Speaker 1: For members only. Golf Smarter number three hundred and eighty five,
published on May twenty one, twenty thirteen.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Golf Smarter Mulligans, your second chance to gain
insight and advice from the best instructors featured on the
Golf Smarter podcast. Great Golf Instruction Never Gets Old. Our
interview library features hundreds of hours of game improvement conversations
like this that are no longer available in any podcast app.
Speaker 1: The subtitle of the book is Growing Up Girls and
Looping on the Old Course? Why Girls and what do
you get?
Speaker 3: Okay, second season I get back, there's a rival business
that has started up in St Andrews that is in
its infancy when I get there in the second year.
It's called model caddying. What it is is two university
girls have started a caddy business in which they're about
twenty five university girls, all of them with modeling experience,
who are going to be caddying in Scotland. None of
them are golfers. They are all from Saint Andrews, but
they I guess none of them even had been on
a golf course before they were like the twenty five exceptions.
If they knew golf. None of them had ever ever
caddied before, so at this point they needed someone to
train them, and I got introduced to them my first
night back in St. Andrews. I'm talking to these three
girls who are about twenty five thousand leagues above me,
like I would never be able to talk to these
girls otherwise, And it comes up that I'm a caddie,
and this girl Julie, who's setting the whole thing up, goes,
oh my god, that's so cool that you're a caddy.
And never in my life have I been told the
caddying is cool.
Speaker 1: An American caddy in Saint Andrews with author Oliver Horovitz.
This is Golf Smarter. Welcome to Golf Smarter for remembers only.
Speaker 3: Oliver, Hello, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: I'm happy to have you on here. You you wrote
a book that I found to be so fun entertaining,
and I'm just excited to have you on the show.
When do I begin tell me the basis of an
American caddie in St. Andrews.
Speaker 3: An American Caddy in St. Andrews is about my seventh
summers that I've spent caddying on the Old Course in
St Andrews, Scotland.
Speaker 1: And that has got to be an exclusive opportunity. How
did you nail that?
Speaker 3: It's a good question. So I was. I went to
high school at Stuyvesant High School in New York City.
Stuyvesant is just so you know, it's one of these
specialized schools. So it's one of the dorkiest high schools
you'll ever find in the entire country. Everyone knew everyone
else's GPA to the decimal place.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's an East Coast thing.
Speaker 3: Our robotics team was nationally ranked, and.
Speaker 1: You were you were golf nerd.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and in the midst of this, I founded the
golf team, so you founded it. I was like the fawnds,
as you can imagine.
Speaker 1: And then and they're like going, oh exciting, we get
to play video golf and you're like, no, with an actual.
Speaker 3: Ball part of the deal. In Manhattan, if you we
were the only public school in Manhattan that had a
golf team. So what that meant was we were either
hitting balls at Chelsea Pears or we were taking the
subway up to the Bronx to play golf at Van
Cortland Park.
Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, fun and how big? How big of a
team did you create.
Speaker 3: We had a lot of spillover from the football team
and the basketball team. We had about four kids who
could play golf. Actually, our high school matches had a
rule in which it wasn't the lowest score one on
the hole, it was after seven shots, the person who
was closest to the cup won the hole. I like,
so anyway, I was.
Speaker 1: On everybody gets a trophy at the end.
Speaker 3: There were a lot of participation ribbons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and who brought the oranges?
Speaker 3: Exactly? So I so I went stabsant and in my
senior year, I was on the wait list to get
into Harvard.
Speaker 1: I was congratulations.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean at the at the time, it was
really really stressful because kids were getting off the waitlist
and being told they had gotten in. Uh, kids were
getting rejected off of it. I heard literally nothing until
until June, and I was in the middle of my
graduation ceremony and I was actually up on stage playing
trumpet because our you know, our school band was playing.
Speaker 1: It wasn't as if you were not a super achiever
you also had to be playing on this Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was playing third trumpet, which is kind of like
playing division seven hockey or something.
Speaker 1: Right, and you only had two trumpet players.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I was. I was on stage playing trumpet
literally the middle of the graduation ceremony, and my phone
rang in the middle of the ceremony and I looked
at it, and it was Sally Champagne, the Harvard admissions
officer for the New York region. Uh, Sally Champagne kind
of sounds like a stripper name, but she was actually
a missions officer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was. I wasn't gonna buy it. Actually, isn't
this a porno that you're talking about? Exactly? Sally Champagne? Yeah,
like ham.
Speaker 3: So basically everyone around me knew that I'd been waiting
on this call, and like everyone was like, oh my god,
she's calling. This is happening. I ran off stage and
I went into this kind of side corridor alley, and
I took the call.
Speaker 1: Wait a minute, you ran off stage during this during
the yep, you guys.
Speaker 3: Were playing so not smooth. I like put down my trumpet,
like clanked he out of my seat, and I like
shuffled out of the out of the auditorium. It must
have looked really bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the band leader probably.
Speaker 3: Was pretty upset doctor Wheeler. I was not a big
He was not a big fan of mine that day.
Speaker 1: Okay, so miss Champagne give you a.
