No One Knows What It’s Like To Be The Bag Man

GRAND BLANC, Mich. —  I feel like a caddie today.

This is neither a boast nor a lament. This is just how you feel after walking 45 holes in Tony Lingard’s shoes, metaphorically at least, over four soupy days last week during the Buick Open at the Warwick Hills Golf and Country Club.

When you think like a caddie, you are alternately proud and aggrieved, privileged and patronized, depending on how the day develops, on how the round is going, and how quickly Joanie and Karen can serve me up a BLT in the caddie wagon when I end up there.

With the PGA Championship, the final major, set for this week outside Seattle, I came here to take a day-by-day, one-tournament peek into the caddies’ whimsical lifestyle on the PGA Tour through the eyes of Lingard, a spry 38-year-old Australian with burnt yellow hair and a merry glint in his eyes.

Lingard carries the clubs for Mark Carnevale, a former Nike Tour player who was playing his 10th consecutive event in his effort to earn a PGA Tour card. And, as Carnevale packed up his gear on Friday, having missed the cut by four strokes, I’m not sure whether Carnevale appreciated my presence here at the Buick, detested it, or even understood it at all.

Which made me feel even more like a caddie.

TUESDAY

Carnevale and Lingard are breezing through a fast nine holes of practice on the Warwick Hills course, and Carnevale is a little tired after gritting out a tie for 32nd last weekend in Memphis and traveling Monday to get here.

As two other caddies pass on another fairway, one yells out to Lingard, a former Australian rules football player who has dazzled the other caddies with his kicking, “Hey, the Lions need a punter, Tony!”

Lingard laughs, and keeps walking with Carnevale, who is smiling, too.

Carnevale is hitting the ball well--as he has for the last five or six weeks--and birdies the last three holes as Lingard watches appreciatively.

“You can come out and walk with us on a Tuesday,” Lingard says. “But on Thursday, when the real playing starts, you’re back behind the ropes. And I’m still there, right next to the player, knowing what he’s thinking, figuring out how to hit the shot, and knowing just by the sound of it if he’s hit it right or not.”

Lingard came to America on a vacation, found himself in the New York area, and, before landing a caddying job at the exclusive Maidstone Country Club in East Hampton, worked as a landscaper on some of the great Hampton estates.

Now, as he quickly smooths over a bunker after Carnevale has practiced a few sand shots, Lingard proudly points to the shape and style of his raking job. A bad raking, he says, sometimes leads to a minor fine from the PGA.

“You didn’t know you need four years of landscape school to be a caddie, did you?” he says, winking.

Lingard hooked up with a player named Sean Murphy at a pro-am at Maidstone, went out on tour with Murphy in 1994, and since has worked with Stuart Appleby and several other players.

Last winter, he and Carnevale had a few drinks at a restaurant in Ponte Vedra, Fla., where Lingard lives with his wife, Brenda Benham. Carnevale had a caddie, and Lingard was tied up, too, but they made a mental note to keep in touch.

“I had a guy who was working for me the first part of the year, and things just weren’t clicking,” Carnevale says. “And Tony came open. . . . I get down on myself sometimes. . . . He kind of calms me down a little bit. He’s definitely a conversationalist, which is unusual for me.

“He talks to a lot of people out there. At times, I’ve got to remind him, ‘Hey, we’re working here.’ But it’s great. He’s a fun guy to go around with . . . and he’s pulling for you a lot. Some guys, if you go out and play bad, they kind of get down on you. And he’s got a real positive attitude, which helps me out a lot.”

During the practice half-round, Lingard paces out a few yardage spots to make sure his old yardage book is still accurate, sketches the slopes of the greens, and Carnevale does the rest.

“There are guys who want their caddie to be their valet,” Carnevale says. “There are caddies out here who have to do everything for their guy. I mean, they’ve got to do his laundry, watch his kids. . . .

“My basic thing is, I want the guy to show up for work, do his job. Don’t run his mouth out there as far as trying to tell me how to play golf. If I go out there and play and don’t say anything to him for the whole round, then that’s fine. But if that one time that question comes up, he needs to know it.”

