Golf With Jay Delsing - - Cinco De Putt

25 years on the PGA Tour and a lifetime member of the PGA Tour and PGA of America, Jay Delsing brings you his perspective on one of the world's greatest games as a professional golfer and network broadcaster.

It's the game that connects the pros and the average Joes brought to you by Whitmore Country Club. Golf with Jay Delsing is now on 101 ESPN. Good morning St. Louis and welcome to Golf with Jay Delsing. I'm your host Jay.

I'm here with my buddy John Perlis. Good morning. Good morning Jay. Good to see you.

Got a little extra sleep in today. We're at 8 30 folks. Thanks for joining us. We're going to be in this 8 30 to 9 30 slot for probably the next four and a half months. Right through the middle of golf season.

Love it. Yeah, so thanks for joining us today. We formatted the show just like a round of golf. This first segment is the On the Range segment. It's brought to you by 20 Minutes of Fitness. 20 Minutes of Fitness once a week.

It works for me. All right Perlis, this is really going to be a fun show. I can't, I almost feel like, and you know this is probably how I feel like always, we could do this show without writing anything down. We're going to talk today.

That's how I do most of the shows. Why is this one going to be something different? All these papers are just props. They're all the same. I guess it's because you're the one doing all the work.

That's why it doesn't seem that way to me. So today we're going to talk about the caddies. We're going to talk about player caddy relationship. We're going to talk about crazy things that caddies have done. We started as caddies. We all started as caddies. Old caddies versus caddies nowadays. We got the good, the bad, the ugly on the caddies. We've got those.

That's right. We're going to have a lot of information about the caddies. Let's go down and join my fellow PGA professional and the city manager for golf tech, Justin Hoagland, for our segment from golf tech this week.

Thanks very much, Justin. And folks, stop into golf tech. Mention that you heard golf tech on the show and you're going to get a 50% discount on your first swing analysis.

So yeah, I really appreciate the support from golf tech and Justin and just a few kind of paperwork, sort of things to go over. This last Friday, we had the Valentino Dixon Arts Unleashed event at the Angad Art Hotel. And oh man, I just, we'll have to revisit that on another show sometime, but what a cool guy. And his paintings. I like his work. I like his work a lot.

Yeah, his story is just remarkable. So, so let's get, let's just jump into this story about the caddies, Pearl. Where do you want to start? I mean, there's so much to go, but let me ask you, what are some of your earliest memories of caddying growing up? That's where I was going to start. So we used to bet on our players.

So hopefully none of them are listening. Maybe they're not alive anymore, but we used to bet on our players and we, you know, Norwood was where I grew up caddying and it's a hilly, hilly course. And so we'd be- How would you bet?

Whether they could get to the top of the hill? Oh no, my player was going to be your player. We didn't have that much money, but sometimes we'd bet more than we were making, which was a whole other story. But, you know, those balls would fly over the top of the hill, Pearl, and I'd run over there and some of the guys, there'd be some balls, there'd be some little extracurricular golf ball activity.

You know, balls would go flying out of bunkers, balls would be coming into bunkers. We had just such a great time. But realistically, what I learned from the people that I got to caddy for and being around the game was just spectacular.

And being around that country club atmosphere, which was such a step up for me, the way we grew up and what I knew. Who's the guy everybody wanted to caddy for or the lady everybody wanted to caddy for? My brother got to caddy for him all the time. His name was Ike Mullenexx. God rest his soul, Ike has passed away now. He'd play first thing in the morning, he paid three times what everybody else did, and he played about two hours.

I like that guy already. He was fantastic. What's the worst one? Oh, I got all the worst in Neil Hilkey. If you're listening out there, you can laugh at this because you're a caddy master. And I'll never forget, you gave me Wayne McFarland, who took seven hours to play and paid me like $5. I kind of walked into the 18th hole backwards, I was delirious.

Mr. McFarland was a great guy, but it was brutal caddying. I would caddy for my father, so I learned how to bet. I learned how to win or lose a bet on the first tee.

I learned how to get the needle out early and keep it out all day. It was always a good group of guys. Like you, all of a sudden, here we are at a very young age, kind of right in the middle of watching adults and how they intermingle in a way very differently than we would see them any other part of our lives. So that was always a big deal when I look back on it. At the time, I just thought it was fun. I didn't know what an advantage it gave me for the years to come. How about just the interaction that was so unexpected and how long did it take you walking down the fairways to know, oh boy, this is going to be a rough day with the different personalities. Now I can tell you before you even get off the driving range about what the folks are going to be like in a Pro-Am.

