fore! The confessions of a caddie to the stars
Fun, frolics and bad tippers... the real truth about working at the home of golf
MARCHING up the final fairway of the Old Course at St Andrews, 45lb golf bag on his shoulder, Oliver Horovitz’s thoughts inevitably drift to the transaction up ahead. Will his golfer be generous? Often the wealthiest are the worst tippers.
At least the disappointing pay days once known in caddie code as Hawaii Five-0s are well behind him. These days, the basic fee alone is £50. The gratuity – unless the caddie has snapped his golfer’s putter – is normally at least half that much again.
But it would be wrong to regard Horovitz’s concern with his tip as grasping or beggarly. At 30, the New Yorker is a best-selling author, occasional film-maker and frequent professional speaker in golf clubs worldwide.
He is a Harvard graduate and has an apartment on the Upper West Side near Central Park. It is just that, for a few months every year, he returns to his ‘summer job’ of caddying at the Home of Golf.
It can be gruelling work – up to ten hours a day heaving a golf bag in often dismal weather. But there is no shortage of glamour. Each October, the Dunhill Cup attracts a clutch of celebrity golf fanatics, including A-listers Michael Douglas and wife Catherine Zeta-Jones, Samuel L Jackson, Andy Garcia and Bill Murray. Horovitz always sticks around for that, caddying every year for pop star Huey Lewis.
The rest of the time, it is the luck of the draw whose bag he gets – and speculating about the scale of the tip is written into every caddie’s DNA.
‘You learn a lot about life when you’re doing this,’ he says. ‘The guy who spends the whole round telling you how many airplanes he’s got, how many cars he drives, he’s the guy who’s stiffing you at the end of the round.
‘The guy who’s saved up his whole life to get over here because it means so much to him, who knows every hole because he’s researched them beforehand, he’s the guy who’s giving you £100 at the end of the round.’
This and many other life lessons were learned on the remarkable journey of a young American who realised at 17 he was not quite good enough to be a professional golfer.
It was a crushing disappointment, but one offset by another realisation a year later – he was hopelessly in love with St Andrews. That love was later expressed in a memoir tracing a teenage New Yorker’s faltering attempts to become one of the gang in a caddie shack full of hard-bitten Fifers.
The results were at first disastrous. ‘I was making every single mistake out there you’re not supposed to make,’ he remembers. ‘It couldn’t be a worse way to start in the shack. All the things which had usually made me friends before were getting me in trouble every day. I was like the scum of the caddie earth that entire first summer.’
HE had been playing trumpet on stage at Stuyvesant High School in New York when the life-changing call came on his mobile. Stopping mid-performance, he answered it to learn Harvard had accepted him – but for the following year.
Looming before him was a gap year for which he had made no plans. But, in an instant, he decided it would be spent in St Andrews, playing as much golf as he could.
Embarking on an exchange programme at St Andrews University, he could not have been happier, revelling in the freedom of his first foreign adventure without his parents while befriending an elderly great-uncle, Ken Hayward, who had lived in the town for years.
Only when he decided to stay in St Andrews over the following summer and do some caddying did the trouble begin. It had not occurred to the cocky New Yorker that a culture clash may be in the offing with irascible Fifers who had little time for trainees, never mind gobby American ones.
Things might have gone even worse had they known his family background. His father Israel is an awardwinning playwright whose one-act drama Line is the longest-running play in Manhattan. Another, The Indian Wants the Bronx, helped launch the careers of future Godfather stars Al Pacino and John Cazale.
His London-born mother Gillian, a former Commonwealth Games athlete, won the Paris marathon in 1980.
Older siblings include film producer Rachael, whose credits include About Schmidt starring Jack Nicholson and Moneyball, with Brad Pitt. Then there is brother Adam, of the hell-raising New York band Beastie Boys.
LITTLE wonder Horovitz was a teenager in search of something to call his own in a family awash with success. He says: ‘It’s a really crazy family and we’re so close and everyone works really, really hard and is so supportive of each other but for me it has always been like this is my niche in my family.
‘I’m the kid who goes to Scotland and caddies on the Old Course. It’s my way of carving out a little identity for myself, I think.’
Lesser characters would have given up within a week. Even before a ball is hit on the first tee of his first round shadowing an experienced caddie, he has been told to ‘shut it’.
A few days later, he commits the cardinal sin of contradicting another caddie’s yardage advice for a golfer. ‘I’ve been caddying here for 15 years, you think I’m gonna let a bloody trainee tell me about yardage?’ screams the caddie. As word gets around about the faux pas, he is shunned by almost all his colleagues.
The fact the trainee’s yardage was absolutely correct was neither here nor there.
Yet Horovitz yearned to bond with those fascinating characters brimming with knowledge and stories about the world’s most famous golf course. He wanted to learn their private language which allowed them to communicate with colleagues while keeping their golfers in the dark.