WEDNESDAY

You don’t become a caddie to get rich or to be pampered and that becomes clear from the morning discussion in the caddie wagon.

The caddie wagon is a trailer that travels to 25 of the 30-plus tour stops, run by two women--Karen Hippenstile and Joanie Mucera--who are married to tour caddies. Subsidized by the PGA, the wagon is where the caddies stop in for a quick, inexpensive breakfast--Lingard is famous for his porridge orders--kibitz a little, or grab a sandwich after a long round.

“They’re all 40, but they act like they’re 15,” Mucera says, smiling. “Hey, they’re all frustrated golfers--my husband included.”

Other than the typical teasing about last night’s annual caddies’ bowling tournament, the subject of conversation today is heat, or more specifically, the 90-plus-degree temperatures and stifling humidity last weekend in Memphis.

The PGA does not allow the caddies to wear shorts--the U.S. Open, run by the USGA, does--and five caddies went to the hospital for heat-related problems at Memphis.

Also, because the PGA does not allow caddies in the clubhouse, they have nowhere to go--other than the tiny caddie wagon--to duck the heat or stay out of a rainstorm.

When they’re waiting for their players to emerge from the locker room or clubhouse, they can usually be found lolling around near the practice green, methodically wiping the clubs, biding their time.

There are no set qualifications for becoming a tour caddie--only what a player thinks he needs. Sometimes they bring out their wives or their brothers or whomever to carry their clubs.

The caddies know how they’re viewed.

“Oh, it’s a terrible state of affairs, really,” Lingard says. “You’re treated like a Third World citizen, and I don’t mean that in disrespect of Third World citizens. But you are by the PGA. They think you’re nobody.

“Let’s be honest here: We don’t want to hang out with players, anyway. But if you need to go into the clubhouse for something, you should be able to. . . . They’re not better than us as people. No player’s better than a caddie as a person. And probably in fact they’re not as good as people.”

Says Bruce Berry, Scott Verplank’s caddie, to everybody in the room, “Did you hear the comment from [PGA official Frank] Kavanaugh last week? Five caddies go down from the heat. Kavanaugh, while he’s laughing, says, ‘Well, I don’t see anybody going down that hasn’t been drinking all night long.’ ”

“Nobody was drinking that week,” Lingard says. “You can’t afford to go out drinking when it’s 95 and the index is 117. You can’t afford to go out and drink 10 beers. That’s ridiculous. You’ll fall over right away. But it just shows what the PGA thinks of us.”

Caddies aren’t employed by the PGA. They make their own deals with the players who hire them and are basically on week-to-week retainers, seeing if the match is right and if the “boss,” or player, wants them to stick around.

Some caddies are well off--like Mike “Fluff” Cowan, who earns a cool $300,000 a year carrying Tiger Woods’ bags. But most of the 120 or so regular tour caddies bounce around to several players during the season, and earn an average of $45,000-$60,000 a year. Many make much less than that.

Carnevale isn’t qualified for the PGA Championship, but, as Lingard allowed himself to hope, could have gained entry by winning the Buick.

“I’m looking for Carney to play well this week,” Lingard says. “He’s been playing well, killing his driver.”

Lingard, like most caddies, works on a week-to-week salary with Carnevale, which generally is about $500-$750 a tournament. Like many of the most respected caddies, Lingard has some of his expenses paid by Carnevale.

The caddie usually gets 10% of the purse if his player wins--and buys drinks for the other caddies--7% of a top-10 purse, and 5% of any other purses. Of course, if a player is cut, he makes no purse, and his caddie makes only the weekly salary. Most of the caddies have side deals, and can earn about $150 extra a week wearing a particular hat or cap.

“If things aren’t going well, you’re first out,” Lingard says. “As a caddie, you know you’re expendable. I mean, that’s just part of the job. It’s no big deal. If you get sacked for bad reasons, well, then you’re going to be a little . . . off. But if you get sacked when the guy’s not playing well and he wants a change, fair enough.”

But the temporary nature of the relationship goes both ways. Lingard has turned down requests by other players to leave Carnevale and go with them, and Cowan ended a long relationship with Peter Jacobsen to work with Woods.