Speaker 3: Call, and I take Miss Champagne's call, and she says
to me, Oliver, I've got great news. You're in. And
then I said, oh my god. And then she said
you're in for next year. And then I was like,
what do you beyond? I was like, why did you
why did you deliver the news in that way? But
what had happened was Stuyvesant, my high school, the college
office lost my final semester grades. They misplaced them, and
they didn't send them for two weeks after they were
supposed to send them. And by the time they were
you know, I'd killed myself that spring because I knew
I had to get good grades if I was getnet
off this wait list. And Harvard didn't get the grades
in time filled up their class of two thousand and
seven and then said to me, you're the first kid
accepted for the class of two thousand and eight, and
I thus was given I guess you'd call it a
deferred admission. So I had to take a gap year,
which is kind of a euphemism for killing three hundred
and sixty five consecutive days.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and not somebody who's motivated to get this to
Harvard is prepared to do well.
Speaker 3: You're totally right. I mean at the time I was,
I was kind of bummed out because all of my
a lot of kids from Stuyvesant were going there. I
had about twenty friends I knew who were going to
be there the year after.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so at the time I was, and those kids
were so smart that if you waited one year, by
the time you got there, they'd already graduated.
Speaker 3: They were going to be president or by the time
I got there. So I so I was like, what
am I going to do for this year? You know,
if I if I take a year off and really
just do nothing for a year, I'm going to get
to Harvard, I'm gonna I'm gonna flunk out. And I
and I had this, I had this idea. So I
had already applied to University of Saint Andrews back earlier
in the year as a as a safety, as like
a lark in a way. And I knew about san
Anerew's because my mom is actually English and we've got
a great uncle who lived in Saint Andrews who'd been
living there for fifty years named Ken Hayward, and I
always knew him as this funny old English guy who
wore a tweed coat and tweed tie every single day,
even when he was in his garden. And you know,
we'd come over there for you know, a visit once
or twice a year to quote unquote see uncle Ken,
but really just to go play golf.
Speaker 1: When did you start playing golf?
Speaker 3: I started when I was nine.
Speaker 1: Ah, okay, yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Remember I saw the Masters on TV. I flipped through
and ooh, what's this beautiful green space and who's this?
Who's this Australian dude named Greg Norman playing? And he
became my favorite player. And I turned to my dad
that day and I said, yeah, we should try this thing.
So my dad who was I think dad was fifty
five at the time, and so I was nine, he
was fifty five, and we started playing golf that basically
that summer. So anyway, so I've been playing at this point,
I've been playing for nine years. I had was playing
off a one point eight. I was playing a lot
of golf, very good. I was, you know, sort of
at the point where I was like, you know, this
is a good opportunity for me for a year to
see how good I can get and see if there
was any way to actually give this a shot of
playing professionally. I mean, when I was fourteen fifteen, Fred,
that was my dream in life was to be a
golf thro Well, let's.
Speaker 1: See, you've already proven that you're a overachiever by a
one point eight stuyves in a you know, an elite
high school getting accepted to Harvard. Yeah, so I'm sure
that you were very comfortable with setting very high goals
for yourself and probably pressuring yourself way too much for sure.
Speaker 3: I mean I should say you one thing about Stivesan.
You have to take a test to get in, and
twenty four thousand kids take a test and eight hundred
get in just one exam. I made it by one point. Wow,
and each question is worth like seven points. So I
don't even understand how that was possible. So I was
literally number seven ninety nine or eight hundred accepted. So
I was very used to squeaking into things like on
the skin of my teeth, so Harvard the waitless thing
didn't surprise me much. So I was like, you know what,
Saint Andrews has this freshman year broad program and you
can sort of go there and do your first year
and then leave and you don't get credit. And the
deal with Harvard was you can do anything you want
for a year, but you cannot enroll in a four
year program. And so I guess the loophole was because
I could just do freshman year at Saint Andrews. The
deal was I couldn't transfer any credit from my gap
year back to Harvard. I'd have to start as a freshman.
And I sort of like complained about that for a second,
and Sally Champagne was like, well, you know, if you
wanted to, you could reapply right now as a transfer,
but you'd have to give up your spot now. And
I was like, no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1: No no no, no, no, no no, because in your mind
you're going I have to repeat thirteenth grade.
Speaker 3: Totally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I flunked. Oh I'm a miserable failure.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm in I'm at this point, seventeen years old,
and I've been, you know, just killing myself academically for
four years in this really huge pressure cooker. And I
was just completely about you know, getting there and getting started.
But this this gap year seemed cool from the get
go as well. I did a little research to St Andrews.
I discovered a couple things pretty quickly like that night.
First of all, Prince William was a junior at St
Andrews when I was going to be going there. I
knew that because he was there, female applications had risen
significantly to St Andrews my year, freend, I think it
was sixty five thirty five girl to guy ratio, sign
them up correct. I also knew importantly that the drinking
age in Saint Andrews and in the UK was eighteen,
and by eighteen, I mean a very loosely enforced eighteen.
There are often kids you see in the bars that
are like maximum fifteen. And Saint Andrew's is, you know,
it's this very quirky little town with only three streets
and thirty one pubs. In this little town, it's got
more pubs, more pubs per capita than anywhere else in
the entire United Kingdom.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: So the thing that sealed the deal was the golf.
