U.S. Career Caddies on Endangered Species List : Invention of Motorized Golf Cart Is Driving Away a Tradition on the Links

Whoever was the first man, or woman, to strike a ball with a club into a hole--and the Scots claim it was a Scotsman while the Dutch claim it was a Hollander--one thing is certain: the arrival of the caddy was not far behind.

For as the game of golf developed in complexity, anywhere from 500 to 600 years ago, the single club grew into an assortment. The assortment required a bag. And the bag demanded to be carried by someone other than the ball striker. Ergo, the caddy was born.

Ever since, the caddy has been the golfer’s beast of burden, alter ego, father confessor, adviser and psychologist--for the player who could afford one.

A Nasty Turn

But evolution has taken a nasty turn for the caddy. In the U.S. anyway.

The career caddy in this country has become a rarity, much like the old-fashioned drugstore soda fountain, the corner newspaperboy and other institutions which once were part of an inimitable part of the American scene.

“He’s become a vanishing species,” observed Herbert Warren Wind, New Yorker magazine’s graceful golf writer and the game’s most respected historian, during a recent conversation.

“They’re a dying breed, a dying breed,” Chick Ruzic said with even greater finality. “And a breed apart,” added Ruzic, who believes it unlikely men of such ilk ever again will walk a golf course in this country after the few remaining expire.

Ruzic, 70, former caddy master at Wilshire Country Club, one of the few courses in the Los Angeles area where men who have devoted all their lives to caddying still can be found, said: “The old-time caddy normally lives alone, the few still around. Very rarely do they marry. Sometimes they’ll live with a gal for a while or they might have their one-night stands. But they normally don’t play around with gals too much. Don’t ask me why, what the reasoning is.

“They’re loners. They live from day to day. They’ve got no real responsibilities and that’s the way they want it. It’s just the most independent life in the world. A caddy is, one, a loner; two, independent; three, a drinker, and, four, a horseplayer. All the old caddies are horseplayers. I used to get so mad, I’d need caddies and they’d all be gone to the races.

“I don’t think anything compares to the old professional club caddy. He knew every blade of grass on that golf course. A few still exist today. But they’re dying off. It’s funny, they fade away. They’ll be dead two or three days before their landlady’ll find them or something. When old ‘Red Shoes’ died, the landlord found him in the room. And this is the way most of them die in their room, all alone.”

“But the old-timer thinks it’s the greatest life in the world: ‘I have absolutely nothing to worry about. I make 12 bucks or whatever--three for rent, three for food and I’ve got six to party with tonight. The only bad thing that could happen would be for it to rain for a week. Then I might go hungry for a couple of days.’

“But what’s amazing is their loyalty to the player. The guy they’re packing for. The kinship between the caddy and player is almost sacred. When the old-timer is packing that sack, the player is ‘my man,’ good or as bad as the player might be.”

A distinction needs to be made here.

Ruzic, who began caddying as a boy during the Depression, as did most of the breed of whom he spoke, was not talking about the caddies employed by touring golf professionals who are familiars on the television screen. Tour caddies endure a regimen that is anathema to the free-spirited, easy-come-easy-go old-timers to whom Ruzic referred.

He spoke of the man who began caddying as a boy and made his primary living, such as it was, as “an independent contractor” for club players--and in the long, long ago even for public links amateurs.

No one disputes that the word caddy-- sometimes spelled caddie although caddy is preferred by most golf writers--is French in derivation and that it owes its present use to Mary Queen of Scots, a devotee of the ego-humbling game over which many another addict has lost his head if not quite with the same finality that Mary did hers.

However, different versions exist as to how Mary brought the name caddy into the sport’s nomenclature. Palo Alto-based Robert Trent Jones Jr., son of the legendary golf course architect and himself a links designer of international acclaim, offers a version that sounds reasonable.

During a period of residence in France, Jones said, “Mary had a little course built around her chateau. She had her own sort of Secret Service, which guarded her everywhere she went. It’s members were called cadets, pronounced ka-days in French. One carried her bag and the others were around to protect her as she walked. So the people took to saying, ‘There goes Mary Queen of Scots playing her native game and there are her cadets following and carrying her clubs.’ ”

The loner:

In little Troon, overlooking the Firth of Clyde on the west coast of Scotland, golf transcends the sporting life and reaches almost religious dimensions. When Andrew Wallace was born there 80 years ago, almost everyone of Troon’s residents, from barber to banker to barmaid, played the game on one of the town’s three courses: the “Old Course,” where stiffish winds blow up from the sea across natural, untamed contours and where the prestigious British Open has been held five times, in ‘23, ‘50, ‘62, ’73 and ‘82; another private club, and a public links with 36 holes for men and another 18 for women.

