Brad Faxon recalls his wild ride at the ’85 Honda Classic — with Michael Bamberger on the bag

In 1985, second-year pro Brad Faxon and aspiring writer Michael Bamberger were two kids trying to figure it out. Faxon was in search of his game, Bamberger in search of a gig. Here the golfer-coach-broadcaster recalls their wild ride at the ’85 Honda Classic, where one of them passed go and the other — well, Faxon tells the rest.

On a late-fall day in 1984, after my rookie season on the PGA Tour had wrapped up, a personal letter arrived at my new townhouse in Orlando. Personal letters had a lot of impact in those days, and this one landed with a particular thud. It was written on a manual type-writer and, though the tone was modest, it went on for pages. The author told me about his own play as a bogey golfer, his experience as an occasional caddie while in high school and his first postcollege job as a reporter at a weekly newspaper on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Eventually, he made his pitch: Was I looking for a caddie for the 1985 golf season, and, if so, could he throw his hat in the ring?

That was my first encounter with Michael Bamberger. He was 24. I was 23.

Michael’s letter pulled at me. I had grown up in Rhode Island and I knew Massachusetts. I spent summers in Harwich, a small town on Cape Cod, where I learned the game from my father and caddied for his friends at an old-bones club nearby called Eastward Ho! (I felt excited every time I went there; the exclamation mark is part of the club’s name.) I was an avid newspaper reader and had warm relationships with the sportswriters and columnists at the Providence Journal who covered my amateur and early pro career. I knew about Martha’s Vineyard and how you could get there by ferry from Woods Hole, another small town on the Cape and one where my grandfather lived, playing his golf at the old club in town. That part of Massachusetts was (and is) loaded with traditional golf clubs, and Ray Faxon knew them all. During the Depression, my grandfather had started caddie camps at more than a few of them. I had been hearing caddie stories all my life.

My rookie season was solid and ended with a bang. In the year’s last “major” event (it was on TV), the Walt Disney World Golf Classic in Orlando in mid-October, I played the fourth round with two veterans, Payne Stewart and Roger Maltbie, and shot 69, good for a tie for third and a $20,800 payday. For the season, I finished 82nd on the PGA Tour money list and earned $71,688. I didn’t have a regular caddie in ’84. Maybe Michael could be my guy in the new year.

I began my ’85 season as we all did back then, playing the West Coast, with its famous stops at Palm Springs for the Bob Hope, Pebble Beach for the Bing Crosby, Riviera for the Los Angeles Open. All these years later, those names still send a shiver through me. Michael hoped to start at the Honda Classic, after the Tour moved East for the Florida Swing.

In Florida, the players and caddies drove from tournament to tournament. At one point, I asked Michael what he drove and he said, “A ’71 VW Bug.”

“Not a great caddie car,” I said.

As if I should talk. I always had cars coming and going in my early years on Tour. I bought one car from Payne Stewart. Looked good, ran bad. You could win cars for making an ace — guys were always talking about that. Everybody knew a car dealer “back home.” Through the Florida Swing in ’85, my ride was some sort of tank — a Lincoln, I’m nearly certain. You could do sit-ups on its front seat.

While on the West Coast, I could feel my game slipping away from me. I had been working closely with David Leadbetter, already a prominent instructor, but the swing changes I was trying to make were not coming easily. I was seeking steadiness in every aspect of my golf life. The idea of a reliable, dedicated caddie appealed to me. But offering a job to a rookie caddie came with risks. Michael wouldn’t know the courses, he wouldn’t know life on the road, he wouldn’t know the established loopers. The best I could offer Michael was a trial week at the Honda Classic, at a new course called Eagle Trace.

We met outside the clubhouse early that week. Michael was taller than I expected — close to my height — and had good posture. You noticed that in those days because so many caddies had backs bent by years of lugging 50-pound single-strap golf bags six or more miles a day. He carried the bag high on his left shoulder, and it rested across his back at just the right angle, no different than the established caddies. But there were telltale signs he was a newbie too. His face and forearms were lobster-red by the end of our first day together. Wrong hat, no sunscreen, unprepared for the intense Everglades sun and all that glare. I’m sure I told Michael what all new caddies were told in those days: Show up, keep up and shut up. (You’d never hear that on the PGA Tour today.) Michael was nervous but likable.

He loved golf and writing, and his goal (he had explained in his letter and a subsequent phone conversation) was to write a book about a year on the road as a PGA Tour caddie. In his ideal world, the book would focus on one player, and right then that one player was me. We had one week to see if this thing could work.

For any young golfer on the PGA Tour every week is make-or-break. It’s not just making money so you can keep at it, pay your bills and get to the next stop. It’s the pressure. Every week you’re staring at your place on the money list. In that era, 125 was a magic number. If you were in the top 125 on the year-end money list, you had a place on the PGA Tour for the following year. You could make a schedule.

You didn’t have to go back to Q-School, the Tour’s torture-chamber six-round qualifying tournament. Nobody on Tour wanted to return to Q-School, where careers were launched and sometimes revived but where a lot of careers went to die too. The “all-exempt Tour” was the brainchild of Gary McCord, a veteran player, a Tour wit and, most significantly in this regard, a PGA Tour board member. I was always thinking about how to “stay exempt,” how to “keep my card,” how to remain in the top 125. You’ve got a good job and you’re trying to keep it. I was (I am) a type A personality. Like a lot of golfers, I’m particular. I had a lot of instruction for Michael, a lot of direction. But he was all in.

