My View From The Sand Trap: A Caddy’s Perspective

Any golfing publication will tell you that there are four types of golfers: the scratch golfer, the bogey golfer, the high handicapper, and the sandbagger.  These categorizations, of course, refer to the varying skill levels of golfers. The scratch golfer might be able to give Tiger Woods a run for his money. The bogey golfer is your average golfer who plays once a week and is more than happy to shoot an 85. The high handicapper lacks any golf skill whatsoever, and is usually happy just to be on the links. Known for erratic tee shots, the high handicapper is more than likely to lose his or her fair share of balls in the woods. While many golfers find the hacker to be annoying, the sandbagger is, by far, the most hated golfer. Known to seduce golfers into bets with his or her less-than-impressive play in the early stages of a round, the sandbagger becomes a scratch golfer as soon as a bet has been placed. Should you find yourself witnessing an unprecedented improvement in a matter of minutes, it’s safe to assume that you have been sandbagged. From the scratch golfer to the sandbagger, this classification system effectively serves as a spectrum of golfers’ skill levels and leads us to believe that skill is all that matters in golf. The only problem is that skill isn’t all that matters in golf.

My experience, both as a golfer and as an employee at a country club, has led me to deviate from golfers’ skill levels and to categorize golfers in a different way. The way I see it, there are five types of golfers: the country club hero, the cheater, the slowpoke, the child prodigy, and the swearing hacker. The country club hero is all business. For a hero, a 3:15pm tee time means getting to the course at 11:30am, warming up, eating a healthy pre-round meal, and putting on the practice green (and still having time to watch three hours of golf on TV). Whereas the hero is a stickler for the rules, the cheater tends to overlook golf rules and often loses track of whether he or she got a four or a twelve on the previous hole (same difference, right?). Ironically enough, in my experiences, the cheater is usually an accountant. And while the cheater is usually either mathematically inept or morally flawed (and sometimes both mathematically inept and morally flawed), many golfers would rather play with a cheater than play with a slowpoke. Unceasingly lethargic and methodical, the slowpoke is the golfing equivalent of a grandmother driving her Buick forty miles an hour on the highway with her hands at ten and two. Needless to say, slowpokes are to be avoided whenever possible. The child prodigy is the golfer everyone envies. Without adult obligations, the prodigy can play golf (well) every day of the week and effortlessly shoot in the mid 70s. Aggressive and short-tempered, the swearing hacker plays poorly, but swears magnificently. With his or her infinite reserve of expletives, the swearing golfer makes the “God damn it” you muttered on the second hole seem like a schoolboy’s prayer. Nonetheless, the swearing hacker gives us all something to laugh about. Usually, as our laughs fill the clubhouse, we realize that golf is not as rigid of a game as the golfing publications make it out to be. For those of us weekend golfing warriors and country club employees, golf is much more about approach than it is about scores.

As we have seen, one can undoubtedly categorize golfers by their skill level and/or their approaches to the game. However, whereas skill is easily quantifiable (except in the case of sandbaggers), a golfer’s approach can only be understood by seeing exactly how he or she conducts him or herself during a round. Additionally, neither categorization is mutually exclusive.  A scratch golfer can play like a hacker and vice versa. Likewise, a country club pro can use more than his or her fair share of expletives, and a cheater can be quite lethargic when kicking his or her ball into the fairway. These two categorizations that attempt to categorize golfers according to both skill level and approach to the game exhibit an essential truth about the process of classification: classification is utterly subjective. My classifications of the types of golfers may be (and most likely is) very different from Tiger Woods’ classifications because I have never been a world champion golfer, and he has never been a caddy. For Tiger, or any world champion golfer, skill level reigns supreme when it comes to classifying golfers. For them, there are no sandbaggers or swearing hackers, only pro golfers and plebian golfers. But for me, having caddied for my fair share of each type of golfer, skill level matters little. As a caddy, I would much prefer a swearing hacker who treats golf like a game to a slowpoke who happens to be both a stickler for the rules and an elitist. Ultimately these two categorizations show that even what we believe to be the most wonderfully accurate categorizations are tainted with the categorizer’s bias, and should consequently be prefaced with a fore-warning.