COLUMN: On the Bag

By Tobin Barnes

         So after getting the valuable down-low tip from Rocky, the car dealer, I rode my bike out to the country club about a mile beyond the city limits.

Counting the distance across town, it turned into a pretty good jaunt that I knew I’d be pedaling every day, particularly when the wind was up, and, heck, it was always windy in eastern Sodak.

             

After parking my bike amongst a bunch of others, I walked up to the pro in the dinky little pro shop there and told him Rocky had sent me, like I was drug mule or trying to get into a speakeasy or something. He looked puzzled, so I also told him Rocky said I could get a job as a caddy.

He told me that, sure, I could be a caddy, just like any other kid that regularly showed up, but he’d never heard of Rocky, which was much as I’d suspected on both counts. Nothing fancy-schmantzy about this gig.

After all, we’re talking lower-level upscale here when we’re talking “country club” in a medium-sized town on the prairie. Just a matter of some local people making marginally more money than most and being able to afford to goof around playing golf a few days a week.

Sure, there were two or three truly wealthy members: one owned a multi-state chain of grocery stores, and another owned a good-sized highway construction company grown fat on the new interstate highway system.

The grocery store guy even had a private plane and could afford to fly anywhere in the world and play real country clubs—which he did—although he was the same hacker in those places as he was at home. (“Hacker” is what we caddies called the lousy to mediocre golfers who populated the place—uh huh, the vast majority, but I’m getting ahead of the story.)

Most of the members were middle class, or maybe upper middle class in some cases. They were the town’s doctors, lawyers, dentists and small businessmen, who unlike their more sober fellow citizens, thought of golf as a legitimate pastime.

But for a kid whose parents were usually on the fingernail-clutching edge of solvency, these people were the moneyed aristocrats of my little rural world. I would initially be goggle-eyed at having the honor of carrying their bags and tending their flagsticks. That reverence would wear off.

The pro was a cocky, strutting little bantam rooster named Dick Clark, who actually looked a lot like the other Dick Clark of American Bandstand. He was originally from Kansas City and would go back there after a couple years.

His buddies, but not the caddies, made a play on his name by sometimes calling him Click Clack. He was in his mid-twenties with wind resistant, Brylcreemed and carefully combed hair, and, of course, he never wore any kind of a cap that would cover up that masterpiece of coiffure.

Though small in stature, he had a great golf swing and hit the ball a mile with a big looping draw. He walked with a confident swagger, knowing that he was the closest thing to a real golfer this area had ever seen.

He was immediately my first non-TV idol.

The thing that really sealed the deal was a picture he had hanging in the pro shop. There he was standing with Jack Nicklaus in one of those faked-up poses of them supposedly examining a golf club.

Yeah, our version of Dick Clark pictured with the guy they used to call “Fat Jack” in his early years as opposed to the slimmer Jack of later years, but I didn’t know any other version of Jack at the time than the “Great Jack Nicklaus.”

Wow! It was like Dick Clark had instant credentials for me.

That same day, Dick took me out with him on my first caddy job as kind of a training mission. He showed me how to balance the weight of the bag horizontally across my back and what my job would be on the greens. The rest was a matter of keeping up or even staying ahead and, of course, making sure I always knew where the hell the ball was.

Nope, it wasn’t rocket science, but I loved it from the first hole on.