And here's why. When you're a student at University of
St Andrew's, you get to play unlimited on the old
course and the other at the time, five other courses
for the entire year for one hundred and three pounds.
Now that's two hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I have I have a lot of golfers that
I caddy for who are seventy to eighty years old,
who ask that it's too late for them to apply
as grad students.
Speaker 1: Okay, then I don't have to ask.
Speaker 3: It's done. I'll come over and write your recommendation.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 3: So I knew it was going to be a good year,
and I knew that this was something that was was
going to be fun. So I called them up. They
said I could do it. I called Harvard. They said, yep,
you can apply and you can go. You can enroll,
and I shipped out and I started that September.
Speaker 1: Awesome.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Now, as soon as I got to St. Andrews,
there was a couple other surprises. I guess in retrospect
it shouldn't be a surprise, but every single person it
seemed like at St. Andrews in the university played golf,
including very very cute girls. Oh everyone played golf. Now,
it's almost as if it was a parallel inverted universe
because the golf team at St. Andrews was the coolest
team in the entire school. It was like the football
team anywhere else.
Speaker 1: Wow, you are not in America anymore, my friend.
Speaker 3: The other the other kids were all English, like Northern English, Scottish,
total party animals. They were basically out of the movie
Animal House. Wow, there was no It's a very differently
run team than in American schools. There's no adult supervision,
there's no coach. We met once a week in a
pub called the Gin House. And when I was there,
there were twenty five kids in the golf team. Fred
with a two handicap or better.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, crazy serious competition.
Speaker 3: And we're talking like a two handicap like in Scotland.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah right.
Speaker 3: I once had a match against a kid who was
I knew he was a one. It was like a
visiting match and I knew he was a one handicap
and I had to play him. And then on the
first he was like, where are you one? At by
the way and he's like, oh at Carnouski. Yeah, I
think I lost about I think I was eight and seven.
I got beaten. Yeah, if that so these kids were amazing,
and golf was kind of like in a weird way,
it was the currency with which you got respect in
the school is completely weird, and so for the first
time in my entire life, my playing golf was like
a cool thing, and I thought, this is yeah, I've
found the right place for me.
Speaker 1: This is good, this is going to be good. And
then you're starting to go, I'm only here for a
year exactly.
Speaker 3: And the year rolled through and they are all these
amazing traditions at St Andrews. There's something called the May
Dip because by the way, the university is six hundred
years old. It turns six hundred this year. Wow, And
they're all these old, old, old traditions, and one of
them is the May Dip. It takes place on May first,
in which the entire school, all seven thousand students, stay
up all night, go into parties and then they at
five in the morning charge into the North Sea completely naked.
Speaker 1: And you're talking about those cute golfing girls too.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's not like the people you don't want to see.
It's a lot of the people that you really are
praying to God every day that you're going.
Speaker 1: To see now, is this something that it's just for
students or do alumni fight to come back?
Speaker 3: They do not come back for that. I've definitely seen
some older people taking pictures on the beach, which is
not totally kosher. But what are you gonna do? Yeah, right,
I'll probably do the same thing when I'm seventy.
Speaker 1: You don't have to. You've got the memories, You've got
the whole album of photographs in your head.
Speaker 3: Totally. So imagine this like every day there's something new
like this going on, and you're amongst kids from all
over the world. And I was seventeen. I had never been,
you know, broad by myself before, and I'm suddenly in
a class in which it'll be ten people in this
international relations class. There'll be a kid from Germany, France, Sweden, England, Spain,
maybe Canada, and I'll be like the only American in
the class. It was wonderful and I just had the
best year of my life. I had my first serious girlfriend,
I did my first serious drinking. I missed five days
of golf the entire year, and then.
Speaker 1: That's probably because of the girlfriend, right exactly exactly.
Speaker 3: And then the end of the year came around and
I thought, you know, I'm just I'm not ready to
leave Paradise yet. And so I thought about what I
could do for the summer, and at the golf team
at one of the meetings, the kids were telling me
that a lot of golf team guys stayed over in
the summer and they caddied on the Old Course, and
they said if you, if you do it, you can
make fifty pounds around. I remember the exchange r it
was so bad back in four that I think was
it was two to one. So you make a hundred
bucks around if on a good day you get two
rounds a day. And they told me all of the
hilarious stories about you know, the gruff old Scottish caddies.
So I thought to myself, Yeah, this sounds like a
great summer job. This is perfect. So I push back
my flights. I found a place to live over the summer,
and I went down to the shack and I enrolled
in the official Old Course trainee Caddy program. Now, when
you're a trainee caddy, the way to get into the
program it's it seems like it would be easier to
get like a PhD. It takes so long. You have
to first of all, do a week in house in
which they give you all of these ridiculous like hours
and hours of instruction covering everything. After this week, you
then have to be a shadow caddy, in which you
have to follow professional, older veteran caddies around the course
and quote unquote I guess pick up tricks of the
trade from them. Then you become a trainee caddy, in
which you have to do thirty assessed rounds which you
get paid a lot less money. You have a humiliatingly
huge badge on your caddy bib which says trainee caddy. Yeah,
it's like saying, hey, pay me less money. And the
worst thing this is it.
