By Leif Skodnick
The conversation, which happens often, is predictable.
I’m on a public golf course to which I showed up as a single, just looking to play 18 holes, and I’ve been inserted into a group of two or three other players. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth hole, the small talk in the cart or on the tee box will turn to what everyone in the group does for a living, and I try to demur for as long as I can before admitting that I’m something of a sportswriter.
“Oh really? That must be fun. Do you write about golf? Who’s your favorite golfer?”
I’ve been asked this question literally hundreds of times on carts and tee boxes from Florida to New Hampshire, and as a 41-year-old, I know the answer I’m expected to give, and I don’t give it, not because I’m being spiteful, or pedantic, or just a jerk. Really.
“Heath Slocum,” I answer without missing a beat. Obviously, that is not the expected answer.
It’s an answer that rarely draws more than an, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of him.”
. . .
The best jobs in life, the jobs that you truly enjoy, the jobs that don’t feel like work, the jobs where you’re sorry to leave at the end of the day and look forward to returning the next day, those jobs somehow seem to capture us during the summers of our youth, when we’re easily distracted and don’t realize how good we had it until years later, when work feels like work, when we feel exhausted at the end of the week, when we scan job postings wondering if there’s something better out there.
I forget how, but me and three other guys from my New Jersey high school found out that a golf course about 20 minutes away had a caddie program, and so shortly after my junior year of high school ended, I was at Olde York Country Club on a Tuesday with a few of my friends and maybe 10 other kids being trained how to carry a bag so the clubs wouldn’t clank and rake the sand and hold the flagstick.
Luckily, I was already familiar with golf and something of a golfer. My paternal grandparents were avid players, but my father, unable to cure his slice, had no real interest in playing, and so I ended up with my late grandfather’s Titleist blades (great clubs to learn on — exceptionally forgiving!) and played four or five times a year from eighth grade on at Mercer County’s public courses and would beat balls at the Windsor Greens Golf Center on Princeton-Hightstown Road a couple times a month. Was I good? No. But I could break 100 and have fun doing it.
So Tuesday’s caddie “training” ends when we get around the front nine there at Olde York, and now we’re ready to go. We come back the next day — I pick up the other three guys and we drive down early so we can be at the top of the list. We arrive before 7, we all get out, walk our 18 holes, collect our $20 plus tip for the loop, and on we go to the next day.
Most days, we get out. Some days, we don’t. Some days, it rains. On the days we don’t get out, we grab range buckets and head into the woods to the right of the first fairway and collect up all the errant Titleist Professionals and Tour Balatas and Maxflis we can carry and then go back to run them through the ball washer.
The first week in July, Larry the Caddiemaster, a somewhat gruff retired Trenton fireman who had a short tolerance for the kind of shenanigans you get when you’re around teenagers, caddies, and teenaged caddies, came in and told us not to come in the next week. He said another club down the road had a professional tournament going on and they needed caddies, so the next Monday morning, off we went to Laurel Creek Country Club for the 1997 Nike Laurel Creek Classic.
That week, the Nike Tour (now the Korn Ferry Tour, there have been several changes in title sponsorship that you probably remember and don’t need me to rehash) showed up 10 miles from Olde York, but it was a different world. At Olde York, the best player I looped for all year was the ladies’ club champion, who was probably a 6 handicap and could shoot 75 on a good day. None of the male players I caddied for were anywhere near as good as her or as good as they thought they were, and generally, they didn’t pay as well. I’d get $40 or $45 from the ladies’ champ for 18 holes; I came to expect $30 or a little more from the men.
We got to Laurel Creek early that Monday, and there was a tent set up and 60 or 80 caddies waiting for loops underneath it. Some of them were real tour caddies, grizzled, loud, and, it seemed, somewhat crazy. There was a guy who told anyone who wanted to hear and plenty who didn’t that he caddied at Bel-Air in Los Angeles during the winter, and Joe Pesci gave him $500 a round; there was another guy who pulled up in a Pontiac Trans-Am covered in stickers that proclaimed that Jesus loved him, and me, you, and the world.
Players came up, pointed to guys, and off they went. My friends and I sat there, waiting. Finally, one guy went out — he went with Jeff Gove. My other buddy got sent out with Rod Pampling. Around 10 a.m., a smaller guy with a huge Ping staff bag and blonde hair and ’Bama bangs comes to the tent, points to me, and off we go to the range.
“Hey, I’m Heath,” he said, with a noticeable southern accent. “I just need you for today, I’ve got my girlfriend coming in and she’s going to caddie for me during the tournament.”
