Choosing the right club

Choosing the right club

In 1964, when I was 12 years old, our family moved from Georgetown to London Ontario. This permanent change of scene came as a devastating blow, complete with the typical leaving behind of school and friends, entailing the requisite adjustment to a new, bigger city culture. In Georgetown, my greatest joy in life and my escape hatch from the atmosphere of mania and acute anxiety that reigned in our family home was to play hockey and baseball year round, both street games and the more organized variety of team activities. Not only did I play these sports religiously but I also memorized a vast array of statistics gleaned from a massive collection of hockey and baseball cards purchased with money purloined from my heritage coin collection. Like Raymond, the autistic-spectrum character from the film Rain Man, I repeated sports statistics over and over in my head to quell chronic and near debilitating anxiety while I lay in bed sleepless night after night, the victim of acute insomnia that persists to this day.

I was a dud at sports and a disaster at school phys. ed., but I knew all the dope on all the players and cheered on my favorite teams, the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Detroit Tigers, with a quiet desperation that bordered on the pathological.

Much to my chagrin, in London there was little in the way of organized youth baseball, and although kid hockey did exist, the opposing teams were often manned with adolescent mastodons who enjoyed nothing better than brawling. My career ended abruptly at the ripe old age of 13 after I was mercilessly pummeled by a testosterone-enhanced farm boy from a rural team, the Lucan-Ilderton Combines.
Fortunately London had a unique sporting venue that rushed in to fill the breach: a public golf course called Thames Valley, where individuals with limited means could play for next to nothing a sport usually reserved for rich elites. My father happened to have a set of rusty ancient clubs that he’d inherited from my Scottish granddad, with strange names like niblick, mid-mashie, and spoon. I took up the sport with an obsessive passion commensurate with my compelling need to escape the wild and woolly tension that reigned at home and the agonies of adolescence which so beleaguered my life at school.

For the next five years, from March until November, I spent nearly every non-school waking hour at that golf course, learning the sport and earning the money to pay for balls, clubs, and lessons by working ceaselessly as a caddie. I became thoroughly obsessed with golf. I read Golf Digest and memorized all the players’ stats and tips. When I wasn’t playing round after round (sometimes as many as 54 holes a day), I spent endless hours on the practice range whacking thousands of balls, before moving over to the putting green to improve my “short game.” And I became a go-to caddie.
In those pre-electric golf cart days, caddying involved lugging a massive, cumbersome golf bag for five hours, often in the baking heat, in return for a couple of dollars and a requisite pit-stop snack.
I began my caddying career at the annual Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) tournament held at a local country club. Prospective caddies would arrive at the crack of dawn, establish a pecking order, and wait to be assigned a “lady pro” who hadn’t amassed sufficient prize money to bring her own beast of burden on the tour. I certainly didn’t get to carry the bags of the great Mickey Wright or Kathy Whitworth, but instead toiled for fiercely ambitious agonizing young pros who sought advice from their caddies and then berated us when they didn’t properly execute their shots.

Waiting to be allocated a pro was in itself a form of education, as the older caddies would wile away the wait by providing ad hoc courses in sexual education, dispensing advice and information that made carnal activities seem a combination of orgiastic mud wrestling and implausible acrobatics fit only for depraved circus freaks. It’s a wonder that any graduate of a caddie house, as the caddie waiting area was referred to in those days, ever fruitfully went forth and multiplied; the stories told by the “big boys” should either have generated an oath of celibacy or a lifelong career as a pimp.

Much better than caddying for the LPGA was the job that I procured by dint of being an everyday denizen of the course and the pro shop. I became the caddie of Johnny Moffat Jr., the assistant pro at Thames Valley. Not only would I haul his bag during rounds at the local course, but I would also shag balls for him, another term that has gained a rather licentious connotation, but which simply entailed his whacking hundreds of practice balls and my running around the practice field gathering them up like a compliant Labrador retriever. But best of all, he took me with him to tournaments in all corners of Ontario, an opportunity to hang out with cool young golf pro dudes with platinum blonde girlfriends or cherubic wives in tow, where we caddies got to sleep over at the digs of the budding pros and sometimes spied nubile maidens scuttling out of their boyfriends’ beds during those 1960s summers of love.
In the meantime, I practiced day and night to become a somewhat proficient golfer and spent all my caddie money on second hand clubs that were a step up from those of my grandpa. Like Salieri in the play Amadeus, I was cursed with mediocrity and had to play second fiddle to many a fairway Mozart among my golfing friends. At Thames Valley, we systematically handed in our scorecards and on the basis of our results were assigned a handicap, which sounds like an imposed disability ( a “challenge” or “special need”), but which actually referred to the average of how many strokes over par you played per round, based on an average of your better rounds.