It is fitting that Andy Wallace, the Los Angeles area’s quintessential professional caddy until he retired early this year, began caddying there on the “Old Course” at the age of 8.

While he may not be much of a drinker or gambler, Andy Wallace is the personification of the loner and independent-minded man common to the occupation. He also is close-mouthed about his personal life, another trait common to the breed. Even his closest acquaintances at Hillcrest Country Club where he worked for 52 years maintain that Wallace carries the trait to a ridiculous extreme. Said one who has known him for more than 40 years, “He’s always been that way. Everyone loves the guy. But he never would say much about what he did with his free time. He’s a loner.”

A Lifelong Romance

While Wallace’s Scotch background is not typical of the average old-time caddy in America, it nonetheless suggests the lifelong romance with the game that typifies most of the breed.

Andy Wallace started caddying in Troon as slip of a lad, he said, because in that era in that small town that’s what a youngster did. “Like when you’re young there is nothing much to do in Troon. So after school, you start caddying,” he allowed. At 14, he quit school to go to work in a shipyard, shipbuilding being the other absorption of Troon at the time.

“But things got a little rough in the shipyard and there wasn’t much work there (just after World War I),” he recalled. So it was back to caddying--full time--until he became an apprentice golf club maker at 16, a trade that led him first to Canada, then to the United States. But making golf clubs by hand became an obsolete trade, not long after Wallace arrived in this country, as the big sporting goods manufacturers began monopolizing what had been a cottage craft.

So he returned to what he knew best, caddying, this time at Hillcrest in 1934. He never tried to find other work after that and he never caddied anywhere but at Hillcrest.

He got $3 carrying one bag for a single player (caddies today often work for as many as four players) in those mid-Depression years, a considerable sum for a caddy in those days; some old-timers recall receiving as little as 75 cents for a “loop,” or 18-hole round, during that era. A history of the San Gabriel Country Club notes that in 1905 caddies received “15 cents for the first hour and 10 cents for subsequent hours. Tipping was prohibited.”

Wallace’s career as a caddy in even-natured Southern California, far from the shivery seaside mists of his native land, suited his disposition just fine. “I didn’t feel like working in a factory,” he said of his disinclination to resume his trade as a club maker with one of the major sporting goods houses. “When you’ve been outside all your life, you don’t feel like going to work in a factory. Caddying, you can come and go as you please, not work when you feel like it.

“Why, you could get a nice room for $5 a week in those days. I lived in a hotel on Pico then, about 15 miles from the club. I took a bus and a streetcar to get there. The bus cost 10 cents and the streetcar 5. I’ve always liked the work. It was easy and the people are real nice.”

Today, Wallace, a slight man with a full head of still dark hair combed straight back in a style popular decades ago, lives in a one-room efficiency apartment on South Robertson Boulevard, which for a walker like him is not far from the golf course, which he visits every Monday to say hello to old friends. Other days, he takes a brisk hourlong walk in the neighborhood, waiting for the weekends to which he looks forward in anticipation because there usually is golf on television.

It’s a lonely life he concedes. “I’ve got a lot of time on my hands. But if I had it all to do over, I’d still be a caddy.”

Loners and the gamblers and drinkers and, sometimes, a combination of all three:

“You got it, you named it,” said Billy Paul, 62, a former New Yorker and caddy at Wilshire Country Club for 35 years, when it was suggested to him that most caddies enjoy the life because it provides them the opportunity to thumb their noses at responsibility. “I don’t want it. I don’t want none of that responsibility.”

Paul sat with a beer in his hand, having just interrupted a card game in the caddy pen on a slow weekday at the club, to talk with a reporter who a short time earlier had been told the following by Leo Romano, 62, who has caddied for more than 30 years at Los Angeles Country Club when he was not playing the horses:

“I heard another caddy say one time, and I thought he hit it on the head, that caddy told me about 20 years ago--you know what he said?--he said, it was a cop-out for not working, a cop-out for not working.

“I like being outside. Being outside is part of that feeling of being free. You know what a lot of caddys say? ‘It’s a walk in the park.’ That’s what it is. Caddying is walking in the park. And you’re getting paid for it.

Asset to Man’s Game

“But when I’m out there, I do feel responsible for a guy shooting a good or a bad game. I have to be an asset to a man’s game, otherwise I’m just out there stealing the man’s money. You know the guy who said it’s a cop-out for not going to work? He’s also the guy who told me, ‘If you’re not doing anything for the golfer, that’s stealing money.’ Not long after, he quit caddying.”

