The places golf can take you extend far beyond greens and grill rooms 

I was 25 when I wrote “The Green Road Home,” in my parents’ house in Patchogue, on the South Shore of Long Island. On my 26th birthday a copy of it arrived there, hot off the press. That was in 1986. This piece is from a new afterword for it, a 40th anniversary edition that was published recently.

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I was kind of amazed, the day that first copy showed up 40 years ago, as I didn’t know what I was doing, certainly not as a caddie, but not as a writer, either, not really. Since then, not much has changed. I’ve come to accept that as a writer and reporter my thing is to puzzle on through. For better or for worse, that’s my modus operandi, the swing thought of my professional life. Ask questions, look around, size things up, like a detective. (TV’s Lieutenant Columbo is one of my inspirations.) I don’t know what could be more fun than being a reporter.

In “Joyride,” a memoir of her writing life, Susan Orlean notes the outsized impact of the first years after college: early jobs, early loves, early discoveries. Of course, for innumerable people, the just-out-of-college years as a chapter of life is not a thing at all. It doesn’t compute. But for others, Orlean’s observation must scream. It screams at me. I graduated from college in 1982 and moved to Martha’s Vineyard to work as a reporter. I caddied on the pro golf tour in 1985 and my book about that stint came out in 1986. Later that year, I got hired as a high school sports reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. My life in the typing trade was off and running. My life life, too. “Joyride.” Nice title.

The Inquirer had a dripping-molasses writer who went to USC (South Carolina) named Joe Logan. Logan had reviewed “The Green Road Home” in the period when I was trying to get a job on the paper. I figured his write-up killed my chances. Then I got hired and met Logan. “You trashed me,” I told him. “I didn’t trash you,” Logan said. “I lukewarmed ya.” Newsroom fun.

The only outside-the-house offices I have ever known are newsrooms, along with press tents and press boxes, if those count. A newsroom is a good place to play Nerf basketball from a swivel chair and bet the imaginary house on “Jeopardy!” Everybody at The Inquirer knew the story about the paper’s editor, Gene Roberts, dating back to his cub reporter days at The News-Argus in Goldsboro, N.C. The editor of The News-Argus was blind and young Gene would read him his stories. The boss offered this critique on at least one occasion: “I can’t see it — make me see.” Any reporter could run with that.

Then there’s this famous (to some) quote from Red Smith, the legendary sports columnist: “I like to get where the cabbage is cooking and catch the scents.” Sight and smell. Two of the big five, right there, along with hearing/listening (No. 1), plus touch and taste. The reporter’s tool kit. (This hardly needs to be said: Empathy and curiosity are job prerequisites.) On my way to getting hired, Roberts told one of his deputies, “I like the way he got around the country on the cheap, doing that caddying thing.” My gateway to the big leagues: off-peak flights on People Express.

When the kids at Dartmouth came up with this campus greeting, a hundred or so years ago, they were on to more than they likely knew.

Student 1: The places you’ll go!

Student 2: The people you’ll meet!

The people I met in rapid succession at the Vineyard Gazette, at The Inquirer, on the golf tour — it almost doesn’t seem fair. On the Vineyard, my neighbor (for a time) was Toni Smith Giamatti, a deep reader with a gift for encouragement. At The Inquirer, I wrote about a poetry-loving skier, Wesley Wilson, near 90, whose father was born into slavery. On the golf tour, I got to know Billy Britton, Mike Donald and Brad Faxon, to cite three soul-of-golf golf pros; Sam “Killer” Foy and Bruce Edwards, to drop the names of two celebrated Tour caddies; Chuck Will, the sui generis golf director for CBS Sports. Scores of others.

I wouldn’t trade my first half-decade after college for anything.

In the summer of ’85, I received a boilerplate rejection letter in response to something I had submitted to The New Yorker, except this missive had an addendum: William Shawn, the magazine’s editor, inviting me to see him in his office the next time I was in New York. For those who don’t know the name, William Shawn was a word god. Wallace Shawn, inquisitive dinner partner in “My Dinner with Andre,” is his son.

My appointment fell on a hot summer day and Mr. Shawn was wearing a suit. (I was, too.) I told him that I had been working as a caddie on the golf tour and planned to write a book about the experience. He asked (asked!) if he could offer some advice. “Celebrate the lark,” he said. What Shawn knew about golf came from editing and reading Herbert Warren Wind. He was sizing up my little golfing adventure on intuition alone. In 1985, PGA Tour caddie yards were still dominated by traveling caddie lifers from the South, many of them Black. As a band on the run, this group contributed immeasurably to the Tour’s color, language and culture. The number of English-major caddies from the Northeast with typewriter dreams was nine short of a minyan.

Herb Wind’s phone-booth office was on the 18th floor, one floor down from Shawn’s. I met Herb in early 1986, when I brought him “The Green Road Home” in manuscript form, hoping for a blurb or something. He had a framed letter from Bing Crosby on a wall. I met my future wife later in the year, at a dinner party at a friend’s apartment, 40 or so blocks north of the New Yorker building on West 43rd Street. Christine left that dinner with her hockey-playing boyfriend. Soon after, somebody (me) sent her a book. You can guess which one.

The PGA Tour I got to know in 1985 was rich in every way. Compared to the PGA Tour today? Well, you can’t compare the two, because the modern tour is no longer a tour and hasn’t been for decades. The paydays are beyond the pale. There’s no reason, for player or fan or caddie, to care about the money list anymore. Once, the money list dominated Tour talk, and guys roamed. Players and caddies, windblown and roaming. Raymond Floyd got it down to three words: “We were gypsies.” And he was a star.