Speaker 1: Also says, hey, if I make a mistake, I'm sorry,
but I'm new with this exactly.
Speaker 3: And then it's you have to stand by the window
as Rick McKenzie, who I'll tell you about later are
stalinesque caddy master, as he told our golfer right in
front of us. Now, just so you know, Oliver is
a trainee caddy, as if like, if I screw up,
it's not his fault. So you work, you work through
the round because you know you want to get you
want to get as much money as you can, so
you work it really hard. Throughout the round, you kind
of try to overcome your training status for your golfer.
And then at the end of the round, what do
you have to do? Fred? You have to give your
golfer a report card for them to fill out right
before you get paid. Uh yeah, it's really really bad.
Speaker 1: God an employee evaluation every four hours, yep, yep.
Speaker 3: And then you have to hand that over to Rick. Now,
once you do thirty of these assessed rounds, then you
take a test and it's a written exam. And on
this written exam you have to name a lot of
the names of the one hundred and twelve bunkers on
the course. You have to sketch breaks in a lot
of the greens. They have like a little diagram you
have to fill in. Gon do all this. If you
pass a test, if you get good feedback on your rounds,
if the shadow catting went fine, if all of this
was successful, then Rick might take you on maybe.
Speaker 1: And this is not easy for a kid who's probably
really good at tests, and you're like, this is more
pressure than you had before.
Speaker 3: Totally totally. So you know, in retrospect, I showed up.
I was eighteen at this point. I was eighteen American,
a trainee caddy, a student. I had nothing going for me.
I was like the lowest of the low.
Speaker 1: But you're thinking, I'm good. You know, I've got a
good score, I know the game. I've been playing most
of my life.
Speaker 3: Totally. At the time, I thought, Oh, they're gonna love me.
This is great. You know, I'm a good golfer. I'm
going to waltz in here and I'm gonna win over
the shack. This is great. So I remember my first
round as a shadow caddy. This is really I'm never
going to forget this round. Had a guy named Kenny
who I was shadowing, a veteran caddy. He had such
a strong Scottish accent and I think other Scottish caddies
couldn't understand what the hell he was saying. And Kenny's
got three American women in his group and they're all
from New York City and they realize I'm from New
York and I don't know. I guess I think that's
like really cute or whatever. So they're chatting to me
before the round by the first team, and Kenny's looking
on seems to be smiling, and I'm thinking myself, you
know what this is.
Speaker 1: This is good.
Speaker 3: My Caddy career is off to a good start. Here.
Walking to the first t, Kenny grabs me aside and
he shoves me up right in front of his face
and he points to his mouth and he goes, you
see this, and I go yeah, and he goes shut
it ouch. Oh one a day one of my Caddy career,
Nikes and Fred. This was pretty much the way it
went for the first month. Every single day I was
like in danger And.
Speaker 1: At what point are you going, I've got a book here?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I mean, well, that's that's later down the road.
At this point, I'm thinking, why the hell did I
sign up for this? Like, I don't need the I
could sorry.
Speaker 1: For the heyes, no, that's all right, we'll blieve that.
Speaker 3: Sorry with that. I don't need this. Uh hassle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I could be.
Speaker 3: I could be back in America with my friends. I
could be Uh you know, I'm starting Harvard in the fall,
Like this is what I've been waiting for. What am
I doing taking this from all the caddies. So the
first month you really are thrown to the wolves. As
a trainee caddy. There are so many things read they
don't tell you about caddying. They're these unwritten rules and
I knew none of them. And some of them are like,
don't don't correct your caddy. You have another caddy in
your group in front of the other players. Just don't
do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I got it. Yeah, and you should carry
it along with girls too, don't.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of good life lessons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Pretend that caddies are your girlfriend never Yeah, okay.
Speaker 3: No, the caddy bib doesn't make you look fat.
Speaker 1: How's my butt?
Speaker 3: So yeah, all of like, I just I couldn't do
anything right for the first month. No, and you know
I was, I was eighteen. I was very talkative, and
I was you know, I was showing new Yorker. What
do you mean very of course I'm a New Yorker.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how you know that?
Speaker 3: It was it was just every day I was getting
screamed at, threaded, and it was.
Speaker 1: It was bad.
Speaker 3: And here's well, here's the deal in the in the
caddy shack. There's a real hierarchy at the very top.
You've got your like old old kind of veteran guys,
who've been there forever, the kind of grandfather's of the shack,
and what kind of age.
Speaker 1: Are you talking about, these old old veteran.
Speaker 3: Guys seventy oh no, oh yeah, we got a seventy
six year old caddy.
Speaker 1: Right now and he's carrying two bags simultaneously through it.
Speaker 3: No. Well, here's the thing. You can't You actually not
allowed to ever do doubles on your on two show. Yeah,
you always do one.
Speaker 1: Bag around, so you can have four caddies going out
as well.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's crazy. It's always four caddies and four golfers
plus some of the golfers wives or whatnot. It's huge groups.
It's about ten or twelve people usually, and they bring
your own with you for sure. I was once with
a Chinese group that had translators for each golfer, assistance
for each golfer, and then a few like tour people,
so there was about twenty of us in the group.
Speaker 1: Okay, so I got to on a group like that.