I can just remember going, oh boy, this is really going to be a tough one because he's ticked off about something and I can't do anything right. I was happy to be out there early on. I know what you're saying, especially after a few years down the line, cadding and that kind of stuff.

But early on, it was just generally fun to be out there. For me, fairly early on, the guy that taught me the game, Don Harrison from up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, what I got from him was so much more because I also got the caddy for him. I got the caddy for him in some professional tournaments up in the Canadian Tour events. As a matter of fact, that's when I had my first encounter and I'm sure we'll talk about him in the future. You know who it is. Mo Norman.

Mo Norman, baby. I got to see him when I was, I want to say, 12 years old and then I got to see him again in college and then I got to see him again my second year on the Canadian Tour up there and just to kind of see his career and the things that happened there. It opened the world to me, just caddying. It was nice to have, at that age, to have some cash in your pocket, too.

How about, that was really why I did it and it got my golf Jones going. It was just a fantastic double whammy. What about at UCLA when Coach Merrins wanted us to be a part of it? At UCLA when Coach Merrins wanted us to caddy.

Well, down in the original caddy alley, as we'll talk about it a little bit, yeah, it was underneath the clubhouse. And you're going to, folks, you're going to hear about caddy alley stories from Pearly because when I'm playing on tour and I'm in there, you know, having a nice lunch, Pearly's wrestling around down in caddy alley and they come out carrying my bag with his eyes crossed and smoke coming out of his ears. I'm like, what happened?

He's like, I'm not really sure. Sure. Well, some of the adventures and lives these guys led, and then when you would just be in a room or an area just with caddies, the stories that would come out, the gambling that come out, the gamesmanship that would come out. It was amazing. But back to the college at UCLA, yeah, we'd have to go, I don't remember how often, but once in a while he'd call us and say, hey, I need you up here.

Mrs. Havisham needs a caddy. And aren't you glad we didn't have cell phones? Yeah, because he would have called all day, all day long. Yeah. And, but just being down there, I can remember sitting there watching TV, they're drinking coffee, kind of getting ready for the day and you just kind of get in line who's going to go next, unless they, you know, a member wanted a certain caddy and that kind of stuff. And it was amazing. Those guys were absolute characters.

Dr. O. We can't even talk about Bobby. I mean, just the characters amongst that group was funny. And same in college though, I'd go out in caddy and sometimes caddy double at Bel Air. And there was a couple of ladies, on ladies days, they just didn't like to pull much cash out of their pocket at the end of the day. Probably my worst day ever. I'm carrying doubles. It took forever. I'm sure they're in combined 40 sand traps.

So I'm raking both those puppies, running back and forth, trying to get this done. I think they each gave me 12 bucks. 12 bucks. Canadian? Yeah.

At the time I didn't care what it was. Mostly I'm thinking, I'll pay you if I can be done with this. And I lose the $12. You won't be surprised with this. No, not at all. No, no.

We don't have time to go into those stories about pearly and losing money, but that's a whole nother show. I can remember, we got to go just very quickly. I get a call and Coach Merritt says, you got to come up. I'm like, oh brother.

Cause I just was kind of over caddying at this time. And I get Hack Wilson, hall of fame baseball player. And I'm thinking right on, this is going to be fantastic. And some guess to his. Well, Hack had like 85 golf balls in his bag. He had a strap about the size of a old, really thin belt. And he shot like 130. And I was in hell the whole day.

I'm like, I don't care if you're in all of it. And I think he paid me like $8. But also somebody, so there's a celebrity that didn't work out so good. I got to carry for Jerry West one time and he can play really cool dude and could flat play. And his group, there was a little bit of coin on the table with that group, but he was, he was really a pure player.

Not a surprise. He was a pure basketball player and wasn't as good a golfer, but he was smooth. Like he was in basketball. Sean Connery. I got to play. What a coolest person I ever played golf with. He comes up to me and that Scottish, whatever that accent is and says, young man, would you care to play nine holes with me? And it's James Bond talking.

And I'm like, can you do, can I do this? You know, it was fantastic. Max Baer was out there from Jethro from Beverly Hillbillies.

