Well now. My granddaughter Amy tells me that people put things on the computer these days so that other people can read them, and that a lot of those people are golfers, and that I ought to. I said I've been telling these stories at the club for forty years and everybody there has heard them twice. She said that's exactly the point, Grandpa, these would be new people. So here we are. I talk, she types. If there's a mistake in here it's mine, and if there's a spelling mistake it's hers, and she says to tell you there won't be.

I've played golf since 1934, which is sixty-five years, and I still get out twice a week when my knee lets me. I'm not a great player and never was. Best I ever got to was about a 9 handicap, for a couple of summers in the late fifties, and these days I'm happy to break 90 from the forward tees, which I moved up to in 1994 and recommend to any man over seventy who's honest with himself. But I've seen a lot of golf and I've caddied for, played with, and lost balls alongside a great many people, and some of it's worth telling.

Pull up a chair.

I was thirteen years old in the summer of 1934, and there was no money. I don't mean we were poor the way people say it now. I mean my father had been out of work for two years, my mother took in sewing, and the four of us kids were expected to bring something home if we could find it. My older brother got on at a dairy. I was too small for that, but I could walk, and I could carry, and there was a golf course out past the edge of town where the doctors and the lawyers and the one banker who hadn't gone under still played on Saturday and Sunday.

The caddie master was a man named Mr. Doyle who had one arm and no patience. You showed up at six in the morning and sat on a bench behind the caddie shack, and if you were lucky he pointed at you. A round was eighteen holes carrying one bag, and the pay was thirty-five cents, and if the member was feeling good you might get a dime on top. Some days you'd go around twice. Some days you sat on the bench till noon and walked home with nothing. There was no pay for the bench.

That first summer I learned three things that I've never forgotten. One, keep your mouth shut unless you're asked. Two, watch the ball all the way down, because a lost ball was a lost ball and the man would look at you like it was your fault, which it usually wasn't but sometimes was. And three, golf is a game where a grown man will talk to a thirteen-year-old boy like an equal for four hours, because he needs somebody to tell his troubles to and the boy can't leave. I heard about more divorces and business failures on that course than I ever have since, and I was a barber for thirty-two years.

The bags were heavy. Leather, most of them, with the big clubs in them. No carts, no pull carts either, not at our place. You carried on one shoulder and switched at the turn. I grew about four inches that summer and I've always figured the bags stretched me.

Every caddie has a member he remembers. Mine was Dr. Feeney.

Dr. Feeney was a short, round man with a white mustache who played every Saturday morning at eight with the same three fellows, and he had a swing like a man chopping wood who didn't like the wood. He hit it maybe a hundred and sixty yards and dead straight, every time, and he'd shoot 88 or 89 and be delighted. He asked for me by name after the second time I carried for him. I never knew why. Maybe because I found his ball in the creek on number seven and didn't say anything about the two he'd already lost.

Now here's the thing about Dr. Feeney. He didn't tip money. Never once. What he did was, at the end of the round, he'd reach in the side pocket of his bag and take out a paper sack from the drugstore, and he'd hold it open, and you took one. One. Horehound drops, mostly. Sometimes a caramel. Once, a whole chocolate bar, and I remember that day like the Armistice.

The other caddies thought this was a terrible deal and wouldn't carry for him if they could help it. I thought so too, at first. Then one Saturday in August it rained, and the other members all went in, and Dr. Feeney stood under the porch at the clubhouse and looked at me and said, "Harold, you look like a boy who hasn't had a hot meal in a while," and took me in the grill room and bought me a hamburger and a bowl of soup, and sat there and ate one with me and talked about baseball, and never mentioned it again. I've thought since that he knew exactly what a dime meant to us and what a dime didn't mean, and that a kid who's got a chocolate bar in his hand on a Saturday afternoon in 1934 is a rich kid for about ten minutes. And he was right.