How are your tips?
Speaker 3: I mean, at that point the tip is irrelevant. You're
just worried about the other translators not being hit by
other golf balls. So so, yeah, so you got you've
got your really old guys who they're seventy fred but
they look like ninety five. A lot of years of
smoking and drinking guinness and standing against the North Sea.
It doesn't do a lot for your your skin tone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was thinking they're probably weather beaten you.
Speaker 3: And what's amazing is I go back and so guys
that I, you know, had maybe haven't seen in a
whole year, they've ate so much when I get back.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the younger guys.
Speaker 3: Yeah, even the guys who were thirty or forty, and
you're just you're out there in the sun and the
elements every single day. But we say that there's no
better place to be ever on a really nice day
when you're out on the course, and there's no worse
place to be when it's a monsoon coming down and
we have to show up. So anyway, So at the
very topic the old guys, then you've got your forty
to fifty year old veterans who are really kind of
the serious professional caddies. These guys loop on tour a lot,
They've done tons of British opens, they've done tons of
women's open events. They're good, they know their stuff. I'd
say a notch below that you have your university kids
who have done a couple of years already, who kind
of they've achieved their decent level of cockiness already. And
then at the bottom you've got your trainees and we're
just the scum of the earth. It's bad. Other caddies
won't even talk to you when you're training. Sometimes you
can be the nicest guy ever. You can be a
really good golfer. You can be you don't even have
to be young, you can be fifty years old. But
if you're trainy, it's like again, the scarlet letter is
on your is on your chest. And so my big
thing was, I gotta get I gotta get rid of
the trainy caddy thing, like I hate this, like I
need to I need to get promoted here. So I
went into caddy overdrive and I did as many rounds
as I could. And one way to get respect in
the shack is to do a lot of rounds. If
you do two rounds in a day, it's called a double.
You do you do a double. If you do a
quick double with no pause in between, it's called a
turn and burn h You come in, you go straight
out again. Our caddy master Rick mackenzie was famous for
being right on the eighteenth green, perched there and as
soon as we got there he would point at us
and then scowl and then point right to the first
t There was no way you were going to say
no to that. You were going straight out again.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And unfortunately this always happens when it's like
the worst weather, when other caddies do slink away. You
are doing a double for sure, Fred, you can also
do a treble three rounds in a day. This is
a mistake.
Speaker 1: It's got to be exhaust and what time are you
starting in the morning, and when are you work until?
Speaker 3: Oh god, you're starting whenever. It's first come, first serve.
This this actually this policy changed a few years ago,
but certainly when I was doing my first four years
of caddying, it's first come, first serve. You would show
up as early as you could, and back in the day,
caddies would go straight from the pubs when they shut
at two in the morning, right down to the shack
and sleep on the benches. Yeah. This still sort of
happens a little bit. One time I showed up at
three forty five in the morning and I was number seven,
I was like, what do.
Speaker 1: I have to do to win? Yeah, it's trying to
like get around at Tory Pines down in San Diego
or like.
Speaker 3: Beth Page exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's funny because golfers are doing the same thing.
Golfers are lining up at maybe five and they're complaining
about that, and then at that point I've already been
there for like an hour and a half.
Speaker 1: Right now, can you get an advanced tea time at St? Andrew?
I've never played there and I yeah, I've never played there,
so can you? Can you book an advance or does
it first come for a serve on that too?
Speaker 3: It's interesting the uh there's one day. I think it's
I think it already happened. I think it might even
be the first day of the year, just January first,
the ballot opens up and people will instantly jump on
the website or call in and reserve a year in advance.
Speaker 1: You can do that.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, wow, there's a couple of things that people
don't really know you can do. But that's if you
want to play in a four ball with three of
your buddies, you're going to probably have to do that.
That's your first kind of port of call, let's do
a year in advance. After that, there's a bunch of
other ways to get on. You can do this thing
called the Old Course Experience, which is a tour company.
It's very expensive, but the big big thing that kind
of the feather in their hat is you get a
guaranteed round on the Old Course. You can also ballot,
which is showing up maybe the week you're playing and
entering in the ballot two days before. I think it's
like maybe a fifty percent chance you'll get on, or
thirty percent chance. And then the other way to do
it is to show up morning of and wake up
as early as you possibly can and then get on
as a casual. There's so many ways to get on.
Speaker 1: So knowing you doesn't help me.
Speaker 3: It actually does help a little bit because I get points. Yeah,
so we can talk about this after the show. I
do need a new set of titleist irons. I can
give you my fitting size.
Speaker 1: You're tugging to the wrong man. So yeah.
Speaker 3: So the golfers you're catting for a lot of them
are they're so happy to be on the course because
a lot of them either showed up, you know, and
waited seven hours to get on, or they came over
and they've been balloting every day and they got on
like on their final day. So a lot of guys
are really really just in little kids in a candy
store when they're out in the course.
Speaker 1: So you did this the first summer after your gap
year where you went to university there? Yea? And then
you had to go back to Harvard would and you
started your Harvard career or did you stay?