I had never caddied or played with him. That guy had the biggest head I ever saw in my life. Thank you.

I appreciate you saying that cause I thought it was me. He did have it. There were celebrities walking around there all the time. Well, let's talk a little bit about the PGA tour coming out on the PGA tour as a rookie and having all of these, you know, some 23 years old and there's all of these 24 years old, maybe all of these older men going, Hey, can I caddy for you? And up to this point, you really haven't ever had many caddy experiences, you know, where now all of a sudden I'm the boss and Oof, man, those caddies live some rough lives early on the PGA tour. We played for no money. Those guys traveled in packs together and vans and nobody flew.

None of the caddies flew. They'd, you know, if they had to go from LA to Miami, they drove it and they'd stay four or five and six to a hotel room and they drank a lot. So just, we're going to get in towards the end of a segment. Just give a little info, Jay, on how it's changed. You just kind of described them. What are some major changes we can talk about in the next couple seconds?

So here's, so here's what it looks like nowadays. So guys come, they're incredibly more prepped than we were to play the tour. They're, they're ready to go right out of a gate where a lot of us were still learning the game, some of the nuances of the game. And they'd go to someone like, well, like if we were doing it, if you weren't a pro, let's say you and I were just best buddies and you, you knew golf, but I'd say, Pearl, Hey, you want to come caddy for me on tour this year?

And you know, if I keep my card, I'll make a million bucks and you're going to make, you know, $150,000 carrying a bet. We'd have had a blast, you know, but that's what the guys are doing now. They're getting, they're getting friends.

They're getting, you know, high school chums and they're, they're getting whomever people they want to, they know they want to spend a lot of time with. And that's the bigger difference between the modern day team orientation and player caddy relationship and what we did on tour there. It really wasn't team-like, you know, you know, I'm glad you said that because you can't hardly hear a guy get interviewed if they're playing well or have won a tournament that they're not referencing.

We, my team, us, all that kind of stuff. And I don't think I ever heard that in the 20 years ago. I mean like ever, did you hear what Joe's Joe tiger's interview on the Sundays round after he bogeys four and five on Sundays round, I watched him and I, and I saw him, you know, run off to the restroom and Joe followed him in there and they had, he had a little talking to and, you know, and that, oh man, that's hard to imagine that happening 25 years ago. Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. There's obvious changes and I think we can keep on kind of referencing the things that we've noticed. Yeah, it's all great stuff and that's going to wrap up the On the Range segment. This is Golf with Jay Delsing on 101 ESPN.

Come back and we are going to go to the front nine. Doster Olam and Boyle LLC are a proud sponsor of Golf with Jay Delsing here on 101 ESPN. The firm was started in January, 2015 by Mike Doster, Jess Olam and John Boyle, three veterans of the St. Louis real estate banking, commercial and corporate legal landscape.

The firm was founded on the shared view that success should be measured by client and community satisfaction, not profits for partner. The firm's focus is on business, real estate, corporate finance and restructuring and succession planning. Since its founding in 2015, Doster Olam and Boyle have been involved in real estate, business and corporate transactions with a combined value in excess of over $1 billion. For decades, Doster Olam and Boyle lawyers have been recognized as leaders in their practice areas by their peers. Doster Olam and Boyle LLC, extraordinary talent, ordinary people.

The choice of a lawyer is an important decision and should not be based solely upon advertisements. I need to tell you about my friend Joe Sieser at USA Mortgage. He's been a loan officer for 26 years and over that period of time, he has closed over $500 million in loans and specializes in pairing the right loan program for each borrower. He has unique loans for the first time, home buyers, VA loans for veterans, no cost loans for refinances and cash out opportunities for your credit cards.

Right now, Joe just called me last week and I am refinancing my home from a 30-year to a 15-year fixed and it's going to save me over $100,000 over the life of the loan. You've got to call Joe at 314-628-2015 today. Joe's NMLS number is 281113. Urban Chestnut Brewing Company is proud to be an official sponsor of 101 ESPN's newest show, Golf with our friend Jay Delsing. Just like Jay, Urban Chestnut is born right here in St. Louis. With three local brewing and restaurant locations, you won't travel far to sample straight from the source. If you're heading out to the links this weekend or if you're just in the mood for a classic German-style beer, grab a four-pack of our fresh, refreshing Zwickle Bavarian Lager wherever craft beers are sold.