Leo Romano, although a former minor-league baseball player, is a round man with a seamless face; he is good-humored and soft-spoken. He describes the Daily Racing Form as his bible and himself as a horseplayer, or his words, an “equine mathematician.”

Billy Paul, on the other hand, is a tall, ruggedly built man with a weather-beaten face; he is noisily acerbic but also good humored.

“I was brought up in an orphanage, man,” Paul said. “I can’t stand four walls. I hate to be indoors. I had a regular job once. I worked three months. Even though I got a raise, I still quit.

He said he was married once, too, but the union was short-lived, he said, “because she wanted me to get a regular job.” Mimicking outrage, he added, “She wanted me to go to work. I said, ‘Forget it, baby.’ ” Paul’s body shook with laughter as if he’d just cracked the funniest joke ever.

“Sure, I’m a gambler. You name it. You name it, I’m a player, baby. I’ll play anything. Bet on football games, you name.”

An almost constant card game goes on in the caddies’ quarters at the club where Paul works. No dice, though, a preference of many old-timers in the past. No club in the area allows caddies to play craps on the premises anymore. “Catch ‘em trying it, and it’s--out,” said one old-timer.

‘Nickle-and-Dime Stuff’

“We cut each other up,” said Paul. “I’m a good poker player. Good pinochle player, too. Right now, they’re playing hearts,” added Paul, with a jerk of his thumb. “I wanted to get a poker game going. Hearts, ain’t no money involved. Nickle-and-dime stuff.”

A week earlier, Paul earlier had caddied five days and earned $250. “That was a good week for me, far above average,” he said. During a comparatively profitable week like that, Paul rents a room for $28 a night in a motel on Santa Monica Boulevard within walking distance of the club. Like many old-timers, he’s never owned an automobile.

“I’ve lived in the street, too,” Paul said. “When I got no money for rent, I make for the street. Plenty of times. Lots of times, they ain’t got too much play. Like Mondays through Fridays. It’s a weekend caddying place. So we pay our rent by the day. We live day to day. We’re like gypsies.

“But why worry about it. You get used to the deal. It doesn’t bug you. I don’t give a damn. My whole family’s dead, my brothers and sisters. I don’t know why I’m living. But, hey, man, I got no regrets.” Paul also admits to being a major-league beer guzzler but he said once he steps on the course “I’m all business. They might smell the beer on me. But I’m all business, all business. I do my job, I don’t stagger.”

Tom Ring, white-haired, immaculately dressed and an admitted gambling addict like Paul, is known as “Ringo” at Wilshire Country Club. He estimates, however, that he has carried clubs at “more than a thousand” courses on both coasts since just after World War II, a period of major transition in the sport, particularly where caddies are concerned. “As a gambler, you never worry about the future,” he said echoing Paul, although his conversation is as genteel as Paul’s is gruff and sassy.

Ring likes to tell a story regarding caddies who drink although he doesn’t fancy the stuff much himself, he said. Seems, he said, he knew a caddy who “would actually start the day with a half pint of vodka and he’d have another pint before 2 o’clock in the afternoon. But he was a super caddy.

“He and another caddy, Indian Gus, were caddying one winter in Palm Springs and both were real good drinkers. Jimmy Demaret (a leading professional of the time) was going to play a practice round. Jimmy told the caddy master he wanted one of the two drinkers to carry his bags. The caddy master protested he had another caddy ready to go.

“Jimmy Demaret handed the other boy a 10 spot and told the caddy master, ‘I’d rather have one of these two absolutely drunk working for me than some of these boys who haven’t been around much.’

“The reason Jimmy Demaret had that attitude was that he knew they would never set the bag down when he was ready to hit the ball or something like that. They may not have been going to help a pro like him much but Jimmy Demaret knew they were not going to cause an incident where it might cause him to shank out of bounds or yank into a trap.”

Philosophical Approach

Eddie Gannon, 69, now caddy master at Lakeside Country Club who began caddying in suburban Chicago more than 60 years ago but held a series of substantial jobs before assuming his present post, is a philosopher about such matters, having watched a lifetime parade of old-timers fade to today’s sparse corps. He recalled this incident:

“We had a member here who was kind of a sourpuss. Never laughed. One day another member asked me in hearing distance of the man, ‘Why would someone become a caddy?’ My answer was that the one thing people want out of life is to make enough money so they have leisure time to do what they want. So I said to him, ‘That makes all caddies millionaires. Because they have all the leisure time they want.’

“And that just about broke up that sourpuss who never laughed. But that would just about sum it up, a caddy’s life.”

