TRIALS OF GOLF NOVICE.

Auckland Star, Volume LIII, Issue 3, 5 January 1922, Page 2

TRIALS OF GOLF NOVICE.

PLATERS AND THEIR CADDIES. * caddy is a youth who carries your toH clubs over the course and has his own opinion of your game. Sometimes he expresses it and sometimes hedoesnt Jn either case you are just as much abashed. After you have played ten minutes with the' average caddy you feel as if you had 'been playing the piano with Paderewski to turn the leaves for you (says the "New York World'). (H the end of the game', when lie takes your putter and drives a green crabapple further than you can drive a golf ball with your pet club, you feel more that way. Caddies come from all places except homes. Apparently none of them have fathers, mothers, brothers or sisters. Neither have they any domestic feelings—or any feelings of any kind, for that matter. They are of assorted sizes. Recently four of us playing on a Hudson River golf course had four caddies, none of whom was less tiian six feet tall. They called us all by our first names or by' insulting nicknames which they invented. After looking at them we didn't do it. Whenever Brown would address the ball one of them would say: "There goes Bill into the rough again.' And another would add: "If the dumbbell gets the :ball off the tee." After they discovered that Brown came from Ohia and chewed tobacco they stopped ca'ding him Bill and referred to him as "C'hewey." "Chewcv's go- two up on you, Shorty,"' my caddie would say. consolingly, "but if you step out you'll get him yet. Vm going to swat a tree with a brassie every time he starts to drive after those." When he was told that this sort of thing wasn't done very much on a golf course, he seemed grieved at my ingratitude. "I was just tryin' to help you into a. couple o" dollars, you poor little sap," he said dismally. Whenever we approached anyone ahead of us our caddies grew particularly- belligerent. 'Drive into 'em. Clumsy, and soak 'em in the egp.'' said one of these simple children of Nature to the worst player among us. "You can't git the green, but ya might get one of them stiffs. We ain't supposed to wait all day while they plays numblcty-peg over the fairway." Wo tvere rather relieved when that gamp ended. We never saw those caddies Hiram, and hope never to sec them. Still they were interesting. They were different. In Scotland. I am fold, caddies all have long grey whiskers and carry flaska on their hips, hips from which they dispense at a shilling a nip. They are very efficient, but Their thrift "makes tbem extremely disinclined to lose (bails. j Hpre it is different. A good American caddy may find the 'ball, (but he seldom announces it. If yon don't find it your- | self, you go on. and he comes out and | finds it the next day.