Speaker 3: Well, here's what happened. I mean, throughout the summer, I
was working so hard and I was kind of picking
up all the tips of what you got to do,
which is basically be quiet when you're a trainee. At
midway through the summer, there was this great moment where
Rick McKenzie, our caddy master, called me to the window
and I had no idea what was going on. I
thought I was in trouble because I often was with him,
and without saying anything, he pulled me up to him
and again I thought I was about to maybe get
into a fight or something, and he removed to my
training badge and put in an official old course caddy badge.
Speaker 1: Oh did you call your mom?
Speaker 3: I was so happy that was one of the proudest
moments of my eighteen years of life. I can tell you.
I was so pumped and all of the trainees were
right around me, the other trainees by the bench, and
they were all like clapping me on the back. My
best friends were there and they were all giving me
high fives, and I was like, you know what, this
is pretty cool. I did this myself, like no one
else pulled any strings, nothing happened. I had to do
this completely on my own, and it felt good. It
felt really good. And as soon as here's the embarrassing thing.
As soon as I became an official caddy, Fred, I
started being in the shack and just saying, Oh, these
training caddies, they're so annoying. There are so there are
way too many training caddies. It's just the worst. I
completely this cycle just completely turned as well. And the thing,
by the way, actually came completely full circle this past summer,
or my seventh season.
Speaker 1: Oh so you kept going back every year.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, we'll get to that. But this past summer, Fred,
the caddy master of the New Guy Robert Thorpe called
me to the window and said, hey, Oliver, can you
take a shadow caddy today, can you have someone follow
you around? And said, okay, and show him how to
do it. And I looked to my left and there
was a seventeen year old Scottish kid who couldn't have
reminded me any more of myself.
Speaker 1: And I was like, yeah, sure, I'll abuse him.
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, exactly, I'll treat him my crap. So by
the end of the first summer, I'd finally want a
little respect, I mean, and by winning respect, I mean
I was getting screamed out a little bit less. I
knew I loved it. I knew I'd stumbled upon this
kind of amazing world that I was, you know, I
was the only American kid there, and I was really
falling in love with it. And then as soon as
that happened, it was time to head back and start
it and start at Harvard. And I have to say
I had really mixed feelings when I got back, because
this is something that I've worked I'd worked so hard
in high school to try to get into Harvard and
this and this was something that I you know, it
was the motivating thing for me so many Saturday nights
where I would you know, study that extra couple hours
of like whatever APUs history or something. I waited so
long to get there, and as soon as I got
to Harvard, the first thing I said was, I want
to go back to St. Andrews now, Because suddenly every
kid was eighteen or seventeen. Every kid was talking about
their SAT scores from the year before. It was very
cold in Boston, very quickly, and I missed all of
my friends, and I missed all the Caddies. And so
that first year actually went back twice to Scotlange.
Speaker 1: Gotta go see Uncle Ken. I know, I know.
Speaker 3: I went back in December, and I went back in
my spring break was spring break St Andrew's.
Speaker 1: How cool?
Speaker 3: Is that exactly? Not exactly Miami.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So you know, it.
Speaker 3: Wasn't even it wasn't even a doubt that I was
going back the next year. Like I was. I was
going back to Caddie for sure that summer. And when
I got back, it was it just felt like I'd
come back home. When I first got back in June
that second summer. Now, there's a thing that's kind of
cool about the Old Course. Lots of things are cool,
but the one thing that I love is that the
Old Course goes straight out and straight back. And what
this means is the front nine, you're basically playing straight
away in the same direction, and you play out to
what's called the eden Estuary, which is the bottle of
the body of water. You hit it on about the
eleventh hole, and then you turn around and you go
straight back in on yourself, so you come back in
on your left. Now, this means that you always have
a fairway to your left, and almost every fairway is
a double fairway, and almost every green except for four
greens on the old course, are all double greens. Big
shared greens. Yeah, no one really, no one knows this
until you get there. Except for four greens, every single
one is shared. The fifth green, by the way, the
shared fifth and thirteenth is from front to back one
hundred yards. Oh my, oh yeah, an acre and a half.
Speaker 1: Wait, but you have to putt.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah. Now, you can hit seventeen greens on the
old course, or eighteen greens on the old course in regulation,
and it will mean absolutely nothing because you'll have like
seventeen three putts. But oh yeah, you got a putt.
I mean, I've had people take their three woods out
and do like almost a half swing just to reach it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, amazing.
Speaker 3: So, and don't forget like you could have an you
have an eighty yard putt. That's a two hundred and
forty foot putt. That's pretty crazy.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So.
Speaker 3: But the really amazing thing about all the shared greens
and all the shared fairways when you're caddying is on
every single hole you pass your fellow caddies. You pass
them in the fairways, and you pass them on the greens,
and you always say what's up to each other, and
you know, you do your hot you do whatever, you
do your high five, you do little caddy dance whatever.
But for me, when I got back that first day
that I was catting again the second summer, I'm never
going to forget it. That entire first trip round the
old course, on every fairway and every green, I saw
all of the other caddies and they all kind of
like rubbed their eyes and looked at me as if
like they didn't believe I was back, And then all
of them waved and smiled.
Speaker 1: Oh great, how cool is that? It was awesome.
Speaker 3: That's the coolest welcoming ceremony I could ever hope to have.
