Tiering Club Events, as a Caddy

From the Desk of BTG,

Morning Folks, and welcome to our Saturday edition of the BTG Newsletter. The Saturday editions will be for subscribers who have successfully referred a single reader to BTG.

The Saturday reads will be longer-form essays written by an acquaintance who is known to me only by the name Country Club Caddy. He’s a hilarious individual, and has worked as both a Caddy and Bartender at elite private clubs across the country. His insights and stories are worth a read, and if you tend to get offended at offensive language or humor, this post is not for you.

Enjoy,

BTG

Okay, friends, this week I have decided to tier the club events where I currently caddy. This list will be based on a series of factors including enjoyment for the caddy, ease, the kind of member for whom you will be caddying, and most importantly, financial upside. Let us begin.

The Founder’s Tournament

Starting off with a bang here. This event is at the end of the summer, when I can read my club's greens Hellen Keller–style if needed. This is an all-out match play member-guest, in a single-elimination, last-team-standing format. This event holds a special place in my heart because my first summer caddying, I was the sherpa assisting two great guys in their thirties to the championship win. This put me on the radar as one of the best caddies at my course, allowing me to swing my metaphorical dick around in the caddyshack a little more. This tourney is the closest that caddying gets to a meritocracy: the better you caddy, the farther your members go, the more shekels you receive at the end.

Men’s Guest Day

This is a recurring event during the summer at my club, and ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s a good day. This is an S-tier event for two reasons. The first is that usually a male guest will be very inclined to tip well and often, and I am the primary beneficiary. It is also fun for me to hear these old guys talk about being divorced; “second swings” they call it. Hilarious.

2-day men's member-guest

Now we are getting into the events that are good with one or two flaws. This is a member-guest consisting of three nine-hole matches the first day, and two nine-hole matches on the second. In the world of caddying, match play is a godsend. Close putts are conceded, which means I don’t have to pretend to intently read a three-footer that I already know the member is going to miss on the low side of the hole. It is also usually a nice payday, considering the extra nine holes that are thrown in. The two downsides are that tournaments like these can be an open-hand slap in the face for those reverse sandbaggers who think that having a line on their ball makes them Brad Faxon, and I am the bank of excuses in which they make their deposit.

Finally, the event is in the spring, and the weather is always dogshit. This causes the players to tense, the bags to get heavier, and the vibes of the round to take a dull turn.

Corporate outings

These can be incredibly divisive in caddying circles. Corporate outings are usually the days when you experience the absolute best and worst in people. I have been paid five hundred dollars by a singular person. I have also had a person throw the club in my direction after every bad shot he hit (you could count on one hand the number of times he hit a “good shot”).

I put it in the A tier for two reasons. First, it is always fun to watch someone talk shit to me about their boss as we watch him block-slice a nine-iron on a short par three. Second, it is important to remember that caddying is a job, and I am always going to take the chance to get paid big rather than trying to avoid the risk of having to be some corporate cock-muncher's servant for five terrible hours. I am willing to roll the dice.

Senior member-guest

This event is, as described, like the member-guest, except with old people. The old people at my club are generally not too bad. I’ll put it this way: I’m never in fear of being too far behind them. Most of them tend to be on the generous side come payment time, but it is certainly awkward when I have to warn them that a cross bunker is a ninety-yard carry and consequently try to catalyze a discussion about laying up short of it. It fits perfectly in the one slot of B tier.

Mixed member-guest

The mixed member-guest is certainly a mixed bag. It is always entertaining when men and women have to play golf together. The men are usually white-knuckling their way to barely breaking ninety while waiting eighty yards ahead for their female counterpart, who is showing me photos of her beach house’s new kitchen cabinets, to go ahead and lump her three-wood 100 yards down the fairway.

The mixed member-guest is somewhat of a raffle in terms of whether the man or woman is paying you. I don’t want to say that women are cheap when it comes to paying caddies, but I have on many occasions looked down at the money in my hand and said to myself, “She’s lucky she’s hot.”

Parent-Child

Now we are approaching the real dump of the summer schedule at my club. This one is especially rough for me as a former college player, because I am now tasked by the father to evaluate whether or not his four-martini mistake is getting a full ride to Duke for golf. These are one of the many difficult situations that a caddy must navigate. How do you respectfully tell your member that his son (the next Tiger Woods) has offered me his vape six times in seven holes and is asking me if I have any good fingering tips? Oh, and he cheated his way to a stellar 45 on the front nine. The only bright side is that if you give the pimple-laden TikToker a well-timed swing tip, you yourself might get a little extra tip at the end of the round.

Club Championship

This one could be in the S tier, as long as you are caddying for one of the two guys at my club capable of winning. If not, buckle up. You will be getting a perfect storm of no practice with anything except driver, David Goggins and Tiger quotes, and the crumpling of an ego by the fourth hole right in front of your very eyes. Enormous waste of walking.

Here we are, everyone, the final tier. This tier is named after the rousing speech that our Caddymaster will give to us before these events begin. Such an elegant wordsmith. I am assuming many of you skipped down to this section. I applaud you for that; I would have done the same. Let’s get into it.

Ladies Member-Member

This one is rough. Women versus women match play. We are going to be making some generalizations about women playing golf, and they are based entirely on my five years of caddying. I look at it this way: when it comes to match play, men want to beat one another, but women just want to win. This means that they never concede a putt. EVER. They spend the walk from tee to green calling each other queens and goddesses, then they go full Israel-Palestine as soon as their manicured fingers curl the putter grip. This causes the rounds to become painfully slow.

A quick sidenote: when men play golf, there is usually a backup on a par four or five where the green may be reachable. For women, the backup is on the hole where the bathrooms are. Pun intended? I don’t know what these shawtys get up to in there, but good luck squeezing in a quick range session after a loop.

Back to the Israel-Puttestine debacle. Mrs. Botox will slide a twenty-foot putt nine inches past the hole. A silence will fall over the putting green. Mrs. Botox will glare and make a comment about another woman’s skirt and call me in to read the nine-inch putt. She will ask me for a read, and I think, “We’ve played five holes in an hour forty-five minutes.” While I do enjoy a good catfight, the rounds are slow and awkward and you always get paid the minimum.

I admit, I struggled to determine which one of the bottom-tier events sucks more. I think they both stink in separate, yet equal ways. Beat the Pro Day at my club is a shotgun start in which the head professional goes out with one of the groups and shoots a gross score, usually around 75, impressive, but certainly gettable. The rest of the field are members playing off of their handicaps. 

I caddied for a visor-wearing gentleman in this event—already a rough start. We start on hole nine, and that’s the number he wrote down as we walked to the 10th tee. He then absolutely buries a five-footer for a snowman on ten, a statement to the other competitors that he had arrived. After a barrage of slammed clubs, slurs, and a total of fifteen over par through five holes, this guy actually had the balls to tell me he shot a 73 last week.

My career flashed before my eyes as I considered asking him if he shot that on the front or back nine. To conclude, this event is the worst because it shows the members at their lowest. Beat the Pro Day is a day of reckoning between the ego and the id, and it never ends happily. It allows me to understand why Sigmund Freud enjoyed the occasional crack rock.

CCC does not miss. See you Monday. As a reminder, just one referral gets you access to these on a weekly basis.