The Tour was an excellent place to test your instinct for survival. It was cutthroat and brutal, on its playing fields and in its caddie yards. The players were self-reliant and independent, and the caddies were con men in the best sense, giving players the confidence they needed. (Nothing but driver, babe.) You were trying to win or top-10 or make enough cuts to “stay out.” Going home was not a good option, unless you had a clear path back. The Tour was fair, intoxicating, merciless. But all the while, random acts of kindness softened the whole enterprise. I couldn’t see that then but now, 40 years later, I can. Small kindnesses as a sort of protective coating, softening the sharp edges of all those accumulated scorecards. Mike Donald, hitting balls next to Bill Britton, or Brad Faxon next to Tom Kite, pointing their knowing eyes at highly specific swing issues.

Try flexing that right knee a hair more.

A swing.

That’s it.

Now the players are the CEOs of their own privately-held little corporations, with the swing coach in on every practice shot, the caddie recording on an iPhone.

The regular caddie was less of a thing in 1985, except at the top of the money list. Tom Kite had Mike Carrick, Tom Watson had Bruce Edwards, Hale Irwin had Killer. Brad Faxon didn’t have a regular guy. Neither did Bill Britton or Mike Donald.

Killer was a legend, a Houstonite, a former boxer, a gent. In ’85, I exchanged nods with him my first week (Honda), talked to him my second (New Orleans) and on we went from there, through 1985 and beyond. He always had time — for me, for anybody — and was willing to point the way to the better breakfast buffets and reliable budget hotels. (Small kindnesses when you need them most are huge.) I was surprised, reading “The Green Road Home” recently and for the first time in years, to see that Killer and I had dinner together at the ’85 B.C. Open in Endicott, N.Y. I don’t recall the meal and I’m sure it was no elaborate anything. But just knowing we broke bread together tickles me. I met a man a few years ago, a member of an old-line Boston club, who told me he knew Killer when Killer was a caddie at the Houston Country Club and the man was a rich-kid junior member. “Killer raised me,” the man said.

Sometimes you hear that same thing said this way: So-and-so “grew me up.” A Southernism, and a phrase that was once in regular circulation on Tour. In the 1980s, the PGA Tour was still more Southern than anything else. Southern and Texan, the players and their tournament locales. Curtis Strange and Lanny Wadkins; Payne Stewart and Ben Crenshaw; Hubert Green, Keith Fergus, Bill Rogers — the list of Southern and Texan players goes on and on. 

The Tour had a bunch of glamorous events, the three American majors, of course, but also the Pebble Beach pro-am; Doral in all its glitz; the Memorial, Jack Nicklaus presiding. But the real Tour, for the players and caddies holding on for dear life, unfolded across the South. If you were playing to keep your card, you needed good weeks in Columbus and San Antonio and Pensacola. Ray Floyd and Big Jack were off hunting and fishing. You had a chance, or more of one. Every tournament ended with payout information followed by a fresh money list. Shots played equaled money earned.

The 1985 Panasonic Las Vegas Invitational had a purse of $950,000, the most prize money of any American tournament that year. Curtis Strange won the event and its first-place prize, $171,000. It was a five-round affair played on multiple courses, well-heeled amateurs playing alongside the pros every day. There was something tacky about the event, with seedy Las Vegas as the backdrop. Both those things, the tackiness and the seediness, added immeasurably to the fun, the stakes, the adventure of it all: amateurs arriving at golf courses via stretch limos choking with cherry air freshener; slot machines at soggy dive bars; check-cashing stores with harsh lighting and late hours.

I caddied in Vegas for an amateur, a long-limbed man in his mid-30s named Lee Roy Pearson III, an oil prospector from Ranger, Texas. (He’s the star of the book’s fourth chapter, “The Two-Fisted Golfer.”) We met in the parking lot of the Las Vegas Country Club, where (per Killer’s advice) I had situated myself, looking for work.

After returning home from the 2024 Masters, another season under way, I wrote to Lee Roy. A week or so later I got a two-page, handwritten letter back, on stationery stamped L.R. Pearson across its top. This is about half of it.

Michael My Boy,

It was so good to hear from you. It has been 39 years since we met. I still remember that you went after my brother-in-law, Jim Adams, first. What a mistake that would have been. Your CAREER would never have been the same without me.

I was always known as a pretty good golfer all throughout West Texas. I wasn’t a constant champion but I did win my share. But after your book came out I became A LEGEND. My wife swears that the main character (Roy) in the movie “Tin Cup” was based on my chapter in your book. What do you think?

I remember back in Las Vegas one day I asked you what you did at night after the round. You said you just went back to the room and wrote down things that happened to you that day. I thought that was the dumbest thing I had ever heard. But after the book came out it suddenly all made sense.

Things are OK here in Ranger + Eastland. I have my cattle and of course still have some oil. I’m 75 years old and can still shoot my age (not every time). If I am ever in Philadelphia I will call you and we will play. By the same token, if you are ever in Fort Worth or Dallas, call me and I will be there. It’s just 85 miles.

It was great to hear from you, Michael. You made my day.

With a little distance I can see now that Lee Roy’s letter captures the spirit and promise of that old campus greeting, the places you’ll go/the people you’ll meet. I hope this book does, too. It does for me. I got myself from New Orleans to the parking lot of the Las Vegas Country Club. Lee Roy got himself there, too. He played and I carried his gigantic golf bag for a week. I wrote about the experience — Lee Roy in Vegas — as best I could. That was 40 years ago. In a manner of speaking, we’ve been together — the two of us, dateline LAS VEGAS — ever since.