Sure all the time, and you know, what this was
a tradition that sort of just it repeated every single
summer that last the last round I did every summer
before I went back, everyone knew I was about to leave,
you know, they knew my flight was the next day.
And it was like saying goodbye and then hello to
you know, to all my friends. It was pretty great.
Speaker 1: Amazing, yeah, amazing. So I are you done with this?
Are you not going back anymore?
Speaker 3: Here's the thing. Every summer I always say, this is
my last summer.
Speaker 1: And you worked last summer. Oh yeah, Oh man, so
you don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know. I'm you know, I'm I know
for sure, I'm going back in June. I'm going to
be back in St. Andrews the entire month of June.
And what what I did the last couple of years
was I would be caddying in the you know, in
the morning. Maybe i'd start cattying at eight or nine
in the morning, and I'd wake up at like five
in the morning, and I'd go write the book and
then i'd go caddy and then after I did a round,
i'd go back to the University of St. Andrew's library
and I'd keep writing and for me, I got to say, like,
I don't think I could have written the book from
New York City, like staring out into like a building
in Manhattan. This was this was something that I really
had to be in St. Andrews to do and sort
of like look out my window onto the golf course.
Speaker 1: What gave you the idea that you needed to write
a book?
Speaker 3: Well, I'd written the second summer. I wrote a couple articles.
I wrote one for Sports Illustrated about really about that
first summer of caddying, and I wrote one in Golf
World and they both came out the same week. They
came out the week the British Open was there five
and I remember being just terrified when they came out.
I was like, I'm about to get fired. Oh sure,
I'm about to get attacked with pointed sticks, like this
could be bad. And it came out and I like
went down to the shack that first, and you know,
my caddy master Rick Mackenzie hated it, like I got
screamed at by him. But the other caddies and the
ones that I really you know that I was worried about,
they looked at me and they're like horror of fits
that was hilarious. That was great, great, and so I
guess that was sort of like in the back of
my mind, I was like, that's cool, that's cool that
they're letting me share the story and they're not and
they're not angry about it. I mean, this is the
shack is The shack is very insular. This is a
place that if you just wandered down and tried to
talk with some of the caddies, strike up a conversation
like it might not happen. They're pretty closed off. And
I think for me to have gotten into their world
and to sort of become accepted, the main thing was,
I think the golf that I played golf and they
knew I was a golfer. That actually won me some
currency there in the shack. And the other thing was
that I had going for me was Uncle Ken. They
knew him. Oh yeah, now, Uncle Ken was He came
there originally to the station there in the Royal Air
Force during World War Two and he married a girl there.
He met a girl, never left, settled down, married her,
she passed away. A few years later he married another girl,
or I guess at that point she might have been fifty,
so she was woman, and he outlived her as well,
and so he lived in this huge Victorian mansion by
himself in the middle of town on Hope Street. Interestingly,
this is right across the street from Prince William. So
every single day they go out of their houses look
at each other and go, hey, what's up?
Speaker 1: Was Ken's going, Hey, what's up to? A prince?
Speaker 3: Literally there go there walking across the street and like
doing the head nod. It's it was so funny to
see dude, dude looking good. William looking good, wille with
U Willey, keep the hair. In ten years time, William,
your brother is going to address as a Nazi for Halloween.
That's a really bad idea. Don't let him do that.
Yeah right, This actually happened. So Uncle Ken was in
later life, he was a town counselor in St Andrews
during the sixties and the seventies, and this meant that
he knew every single person over the age of like
eighty two years old. Uncle Ken was the president of
the Gardener's Club, the president of the Caravan Club, and
could tell you every single thing about St Andrews. So
he was really a funny old fixture in the town,
and everyone loved him, and he had he had this
giggle that was kind of like a and every single
person in the town knows the giggle and remembers it
and makes him smile.
Speaker 1: Oh so the caddies knew.
Speaker 3: That I was Uncle Ken's great nephew. I think that helped.
Speaker 1: That had to help. So listen, I don't want you
to tell the entire book. I would like people to
get it because this has been so entertaining. You can
imagine how good the book is. But the subtitle of
the book is growing Up Girls and Looping on the
Old Course. All right, we've covered two out of three briefly,
Why girls and what do you got?
Speaker 3: Okay, So second season I gets back. I discovered something
pretty cool at this point, the coolest thing I'd ever
heard of in my life. There's a rival business that
has started up in St Andrews that is in its infancy.
Get when I get there in the second year. It's
called model caddying. What it is is two university girls
have started a caddy business in which they're about twenty
five university girls, university students, all of them with modeling experience,
who are going to be caddying in Scotland.
Speaker 1: And all of them are golfers too.
Speaker 3: None of them are golfers.
Speaker 1: Ah, so they're not from the St Andrew's University.
Speaker 3: They are all from Saint Andrew's. But they I guess
none of them even had been on a golf course before.
They were like the twenty five exceptions, okay, sure, and
if they knew golf, none of them had ever ever
caddied before, so at this point they had no way
to They needed someone to train them, and they needed
someone to advise him and everything. And I got introduced
to them, like my first night back in Saint Andrew's
and I'm talking to these three girls who are about
twenty five thousand leagues above me, like I would never
be able to talk to these girls otherwise. And it
comes up that I'm a caddie. I can introduce them
as a caddy. And this girl Julia, just who's the
I guess, sort of the setting the whole thing up goes,
oh my god, that's so cool that you're a caddy.
