Just Golf

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Polishing Antique Idea, Club Recruits Caddies

By BILL MORRIS


When Joan Small and Carolyn Argento met at the Lawrence Yacht and Country Club on Long Island for a round of golf on a recent Saturday morning, they shared a bad feeling. It was not about the gloomy weather forecast.

The women wanted to walk the golf course, but all the club’s caddies were usually snatched up by the men who tee off early on weekends. That meant Small and Argento, under club rules, would have to ride a cart or wait until 3 p.m. to walk the course carrying their own bags. Neither prospect held much appeal.

Then they got a pleasant surprise. Thanks to the club’s recent push to attract and train new caddies, there were plenty on hand that morning, green but eager, like colts aching to gambol across an open pasture.

Small and Argento were paired with Kyle Singh and Zachary Pratt, two juniors at nearby Lawrence High School who had never swung a golf club or set foot on a course. The women smacked their tee shots, and the four marched down the first fairway, beginning a four-hour session of hands-on schooling for the two novice caddies.

“It’s a different game when you walk,” said Argento, who started playing four years ago. “You’re not discombobulated worrying about the cart. You focus on the game, not on where to park.”

Small, who has been playing for 15 years, added: “When you walk, your whole body is involved in the game. You have a sense of perspective. When you ride, you’ve got the food and the drinks in the cart. It’s almost like a picnic.”

By the end of the round, Singh and Pratt were each $30 richer — and much wiser after receiving an abundance of pointers from their employers.

“It’s a nice game,” said Singh, who is on his school’s basketball, football and track teams and is considering taking up golf. “There’s a lot of strategy.”

Such words are music to the ears of Peter Procops, the club’s teaching pro, who grew up nearby in Nassau County and started caddying at neighboring Rockaway Hunting Club when he was 11.

“Caddying is very much like a mirror of life,” he said. “It teaches kids how to be around adults. It gets them out of their shells, and they learn a trade. We’re taking kids and turning them into young adults.”

The American sporting scene is littered with innovations of dubious merit like the TV timeout, metal bats in baseball and oxymoronic “metal woods” in golf. But few innovations have done more damage to a game than the motorized cart has done to golf, and particularly to the art of caddying.

When men were clubbing little balls on the eastern coast of Scotland some six centuries ago, they chased their shots through the seaside sand and gorse on foot, followed by young men carrying clusters of clubs. By the 18th century, those ambulatory valets had come to be known as caddies.

They remained a vital and inviolable part of the game until 1930, when Curtis Willock, chairman of the greens committee at Annandale Golf Club in Pasadena, Calif., got a friend to build him a three-wheeled cart powered by a 12-volt battery. The cart reached a top speed of 11 miles per hour and cost a whopping $4,500. But Willock had a hard time walking 18 holes because he had a wooden leg.

Most of the American golfers who embraced carts in the years after World War II did not have such physical handicaps. Many golf courses were happy to cater to them because they brought in hefty revenue, while the money paid to caddies walked off the course at sundown.

But there were trade-offs. Carts punish grass, which led to the laying of unsightly ribbons of blacktop to accommodate them. In addition to being a packhorse, a companion, a course expert and a psychologist, a good caddie is a tireless maintenance machine, replacing divots, raking sand traps, repairing ball marks on greens — chores many cart-riding golfers often forgo.

“Some of the damage done by carts was more subtle but perhaps more important,” Richard J. Moss writes in his new book, “The Kingdom of Golf in America.” “The job of caddie had introduced thousands of young boys (and a few girls) to the game of golf. The cart slowly squeezed shut this pipeline into the game.”

The dwindling number of young players is just one of the problems for the game today. The number of regular players of all ages in the United States peaked at more than 30 million in 2003 and has been declining since. Perhaps the most accurate barometer of the game’s health — the number of rounds played — has been declining for years. According to the National Golf Foundation, Americans played 518 million rounds in 2001 and 489 million last year.

The recession did not help. Nor do the complaints that golf takes too much time and costs too much money, killer considerations in a country with a shrinking attention span and a mushrooming array of diversions.

When Vinny Biondo, the caddie master at the Lawrence Yacht and Country Club, first began working there in 1976, the club had three dozen caddies and a fleet of 40 motorized carts. Today there are one-third as many caddies and twice as many carts — a ratio the new caddie recruitment campaign is hoping to reverse.

Biondo, Procops, his assistant James King and a club member, Rob Raider, spoke with guidance counselors at local schools, distributed fliers and wound up attracting nearly 60 teenagers to a weekend clinic in May. The recruits were shown a video, given some instruction, then taken out on the course to watch a golfer and a caddie interact. The education process is still in its infancy, but signs are promising.

Other efforts are under way to increase caddying and foster the culture of walking. As it does every spring, the Metropolitan Golf Association, which has 420 member courses within a 100-mile radius of Manhattan, recently put on nine one-day academies to teach the rudiments of the craft. Some 700 aspirants turned out across the tristate area.

“Golf needs to do a better job of promoting the fact that the game is a healthy activity,” said Jay Mottola, executive director of the M.G.A. “Walking 18 holes is tremendous exercise — you burn 10,000 calories. That’s appealing to young people, just like basketball, football and baseball.”

In addition to introducing young people to the game and putting money in their pockets, caddying can lead to scholarships, even job contacts. The golf associations of New Jersey, Westchester County and Long Island, with fund-raising help from the M.G.A., give $1.5 million in scholarships each year, benefiting more than 200 caddies. A handful of local caddies have recently received full college scholarships from the Western Golf Association’s Evans Scholars Foundation.

“I have a little melting pot out here,” said Rich Uva, the caddie master at Quaker Ridge Golf Club in Scarsdale, N.Y., and president of the Metropolitan Caddie Masters Association. “I’ve got kids from the inner city, from the Bronx and Westchester, teenagers and older guys. It goes to show that no matter who you are, there’s something beneficial about caddying. Money might be the main thing, but there’s the experience of meeting people. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a golfer take a liking to a caddy and then hire him to come work for him. That’s priceless.”

At the Lawrence Yacht and Country Club, Neil Cohen recently had such a bonding experience, walking 18 holes with one of the raw caddying recruits.

“It was delightful,” Cohen said. “The kid had never been on a golf course before, but he was respectful and he had a lot of legitimate questions. He knew when to ask them and when to keep his mouth shut.”

Cohen was so impressed he arranged to hire the caddie again the following weekend.

Richard Kaner, a member of the club for nine years, is on an informal one-man crusade to promote walking the course with a caddie.

“I’m always urging players to take a caddie,” he said. “I sense that, slowly, the mind-set is starting to change. People are starting to see the benefits of walking. By the end of last year, I had my whole regular foursome taking caddies. The pace of the game is so much more enjoyable. It’s infectious.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/sports/golf/long-island-club-reintroduces-a-golf-artifact-the-caddie.html?ref=golf&pagewanted=print