He died in 1941. I was twenty and working, and I went to the funeral, and I was the only caddie there. I still eat a horehound drop now and then. Amy says they're awful. They are.

You have to understand that a caddie in those days didn't own clubs. You played, if you played, on Monday mornings when the course was closed to members and Mr. Doyle would let you go out with a couple of clubs borrowed out of the lost-and-found barrel. I learned the game with a borrowed mashie and a borrowed putter and one ball that I'd found, and I got so I could play a whole nine holes with just those two clubs, which I still say is the best way anybody ever learned.

Then came the war. I was in the Army from 1942 to 1945, and I won't say much about that here except that I didn't see a golf course for three and a half years and thought about them more than a man should. When I got home in the fall of '45 I had my mustering-out pay and a job at a barbershop lined up, and the first thing I did in the spring of 1946, before I bought a car, before I had a suit, was walk into the sporting goods store downtown and buy a set of golf clubs.

Matched set, steel shafts, a driver, a brassie, and irons two through nine, and a putter. Made by a company that's long gone now. Thirty-eight dollars, which was about two weeks' pay, and I paid it out at five dollars a month because the man behind the counter had been in the service too. I carried them home on my shoulder like I'd carried Dr. Feeney's, and my mother looked at them and looked at me and said, "Well, I suppose you've earned it."

I played my first round with my own clubs on a public course on a Sunday in April of 1946 and shot, I believe, 103. I have never been happier on a golf course, before or since, including the day I broke 80. I've still got the putter. It's in the umbrella stand by the front door and Amy says I should put it somewhere nicer, but I like to see it when I come in.

It took me twelve years. From 1946 to 1958 I got down into the 80s and stayed there, and every golfer who's ever lived knows what that's like. You shoot 82, and you think, next time. You shoot 81 and you can taste it. You shoot 85 and you wonder why you play this game.

By 1958 I had my own shop, two chairs, and a boy of nine, and I could get out on Wednesday afternoons when the shop was closed and Sunday mornings early. I'd joined the club by then, the same one I'd caddied at, which is a story in itself, and the members who were still around from 1934 never quite got used to it. One of them, an old lawyer, called me "boy" till the day he died. I cut his hair for twenty years.

It was a Wednesday in July, 1958, hot as a stove. I went out alone at one o'clock, which nobody does in July, and I don't know what happened except that everything went where I looked. I made the turn in 39, and I knew, the way you know, and I didn't let myself think about it. Par on ten, par on eleven, bogey on twelve, and then I holed a putt from off the green on fourteen for a birdie and had to sit down on the bench behind the tee for a minute.

I came to the eighteenth needing a bogey five for 79. Drove it in the fairway. Hit a four-iron into the front bunker. Blasted out to about twenty feet. And stood over that putt for what felt like a week, with nobody watching, nobody in the world knowing or caring, and the sprinklers going on the practice green, and I two-putted for a five and a 79, and I walked into the grill room and told the bartender, and he said, "That's nice, Harold," and kept wiping the bar. And that was that.

I broke 80 maybe fifteen more times in my life, and never once by more than two strokes. I don't think I ever needed to.

My son Jim started caddying for me when he was ten, in 1959, and I paid him a quarter and a bottle of pop, which was more than Mr. Doyle ever paid me and I told him so. He played a little in high school and then he went off to college and the Air Force and got busy with his life the way you do, and for about twenty years we played maybe twice a summer, when he came home. He's a good player. Better than me at his best, a 6 or a 7, and he hits it a mile and doesn't know where. I used to tell him he played like a man in a hurry. He was.

Then in 1988 he moved back to town with his family, and his boy Tommy was eleven, and one Saturday in June the three of us went out together for the first time. Jim on the back tees, me on the whites, Tommy hitting off wherever he could reach the fairway from. I don't remember what anybody shot. I remember standing on the seventh tee, the one by the creek where I found Dr. Feeney's ball fifty-four years before, and watching my son show my grandson how to hold the club, and thinking, well, Harold, that's about it. That's the whole thing right there.