And never in my life have I been told that
caddying is cool. So I did fred what I think
any nineteen year old caddie would do in that situation.
I became their secret trainer.
Speaker 1: Now very good.
Speaker 3: Now, this was I think a good move on my part.
But it was a dangerous move because the old course
caddies hated the model caddies.
Speaker 1: Oh I bet they were not thrilled about this idea
at all.
Speaker 3: Hated them, uh so jealous, so threatened by them. And
the whole town is so traditional and insular that the
town hated them as well. So this caused a huge controversy.
So every time I was walking down the street, I
was in the shack, I was in the supermarket, I
was hearing just put downs of the model caddies, and
I was hearing, you know, just like insults every day,
and I had to play along with it. When I
was in the shack, I had to be like, oh yeah,
oh god, that's so stupid. They think they can caddy.
But every night I was going onto the Jubilee Course,
which is like a course right next to the Old
at night, and I was training model.
Speaker 1: Caddies and riding home.
Speaker 3: Tell your friends if the first summer was the best summer?
Speaker 1: Got pictures of that in the book.
Speaker 3: Wait a minute, we do have a picture. We do
have a picture.
Speaker 1: Wait minute, Well, wait, what page is that on? I
want to see these model caddies. Where are they?
Speaker 3: They're in the middle of the book, open too.
Speaker 1: Okay, And there's a young training caddies sunburn in the ship.
Rick McKenzie, a good old Rick. Yeah. Okay, yeah, I'm
not seeing anymore.
Speaker 3: Okay, keep you on. One more page, two more pages.
Speaker 1: Two more pages. There's people sleeping on the fairway. There's
hello oh yeah, oh hello. Yeah. All right, so listen,
you got to get the book for yourself, folks, because
I'm not I'm not sharing this copy. Oh they are
beautiful girls. Oh yeah, and they're and clearly they're models.
I mean they are styling here, they're striking a pose.
Speaker 3: They are doing blue steel.
Speaker 1: Oh that's great, that is hilarious.
Speaker 3: And this became this became a huge, a huge thing,
huge part of my summer and became increasingly dangerous every
single day for me to be involved in this. And
I'm not going to tell you how it uh, how
it played out, but it did become a little too
dramatic for what I wanted that summer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it always does, it always does. Hope, will you
have some sort of memory and you can not get
yourself in much more trouble than you did at that time.
Speaker 3: And we want to know something, Fred I think. I
think to this day most of the caddies did not
know that I was the trainer. They knew there was
an anonymous trainer. This will be one of the things
that I think a lot of people are going to
find out in the book.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, that's great. So then you you may not
want to go back next summer.
Speaker 3: Might bring a bodyguard when I go back. Yeah no, no,
I can't wait to get back.
Speaker 1: Oh that's great. Well again, the book is called an
American Caddy in Saint Andrew's Growing Up, Girls and Looping
on the Old Course by our guess, Oliver Horowitz, a
young ambitious man who, uh, you know, when you're done
caddying and you're not going to have a professional golf career,
what are you going to do? Man, I don't know.
Speaker 3: Maybe some exotic dancing.
Speaker 1: Okay, well you can call the models back and they'll
train you. What do you think, good idea?
Speaker 3: Huh, I love it. We should go on, we should
go on tour together. That's great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go, there you go. And speaking of
tours here in the United States, you were alluding to something,
Can you share it with us?
Speaker 3: Absolutely? It be my pleasure. So this summer I'm doing
a tour of different golf clubs around the country, going
to tons of different golf clubs, and we're doing an
evening I'm calling a Taste of Scotland. So it's basically
an hour of my best catty stories, tell you what
about my experiences growing up amongst all the old Scottish guys,
and more importantly, I'm giving everyone insider advice for planning
a golf trip to Scotland, So like, where you should stay,
where you should play, kind of all the cool stuff
I've picked up, and we're combining it with a Scotch
tasting ah to give it a real authentic Scottish feel.
Speaker 1: Awesome, Yeah, awesome. And where are you doing these talks.
Speaker 3: We're going to be on the West coast near San Francisco.
I'm going to be all over the Northeast. We're looking
at some places in the Midwest as well, in Tennessee.
So basically, if you're if you want me to come
to your golf club, get in contact and we might
be able to make it happen.
Speaker 1: Perfect Well, there's a couple of ways. You can go
ahead and click on the Heyfred button at golfsmarter dot com.
If you want to send me an email, I can
forward it off to Oliver and check out his book please.
And you may want to have him at your golf course.
He'd be happy to come out there and tell you
more stories. The book is available on the golfers maart
at golfsmarter dot com and our Amazon section our book section,
so if you want to pick up the book please,
you can get the kindle version or the hard copy version. Oliver,
I wish you the best of luck and everything that
you do. Man. This is a great start for you
and a very entertaining book. I highly recommend it. Thanks
so much for spending this time with us.
Speaker 3: My pleasure, Fred, And if you ever need a caddy,
you know where to You know where to turn.