Andy Wallace and old-timers still caddying have seen it all. When they began their life’s occupation, golf club shafts still were made of hickory unlike the precision-tooled steel clubs found in the matched sets of today. Balls today are livelier and carry much greater distances. Bags are heavier, elaborate and hold many more clubs.

The old hickory clubs had names not numbers. What is now a five-iron was called a mashie, today’s two-iron a midiron, the present nine-iron a niblick. Usually only two woods were to be found in a golfer’s bag, a driver and a brassie. The sand wedge developed in the early ‘30s by a former caddy, the redoubtable Gene Sarazen, but which did not become commonplace until after the war has revolutionized bunker play.

Some old-timers remember when players hit their drives off little mounds of wet sand before the arrival of what most of today’s players consider as standard a piece of equipment as their putter: the wooden tee.

But of all the changes that have affected the career caddy, even rendered him an endangered species, nothing compares to the mechanization of the game and, especially, the popularity of the golf car, as their manufacturers prefer to call both the electric- and the gasoline-powered vehicles.

The pull cart was the predecessor of the golf car and still is prevalent on most municipal and public courses, particularly the shorter and flat ones. According to Golf magazine’s Encyclopedia of Golf, it “was invented in the late 1930s to answer the demand of golfers on public links who wanted to play but could not afford caddies.” Few private clubs ever have allowed members to use pull carts and virtually none do today.

Even after the pull carts’ appearance, caddies still could be found in considerable number even at public links as well as private clubs. Frank Hannigan, senior executive director of the U.S. Golf Assn., recalled, “I grew up playing on a municipal course that had caddies.”

When the present Griffith Park clubhouse was designed and built in 1933, said Marty Tregnan, president of the Los Angeles Municipal Golf Assn., a caddy shack was included. “Pull carts depreciated the number of caddies,” Tregnan said, “but the real demise of caddies on municipal courses came with the arrival of the cars.” The last of the caddies had disappeared from Griffith Park by the mid-1960s, added Tregnan.

Prone to Tipping Over

Old-time caddies say they recall their first sightings of the mechanized cars after the war in the 1950s. The originals were three-wheelers and prone to tipping over. “They were gasoline-powered and were intended to help invalids,” said Don Rossi, executive director of the National Golf Car Manufacturers Assn.

“The first ones I saw,” Ralph de la Rosa said, “were used by people who had heart attacks and couldn’t play otherwise.”

“At most clubs,” Tom Ring said, “you needed a doctor’s excuse to use one.”

But the arrival of a more stable vehicle in the 1960s changed all that and altered forever the life of the old-time professional caddy.

This has not eliminated caddies but it has greatly diminished their numbers. They still exist because most private clubs demand that at least threesomes and foursomes employ one and sometimes two caddies. This rule prevails, partly for prestige reasons, partly because some players still like to walk and partly because clubs believe caddies contribute to maintainance by replacing divots and raking sand traps.

While many purists don’t approve of golf cars--”Our attitude is terribly, terribly Victorian,” the USGA’s Hannigan said--caddies may yet be banished altogether, many of the caddies fear as do others connected with the game of golf.

The reason is a matter of economics. The cars supply both private clubs and public courses with “a significant piece of revenue,” said Hannigan. “A lot of clubs couldn’t operate without the car income, as many as 90%,” said Rossi.

Those fearful that the caddy will vanish altogether cite what has happened in Palm Springs. With its numerous courses, the area once, according to Chick Ruzic, “was a mecca for caddies. But then the courses there started going to carts (the most common name for golf cars) and the caddies started dying off. So now they’re no caddies in Palm Springs. I think Eldorado (actually in Indian Wells) has a few, but it’s the only one .”

‘Waiting for Us to Die’

“And they’re just waiting for us to die,” said Fred Pennie, 65, who said of “about eight caddies” still working at Eldorado only he and two others support themselves with the job. “And we couldn’t make it if we didn’t have our steady customers. The others are just lucky to get by.

“Courses aren’t built for caddys anymore. The distances you have from the greens to get to the next tee are just huge . You need a car to get from green to tee. I’m not talking about from tee to green.”

True, said Robert Trent Jones Jr., the golf course architect. New courses built in the last couple of decades have been designed for in areas like Palm Springs and with the cart-rider in mind, he said. “They’re spread out and attached to resort developments. And Palm Springs is the resort development capital of the world,” Jones added.

His father, Robert Trent Jones Sr., 80, who has designed 450 courses in 34 different countries during his long career and still is going strong, said he has not planned a caddy shack or caddy yard or caddy pen, whatever the name, for a links in 25 years--or since the big effect of the golf car on the game. “Now we have to design courses with the traffic rules in mind,” he said referring to the cart paths which cobweb most courses today so the turf won’t be damaged.