Heath Slocum was screened in cursive across the big front pocket of his enormous white Ping staff bag, and he had a full set of Ping irons and wedges with wear spots the size of dimes on the faces, and he was wearing the big white Ping visor, a white shirt, and khakis. Slocum was just out of the University of South Alabama, a school I then didn’t know existed and proceeded to forget for a decade until I lived in Biloxi, Miss., and drove there to take the LSAT in 2009. It was just his seventh pro start, and he had made exactly $530 on the Nike Tour so far via a T-50 finish at the Nike Cleveland Classic three weeks earlier. If I had to guess, I had made more looping at Olde York to that point in the summer.
Now, to this point in my life, I’ve never seen a professional golfer besides Gary at Olde York, the head pro who I’d seen giving lessons but had never actually seen swing a club; Mario, the pro at Windsor Greens; and Steve, who ran the shop at Princeton Country Club, which was neither in Princeton proper nor a country club. I felt like the coolest kid in the world throwing that big strap on my shoulder and following two steps behind as we headed down the cart path.
We arrive at the range, down a hill and a good 200 yard walk from the caddie tent, and I hand Heath a 7-iron, and he starts warming up and…HOLY SHIT, THIS GUY IS GOOD. The sound of the ball coming off the club is like nothing I’ve ever heard, and you can throw a pillowcase over the balls he’s hitting with each club, and I’m just toweling off the clubfaces and trying to keep my jaw in place.
Off we went to the first tee, and around Laurel Creek, one of the very few courses I’ve been to in the Northeast that was built through a housing development with long distances from the green to the next tee and thus far less than ideal for walking.
I wish I could tell you who we played with. They talked about guys they knew from playing college golf in the South, places they’d played down there, and so on. I know there was a money game going, but I couldn’t tell you the details, since I had yet to become familiar with nassaus, hammers, greenies, presses and so on. I was 17, and generally a pretty good kid; the caddie yard had only recently introduced me to the fun of cigarettes, dip, pot, and beer.
As we went around, I paced off yardages and otherwise tried to keep to the three rules of caddying: show up, keep up, and shut the fuck up. As I remember it, Heath hit the ball in the fairway, knocked it up to the green, then putted around on each green to the small spray-painted dots where the holes would be cut for the tournament.
As we walked between holes on one of the cart paths, he started dribbling his Titleist Professional 90 like it was a basketball.
“Heath,” I said, “don’t do that, man. That’s a $3 golf ball!”
“Not for me, it ain’t,” he replied, smiling.
He made the game look effortless, and I wondered if I could swing Grandpa Mike’s Titleist blades that well.
At the end of the round, he slid me a $50 bill, the most I got for a single round the whole summer. I probably wasn’t worth it, but hey, $50 is $50.
On Wednesday and during the tournament rounds, I looped for another player, David Branshaw, who missed the cut.
Slocum, with his girlfriend on the bag, made the cut and pulled in his second-biggest check of 1997 — $1,553.
On Saturday, I was back at Olde York, slinging a bag overloaded with found balls belonging to a 15 handicapper on my shoulder for $20 and a tip.
. . .
I spent a few minutes a week the rest of the summer dialing into AOL and looking up Nike Tour results, trying to see where Slocum and Branshaw had finished, and looking for Gove and Pampling as well. My senior year of high school began a few months later, and since I wasn’t much of a student, I was told I had to leave Olde York to “focus on school,” a decree which only engendered rebellion. If you want to really piss your kid off, tell him he has to give up something he loves for school. He won’t forgive you for years.
The summer of ’98 came, and Heath Slocum found himself off the Nike Tour not because he didn’t win enough money in ’97, but because he had developed ulcerative colitis. In months, he’d shed weight off his previously 150-pound frame, and he disappeared out of the agate.
Later that summer, off I went to college in northern New York, to a school that I picked largely because it had a Division I hockey team and a golf course. I’d occasionally look for his name, and Branshaw’s name, and so it would go.
In the three-and-a-half years following the 1997 Shreveport Open, Slocum made just one start — the 2000 Mississippi Gulf Coast Open at The Oaks in Pass Christian, Miss., finishing 1-over and missing the cut.
And so there I was in the bar at the University Inn next to the Oliver D. Appleton Golf Course at St. Lawrence University when the name SLOCUM popped up on a leaderboard on the Golf Channel.
Early in March, he started one of the hottest seasons in Nike Tour history with a third-place finish in the Florida Classic. Two months later, he’d made four of six cuts, then finished seventh at the Virginia Beach Open before missing three cuts in a row.