Urban Chestnut Brewing Company, St. Louis, Missouri, Prost. You're listening to Golf with Jay Delsing on 101 ESPN. You can find Jay online at jaydelsinggolf.com. Hi, this is Golf with Jay Delsing.

I'm your host, Jay, with my buddy, John, and we are going to the front nine. I have to thank my friends at Whitmore Country Club for sponsoring this show. There's 72 holes of golf at Whitmore. With a Whitmore membership, you get complimentary golf at all the Whitaker courses. That's the Missouri Bluffs, the Links to Dardin, the golf clubs, the Golf Club of Wentzville, and the cart fees are included in that membership. There's no food or beverage minimums.

There's no assessments. They have a 24-hour fitness center, a huge pool complex, and three tennis courts. The year-round social calendar is spectacular.

The holiday parties were great. Picnics, date nights, live music. There's a kids club out there.

You can drop your children off if you and your wife want to go play, you and your girlfriend want to get out and have dinner. There's junior golf, junior tennis, all sorts of different family activities to enjoy out at Whitmore. If you get a chance, you got to get in the golf shop and go check out my friend Bummer. He is a great guy and he'll tell you all you need to know.

So, go check out Whitmore. You can call him at 636-926-9622. Thanks for reaching out with your questions, your emails, any sort of golf-related stories that you have.

You can find me, Jay, at jdelsongolf.com. And if we read your email, you'll get Golfer II at Gateway National. Really nice track right on the east side of town, just across the river, compliments of Walter's Golf Management.

Perfect. Well, this week we have Patrick. He asks, can you help me figure out why I continually struggle with my putting, especially on my long putts? I cannot seem to get the distance right on my putts over 15 to 20 feet. Yeah, Patrick, good question.

Thanks for listening and for writing us. And yeah, I can tell you pretty safely, there's two things that you have to work on. First and foremost, you're probably going, you're short of the hole, you're short of the hole, and you get tired of going short of the hole, and then you probably blast one that goes 15 feet by the hole. You've got to take your lower body out of your putting stroke. From your belt line to the ground needs to be locked in cement. I don't want you to be tense.

I just don't want it to be moving. And what happens is, Patrick, when you're swinging your driver and your five iron, even your short wedges, that part of your body is such a motor and it's so powerful and you want that active. But as we get closer to the hole, and this is a tip for everybody, Pearl, as we get closer to the hole, we want more precision and more softness and more accuracy than power.

I mean, think about it. We're standing on the tee and we got a fairway that's probably 40 yards wide. We want the ball on the fairway. We got a neck shot, we're going into a green that's probably 15 yards wide and maybe 20 yards deep. So the target's getting smaller. Now all of a sudden we're going for a hole that's a little more over four inches wide and we need precision.

Now we don't need power. So there's really two components to the golf game, the powerful swing off the tee and with your irons and things like that. And then as we get closer to the hole, we want some softness, some subtleness, some subtleness, and some precision. And then the last thing is you've always got to check your aim, Patrick. More times than not, your stroke is going to mimic your aim. And what I mean by that is if you set up, let's assume you're a right-handed golfer and you set up with your body and all of your lines too far left of your intended target line for this putt, you're going to create a stroke that's going to give you a chance to get it on that line.

The problem is, Patrick, it'll be ridiculously inconsistent. Every once in a while, your timing might be on, you might be able to roll well, roll a couple of putts in, but by and large, it's never going to be anything you can count on. Get that line on your putter like we've talked about in the show. Get the line on the putter, matching the line on the brand of the ball. It doesn't matter if you're playing a Titleist, a Shrickson, a TaylorMade, and line that up to go down the line of where you want your ball to start. And then try to make your backstroke and your through-stroke match in length. And if anything, let your through-stroke be a tiny bit shorter than your backstroke.

Jay, should you practice in 15 to 20 footers or spend more time on that to kind of see what his alignment's looking like and some of the other things you just mentioned? For sure. And he's going to have to get a second pair of eyes in there to have somebody give him a give him a read because you don't, you know, Pearl, that saying on tour, your feel ain't real. You know, you're convinced you're doing this, you're convinced, and then you see it on video and you're not. Or you have a pair of trusted eyes. Trusted eyes maybe like a caddy? Yeah. Hey, let's talk about the caddies. Absolutely.

