Elie, Scotland. Almost three weeks ago, I flew to Scotland and took residence in the village of Elie, just up the road from St. Andrews, because there is a golf course here open through the winter where I can get back to the game and into decent shape. For the last ten days I have walked two rounds a day at the Elie Golf House Club, carrying rocks from the shore in my golf bag for extra weight, always marching at a good clip and pacing off the yardages in my head. Not an easy task for a fifty-seven-year-old, but the exertion feels productive. “I’m in training!” I yelled to a groundskeeper during the gale last week when the wind knocked me to my knees twice.
“You’re mad!” he yelled back at me.
I’ve been thinking maybe he’s right. During that gale, the town had to plow two-foot sand drifts off the main street, and I began wearing my headphones day and night to block out the noise of the wind. Some of those winter days I was so cold as I dressed to start my first round that I put on my three layers of clothing right over my pajamas.
This morning I waited out a downpour with a couple of the greenkeepers inside a shed off the 13th fairway that looked as if half of it had blown off its foundation in the storm. Both guys had such weathered faces that it was impossible to believe they could look so old and still be standing up. They spoke with thick accents, and I couldn’t understand a word one said, and only about 30 percent of the other. What was curious about them was that the large fellow’s clothes were too small and the small fellow’s clothes were too large, so I was distracted from our conversation at first by the ridiculous thought that maybe they’d accidentally dressed in each other’s clothing.
When I told them that I was going to the Old Course in a few days to sign up as a caddie in training, they told me about some lads they knew who had worked there long ago. A fellow called “Shell” because he often passed out and spent the night in the Shell bunker off the 11th green. “Ringo,” who allegedly played the drums better than Ringo Starr before he had one hand mauled by a pit bull. “Soap,” who never washed, and “Rotar,” who had worked the grounds crew at an RAF base and learned to roll his cigarettes inside his pocket in the gale winds. When I explained that I was down to my last pack of American cigarettes and at the equivalent of almost $12 a pack would not be replenishing them, they took out their papers and gave me a lesson in rolling my own. I was surprised to see that they used little white filters. “We’re tight,” the one I could understand said. “You can’t smoke the last wee bit of tobacco, so you end up wasting it without a filter.”
That began a conversation about the cost of living and the Yanks who came to Scotland “on holiday,” as they put it. I pointed out right away that I was not one of them. “I’ve got four kids in college at the same time,” I explained. “I need to earn every penny I can and send it straight home.” They nodded with sympathy and together explained that at the Old Course I would average two rounds a day at £60 per round. I did the math inside my head. In a season that lasted around two hundred days that was around forty grand in U.S. dollars. Music to my ears, and I immediately set down two objectives for the six months ahead of me—learn to be a damned good caddie for Jack, and earn $40,000 for my family.
The rain, which had been coming down in sheets, suddenly got even heavier, peppering the metal roof above us like machine-gun fire. “Get yourself some good waterproofs, tops and bottoms,” one fellow said. “Gore-Tex. Nothin’ else works in this shite.”
The whole time we were in the shed I wondered how difficult it was going to be for me to be accepted by the other caddies. Tonight I made up my mind that I’m not going to tell anyone that I’m a writer. If someone asks, I’ll say that I was a teacher before I came to Scotland. I won’t say I was a college professor, just a teacher. Wherever Americans go in the world they think they’re better than everyone else, and if word gets out that I’ve been on the Today show, and chumming with Hollywood stars on the set of a movie I wrote, and riding through Chicago in Oprah’s limo, I won’t stand a chance. In truth, those things are faraway memories now, just things that happened to me across the years and don’t have anything to do with why I’m here. And none of these boys I will work with comes from a more modest childhood than my own, and so I have earned my humility.