2010 US Women’s Open
Oakmont Country Club
Oakmont, PA
Oakmont Country Club
Oakmont, PA
And that’s that.
After the postponement of play on Friday afternoon, July and I returned to Oakmont Country Club on Saturday morning to finish our second (and final) round, meeting at the player/family hospitality area at about 6:30 A.M. to grab a bite before warming up and playing the final 10 shots of her 2010 United States Women’s Open.
It had a strangely celebratory feel.
But as I have before in this journal, I’m getting ahead of myself. From looking at the live scoring throughout the day on Friday, or in the sports section of your newspaper on Saturday morning, you knew we weren’t going to make the 36-hole cut. However, for me the real fascination was in the journey and while the competitive result of that journey was not what I’d hoped for, there was much joy along the way. So much, in fact, that I am sad I had to leave it.
Allow me to rewind.
First Round (Thursday July 8th)
Frankly, I don’t really remember what I wrote about Thursday’s round in my quick update that evening. I thought the round was largely successful in that we posted a 79, which was 8 over par and within 2 shots of our intended score. We weren’t perfect, but then, as Bob Rotella is so fond of telling us, golf never is.
I made one huge mistake which cost us dearly.
For me, the day started early, as I took the opportunity of a late starting time to walk the course for the purpose of locating the pins on the greens and seeing how approach shots from other players were reacting. I started my reconnaissance at about 8:30 A.M., and given the weather, the course was only going to firm up even more; greens would be harder to hold and more slick to putt on and the fairways would also be faster and harder.
As I reached the second hole, another caddie who was doing the same for his player turned to me and asked me what my starting time was. It turned out that this particular fellow was a local Oakmont caddie and he’d spoken to some of the Oakmont maintenance people who reported to him that the USGA had ordered that the aprons to the first and tenth greens be watered prior to play. I wasn’t surprised to hear that news, and it wasn’t public as far as I could tell. As I’ve described, and will discuss later when talking a little about our Friday/Saturday round, the approaches to those greens were nearly impossible.
My Thursday goal for July was a 77. July’s stated goal was to get through the first couple of holes on each side without major damage. Doing so would probably accomplish both of our goals. We came close, but…
We didn’t make it through the second hole as unscathed as July and I would’ve liked and it was my fault. The caddie’s job is to show up, keep up and shut up while providing useful information to the player and helping maintain the player’s confidence, not confusing her or introducing any shadow of doubt. In golf, doubt and incorrect information are death to success. Failure can lead to a loss of confidence, which propels the player into a death spiral of failure, lack of confidence and more failure.
As we stood on the second tee, mulling over the tee shot, we pored over our yardage books, decided on a target line, a desired distance for the second shot and did the math. The most important question was how far we had to hit the tee shot to carry the second bunker on the right side of the fairway.
I’ve long made the joke, as a securities lawyer, about attorneys doing math. Math is for the investment bankers who graduated from business school, or the CPAs that do people’s taxes. If you want the wrong answer, have a lawyer do the math. At least that’s my joke. Sometimes it’s just not funny. You know, like the times when you add an extra zero onto the price of a $200,000,000 bond offering.
Or when your player asks you the distance to carry the bunker with the impossibly high lip. The bunker which is so deep and has a face so high that it’s impossible to launch a golf ball at an angle steep enough to get it over the front lip of the bunker and to the middle of a green 135 yards away up a fairly steep hill.
In the practice round on Monday, we’d chosen a 3-wood for the tee shot, which July carries about 200 yards, and found the fairway just to the left of the bunker of which I speak. From there we’d hit a soft 8-iron to the green and while the ball didn’t stay on the green, given a nice chip, we would’ve made par. In Tuesday’s practice round, there was a little more distance on the shot to the green, I believe (I didn’t make notes of that hole on Tuesday so there couldn’t have been anything dramatic) but we would’ve had the same result. On Thursday? Well….
The bunker of which I speak juts into right edge of the fairway. Any tee shot hit a little off line to the right can find the bunker if it doesn’t carry about 215-220 yards. I think you get the picture. From there, we made the only double-bogey of the day and so started the round plus 3 (after a predictable and, honestly, respectable bogey on the ridiculous first hole).
