Bouncing Shots

Wayward hackers have been known to place the job security of many a caddy in jeopardy. One of the more dreaded layouts was a quaint nine-hole course on Weihaiwei Island in China that was shut down after the revolution. Sporting greens of packed fine sand instead of grass, its most conspicuous landmarks were an adjacent shooting gallery, an abandoned fort swarming with scorpions, and a short ninth hole which required bouncing a drive off the clubhouse roof.

The word "caddie" is the Scottish corruption of the French cadets, who were the sons of French noble families who went to Edinburgh in the train of Mary Queen of Scots. Nondescript caddy yards seem unlikely vessels of tradition for a game whose aristocratic origins date back to the reign of King Charles I. Charles received the news of the Irish Rebellion while playing a round at Leith, but the legend of Hagen's verve and reckless gamesmanship has managed to bridge the years and has found its way to Bartlett. Although Hagen died in 1969, slumped in the corner of Rochester's ramshackle caddy pen sits a greybeard who Bartlett says "used to caddy for Hagen in his heyday."

And quite a heyday it was. Hagen won the U.S. Open in 1914 and 1918, and turned the trick in the British Open four times during the '20s.

"He was a real partier," Bartlett says of Hagen. Although he has only a second-hand knowledge of Hagen's glory days, the anecdotes speak for themselves. After he won the British Open at Troon in 1928, he begged off entering the clubhouse for the victory presentation because the players had been forbidden to go inside during the tournament; instead, he invited the gallery over to the pub where he was staying.

Bartlett adds with some pride that "Hagen was a terrific hustler. He used to gamble thousands and thousands of dollars on the golf course."

Nonchalant

It was his characteristic feisty non-chalance that made him a terror at match-play. One analyst of Hagen's game writes that it was his ability to project his personality during the course of a round that so totally nonplussed his opponents: "His demeanor towards his opponents, though entirely correct, had yet a certain suppressed truculence; he exhibited so supreme a confidence that they could not get it out of their minds and could not live against it."

For Hagen's aging caddy, still languishing in the Rochester caddy yard, Hagen's antics are still a vivid reality. Bartlett becomes excited by simply recounting the favorite epigram of Hagen's aging chronicler: "He always used to tell the story about how Hagen showed up one morning on the first tee wearing a tuxedo."

It seems that Charles Walter Hagen never kicked the habit of showing up unexpectedly at first tees after that first day when he skipped out of his seventh grade classroom and headed for the clubhouse.