Here we go. Okay, so you first got on tour. You gave us a little description about how the caddies have changed through the years.

Guys you're looking for, people they want to hang out with, spend a bunch of time with. Are the guys traveling more with their caddies now? Are the caddies with them or is it like the old days where the caddies were very much on their own? Oh, certain situations.

So many guys fly privately anymore. Do the caddies get to go on that? They do.

Don't look at me like that. I don't remember that happening. That didn't happen for us. God dang it.

I know and I wish it would. But of course, you weren't finding me driving. We were both driving.

We were together. It wasn't like I was living it up and not taking you with me. Yeah, that is kind of what it's like otherwise. So the caddies aren't driving hardly at all anymore. They'll drive when it's convenient. They'll have their own cars out when it's convenient. But it's just a whole different existence on the PGA Tour.

The money is five, six, eight times what we were playing for. And it trickles down to the caddies and everybody else. So tell us about the first caddy you ever had playing in a PGA Tour event. So the first caddy I ever had was my buddy John Winston. He lived here in town.

He used to own, for folks that are about our age, he owned a bar down at the Landing called Bogarts. And Winnie's a fun guy. Great guy. It's the best story.

Okay. First tournament, he's caddying for me in Hawaii. I'm playing on Sunday with Bernard Langer and Tom Pertzer. And I'm playing well. And I'm like five under par with two holes to go. And I think I'm probably somewhere approaching the top 10.

And you know, this is gonna be a huge payday. And I hit this shot in on 17 at Wylie. I hit it about six, seven feet from the hole. And that was one of the first times I'd ever really putted on Bermuda greens before.

But these Bermuda greens were perfect, not much grain. And for whatever reason, Pearl, every putt seemed kind of straight that way. And so I was just hooping a lot of putts, but I got this putt and I'm looking at him like, man, it looks like he could go right from behind the hole. Looks like he can go left from behind the ball. And I said to Winnie, I said, Winnie, what do you think about this putt?

What do you think it's going to do? And I, he, he gets up from crouching down from behind the ball and I look at him and his, his face is as red as that microphone cover in front of you. And I go, you okay? And he goes, I think it breaks towards the water. I said, you realize we're in Hawaii? He said, I do.

I have no idea. And he goes, just knock it in. And actually that little levity, I was like, that is, that is, I'll never forget. Did you knock it in? I did. I knocked it in. Yeah. I was like, why would I try to read anything else into it? I said, they mostly look straight.

I tried to aim it straight and it went in. I remember he catted for you at least in one tour, tour school. And I catted later in your career in tour, tour schools.

That's a tough a tough week, especially when you're playing for the rights to get on the PGA tour through six rounds, not, or not to get on the web.com. Not that there's anything wrong with the web. It's a great place, but it's not the place you want to be. It's not where you're trying to get to. Right. It's not one of my favorite. I got this guy named Dick Christie came up and caddied for me when I started looking for where you were in your career.

I am in probably my third year. Okay. And I was looking for a guy that was kind of better groomed, you know, wanted, thought he might show up, stay on time, things like that. And so his nickname was the judge because in Asheville, North Carolina, he was a judge and he left his judgeship to come caddy on the PGA tour.

Oh baby. There's going to be a story behind that right there. So I was thinking, you know, I was thinking, okay, we're going to, he's going to be a responsible guy.

And he was, he showed up, everything was good. We're coming down like third or fourth round last hole. And I this is when we had fly, you know, I had a flyer every time I hit in rough, which was about every time I hit a deep ball. So I'm playing for this ball to jump on the last hole and it doesn't jump.

And so it stays down on the lower tier. We're playing at La Quinta, La Quinta Country Club in Palm Springs. And he hands me my putter and I've got 40 foot, 40, 40 footer.

He hands me my putter and says, anything but a three putt here, boss. Oh baby. Oh baby. What? And you know what I did?

Three putters. And I looked at him and I was holding my putter and I was thinking I could hit you with my putter right now. So I said, never. Is that before the sports psychology was invented?

At least in my world it was. I was kind of giving him my own version of my own sports psychology at this point. If you can't say something positive, I don't want you to ever talk to me again. And he's like, what did I do? I go, why would you, why wouldn't you just tell me to hold a 40 footer instead of not three putting it? Or say nothing.