It was my fault. I was the lawyer who did the math.
I was immensely proud of July on Thursday. Actually, I was immensely proud of her all week, as she handled the entire experience with unflappable grace – every aspect of it. She might have gone back to her hotel with her parents and flung stuff against the walls or kicked the garbage can and thrown temper tantrums, but I never saw it and doing so would be grossly out of her character anyway.
An attitude like that, the ability to take what comes in stride and with grace and humor, will take her a very long way. There are guys that I play golf with that could learn something from playing a round of golf with July. Had the greens been more receptive to approach shots on Thursday – had they been more like the greens the LPGA Tour plays to during the regular season (not USGA-spec major tournament greens), July might have walked off Oakmont on Thursday with a one-under 70 or even par 71. (I’m also assuming that she had a caddie that didn’t make a massive math error.) I’ve already mentioned that when she hits 3-wood, it carries about 200 yards. That’s about what most average recreational golfers do, as well. The USGA calculated her driving distance average for the first round at about 235 yards. She’s not a long hitter, but her iron play, short game and putting is excellent. Most importantly, she has a remarkably strong game where it counts the most – in the six inches between her ears.
I’m convinced she would’ve been at or under par if the greens had been anything but glass tabletops. And that’s at Oakmont.
Oakmont on Thursday was more difficult than I could have expected, even after the practice rounds. If you recall, I wrote in an earlier entry that I generously gave July two putts per green on Monday and had her for about a 74-75. Of course, during the practice rounds, we were putting from angles to anticipated hole locations so…well, you never know. It turns out that I was just about perfect in giving July 2 putts per green. For the thirty six holes we completed, July recorded only one three-putt! One. Uno. Une. None on Thursday. Fewer three-putts than the number recorded by the eventual championship winner.
It was all about July’s patience. She had abundant patience and clearly she understood that the golf course was going to give shots, it was going to take away a lot of them and she would do her best, which was what she could control and that was that.
When the golf course or her own performance took away a shot, she handled it with aplomb. I nearly hugged her once on Friday because of her exceptional poise. Early in the round, while we were fighting to stay in sight of the cut line, she hit a shot that was not particularly to plan. She handed me her 8-iron, and though the failed shot was likely going to lead to a bogey, she smiled and in her lovely Columbian accent, said, “It is what it is. Let’s go see what we have to do next.”
An example of what her patience gave her? Number 15 at Oakmont features a 75-yard version of the Church Pews running up the left-hand side of the fairway. For those of you who don’t know what they are, the Church Pews (on the left side of 3 and 4, which run parallel but opposite directions) are a huge 100-yard long bunker with twelve mounds shaped like hot-dog buns and nearly the width of the bunker, covered with thick fescue grass. They can be murder. On Thursday, on 15, July unfortunately overcooked her tee shot into the bunker, about 240 yards from the green. Luckily, we were in a place where the lip of the bunker wasn’t particularly high and the ball sat up on the fairly heavy sand. Using her trusty three-wood, she launched the ball at the green and hit a magnificent bunker shot which came to rest, after rolling a fair amount, about 20-yards short of the green on the apron. From there, using her putter, she rolled the ball about 2 feet short of the pin (42 yards away) and calmly stroked in the par putt.
Let that be a lesson to all you hotheads out there. I’m sure that when the members play the course, 15 is a single-digit handicap hole. Has to be. Nine times out of ten, one does NOT make par from that bunker. Simple as that. July forgot the first shot after it was over, forgot the second one (only remembering later in the clubhouse), etc. Par from the Church Pews. Amazing.
For me Thursday’s round was much as Mike Davis (the USGA guru who sets up Open courses) had predicted. In Thursday’s USA Today, Davis was quoted as saying that Oakmont was in his view the gold standard of Open venues and that it would be an interesting intellectual test for both players and caddies. I failed the pop quiz on number 2, but overall, I’d give myself about a 75 for the round. I’ll discuss that test a little later, but as far as Thursday went, I passed, but I knew I could’ve been better for my player, and vowed to be so on Friday.
