How Australian Golf Digest managing director Nick Cutler came to caddie at the WPGA Championship – and the lessons he learned.
Newcastle journeywoman Nikki Garrett had spent seven years away from professional golf and swore she hadn’t hit balls at a driving range for the past four of those. Instead, the two-time Ladies European Tour winner’s time had been divided between motherhood, corporate golf commitments and the odd social round with friends.
I sensed an air of desperation in her voice when she asked me to be her caddie at the WPGA Championship, hosted by Brisbane’s Royal Queensland Golf Club in January. She may have been under the influence – it was at the very festive Jack Newton Celebrity Classic after all – but, even so, how could I say no? To go inside the ropes for four days (there was no cut at the inaugural event that also offered up the Karrie Webb Cup to the winner) was something that intrigued me, and I knew it was going to be a great learning experience.
Here’s what I picked up along the way, while toeing the age-old caddie rules of showing up, keeping up and shutting up.
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Professional golf is about mistakes and how you can minimise them. Most of us have heard this adage but over the four rounds of my caddie experience, I saw Nikki (and the other pros) continually scramble and get up and down. They minimised damage on the scorecard time and time again. Mistakes aren’t compounded, fullstop.
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I knew Nikki was previously ranked in the top 50 in the world and a two-time winner in Europe but I have to be honest, I wasn’t prepared for the level at which she can still play. Nikki missed only five fairways all week and, even then, by a couple of metres at most. Nikki’s short game was also nothing short of amazing, with a couple of the male pros mentioning it to me on the way around. One even admitted that if he had a short game like hers, he would have been playing in Hawaii that week on the PGA Tour instead of Royal Queensland. Despite her lengthy time away from tournament golf, I found out the reason Nikki is still off plus-6 at her home club of Shelly Beach on the New South Wales Central Coast.
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Mixing motherhood and professional golf is hard – almost impossible. Having known Nikki for a while, I know how much she puts into motherhood (Nixon, 6, and Stella, 3) and the family. Nikki’s husband, Frank, has a full-time job that includes weekends and so something had to give – and that was Nikki’s full-time golf commitments. But, as it panned out, she and Frank were able to make things work for the week of the WPGA (thanks to extended family). I can’t offer any long-term solutions here. The fact is tournament golf isn’t family friendly. It’s a conundrum many women will continue to face when the peak of their playing career clashes with their peak childbearing years.
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The format of two male players and a female player per group worked. Nikki liked the concept and the guys were equally complimentary of the idea.
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Pros get nervous too! Really nervous. Nikki walked out of the locker room on the first day ashen-faced. I think if she had failed her rapid antigen test then and there (strict COVID-19 health and safety protocols were in place all week), she would have been happy to head straight to the airport. It took a good four to five holes on day one and at least the third hole on the other days for Nikki to settle into her groove. Pro sportspeople don’t necessarily have ice in their veins. They learn to work with nerves, something us mere mortals should remember the next time we are putting for a $5 skin.
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Australia needs tournament golf and the players want to play more of it. But the economics of running tournament golf in Australia is not 100-percent understood at playing level, and with every sport competing for the sponsorship dollar, it’s getting harder. TV ratings equal dollars, and the PGA/WPGA Championships averaged 60,000 a day on Fox Sports/Kayo. This figure needs to be five times higher to make a proper impact. If Greg Norman’s LIV group delivers half of what it is promising for the Asia-Pacific region, then there will be no shortage of support from the players (and the golf public), particularly a new teams event.
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Party holes make the experience. The 17th hole at Royal Queensland was set up as such, with all players encouraged to interact with the crowd. Each putt sunk was celebrated as if it were a birdie, and each approach shot was met with cheers or groans depending on where it finished. Every tournament needs one, if not two party holes.
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Pros love crowds. Nikki flew the green at 17 on day one only to use a hybrid from seven metres off the green to finish within two feet for a saved par. All this in front of a corporate crowd with drinks in hand sitting no more than a few feet above her. After playing her superb second shot, she acknowledged the generous reaction from the crowd before looking at me with a big smile of sheer relief. “Love a crowd,” she said as I handed her the putter.
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One more thing: yardage books vs rangefinders… I get the ability to read a yardage book and the level of skill to work out distances, but for the sake of the sport, to keep things moving, why not just allow rangefinders and speed up the game? I know, spoken like a true ring-in caddie, right?
