazing,” he says. “It was like, I know I was there, but my mind was like, ‘Wow!’ ”

Puga pulls out a money clip adorned with the Masters insignia. He bought it in the Augusta pro shop, along with a variety of caps and jackets.

“Isn’t this cool?” he says.

Yeah, you say. Very.

*

His brother-in-law promised he would watch the silly teenager. He didn’t promise where.

So it happened that, at 14, Greg Puga was dragged off to his introduction to golf.

He had never seen a golf course. Never touched a club. Did not understand a scorecard. And how can anyone hold those little pencils?

“My brother-in-law wanted to play with friends, but he had to baby-sit me, so I just came along,” Puga recalls.

It was an executive course at Whittier Narrows. Puga hacked around with three borrowed irons and a putter.

A natural athlete, he was a pretty good football player at the time, eventually becoming a backup quarterback and defensive back for Roosevelt.

But in that first golf game, he found a sport that was better than he was.

“So I got mad,” he recalls. “I wanted to keep playing. I wanted to play the game like I could play everything else.”

His parents bought him used clubs. He loaded the pouch full of old range balls. He visited a Saturday-morning free clinic at Pico Rivera run by Danny Garcia.

“Crazy clinics,” Garcia recalls. “Sometimes 60 kids at once. So many kids--they didn’t know how to hold a club, they didn’t know the rules. I never thought that one of those kids . . . “

Would be Greg Puga?

Puga’s father, Salvador, spent years working at a Sears service center. His mother worked in a supply room at nearby Malabar Elementary.

Puga applied their ethic to golf.

“It wasn’t all about fun,” he says. “It was about not letting a game get the best of me.”

He played on muddy par-threes after school, then chipped around his dog in the backyard after dark.

Two years later, as a sophomore at Roosevelt, he pleaded with the athletic director to start a golf team, so he could get more course time.

He found old clubs in a physical education closet. He recruited a few novices from the football team. He coerced a math teacher into coaching. Officials were convinced.

“And there you go--we had a team,” he says, smiling again. “Not a very good team. But a team.”

Those friends would routinely shoot more than 100--for nine holes. The Roughriders were repeatedly embarrassed by schools whose golf team members could actually play golf.

This didn’t stop Puga, who, in his senior year, qualified for the CIF state finals and made second-team All-City.

All of which paled beside what has become his greatest prep achievement--in a putting contest.

He was 16. His opponent, a local hotshot, was 11.

After a local junior tournament at Industry Hills, the adults were talking, so the boys walked to the putting green, where they bet $5 on an 18-hole competition.

After 14 holes, Puga was beating the kid by three strokes.

“Then all of a sudden, he says, ‘I don’t want to play anymore,’ and walks away,” Puga recalls. “I let him go. What was I going to do, stop him? I didn’t want to make him cry.”

This week, for the first time since then, Puga will have a chance to talk to that kid, and he can’t wait.

“I’m going to remind Tiger Woods he owes me $5.”

*

At this point in the story, it would seem redundant to write about how Puga enrolled at San Diego State, but left after one year because the golf coach wouldn’t allow him to try out.

Or about how, after two years of junior college, he accepted a scholarship to Cal State Dominguez Hills, even though he had never heard of the joint.

Perhaps we should pick this up later, in the Bel-Air parking lot, about five years ago, when Joe Ford, Masters vice chairman, was leaving after a round.

The caddie putting the bag into Ford’s trunk was Greg Puga.

“Good luck in golf, young man,” Ford said.

“I’ll see you at the Masters one day,” Puga said.

“That would be nice,” Ford said.

Eddie Merrins, the renowned Bel-Air pro, tells the story slowly, as another man would drink a glass of cabernet.

He pauses, then pours in the punch line.

“Do you know who will be presenting the award to the low amateur Sunday at the Butler Cabin?” he says. “The same Joe Ford.”

Merrins loves that sort of tale. The swing doctor to some of this town’s most powerful people has been known for helping such underdogs as the PGA Championship’s near-hero Bob May and, now, Puga.

“An unbelievable story,” Merrins says. “To come from a meager background and earn his way into the most august tournament in the world? It’s incredible.”

Puga drives a 1988 murky-colored Ford Thunderbird--115,00 miles and all--to work. Once there, he hangs out with several dozen caddies in a room underneath the men’s lower locker room.

There is a TV in the caddie shack. This weekend, there could also be a party there.

“If he does well, they are going to be hearing it from upstairs,’ said Andy Schaefer, the Bel-Air caddie master. “Everybody here is talking about Greg.”

When he returned from the Mid-Amateur championship, a congratulatory banner was hanging for him. Free golf awaited him. New respect followed him.

“Before it was like, ‘Oh, he’s a caddie who wants to be a golfer; it will never happen,’ ” fellow caddie Robert Ward said. “Now it’s like, everybody wants him to be their caddie.”

You might expect some underlying bitterness from a rising golfer who carries bags for rich folks with half his talent.

But, as with many notions involving Greg Puga, you would be wrong.