Trouble was, our Thursday round ended at 8:30 in the evening, we had a 9:12 AM tee time the following day and no matter what I might have hoped for, it was important that we eat and sleep. There was almost no way that I could do that and get back early enough to pre-walk the course. Some wag is going to comment about what a real caddie would do in that situation, but….
After signing her scorecard, July invited me to join her, her parents and her psych coach for a quick dinner. Easier said than done. I learned that following a crazy Columbian driver, especially one that was a little lost, is not as easy as one would hope…and a lot of Monroeville closes at 9:00 P.M. We managed to find a Red Lobster that would be open until 10:00 and though poor Angel our server dropped July’s broiled flounder, smashing the plate and nearly giving me a flounder/potato bath, we managed to fuel up and then it was off to our respective hotels.
After our 79, we were still in position to make the cut.
Second Round (Friday July 9-10)
Friday dawned fairly clear and still hot and humid, with the threat of thunderstorms in the air, but by most accounts, the likelihood was that the rain wouldn’t come until early evening by which time we’d be through playing. I was hoping that we would be sitting around, or smart-phoning around (what a fascinating, modern age we live in – to quote “Lucky” Jack Aubrey of HMS Surprise) watching the cut line, waiting to see if we would be playing through the weekend.
It wasn’t to be. We knew before we finished we wouldn’t be around for the weekend and we didn’t escape the rain and finish our round, either.
Sigh.
I won’t bore you with too many details. I have to give you one, however.
One. As is the number one. The first hole at Oakmont. I don’t believe I will ever forget, nor will I ever forgive, the first hole at Oakmont.
On Friday, we played the first as our tenth. We started on the back nine on Friday morning. Number One is a 437-yard par four which runs parallel to Hulton Road east towards the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The hole at first climbs a small hill, then dives down steeply towards the highway, as I have described previously. From the landing area that July and I could reasonably expect to find off the tee, we would be looking down a significant slope at a shot about 160-170 yards long to the front edge of a green with severe right-to-left and front-to-back tilt. Johnny Miller adroitly noted, in the NBC Sports broadcast of the final round on Sunday, that when Oakmont was designed and built, courses had to be made to withstand the elements. Accordingly, greens like the first green would have to be built so that rainwater would easily drain off the green, not stand and soak into the green to make it soggy and unplayable. Were one to drop a thousand balls onto Oakmont’s first green from some height, they would roll according to the slope of the green and collect mostly around the edges.
On Friday, our tee shot missed the fairway, finding a bunker off the fairway to the right, forcing a sand wedge out of the bunker – not the hand wedge we used on Monday) to a spot on the fairway about 130 yards from the front edge of the green. Our playing companions had found the fairway with their tee shots: Belen Mozo’s ball lay about 150 from the front, Kirby Dreher’s about 140. The pin was 23 steps from the front of the green and about ten from the left side of the green, which falls off severely – obviously, the major drainage point for that particular green.
Belen, hitting first landed her shot about 15-20 yards short of the green on the extended apron, exactly the shot my eyes told me necessary from her position in the fairway. The ball bounced once, landing on the front of the green, then rolled all the way to the back of the green and into the rough behind the green, almost on a straight line from where her shot started, taking virtually none of the slope of the green. Kirby learned from that shot and landed her ball about 40-50 yards short of the green, but to nearly the exact same result. The ball took a little more of the break of the green and ended up on the back rough, but about 5 steps to the left of Belen’s ball.
July and I were nothing if not alert and watchful.
We chose, as the landing area for July’s shot, the backside of a small mound about 35-40 yards in front of us and to our right. We expected the ball to kick off the mound (90 yards from the front edge) and roll to the front of the green, eventually losing enough speed that the ball would take the break of the green, curl to the left and trickle to a stop about 20 feet from the pin.
We got everything right, except the last part. The ball trickled to a stop at the edge of the rough pin-high on the left side of the green.
Could that really have been what the USGA intended?
