Caddying for a Professional

I caddie for PGA Professional Chris Tyson when he plays competitive golf, and it has given me an opportunity to see the game from a perspective I wouldn’t normally experience as an amateur golfer.

Watching professional golf on television is one thing. Walking every hole alongside a professional, discussing shots, watching how he prepares and seeing what happens when things don’t go according to plan is quite different.

This section of Weekend Golfers is where I document what I learn from those experiences.

What an amateur golfer can learn from a professional

I’m not interested in trying to copy everything a professional golfer does.

Chris plays the game at a level I don’t, and there are shots he can play and decisions he can make because he has the ability to execute them. Telling an ordinary golfer to copy those things wouldn’t necessarily make them better.

What interests me much more is what is transferable.

That includes the way decisions are made before a shot, how targets are selected, understanding carry distances, managing risk, preparing for a round, developing routines and dealing with the inevitable poor shots that still happen even to very good players.

Some of the biggest differences I notice aren’t necessarily technical.

They are often decisions.

What I see as a caddie

Caddying also changes the way I watch golf.

When I’m playing my own ball, I am naturally occupied with my own score, swing and next shot. When I’m caddying, I can concentrate entirely on somebody else’s golf.

I get to see the whole round rather than a collection of individual swings.

I see what happens before the shot, the decision that was made, the result and what happens afterwards. I also see the stretches where nothing particularly exciting happens but the score continues to be built.

That is particularly interesting to me because my own golf has increasingly moved towards the same basic idea: pick sensible targets, commit to the shot and avoid turning one mistake into several.

Learning rather than copying

Anything I write here will come from something I have genuinely observed while caddying.

I don’t want to turn every tournament into a list of lessons or pretend that everything Chris does contains some hidden secret for amateur golfers.

Sometimes I will simply have had an interesting day caddying.

At other times I may notice something about course management, preparation, putting, decision-making or the mental side of the game that changes the way I think about my own golf.

Those are the experiences worth documenting.

The aim isn’t to teach weekend golfers to play like professionals.

It is to look closely at how a professional actually plays the game and ask a much more useful question:

Is there anything here that I can apply to my own golf?