“The club belongs to the members, not me,” he says. “You don’t have to be good to belong. You don’t have to be good to play golf there. It’s not like I’m caddying on the PGA Tour. I can handle this.”

So he quietly carries bags, often one on each shoulder. He earns his $80-$160 a day. He eats at Denny’s. He phones in early-morning reservations at public courses like everyone else.

“I know some people will look at this East L.A. Mexican kid and say, ‘What is he doing in our Masters?’ ” Puga says. “I don’t care. I’m here to play golf, not make them like me.”

His Masters clubs?

Hector Urias, a mechanic buddy from El Monte, got them for Puga from another golfer who needed a brake job.

“This whole thing is crazy,” Urias says.

His Masters mentor?

He doesn’t have one, doesn’t know any former Masters competitors, so he has been studying some old tournament videotapes.

His Masters chances?

There have been 12 Mid-Amateur winners invited to the tournament. Only one has made the cut.

This means, well, this doesn’t mean anything in the world of Greg Puga.

Rick Clevenger, a caddie buddy and drummer for the rock band Cosmic Wheels, will be playing at the Westwood Brewery Sunday afternoon. He figures it is perfect timing.

“While I’m playing, Greg will be on TV playing,” he says. “It will be awesome.”

For the last several years, Clevenger has enlisted Puga to lead his team to the best gross score in the Bel-Air caddie-member tournament.

“He was our ringer,” Clevenger says. “You think I can still get away with that?”

*

After leaving Brookside that night, Puga flew to Augusta for early practice. But when he landed, his clubs did not.

Panicked, he phoned home to Urias, the guy who’d traded brakes for clubs. And he phoned Garcia, who’d once given him a bag.

Together, the three men schemed a way to get Puga a new set of sticks, even if they wouldn’t exactly be new, and the set might not be complete.

“We would get a driver from one place, the rest of the clubs from somewhere else,” Garcia says. “If we had to drive them there ourselves, we would make it work.”

But the airline eventually found Puga’s bag. He took it to a course in full bloom. The amateur practiced like a pro. He will play today with Seve Ballesteros and Steve Stricker. His most recent call to Urias sounded like a song.

“I can’t believe I’m here,” said the caddie among kings. “I can’t believe how beautiful this place is.”

Stories like this, it’s not so hard to find an ending.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

How They Qualified

Field for the Masters and how players qualified (players listed in only one category)

* Masters champions (lifetime): Vijay Singh, Jose Maria Olazabal, Mark O’Meara, Tiger Woods, Nick Faldo, Ben Crenshaw, Bernhard Langer, Fred Couples, Ian Woosnam, Sandy Lyle, Larry Mize, Jack Nicklaus, Seve Ballesteros, Craig Stadler, Tom Watson, Fuzzy Zoeller, Gary Player, Raymond Floyd, Tommy Aaron, Charles Coody, Billy Casper, Gay Brewer, Arnold Palmer, Doug Ford.

* U.S. Open champions (last five years): Steve Jones, Ernie Els, Lee Janzen.

* British Open champions (last five years): Tom Lehman, Justin Leonard, Paul Lawrie.

* PGA champions (last five years) Mark Brooks, Davis Love III.

* The Players Championship (last three years): David Duval, Hal Sutton.

* U.S. Amateur champion and runner-up Jeff Quinney, James Driscoll.

* British Amateur champion: Mikko Ilonen.

* U.S. Amateur Public Links champion: D.J. Trahan.

* U.S. Mid-Amateur champion: Greg Puga.

* Top 16 players and ties from 2000 Masters: Loren Roberts, Carlos Franco, Phil Mickelson, Greg Norman, Nick Price, Jim Furyk, John Huston, Dennis Paulson, Chris Perry.

* Top eight players and ties from 2000 U.S. Open: Miguel Angel Jimenez, Padraig Harrington, Lee Westwood, Stewart Cink.

* Top four players and ties from 2000 PGA: Bob May, Thomas Bjorn, Stuart Appleby, Greg Chalmers.

* Top four players and ties from 2000 British Open: David Toms.

* Top 40 from the 2000 PGA Tour money list: Mike Weir, Jesper Parnevik, Kirk Triplett, Steve Flesch, Robert Allenby, Chris DiMarco, Notah Begay, Scott Verplank, Mark Calcavecchia, Franklin Langham, Paul Azinger, Steve Lowery, Duffy Waldorf, Scott Hoch, Rocco Mediate, Tom Scherrer, Rory Sabbatini, Shigeki Maruyama, Grant Waite, Jeff Maggert, Jonathan Kaye.

* Top three from the 2001 PGA Tour money list four weeks before Masters: Joe Durant, Steve Stricker.

* Top 50 from world ranking at end of 2000: Colin Montgomerie, Darren Clarke, Michael Campbell, Thomas Bjorn, Retief Goosen, Eduardo Romero, Dudley Hart, Jose Coceres, Pierre Fulke, Angel Cabrera.

* Top 50 from world ranking four weeks before Masters: Brad Faxon, Toshi Izawa.

* Special international invitations: Aaron Baddeley, Shingo Katayama.