“If you want to work with a guy, if you think he’s a better player or if you think you can do better or get ahead, you say, ‘Well, I’m parting ways. I’m going to start with Joe Blow over here,’ ” Lingard says. “Because the bottom line is, you’ve got to make money. Most of us are married. It’s a business.”

THURSDAY

So, once the tournament begins, what does a PGA Tour caddie do, other than wear his player’s name on his back and carry the clubs?

“Actually, I think one of the most important things a caddie can do is just show up on time,” says Cowan, by far the most famous caddie. “Be there when you’re supposed to be there. And the rest of it just falls into place.”

The caddie’s basic job, say Cowan and Lingard, is to be there for all practice sessions--even if just to stand there in support--and to keep the player feeling confident. That usually means always knowing exactly how far away he is from the hole, which way the wind is blowing and how far he has to carry his ball to be safely on the green.

A caddie’s most valuable tool is his yardage book--which tells the distances to various points on each hole, to the fairway bunker or big oak tree. A caddie without his yardage book is just another guy from the crowd holding the bag.

Which leads to the funniest thing Lingard has ever heard about a caddie on a course.

“A guy that went to the Port-A-John and dropped the yardage book in. That’s happened a couple times,” Lingard says. “They had to fish it out, because you need that book. Smells, though.”

The caddie’s biggest fear, and the thing that will get his player in the most trouble and get him angriest, is getting the yardage wrong--and having it result in a shot over the green. “Touch ‘em all” is the caddies’ sardonic expression when a shot is over-cooked.

“The bag weighs about 30 pounds, but some days you think it’s like carrying a ton,” Lingard says. “But when you shoot well, it’s like carrying a paper bag. . . .

“When a pro asks you a question, you need to know your answers sharp and clear. No hemming and hawing.”

There isn’t a lot of hemming and hawing between Carnevale and Lingard during the first round at Warwick Hills, mostly because Carnevale isn’t playing very well and is more than a little angry at himself.

He shoots an even-par 72, and needs a much better second round to make the cut.

“He’ll do better tomorrow,” Lingard says. “He’s been playing too good to hit it like that again.”

FRIDAY

Carnevale hits it like that again.

Midway through the round, Carnevale is still around par--the leaders are 10 or so under--and needs to catch fire to make the cut. But he whips his drive left on the par-five 16th--almost out of bounds--and storms up the fairway.

Lingard smartly stays 30 yards away from Carnevale all the way up to the ball, then lingers on the fairway, pacing off what has to be more than 300 yards to the green.

“C’mon Tony, we don’t really need yardage here,” Carnevale says.

Quietly, to himself, Lingard mutters, “Trying to give you some time to cool off, eh?”

Carnevale finishes the round two over for the tournament, and the cut is two under.

Afterward, Dave Lemon, caddie for Robert Damron, relaxes near the parking lot outside the clubhouse. Damron, a promising young player who has already made more than $400,000 this season, has missed the cut by a stroke.

“I’ve been out here since ‘78,” Lemon says. “And I won with [John] Mahaffey at the PGA and that kind of ruined my life. So I’m still out here caddying. I tried to quit doing it once. I was shooting pool. . . .

“But I came back. When you’re doing good, things couldn’t be better, right? When your player’s not making any money and you’re just barely getting by. . . . I’ve been through that, too. I went for a couple years. . . . But Bobby, he’s a great kid. I’m very, very lucky. The only way we’d split up is if he fired me.”

Meanwhile Lingard meets Carnevale at the same spot, and agrees to meet him again in Denver in two weeks. That is, if Carnevale--who is nonexempt and so must wait for all the exempt players to decide if they want to play--can get a spot in the Sprint International.

Then Carnevale hands Lingard his weekly check, shakes his hand, and drives off in his courtesy Buick.

Lingard walks back to the caddie parking area, half a mile away, back to the “Blue Chariot,” the name for the rusty light-blue 1982 Ford Granada he bought several years ago for $500.

“It runs like a dream,” Lingard says. “Why should I get anything else?”