Markingtime

Twenty years ago (ouch), I ran away to join the circus, or tried to anyway. It was a different PGA Tour then. Now the game is awash in money and glamour. Two decades ago when Brad Faxon was nice enough to give me a caddie tryout at the 1985 Honda Classic, the overriding emotion on Tour was lust for the game and desperation to find a way to stay in it. At least that's how it seemed to me. � I think of 1985 as the final year of the old Tour. In '86 the Bing Crosby tournament became the AT&T; Jack Nicklaus motivated a million middle-aged people to take up the game when he won the Masters at 46; and Greg Norman nearly won everything, setting himself up for birdies with long, straight bombs with a metal driver. Nabisco had made a big play in golf, and in '86 the purses started to fatten substantially, and as they did, more players brought out relatives and college friends to caddie. The Tour's core of older, black, migrant caddie-foils--Golf Ball, Killer, Bebop, dozens of others--started to fade away. Two weeks ago at the Honda, at which Faxon and I had a low-key 20th-year reunion, I saw only one African-American caddie. In practice rounds caddies now carry compasses (to establish prevailing wind directions), altimeters (to determine elevation changes) and range finders (to measure distances to the yard). I believe most of them have degrees from MIT.

Brad was 23 and I was 24, but I felt as if he were older, and still do. We're friends and have little catch-ups at Tour events, but generally I'm slightly nervous around him. It's all rooted in this: He fired me after a week, for cause. He could have fired me after a day. In '85 when we--we?--made the turn on Thursday morning, all Brad wanted was his scorecard, his driver with the headcover off, a new ball, a banana and his sweater put away. I was juggling all this stuff when Brad looked at me and said, "Your hands are too full." Walking off the 10th tee, he asked Greg Rita, who was caddying that week for Mike Donald, about which tournaments he could work for him down the road. I found work with other players-- Donald's friend Bill Britton, Steve Elkington, Al Geiberger--and wrote a book about my fast year as a Tour caddie called The Green Road Home.

The kids, like Faxon, playing the Tour 20 years ago all had heroes: Nicklaus or Watson or Trevino. Now they don't. They're good, they know they're good, and they want to do it their own way. A similar thing has happened in the writing game. In '85 I sent my bagger manuscript to four gods: Dan Jenkins, George Plimpton, James Reston and Herbert Warren Wind. They all blurbed generously. Now, with the Web and all, you can start your own career. Mentoring is not a growth industry.

I'll always be grateful for my early help. In '86 Golf Digest ran an excerpt from the book, the part about Faxon's sacking me. That bit has legs. At a U.S. Open a couple of years ago, somebody looked at my press pass and said, "I know you. You're that guy Faxon fired. What have you been doing since then?"

Faxon's career is more well-known. He has won seven times on Tour, been a Ryder Cupper, served on the Tour's policy board and developed a reputation as a good quote, an all-world putter, a golf-course buff and a player on an endless quest to solve golf's enduring riddles. He hasn't done all he hoped to do, not so far, anyway. He was the college player of the year coming out of Furman in '83, and the practice putts he holed on afternoons 20 years ago were to win U.S. Opens. He hasn't actually faced such a putt, not in real life. Still, he's 18th on the alltime money list, having won $15.5 million. More than that--and in this he's lucky--the game still absorbs him.

Anyway, who can say they've done all they hoped and hope to do? Not Faxon, not I, not anyone I know in his mid-40s. Faxon once said to me, "Would you ever try to learn everything you can about writing in a week?"

"No."

"Golf's the same way. You simply keep at it, trying to get better."

That's when I realized that making a living from a typewriter or from a set of golf clubs is about the same thing. You can't fake the results in either. You're on your own. The writer and the golfer, they both know, deep down, whether they're getting better or not. At 43, 44, you're young enough to hang on to that useful phrase, so far. It pushes you. But you're old enough to feel the pain of passing time and lost chances and buried dreams. I'm not being gloomy. I can't be: The writing life, like the golfing life, is rooted in optimism. I'm only trying to be truthful. Now it's our children with the sun in their hair, their skin slippery with ocean water. In a wave you lose all sense of time.

Faxon and I couldn't figure out what happened to the 20 years. A blink. "You were wearing a blue alligator shirt, too small for you," Faxon said. He had just finished the first round of the Honda, and we were sitting in the players' dining room. Nobody was looking to chase me out. It's embarrassing, the things other people remember. I haven't worn a shirt with a logo in years. "Thursday was windy and hot," Faxon said, "and on Friday you were red and crispy." It's a painful memory, all the way around.