He noted wryly that his first course was a municipal affair the city of Rochester built with WPA labor in 1931. “It had a caddy shack,” Jones Sr. said.

His son advanced a theory as to why American golfers have become so dependent on the cart, whereas “in most of the rest of the world it is not considered sporting not to walk.” The theory goes like this: The United States is a nation “enchanted” with mechanization, thus “the mechanization of America carried over into the game. Caddies still thrive in the rest of the world which rejects the idea of mechanization of the game.”

No Golf Carts in Scotland

Scotland, where the game originated, he said, does not tolerate golf cars. Nor does England. “Nor most of the rest of Europe and Asia,” Jones Jr. said.

“In the Philippines, where labor is dirt-cheap,” Jones added, “I’ve seen three caddies to a person. At a course with an appropriate name for the game--Wack Wack--one caddy carried the parasol for the player, one iced drinks, one the clubs. A foursome looked a little like an army coming down the fairway.

“There are 40 million golfers in the world and only 18 million in America. So you can see the majority are rejecting the idea of riding.”

Which, for a traditionalist like Jones, is the way it should. He said, “I think car paths are an abomination. Sticking on a black asphalt path ruins not only the aesthetics but it can hurt a golfer’s game if his ball hits on it and takes a crazy bounce.

“It’s like painting a black mark on the Mona Lisa.”

There are those like Chick Ruzic who believe caddies never will go totally out of style since a good experienced caddy “is worth his weight in gold” because of his value to the golfer aside from chaperoning the player’s clubs. They could take heart from a section in Golf Magazine’s Encyclopedia of Golf describing a caddy’s duties. The passage comments that Webster’s defines a caddy as “one who assists a golfer especially by carrying his clubs.” But the Encyclopedia refines that to say: “With a good caddy, it is the ‘assists’ that is important, and the carrying of clubs is only incidental to the main purposes: helping the golfer in any way he can.”

Chick Ruzic refines that even further. He said: “You have caddies and you have bag toters. The basic duties of the caddy are, one, carry the bag, two, club the man and, three, read the greens. Anyone can carry a bag. But reading the greens and clubbing a man you can only learn from experience and by having the right instincts.”

And being something of a psychologist. “You work on your player in subtle ways. It’s like any kind of sport, you have to instill confidence in the player,” said Ruzic.

Herbert Warren Wind, the writer, said, “There’s a nice feeling between the player and the caddy. They work as a team. It’s the only game where you can have an auxiliary like the caddy. There’s no other sport like that.”

An Egocentric Lot

Said Leo Romano, “I’ve always felt that a golfer without any information is lost. Just like a lawyer--if he doesn’t have evidence, he doesn’t have a case.”

Career caddies, despite the humble origins and chancy income of most, are an egocentric lot in this respect. Almost to the man, the old-timer is convinced he knows more about the game and how to impart that knowledge better than any of his fellows.

For instance, Billy Paul said without the slightest trace of embarrassment, “I’m the best out there. I know the business. Hey, how to club a man, how to figure the breaks of the greens. You can’t just go out there and carry bags.”

Said caddy master Eddie Gannon, of the old-timers, “ Everybody was an authority.”

Said Ruzic, “The old-timer will never admit he’s wrong. That he suggested the wrong club or distance to a player. At the end of a round, he’ll tell the other caddies. ‘Yeah, we made a three on seven. We made a four on eight. But he goofed up on nine.’ A caddy talks like a prizefight manager.” The story goes that one old-timer after watching his “loop” butcher a hole by putting poorly rejected the player’s suggestion that he, the caddy, just maybe perhaps, had misread the green. The caddy replied nonchalantly, “I guess those underground streams are changing their course.”

Said Ruzic, “They all knew they were the best caddy. If anyone ever questioned an old-timer’s ability, he’d shrug and say, ‘Just ask my man.’ ”

Take Ralph de la Rosa. He is a mere 62 but he began caddying in the mid-1930s at the old California Country Club, then switched to nearby Hillcrest when the former was subdivided, circa 1950.

De la Rosa likes to tell how “one of my men” refers to him as “The Consultant”--in capital letters. But de la Rosa chooses to advance his expertise a bit beyond that. He recalled, “A guy once asked me what I did for a living and I said, ‘I’m a golf psychologist.’ The guy said, ‘You mean a golf professional?’ I said, ‘Naw. I’m a golf psychologist. Hey, man, I caddy.’ ”