Or say nothing's better. And I said, you know, I'll let you know when a good time to three putt is. I haven't found that time yet, bro.

Oh man, it was beautiful. There's so much responsibility. I'm not sure that the caddy makes a situation. And I think sometimes it can absolutely be very, very helpful.

But boy, as a caddy, you can really misstep on any of those. Because sometimes, sometimes you guys are really fragile out there. Oh, sometimes?

Oh my gosh. You know, I mean, if it starts raining at the wrong time, you could get it. But that's why I think what you're talking about nowadays, when the guys have their friends with them, they get them. They know much more when to say, what to say. They have a better chance of cracking a joke at the right time.

A little bit of levity. I mean, there's times when I was caddy for you, there's a lot of pressure going on. But somehow I could throw something out there to just kind of cut to the chase. And if we didn't know each other, even if somebody else said the exact same thing to you, it wouldn't have come across the same way. I can remember, I've literally had hundreds of people say to me, they did not know me, when you caddy for me, were like, we had so much fun following. What were you guys talking about? Nobody is smiling and laughing and joking as much as you two are out there. Well, a sister who does not watch bunch of golf would say the exact same thing. Because when I had caddy, when you'd be on the TV, she kind of said the same thing.

You guys are just out there. And I don't remember that. I don't remember it that way either. I remember just trying to keep up, do I get that protein bar at the turn? Do I have enough waters in my pouch for you? Do I have that extra golf ball when you need it? What about one of the first times you caddy for me, we had to do a 36 hole Sunday finish at Tucson or something. And it was hotter than hell.

Is this the Milwaukee one? That was another 36 hole. Which is the one pro where we got to the team, we each had like a 12 pack of water. Remember, you're like, I got enough water. I was stuffing it in the bag, you're like, this is when, so remember, there's a problem with that because I'm carrying it. So it didn't really bother me that much, but I could end up bringing, I couldn't have too much because I would need more if I was carrying more.

I never did figure out that equation. But remember when we go from drinking water out of like a little Dixie cup to, oh man, we got bottled water on the PGA tour. Now, how cool is this? So I was like, I'm hoarding this stuff. And you're like, dude, I've already got four in the bag. You can't put that other 12 back in there.

They have them on every other tee. I know, I know. So I was a slow learner. But another great caddy story on the positives.

I gave you a lousy story. I was walking up to the 18th green at Omaha, 2002, I think. And I had about a 10 foot putt to win the tournament.

And it was 100 degrees out and my caddy was fading fast. Hawk was a great guy, lives in Tennessee. He said to me on 18, he goes, boss, I don't think I have any more holes in me. You're going to have to end it right here. I like that. I like that. And I thought that you were thinking that way anyway. I was thinking that way anyway.

But yeah, interesting. And that was one of those things. And then I took, signed a card and a nice little puppy pile with the girls.

Not a real pile, but it was really fun to have the girls there. And then we took Hawk straight in the men's locker room, threw him in the shower and got, he had two gallons of IVs administered in the shower. So he was hurt. He was hurt. Yeah. He was hurt. Those are long days out there.

I mean, part of understanding this, I think is, you know, just the nature of around. I mean, we're up, we're up, you know, three, what, four hours before you're playing, you're working out, I'm running around with the bag, getting things ready, toting that puppy around. And how many miles are we walking on the golf course? Somewhere around 10.

Around 10 miles carrying, I think it was 190 pound bag. I think it was actually 40. It just felt like 190. Some days it had to feel like 290. And it was always light when you were playing good. And it was dog heavy. I can't really drag this puppy if you weren't playing well. I'm sorry about those days. I know. I look at you. I'm like, dude, just throw a couple of clubs out of that bag and lighten it up. Well, we tried that in Australia that one time.

It didn't work. Oh, we got to tell that story. We got to tell that story when we come back. Well, that's going to wrap up the front nine. This is Golf with Jay Delson.

Come back and catch the back nine with Perley and I on 101 ESPN. I got a big shout out and a thank you to Whitmore Country Club for supporting my golf show. I don't know if you know Whitmore Country Club has 72 holes of golf. There's a 24 hour fitness center and has a extremely large pool complex. This is a family friendly country club to belong to. There's a kids club in the main clubhouse right near the fitness center. There are golf leagues, skinned game members, tournaments, couples events are available all year long. If you join at Whitmore, you also get access to the Missouri Bluffs, the links of Dardene and the Golf Club of Wentzville. And the cart fees are already included in that membership.