And then, the hot streak began. A win at the Greater Cleveland Open on June 17 netted him $76,500 — more than he’d made in every event combined to that point — and third place in the Dayton Open the next week pulled in $28,900. Slocum picked up another win the next week at the News Sentinel Open in Knoxville, all but assuring him a top-15 finish on the Nike Tour money list that would get him a PGA Tour card for 2002. When Slocum picked up his third win of the season on the developmental tour at the Cox Classic in Omaha on August 5, he finished at 22-under, a stroke ahead of Pampling and four ahead of Gove, earning $94,500.
And the next week, having become just the second player to win three events in a season on the Hogan/Nike/Buy.Com/Nationwide/Korn Ferry Tour, he was at Warwick Hills Country Club in Grand Blanc, Mich., teeing it up as a member of the PGA Tour in the Buick Classic.
. . .
The thought was in my head that one day that I could be that good, and as the summer of ’97 went on, I hit enough balls and improved to the point where I could break 90 with some regularity. Over the summers of my college years, I stayed upstate to take summer classes and played the Devereaux Emmet/Geoffrey Cornish layout at least six times a week, dropping my handicap index into the low single digits.
After college, my alternating shifts of being unemployed or underemployed or working 95 hours a week largely kept me away from the course. I’d occasionally beat a bucket of range balls, play a round or three a year with the set of Palmer Peerless irons I got from the pro at Olde York in ’97, but my focus was on my career as a play-by-play announcer for a couple of different East Coast Hockey League teams, one of which was in Biloxi, Miss. I got back to playing a little bit more in Biloxi; there’s no shortage of decent courses on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
When that team in Biloxi folded, I ended up in law school in Jackson, figuring that the family of the Ole Miss sorority alumna I was dating would like me a lot better if I had a more reputable career.
Each semester of law school, for those of you who didn’t attend, is two months of boredom (reading cases and outlining) capped off with four weeks of terror (studying for and taking exams). You make friends around studying, and being that I was 30 when I started, I was no longer into late nights at bars and parties. Sometime in the fall semester of my first year, I found myself at a local course near the airport called the Refuge, and then I was there the next weekend, and then three days later.
And we’d get out onto the course, and I’d be asked about how I got into golf, and I’d mention Grandpa Mike’s Titleist blades and that time I broke 90 in 8th grade and that I’d caddied in high school.
“Really? Ever caddie for anyone good?”
I’d smile and tell them about that week in 1997 when I lugged the bag for Heath Slocum, who won a FedEx Cup event a year earlier, with the huge white Ping staff bag and the dime-sized wear spots on his irons as we slugged Miller Lites and rolled down the cart path to take another swing.
By that point, Health Slocum had made a name for himself on the PGA Tour, with four wins including a 2009 win at the Barclays at Liberty National, where, despite being 124th on the FedEx Cup points list, he knocked in a 20-footer to save par on 18, avoid a five-way playoff with Ernie Els, Padraig Harrington, Steve Stricker, and Tiger Woods, and win $1,350,000.
When when that gal and I split up, I put my clubs and my broken heart in my Volvo and trekked around to Castlewoods, Brookwood Byram, Live Oaks, and a few other places several times a week with a bunch of guys who were better at golf and more interested in lawyering than I was to chase Titleists and forget my loneliness. I went from a 15 to a 12 to a 10; one day while studying tax law, I ordered a new (used) set of AP1s and a Scotty Cameron Platinum Newport 2 off eBay since I didn’t have to plan travel to keep a relationship alive.
The summer before my final year of law school, my parents organized a trip with some friends of theirs to Pensacola Beach. With clothes for a week and those AP1s, I headed off to Florida and met my parents and their friends.
On the last full day I spent in Pensacola, I got on GolfNow and booked a round at Tiger Point Golf Club. At the time, I felt as though I didn’t have much to be happy about; though I had great friends in Jackson, I’d lost enthusiasm for a legal career and knew the City With Soul wasn’t where I wanted to spend the rest of my life.
After checking in at the pro shop, I sat down in the locker room to change my shoes. Dropping my FootJoys on the floor, I looked up at the name on the locker in front of me.
Heath Slocum.
I thought back on that week 16 years prior and cracked a smile.
Leif Skodnick, a recovering journalist, lives in Rye, N.Y., where he maintains a handicap index that indicates he's modestly abled at the game of golf. He enjoys golf, sailing, beer, barbecue and hopes to one day own a beach house in Ocean Springs, Miss. He'll gladly caddie for you for $100 a round plus tip. Follow him on Twitter at @leifskodnick.
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