You will already know that we didn’t finish our second round on Friday. The thunderstorm, which ended up lasting through the night and dumping an inch-and-a-half of rain on the course, whipped up just as we teed off on number 7, our 16th hole of the day. By the time we hit our approach shot from the fairway (which found the front right greenside bunker) the USGA had decided it was too dangerous to continue and the horns blew all across the course, calling us to the school buses which surrounded the course – marked as player evacuation vehicles.
I should’ve kept my mouth shut. Earlier in the round, as I grabbed one of several Gatorades I consumed during the day, I noticed that the hole marshals had a supply of disposable air horns hidden under the tables holding the drinks coolers. “Hope you don’t have to use those,” I quipped.
For some reason, I found it immensely amusing that each of the four small school buses that were parked behind the trees lining the 7th fairway had a sign hanging in the back window which read: “This bus has been examined for sleeping children and none were found present.”
Soon, each bus was crammed to capacity with sweaty, irritated golfers, caddies, USGA Rules officials, standard bearers and scorers along with golf bags, score standards, towels, etc. The doors closed and the lead rules official in each bus then announced that we would wait – on the bus with no air conditioning – for twenty minutes while the USGA decided what to do. Eventually, we were driven back to the clubhouse, where we were herded onto the porches, or into the player/family hospitality areas – wherever we could squeeze a little space.
We were to wait.
It was miserable, but in the end, it was interesting out there on that porch. One sweet moment occurred near the end of our stay out there (though we had no idea it was to be near the end). I was sitting on a table against a wall, next to Azahara Munoz’ caddie, Dan Wilson. It was hot, there was little air moving, the rain outside the porch was falling in anger. As I said, it was miserable. Louise Stahle came out to the porch to grab something from her golf bag, which stood next to where Dan was sitting. She looked at the two of us sitting on the table and asked if she could bring us something to drink.
Thank you very much Louise. You are a true Sun Devil.
Later, after play had been suspended for the night, I passed Louise on the way to July’s car with July’s golf bag. I stopped and wished her the best of luck for the remainder of the tournament (she stood in the top 10 when play was suspended) and, to my surprise, she reached out, touched me on the arm and said, with all sincerity, “Thank you very much. Good luck to you too.” Something a full-time caddie on the LPGA Tour had said to me on Tuesday resonated in my head. That exchange would never happen on the PGA Tour.
Second Round Conclusion (Saturday, July 10th)
At least we made the weekend.
I can’t take credit for that – that one belongs to Rafael Murcia, July’s dad.
What I can take credit for – at least partial credit – is this one: we played even par on Saturday. We finished the par on 7, then made par on 8 and 9 and went in.
Oakmont had been much affected by the Friday evening rains. July and I noticed how the balls reacted when we warmed up on the short-game practice area Saturday morning. They stuck on the greens. Our group noticed as we walked off the bridge over the Expressway from the eighth green to the ninth tee and watched a group play their approach shots to the green on number one. None of the players in that group got their golf balls to the green with their approach shots down that hill. They all apparently couldn’t believe that the rain had softened the course that much. Likewise, their pitches all came up short and the two putts I saw were left 10 and 15 feet short.
Oh, to have played in those conditions for an entire second round as some of the afternoon tee times on Friday did! They never started Friday and played their entire second rounds on Saturday. We might very well have made the cut; others, though, would’ve benefitted from the same benign conditions and the leaders’ scores might have been much lower.
Remember my fearless prediction that the winning score would be over par, unless there was rain?
In an earlier journal entry, I’d said that if we shot 79-76, we’d have a great chance at making the cut. I was off by a couple of shots; as it turned out, a score of 152 or better after the second round made it to the third and fourth rounds. We came in with an 81 which eventually left us T-125. We beat some big names, though.
It was a difficult, but as I said before, somewhat celebratory feeling to finish the round, knowing that we were not going to make the 36-hole cut. I think my wife Sherilyn had the simplest explanation for my feelings of sadness.