Back then, players and caddies weren’t given towels. I showed Michael the type I liked. They had to be white, not too thick and not too thin. I showed him how to clean and rub down the grips before each round with a damp towel, to get their tackiness just right, a procedure a club caddie would not likely know. In those days, a lot of us played rough cord grips, and rubbing them down and having them dry in the sun was part of the pre-round ritual, along with counting the player’s clubs and warming his balata game balls in a hand or pocket. I showed Michael the semiofficial caddie yardage book, the one made by one of Arnold Palmer’s former caddies, George L. Lucas II, who went by “Gorjus George.” I showed him how to read the sprinkler-head yardage numbers on its pages to the fronts of greens, how to calculate the carry distances over ponds and bunkers. I told Michael not to offer too much information — I liked doing my own yardages and reading my own greens — but to be ready in case I had a question about anything, about pin position, order of play, the wind.

I noted that Michael didn’t smoke. In those days, many caddies and some players did, and you were often sneaking looks their way to read the wind from a burning cigarette or cigar. You were always looking for an insight about how a course was playing. I told Michael about grain on the bermuda greens in Florida and how different the Eagle Trace greens were from the greens we had in the Northeast. All this information had to be overwhelming for him. Overwhelming, and stressful. We both wanted this to work. But I needed a good week more than Michael did.

LOOKING BACK, ALL THESE YEARS later, my second year as a touring pro was nothing like my first. I barely kept my card in 1985, finishing 124th on the money list. I had the driving yips (wooden driver, steel shaft) and saw more swing coaches than I had irons in my bag. I missed the final five cuts of the year, including Walt Disney. If I had finished 126th on the list that year, forcing me back to Q-School, there’s no telling if I could have recovered. Over the course of the year, I became more unsure about what I wanted to do as I stood over the ball. What saved me was my short game and my putting. Michael still talks about all the putting work I did at Honda, holing putt after putt after putt on the practice green at the 1985 Honda Classic. Michael’s job was to sit at the hole, pull balls out and count. Good putters are made, not born.

At that Honda, during the Friday round, I was on the cutline all day. One mistake and I would miss the cut, miss the chance to play on the weekend, miss the chance to cash a check. My position on the money list would fall.

Late in that second round, on a short par 4, I was about to play my second shot from the fairway when Michael did something bold. He stepped in. He realized that I had the wrong yardage, off by a full 20 yards. I had warned Michael to never interrupt me when I was in my routine, but there he was, doing just that. I had a 6-iron in hand. Had Michael not stopped me I would have airmailed the green with that club. From over the green, I would have done well to make a bogey. He almost stuttered when he said the yardage was wrong, but he was right. I recalculated (we recalculated), stiffed an 8-iron, holed my birdie putt and made the cut by a shot.

Had I missed that cut at Honda, I might have finished out of the top 125 for 1985. I might have flamed out at Q-School. I’ve known a lot of players in this game, golfers with more talent than I had, who were not able to keep their card year after year. Keeping my card in ’85 paved a path to ’86. That’s how it goes, one tournament to the next, one year to the next.

At the end of play on Sunday at Honda, Michael and I got in my Lincoln and went for a drive. I knew I had to fire him. It was a difficult decision. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him, because I did. I just felt I would have to spend too much time managing him, teaching him the ropes. I have often wondered how that season would have gone had I kept Michael on the bag. Golf is unpredictable as life is unpredictable. We’ll never know. You can’t know.

But we do know how the book Michael wanted to write came out, because it came out. That book, The Green Road Home, was published in the spring of 1986. The second chapter, “Basic Training,” is all about our week together at the ’85 Honda. I read it pretty much the day it came out in 1986, and in June, a 40th-anniversary edition of the book released, with this piece as a foreword. There’s a photo, in both editions, of me at bat in the 1985 Caddie-Player Softball Classic, which we played every year at the B.C. Open in New York. Michael played in it. Any player and caddie who wanted to did. It was a different Tour then. Same goal: ball in the hole as fast as possible. But a different Tour.

I have a library of golf books, with a shelf of golf novels. I have books about the game’s history and architecture and psychology. All sorts of instruction books and nearly as many biographies and autobiographies. Books by caddies and about caddies. I have books written by legends, including Bernard Darwin, Charles Price, Herbert Warren Wind and Dan Jenkins. But of all these books none have I enjoyed reading more than Bamberger’s.

When you read Michael, you feel like he’s sitting there with you. For 40 years now, he’s been taking readers inside this game, seeing the obvious in new ways and seeing things others don’t. More than once, I have read something by Michael and said to myself, “I wish I had thought of that.”

We were in our mid-20s at that long-ago Honda tournament. Now we’re in our mid-60s. We see each other at different tournaments and other events, compare notes on our paths through this game. We have a unique, enduring friendship, and we’ll be connected forever in a unique and enduring way. It’s been a long ride and a long run. After all these years, we’re still at it, still trying to figure out golf and its puzzles. Little did I know the impact that letter from 40-plus years ago would have on my life. Both our lives.