I had the luck yesterday to be out with lovely Gerry and Morag from mid Cape Cod. Morag had an interesting accent which turns out to be a cross between Cape Cod and Dumfries as she had emigrated in her twenties. While Gerry was pure Cape Cod.
They asked if I didn’t mind ‘four caddying’ and I said ‘fine but there are only two of you?’. However, it transpires that’s a technical term for just being a sort of course guide. We kind of laughed but I could see Matt my caddie master half grimacing in the background. I don’t think he quite realises what a wayward cannon I can be at times.
Anyway we got to the 4th and Gerry asked me why the hazard posts were painted yellow and I had to say I didn’t know. I mean I wasn’t going to lie to a top lawyer. My immediate instinct was that it could be a greenkeeper whim thing or maybe a colour blindness issue. Gerry said he wasn’t sure either but knew there was a significance between red and yellow hazard posts. And I suppose I should know about this.
You get quite a lot of questions out on the course which can often stump you. But on the whole they’re quite easy and most of us know that there’s barley grown in the fields across the road and that’s what whisky is made from, and the tracks in the field are made by tractors, the Cathedral is the building in town that is half in ruins, and the rocks off the 17th are volcanic. And we have the oldest University in Scotland and the orange things floating in the sea are buoys for lobster creels. And we export a lot of our lobsters to France because you can’t get one for love nor money in town. And Carnoustie is across the water and so is Dundee. And the sea is called The North Sea and it is very cold. And that white thing out there miles away (fiftyish) is the Bell Rock Lighthouse built by Robert Stevenson. And that is one of the seven wonders of the industrial world. A bit like the game of golf but we’re no longer taking credit for that.
However Gerry was more for asking golfing technicalities and on the next hole he floored me by asking what the slope index of the course was. My immediate reaction was to say I wasn’t quite sure but it was really quite hilly for a Links course. But I thought better and had to admit my ignorance of slope indices. It turns out to be an American-inspired course rating system which assesses courses, and so equates handicaps, globally. Gerry seemed quite informed about all this and said that it all came down to the GIN Index. And I thought that sounded promising.
I felt a bit better a few holes later though when Gerry asked what sort of grass we had here and I confidently, and quickly, replied that it was rye. And I was glad that he thought it might be that too.
Gerry loved the Castle Course but I’m not sure of his estimation of the savvy of its local caddies.
Well, of this particular four caddie.