For me, this was a huge event. As I said to a number of people and wrote in an early journal entry, this was likely my one chance ever at competing in a national championship. July has a number of these ahead of her, as do our playing companions on Thursday and Friday. Chances are I will never again step inside the ropes at a USGA event with the ability to do something about the outcome of the round. Because of that, the buildup to the event was big and the letdown after failing to achieve my goal was equally as deep.
The ending had a celebratory feel in part because the pressure was off and July, Nancy and I, after depositing clubs in their car, sat in the gallery behind the 18th green, eating ice cream sandwiches (I had one of those incredible Nestle’s Tollhouse Cookie Ice Cream ones!) and drinking Diet Cokes (I swore off sodas the entire week) and just watching and enjoying golf, including hugging Aza Munoz after she birdied 18.
After flirting with the top-ten, Aza would go on to finish T-19, a huge achievement, one likely to go a long way in her quest for the Rolex LPGA Tour Rookie of the Year Award. A great finish and a tribute to Aza and, to her caddie, Dan Wilson. Dan, as most people will never know, did a great job of rallying Aza on Thursday after what could’ve been a disastrous beginning, when she opened the round four over par through the fifth hole and seemed, when I saw the two of them as they walked off the sixth green, on the verge of tears.
Kudos to the two of them.
As we sat in the bleachers, July asked me whether the experience was what I’d expected it to be and what I’d learned from the week.
The Answers to July’s Questions (Summing Up the 2010 U. S. Women’s Open Championship)
From the golf standpoint, the U.S. Women’s Open at Oakmont in 2010 was more than I expected. In other ways, the experience was less than I expected. Let me explain.
I refer you back to the fact that I was privileged enough to be paid $400 (against expenses at least four times that) to be a spotter/scorer for NBC Sports at the 2006 U.S. Men’s Open at Winged Foot. I also spent Father’s Day Sunday in June, 2000, at Pebble Beach for the 2000 U.S. Men’s Open and was blessed to have attended the 2008 Masters “Toonamint” with my dear friend, the Honorable Edward Johnson of the Court of Appeals of the State of Georgia. So, I’ve attended majors in the past and have some idea of what it’s like to be both inside and outside of the ropes.
From a golf standpoint, Oakmont was every bit the test of USGA golf provided by Winged Foot in 2006. In fact, I think Oakmont, probably in 2007 (Angel Cabrera) and definitely in 2010 (Paula Creamer), was an even more stern test than Winged Foot. (Shame on you, Phil Mickelson…darn it…). It featured everything one comes to expect from a U.S. Open. There was the impossibly long three-shot par 5, the drivable par 4 (with serious consequences – and a blind tee shot thrown in for good measure), the monstrously long par 3, the nasty rough, the bunkering, the slippery and outrageously contoured greens. Seasoned golf fans know the drill. Why was the course more difficult than Winged Foot?
The Oakmont greens.
The greens were nearly impossible to hold (until the weekend), difficult to read, speedy as a scared jackrabbit and as a result confounding and mind-numbing test of patience and skill. Even if one were successful in landing a ball on the green and having it stay there, the number of times the ball’s final resting place yielded a realistic birdie opportunity was extremely small. The Oakmont greens were not for the timid, the weak of heart or mind, the needy and unsure. The greens were a three-putt waiting to happen, an instant bogey on the card the moment a ball rolled off the fringe or a contour discounted or ignored. Their seemingly impossible elevation changes frustrated and confused.
In short, the Oakmont greens were a nightmare. Every maddening one of them. The Oakmont greens were so difficult that the players felt enormous pressure to find the fairways, and the proper positions in the fairways, off the tee just to have the faintest of chances to hold a green off the fairway or find the appropriate target. Thus, from tee to green the margin for error was miniscule while the required precision of execution was immense. I kept thinking, on Thursday and early Friday before the thunderstorm that there were likely a whole lot of PGA Tour stars who would be doing no better than their LPGA colleagues, playing from the same tees that the women were playing. It is likely a given that there are a number of men capable of spinning the ball more than many of the women, but in truth, at least in my view, the greens were so difficult to hold in the first and early second rounds of this Open that spin would not have provided the same advantage as creativity.
