Ah, America. Land of the free, home of the caddie meltdown. Over there, caddies are a genuine part of the golf experience at plenty of private clubs, something most Aussie golfers, used to pulling our own buggy or hopping in a cart, would find fairly foreign. But even by American club standards, this one’s a doozy.
A golfer went viral this weekend for an extraordinary meltdown at Chicago’s Beverly Country Club, all because the club couldn’t provide the caddies she’d asked for.[Editor’s note: Golf Digest does not condone the “men-only” sentiment of the tweet itself].
“This is unacceptable!” she begins, with one of the most important phrases in the Karen lexicon. “I have guests that have played Medinah and are playing Shoreacres… I’m gonna bad mouth this club all day if we don’t get this together!”
“Figure it out. I’m not going out until I have two caddies for three people. Nobody said a cart. I talked to you today. I wrote a letter. Nobody ever used the word cart. John [now addressing the club pro who pulled out his phone to film the ordeal], this is bullshit! It’s not unusual for Beverly to treat people like this, especially women. I organised this months ago, I wrote a letter yesterday that I never got a response to and I called this morning, and this is how I’m going out to play golf. I want two caddies. I’m not taking a cart and my guests shouldn’t have to take a cart! They want to walk!”
Here’s the twist that will make even more sense to an Australian reader once you know America runs on a school calendar quite different to ours: Beverly Country Club relies on a youth caddie system over the American summer months. Once those kids head back to school for their autumn semester (naturally, “back to school” happens smack in the middle of America’s golf season, not ours), the caddie pool dries up fast.
That explanation only fanned the flames.
“You’re a f***ing liar,” she replied to the club pro. “Because there’s three caddies out there ahead of me and there’s caddies over there [gestures toward the back of the pro shop]… I apologise, it’s just because I’m a woman—”
When staff again insisted it had nothing to do with her gender and everything to do with the seasonal caddie shortage, the woman stormed off and the video ends.
We weren’t in the room, so we can’t say for certain who was in the right. Maybe she’d booked caddies months in advance and was never told the booking couldn’t be honoured until she showed up. If so, the club deserves some blame too, especially if gender played any role in how it was handled.
But swearing at club staff, calling them liars, and threatening to “bad mouth” the club to your well-heeled mates? No matter how wronged you may be or whatever else you have going in your life that pushed you to the brink, if you think this behaviour is going to get you what you want and inspire someone to go above and beyond for you, well, let’s just say you and I weren’t raised the same.