Tommy's twenty-two now and he's the best of the three of us by a good deal. He's got a swing like they teach on the television, all one piece, and he hits those big-headed metal drivers three hundred yards when he catches one, and he's got the patience I never had. He asks me to play. I want you to understand that. A twenty-two-year-old boy calls up his grandfather on a Saturday and asks him to play, and rides in the cart with him, and doesn't rush him, and listens to the story about the mashie for the fortieth time and laughs in the right place. I don't know what I did to deserve that but I'm not giving it back.

We played last Sunday, the 19th. Jim shot 81, Tommy shot 74, and I shot 91 and made a twelve-footer on the last hole to beat Jim on the hole, which is what matters. Amy walked along and kept score. She says she's taking up the game next spring. I told her to start with two clubs.

People ask me about the old clubs, so here's what I remember. In 1934, steel shafts had been legal for about ten years, and most of the members had gone over to them, but a good number of the older men still had hickory in the bag and swore by it. Hickory shafts were beautiful things and they'd twist on you if you swung hard, so the old-timers had a slow, easy swing you don't see anymore. They also warped in the damp and broke in the cold, and I've seen a grown man cry over a snapped shaft. You couldn't just go buy another one that matched.

The clubs had names, not numbers, and you had to learn them. Amy made me a table so it lines up.

The balls were wound balls with a soft cover they called balata, and if you caught one thin with an iron you'd cut the cover and it was done. A new ball was expensive. A caddie who found a good one in the rough and kept it was a rich man. The greens were slower than now, a good deal slower, and bumpier, and you hit your putts instead of stroking them.

Now? My grandson's driver is made of metal, some kind of titanium, with a head the size of a grapefruit, and a graphite shaft that weighs nothing. His irons have the weight around the edges so a bad swing still goes straight, which is either wonderful or cheating depending on my mood. The balls are two-piece, you can't cut them, and they go forever. The greens are like a pool table. Carts everywhere, so nobody walks, and nobody caddies, and that's the thing I'd change back if I could change one thing, because a boy on a bench at six in the morning learns something a boy at home doesn't.

But I'll tell you what hasn't changed. The ball still doesn't go where you're looking. It goes where you're swinging. Nobody's invented a club that fixes that yet and I hope they never do.

None of these are in the rule book. They're the ones that matter.

1. Fix your ball mark on the green. Then fix one more. It takes ten seconds. A ball mark fixed today heals in a day or two; one left alone takes weeks and every putt that crosses it for a month is your fault.
2. Rake the bunker. All of it, not just where you were standing. And put the rake back where you found it.
3. Replace your divot, or fill it with the sand in the bucket if they give you one. Fairways don't grow back on their own.
4. Keep up. Your place on the course is right behind the group in front of you, not right in front of the group behind you. If you're holding people up, wave them through, and don't take it personally. I've been waved through and I've done the waving, and it's the same game either way.
5. Be ready to hit when it's your turn. Figure out your club while the other fellow is hitting, not after. A round of golf ought to take four hours. It took three and a half in 1934 and nobody was in a hurry.
6. Count every stroke. Every one. The whiff counts. The one in the water counts. If you don't want to count it, don't hit it. A man who shoots an honest 95 is a golfer; a man who shoots a dishonest 85 is just a fellow with a pencil.
7. Stand still and be quiet when somebody's hitting. Not behind them, not in their line, not jingling change. Your grandmother taught you this in church and it applies.
8. Don't give advice unless you're asked. And if you're asked, give one thing, not six.
9. Play the ball where it lies unless the course says otherwise. Bad lies are part of the game. You'll get good ones to make up for it, and you won't remember those.
10. Say thank you to whoever's on the bag, in the cart barn, or behind the counter. I spent one summer on that bench. I never forgot who said thank you and who didn't. Neither will they.