Maybe what I was seeing and not recognizing was the effect on playability, accuracy and ball spinning power of the new rules regarding grooves in iron clubs. Someone with more technical expertise than I will have to weigh in on that. To my knowledge there aren’t any new rules about putters. The greens were not only a nightmare to hold with approach shots, they were a constant strain to putt.
In short, from the golf perspective, I agree with Mike Davis. Oakmont provides the ultimate test of USGA Championship golf and is a difficult and exhausting intellectual test for players and caddies. While it lacks the aura and character of some of its other colleagues, the truly great golf courses such as the Old Course at St. Andrews, Cypress Point Golf Club and Augusta National, Oakmont makes up for that by being their superior in difficulty and fascination. Someone wrote in something I read prior to going to Pittsburgh that forty years of Oakmont might not be enough to understand its every nuance. I believe that and would count myself among the luckiest golfers alive to be a member and have the opportunity to play the course at will.
As far as the experience being less than anticipated?
Less hassle, less traffic, less annoying and pointless security, less rudeness, less uptightness and arrogance from the USGA officials, less of everything which makes the U.S. Men’s Open such a pain in the neck. The U.S. Women’s Open was a gallery-friendly, player-friendly and largely caddie-friendly event. I think more people should see the women play. They are astounding golfers.
What I learned about golf and being a caddie.
What did I learn?
The answer to that question is really the most important aspect to the whole experience. I went to Oakmont for the experience and I wanted to have the experience in order to observe and learn. And of course I went to Oakmont to have fun and to support my player, Juliana Murcia Ortiz.
I had a heckuva lot of fun. And I learned a lot. Enough to fill a small book. Which I’ve kind of written, huh?
It was a fascinating experience having to learn to set aside, yet draw from, my own instincts and experiences as a player in advising my boss on strategy and choices around the golf course. And it was interesting, in the rare moments I took the time to do so (mostly on the practice tee but occasionally on the course in competition) to observe my own ego as the transformation took place. Put a different way, I learned to set aside my own aspirations and see what lay in front of us through July’s eyes, using her filters and conforming to her remarkable set of skills.
I am clearly a different player than July. I am bigger and stronger than she, but she is far more skilled than I. (She practices!) She is less aggressive and takes fewer risks than I do.
As a sidebar, and a good example of what I’m writing about, during our practice round on Monday, when we reached 17 (the obligatory “drivable par 4”), after July hit the conventional 5-iron equivalent up the hill and to the middle of the sweet spot, 100 yards from the middle, I asked her if, for the sake of experiment, she wanted to hit a driver at the green. She had no interest in doing so, and we never considered it during tournament play. The fact that she tried the driver during our practice round on Tuesday, I felt probably owed more to some potential desire in her to satisfy my curiosity coupled with the fact the tees were set 15-20 yards closer (I recall the tee shot being about 239 yards uphill) than any real intent to use the shot during the tournament.
So as July’s caddie, I learned to see through another’s eyes and mind, setting aside my own game as only a set of experiences from which to draw a picture or an idea when necessary. It’s a skill, a necessary one if one is a coach, a counselor, a parent, an advisor. I couldn’t project my game, my personality or my skills as a player onto July. And interestingly enough, I never wanted to do so.
After I arrived home in Bellevue on Saturday evening, I had a great chat with some friends staying at our house whose daughters are competitive junior golfers. We talked about this very subject and in talking to Bruce and Kim about this, I discovered that in six days at Oakmont, each day with golf clubs in my hand, immaculate Titleist ProV-1s at my feet on perfect turf and acres of open space in front of me, I never once applied clubface to ball – and I only thought about it twice the entire week for a brief moment each time.
In other words, I was never tempted to “see for myself.” I had transformed my efforts into seeing for my player.
Bruce asked me if there were ever times when I disagreed with a choice July made. In what was probably an inarticulate response, I answered that there were maybe a half-handful of times when I thought perhaps a slight variation of her intended play was more appropriate, but that there was never a case where I thought her choice was dead wrong.