I eventually reached a 13 handicap and often played with guys who were much more gifted than I could ever hope to be, with my stiff swing and tendency to shank. Those who’ve never played golf need to be forewarned that it’s among the most frustrating sporting activities to take up, perhaps one notch below bareback bronco riding. I frequently witnessed titanic displays of temper that had be seen to be believed. After a flubbed shot, my playing partners emitted all sorts of creative and ferocious obscenities or simply lapsed into muttering, gibbering, and profound self loathing. For instance, I often played with a boy named David Porter. Everyone called him Muscles. His brothers called him Muscles; the clubhouse golf pros called him Muscles; his parents probably called him Muscles. He gained the name due to his being what the decidedly non-woke folks back then deemed “scrawny” and a “runt.” Whenever Muscles messed up a shot, he’d ritualistically bang his club on the ground and repeat the mantra “Stupid. Ignorant. Childish.”

Stupid. Ignorant. Childish…this venting was strictly small potatoes. I also played with numerous golfers who threw clubs or wrapped them around trees in a fit of pique. On more than one occasion, as I left a green, an airborne putter whistled by, grazing my head, wildly gyrating like a metallic whirlybird helicopter.

One of my regular golfing companions, Jens by name, was a brilliant player but had the most mercurial temper of all the young golfers I knew. He was rarely satisfied with his shots and would methodically smash various clubs against trees like an enraged Paul Bunyan wielding a non-compliant ax or hurl them like javelins in an arc across the fairway or into the woods.

The 18th hole of the Thames Valley golf course slithered along the Thames River, in those days a poisonous cesspool where enormous, bloated carp floated or were beached in a nightmarish morass of miasmic stench. The slightest errant shot, especially that bane of the hacker’s existence, the proverbial slice, would propel the ball into the malodorous drink with an unceremonious splat. Some poor souls would send several balls to a mushy, putrid grave. And then the excrement would, as it were, hit the fan. Accompanied by strings of imprecations of the vilest sort, clubs would begin flying into the river, including entire golf bags upon occasion. For these folks, it was time to abandon the golf links and to take up shuffleboard or darts.

In early spring 1966, out of the blue, my friend Ron and I were offered a major caddie job. We were already experienced hands by this point and in rather high demand. A pair of local businessmen wanted to hire us for their weekly Sunday outings, not only to tote their clubs but also to secure their tee-off times, which were allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, meaning that we had to be at the pro shop by about 5:30 a.m. to claim the first 8 a.m. slot . My employer was Jerry Siegel and Ron’s was Ben Cohen. These two members of London’s miniscule Jewish community were Sunday golfers who formed weekly foursomes with other community members and placed hefty bets based on arcane calculations of their golfing skills. We loved this job! Not only were we treated to a hot dog and coke at the 11th hole snack bar, but most of all we learned the richest and most exotic cursing and swearing, liberally salted with what we soon discovered to be Yiddish. “You’ve got luck up your ass, Jerry,” repeated Ben. “All your teeth should fall out except one, and that one should hurt!” Jerry would reply. They also referred to each other using various outlandish designations of the male reproductive organ: Shmuck, Putz, Schmeckel, Schlong, Schvantz, Petzl …terms that I felt put our more tepid North American expletives to shame. “Vey is mir!” [“Woe is me!”] they’d shout when they “crapped up” a shot …“Oy vey!”

For three golf seasons, we were the regular caddies for these peppery individuals, so wonderfully different from our own suburban dads. By the time we were about 16, our erstwhile Sunday bosses decided that they would invest in electronic golf carts and our caddie careers fell victim to automation. But not before they challenged us to play a farewell best ball match, us against them, for cash. We proudly held our own on the links, but were most of all flattered by the invitation and absolutely thrilled by the experience itself.

Later in life, I learned that Mr. Cohen, Mr. Siegel, and the other members of their Sunday golfing coterie played at the public facility of Thames Valley because they were barred from all the private golf and country clubs of the city, proscribed for the crime of being Jews.

The Thames River was not the only source of putrescence in London, Ontario during the era of peace and love.

Your friend,
Robert

In memoriam John Moffat Jr.

Obituary of John Moffat | Watford Funeral Home located in Watford, …

Robert McBryde – robertmcbrydeauthor.com