Walking with Jack by Don J. Snyder Page A

the same is true for becoming a caddie. I have to learn how to manage my golfer’s game in weather so foul that you just want to dig a hole and crawl into it. Tomorrow is my first day, Jack. My first real step to prepare myself. Wish me luck. I’m five hours ahead of you, so you will be sound asleep when I do my first loop. I love you and miss you tons. Daddy

      MARCH 28, 2008     
    I was much too excited to sleep well, and in order to be certain I wasn’t late for my first day on the job, I took a bus this morning that got me into St. Andrews two hours early. I took a walk out to the farthest point on the course, the 11th green, where Bobby Jones had met his demise. The sun lay in gold bands across the fairways as I made my way back, dreaming about what it was going to be like walking the same ground each day where Jones and all the great players had walked. There was still no one in the caddie pavilion or standing outside, so I killed some time looking in the windows of the handsome gift shop behind the 18th green, deciding what I might buy Colleen and the three girls at the end of my first day of work. I had my face pressed to the glass, searching for some little thing I could send them to mark the beginning of my journey as a caddie, when a reflection appeared. Two people just behind me, walking up to the 18th green, where the white flag was blowing in the rising breeze off the sea. Rather than turn around and face them, I let myself imagine that Jack and I were coming to the green together and it was our reflection in the glass. Not the two of us last winter, but on some day in the near future when I would be carrying his bag. The possibility of this felt so close and real and I was zinging along with it when my BlackBerry zapped me in my heart. It was much too early for anyone from home. That is what I was thinking when I took the phone from my pocket and saw an incoming e-mail from the caddie pavilion. No lights were on there, and no one was standing outside. I clicked open the e-mail and found this message: “This is Rick Mackenzie, the caddie master. If you’rethe writer, I cannot take you on as a caddie. I won’t have any writers working for me.”
    A few minutes later at the window of the pavilion, the assistant confirmed this and handed me back my £100. So much for my life here as a caddie.

      MARCH 29, 2008     
    I was on the 4th tee at Elie yesterday playing my final round before I packed to return home when, to make matters worse, I got an e-mail from Jack telling me that several members of the Inverness Club whom he has gotten to know are coming to St. Andrews to play the Old Course this summer and they plan to look me up to caddie for them. I wrote back and said nothing to Jack about what has happened. He doesn’t need any bad news from me.
    I played fifty-seven holes of angry golf today trying to get it out of my system. Out on the course I sent Rick Mackenzie an e-mail telling him about Jack and me and our dream and asking if he would reconsider. He wrote back immediately with two words: “Sorry. No.” I birdied the next hole and the one after that while my blood was boiling. Something about anger focuses the mind, I suppose. I felt as if there were no hole on the course I couldn’t birdie. Until I made a bogey.

      MARCH 30, 2008     
    My plan was to take the train to London today, spend the night there, and get the cheapest flight out tomorrow. This morning I walked to the maintenance shop off the 3rd tee and presented the head of the grounds crew with a quart of Jameson whiskey as a thank-you gift. I explained what had transpired at the Old Course and said that I was going home. When I delivered the news, there was a look of sorrow in his eyes, as if this reversal of fortune had happened to him. He took a deep drag on his cigarette, and then he told me that he knew the caddie master at Kingsbarns Golf Links, just outside St. Andrews. “His name is Davy