By my intent, she nearly always spoke first as we analyzed a shot and I had determined, after consultation with Missy Farr-Kaye and July’s sports psychologist that I would take those opportunities to confirm July’s thought processes. I never found myself thinking that she was inaccurate in her calculations.
In the process of learning to set aside my own game to see through my player’s eyes, I learned much about my own thought processes on a golf course.
Once during the late stages of the first round, July asked me what playing partner Belen Mozo had scored on the hole we’d just completed. I had no idea. It wasn’t that I wasn’t watching. I watched every ball struck by every competitor on the course that I could see, but not out of a sense of competitiveness so much as an opportunity to possibly learn something that could be used to our advantage. Consequently, I was never counting. Likewise, there were a few times when I didn’t even know our score.
I found myself focusing on one of two things the entire time on the golf course.
As Missy and Sandra and I had discussed during the practice rounds, it was important for July’s performance and her sanity that she focus when it was necessary and relax her mind when it wasn’t. Fred Shoemaker (of Extraordinary Golf fame) talks about showing students just how little of the time spent on a golf course is actually physically playing the game of golf. Because July was going to spend 6 hours a day on the course in the pressure-cooker of a national championship, I was set to remind her to breathe, enjoy the walk, enjoy the course and her playing companions, and when it was time to “play golf” – be ready. Our routine was to start preparing a shot from about 20 yards from the ball. From the beginning of the process through the moment we knew the result of the actual shot took about 2 minutes. Doing the math (I used a calculator this time) only about 2 and a half of the 6 hours would be playing golf. The rest of that time was to rest her mind.
Part of the caddie’s job, I discovered, was to help my player with the 2 minutes of each shot. That was one of the things upon which I focused.
The other “thing” was to be on the lookout for troublesome mental/emotional stuff in my player the other 3 ½ hours of the round, gather as much extra intelligence about the course and conditions as possible when not engaged in the 2 minute drill or checking on my player’s mental state, help her remember to stay hydrated and fed, towel her cheeks when they became drenched with sweat and hand her the umbrella to stay out of the sun, make sure I myself was hydrated and fed (as well as her family members walking the course with us), all the while carrying the bag and keeping the clubs clean.
Most important was not to lose any head covers.
I learned that caddies, like public school teachers, are somewhat over-worked, mostly under-appreciated and grossly underpaid.
Some Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Melissa Luellen, Head Women’s Golf Coach at Arizona State University, for a lot of things related to this whole experience, including putting up with some really stupid questions when it became apparent that I was going to Oakmont for Juliana. Melissa really kicked off the entire thing by accepting my invitation to bring her team to our house in 2006.
Dan Wilson who probably has no idea that he really helped me in my first (and possibly last) experience as a caddie in a major championship. I could’ve been treated as a pariah out there, but there had to be some reason we were thrown together so many times during the week. I never felt as if I were really, truly, intruding. Thanks, Dan.
Thanks to Anna Nordqvist and Azahara Munoz, who helped to make me feel welcome in their world as professionals.
Thanks to you guys for reading this journal, and for your encouraging comments along the way.
Special thanks to Missy Farr-Kaye, Assistant Head Coach of Women’s Golf at Arizona State University, for her insights about July, July’s golf and many other things that went on during the week. Thanks also for being there to check in on all the Sun Devils at the U.S. Women’s Open (including me). Be well always.
Thanks to Sherilyn for putting up with having somewhat of a Walter Mitty living under the same roof. I am well aware of what a frustration I’ve been and you are a saint.
Finally, July, thank you again so very much for allowing me to join you at Oakmont in 2010. Caddying for you was an honor and privilege, an incredible experience and one heck of a lot of fun. I am proud of you for the way you enjoyed your time in the Open and I learned much from you about myself, about grace under pressure, about enjoying the many rare and unrepeatable moments we experienced and maintaining self-possession and calm in the midst of such an occasion. You are funny, wise beyond your years and charming and you have a very bright future ahead of you. I wish you every happiness and success – in golf, in art, and in life.
If you ever need someone to haul your bag, I would do it in a heartbeat. For as long as I have one.
