September 3, 2021 | By Leland Hardy
EAST LAKE GOLF CLUB, ATLANTA, GA
Here we are. Moving day at the third and final leg of the FedEx Cup Playoffs which is the Tour Championship being contested at East Lake Golf Club, located just a few Finau 7 irons away from downtown Atlanta. The sport loving public will be fixated on names we all know, and that most of us love, like Brooksie, and Spieth, and Rory.
The fans will be rooting for all of the rest who are lucky enough or skilled enough to be among the top 30 ranked players in the world, and who are familiar enough to us to be known by their one word sobriquets or, in the case of Dustin Johnson (DJ), their mere initials.
Speaking of DJ, a couple of weeks ago, just when East Lake’s Director of Golf, Drew Dunn —who is definitely one of the best in the business —had all but finished expertly manicuring the golf course sufficiently unforgivingly enough to make it worthy of hosting the world’s very best, I was given the honor of using DJ’s 2020 Tour Champion locker for my round at the pristine, ultra-private course.
While the golf world focuses on the late round heroics of its golf heroes and would be FedEx Cup Champions as they vie to collect their $15 million winner’s check, I call upon the world’s golf fanatics and casual fans alike to think about what they are NOT getting a chance to see, let alone focus on, i.e. Black caddies at work.
Where have they gone?
While I could write a University of Saint Andrews worthy Ph.D. dissertation on the topic of the vanishing, nay, essentially extinct* Black caddie, I’ll save that for a different article or another TV interview.
Please note, “extinct” is asterisked in the previous sentence because the Black caddie isn’t actually extinct—there are legions of them—they’re just essentially extinct at what I call “the big boy level,” aka the PGA Tour and LPGA Tour level, aka where the money is.
I have the enviable distinction of counting among my friends the ‘Dean of Black golf caddies,’ Carl Jackson, whose Hall of Fame-worthy career is marked by his having caddied in 54 Masters Championships. He is so steeped in all aspects of golf course management that merely standing a socially distant six-feet away from Mr. Jackson qualifies you to read putts by osmosis alone.
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His life and his time as a looper spans the continuum of time, from when the rule book stated that “all caddies must be Black and all golfers must be white,” to the time when the economics of golf has essentially promulgated “NO caddies at the big money PGA Tour level will be Black and all golfers, with the exception of a scant few, will be white.”
The reality of the situation is that as golf purses exploded in magnitude beginning in the mid 1990s, and as caddies’ compensation increasingly became a percentage of their golfers’ winnings vs. the paltry fixed sums Black caddies were typically paid for being on the bag, PGA Tour golfers’ college roommates, fellow college golf teammates, and hang out buddies became their caddies.
The last time I checked, the going rate for a top tier caddie was ten percent of his golfer’s purse. According to the OLD math, 10% of a FedEx Cup Champion’s $15 million winner’s check is a cool $1.5 million bucks.
The highlight of my recent pre-Tour Championship round wasn’t using DJ’s locker, though I was honored by the Club’s courtesy, and it wasn’t my being regaled by the challenge of managing the course’s pencil thin fairways, or finessing its Indy 500 worthy green speeds. No, the highlight of my round was experiencing real, genuine, expert caddying from two African American local caddies who, for all intents and purposes, knew every blade of grass on the course as if they planted or trimmed them themselves.
With the most colorful names imaginable right out of an Alex Haley novel, “Milkshake” and “Big C,” the two gentlemen – and they were, indeed, gentlemen – expertly advised as to where to place my ball off the tee on the par fives playing from the Big Boy championship tees.
They counseled not just where to play the breaks on my putts, but how hard or how softly I should putt. They knew EXACTLY how the ball would move. They knew how to adjust for wind speeds. They knew exactly how to mesh with their golfer, weekend duffer though he was. Needless to say, I had an order of magnitude better round than I would have had absent their wise counsel. Champions Tour be damned. With guys like these on the bag, even I could make it out there!
Milkshake and Big C weren’t the only Black caddies on staff at East Lake. There are many African American caddies on staff there, just as there are many African American caddies on staff at many, if not most, of America’s private and semi-private country clubs, and at the nation’s public courses that feature caddies. But they’re not on the big boys’ bags on the Big Boy Tour. Where are they?
They’re in America’s clubhouses hoping against hope that they’ll be given the opportunity to be on a PGA Tour player’s bag. They’re at home on their couches in front of their TVs, whoopin’ and hollerin’ with excitement as late round leads change hands, when they’d rather be loopin’ and swallowin’ the champagne of victory with a PGA Tour Champion.
Change doesn’t just happen. It must be instigated. Sometimes it must be agitated. As an agitator and an instigator, I choose to make my contribution to the reemergence of the Black caddie by helping to create the next generation of world golf champions of color. Their college roommates and hangout buddies who are fantastic golfers but who are just shy of good enough to make it on Tour can be Hall of Fame-worthy caddies—just like the legendary Carl Jackson.
But, while my contribution is DEFINITELY in progress and is DEFINITELY yielding as we speak the harvest I am sowing, that reemergence might take a while. So Brooksie, and Spieth, and Rory, and “The Scientist” DeChambeau, and DJ —and all the rest, give a deserving caddie of color a shot on the bag, and let’s help to make this game we all love so much more representative of ALL of us. America needs it now more than ever before. The world needs it now more than ever before.
Leland Hardy (@LelandHardy) is a philanthropist, entrepreneur, financier, and former professional athlete. He is the Founder of RacialBias,org, a certified 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation focused on identifying and helping to eradicate bias in all of its forms wherever it is found in society and Strivers Row Media, a key manufacturer and supplier of healthcare products to First Responders amid the Coronavirus pandemic via www.AmericanPPEsupplier.com. Hardy is also a Board Member of Sport BLX and is a contributing writer to leading sports and finance publications.