Talk about TNT, for example, referred to blowing up – which, in caddie speak, meant telling their golfer they had not tipped highly enough and asking for more. Caddies holding the pin high above their heads, meanwhile, indicated a golfer ‘beyond comprehensible levels of horribleness’.
One of the few things working in the 18-year-old Horovitz’s favour was the fact that he was an excellent golfer, with a handicap of 1.6. ‘That wins you respect in the shack, like it wins you respect in the town,’ he says.
The second factor offering a glimmer of hope was his Uncle Ken, a former
Conservative councillor who knew almost everyone in St Andrews. ‘That helped because I had a connection to the town. People realised I wasn’t here for a year and gone.’
So, with hard work and major adjustments to his Manhattan boisterousness, Horovitz graduated from trainee to fully-fledged caddie.
By the time he was due to enrol at Harvard, he knew exactly where he intended to spend the following summer – every summer, in fact, throughout his academic career.
Returning to St Andrews that second year, he found the welcome in the shack a little less frosty. But soon he was embroiled in a scheme that threatened to undo all the progress he had made.
A rival outfit called Model Caddies had been launched in St Andrews. The idea was that rich golfers who fancied some eye candy could hire models laid on by the agency to caddie for them. The only problem was none of them knew anything about golf.
When Horovitz was asked to become their secret trainer, it left him with a dilemma. Spending time on a golf course with gorgeous girls hanging on his every word was his idea of heaven. But his caddie colleagues could not have been more disparaging about the rival business that placed looks above hard-won expertise. But even when the shack discovered his clandestine training sessions for Model Caddies, he somehow talked his way out of it.
It was the last time he would ever take sides against his caddie ‘family’.
The following year he was back again, this time with film equipment in the hopes of persuading caddies to be in a short documentary for his film studies degree. That was the year he finally earned a nickname: Spielberg.
Seeing the 1st and 18th fairways loom into view as he travels into town by bus, he is suddenly overcome by emotion. ‘I’m here and my golf clubs are here and a whole glorious summer now Celebrity golfers: Oliver Horovitz, far right, with, from far left, Huey Lewis (of the News), an unidentified caddie, Bon Jovi drummer Tico Torres and actors Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia stretches out in front of me… and as I keep looking out the window, I realise I am crying.’
Sitting in the St Andrews Links clubhouse, gazing out over the New Course, Horovitz says he can barely imagine not returning to St Andrews every summer.
‘I’ll usually come here in June and I’ll be here through the Dunhill in October,’ he says.
BUT why is he carrying on caddying? Should successful writers really be carrying golf bags for tourists, many of them overpaid American captains of industry? That’s not how he sees it. ‘I’ve had 70-year-old guys just crying on the golf course, they are just so happy to play the Old Course. On many of the days we are caddying, this is pretty much the best five hours our golfer is having in his life. To be able to have that on a daily basis is very cool. ‘Just last week I had a lawyer from Washington State, a very quiet guy. At the end of the round, he went to tell me how much fun it was for him and he choked up, he literally couldn’t get the words out. This means so much to these people.’ Evidently, spending his summers on the hallowed St Andrews links still means the world to Horovitz too – and establishing himself at its caddie shack is clearly among his proudest achievements. Not that he considers himself one of the senior guys yet. ‘Seriously, 11 seasons here is nothing. There are guys who have been there for 30, 40 or 50 years.’ Among the legends he has met at the shack are Bruce Sorley, one of only five people to have caddied competitively for Tiger Woods, and Jim Bowman, who caddied in four Opens and for President Bill Clinton, yet had never swung a club in his life. Horovitz is at least established enough to be the one Huey Lewis asks for every time he plays the Dunhill Cup. The two have teamed up for five years. Ironically, having carved his own niche away from showbiz, he finds himself mixing with celebrities almost as often as the rest of his family. It was a US publisher who first showed an interest in Horovitz’s memoir of his first few years in St Andrews. By the time a British publishing deal came a year later, the book was on the New York Times bestseller list. Since then, Horovitz has spent much of his time away from St Andrews, travelling the world and talking about the place. He has spoken in golf clubs as far afield as Nepal, New Zealand and Saudi Arabia. ‘I tell them to come here and play golf – and to take caddies,’ he says, laughing. He describes his book as ‘a love letter to the shack’ – or more precisely, to the curmudgeonly philosophers of golf who populate it. All these years later, he suspects, they may have warmed to him... just a little. But it is plainly a love letter to St Andrews and to Scotland too. Sometimes, he suggests, it takes an outsider to point out just how blessed we are. An American Caddie in St Andrews by Oliver Horovitz is published by Elliott & Thompson at £8.99.