There are no food or beverage minimums, no assessments. Go out and see my friend Bummer out in the clubhouse. He is an absolute jewel and a wonderful guy that will tell you all you need to know.

Or you can call Whitmore at 636-926-9622. After 25 years on the PGA Tour, Jay Delson takes you behind the scenes from the eyes of a pro. Now back to more golf with Jay Delson on 101 ESPN. Welcome back to Golf with Jay Delson. I'm your host Jay. I got Pearly with me and we're going to the back nine.

Pearly, this segment's flying by. Folks, we are talking all about caddies and you got a great one for us. Well, you're talking about the right attitude of the caddy. Caddy's saying the right thing to the player. Something I'll throw out there as well. I'm playing Canadian tour so it's a professional event and we show up a couple times a year and they would ask us to take some of the junior players at the club to caddy. And so we want to oblige.

We want to promote the game and that kind of stuff but it's a little bit nervy sometimes with the younger guys. So this one week I'm up in Windsor. I'm playing with Billy Ray Brown. He gets his caddy. Nice enough young kid.

My caddy, when I tighten the straps up as much as possible, the bag was still resting on his heels. So his mother comes up to me right before he off and says, hi, I'm Jimmy's mom. And I'm like, well, nice to meet you.

I got a hit. And she says, now I've got a cart hidden behind a tree on the second hole. If it's okay if Jimmy just throws the bag on the cart. And I'm thinking, no.

I'm pretty sure it's not. The pro comes out to me and says, yeah, it's okay. Jimmy's dad was a big shot in town or something so Jimmy was going to caddy in that tournament but he wasn't going to carry that bag. And I didn't care.

I wanted the kid to have a good time and he was a nice young guy. We're out there in about 5th or 6th hole. Billy Ray gets up there and just pull, hook, snipes one out of bounds. Billy Ray Brown. And the caddy goes... From people that don't know, Billy Ray Brown went on the PGA Tour, won three times.

One hell of a player. Well, he's commentating on one of the sports. The Golf Channel. Yeah, the Golf Channel. He does his senior. He does the Champions Tour stuff now. Super, super player.

Yeah, no, I'm glad you said that. Several time All-American at the University of Houston. His dad was an all-pro center, I think, for the Oakland Raiders. And Billy Ray is also an all-pro character.

A hundred percent. We might have a show on Billy Ray Brown at some point. We could do that.

Yeah, we could. So Billy Ray gets up there and just pulls, snap hooks one into the trees and his caddy says, oh no. And Billy Ray turns to him as kind as he could, says, son, after I hit a shot, you never say, oh no. And this poor kid is just panic stricken. He's all scared. And Billy was pretty nice about it. He's just like, hey, don't say that when I hit my balls in the air. Don't say, oh no. About three holes later, Billy Ray just pounds a tee shot, but he just pushes it a little tiny bit, catches a fairway bunker and just buries under the top lip. I mean, you can barely see like two dimples of the ball. So he's in there and he's huffing and puffing, walking around this bunker. He is so hot. Caddy gives him whatever club he wants, which is, I'm sure, whatever.

We didn't have sixties back then, but it was something as close as possible to that. Billy Ray gets up, trying to set himself in this bunker because he's up on the face and you know, he's got 180 to the hole yet. And he's not going to hit this thing five feet, trying to get this thing out. And right before he takes it back to Caddy, he says, I know you can do it, Mr. Ray. I know you can do it, Mr. Ray. Billy Ray backs off. We are all laughing. He called him Mr. Ray.

He can do what? He's got to hit it five feet. Oh, it was so funny. The little, the little guy was just doing his best.

It broke the whole thing. And then about two holes later, I kept getting to my cat. I said, you've got to keep the towel wet. So finally Billy Ray route actually says to the kid, there's a pool over there. Just dump it in that kid, that people's pool. So this is one of these five foot towels.

I remember this kid's four and a half feet tall. He dumps the whole thing in there. So it's completely sock away.

You could barely carry the towel back to the bag. Anyway, good stories back on that. Absolutely. You know, probably the first, most recognizable Caddy that I can remember Pearl was Angelo, the Caddy for Jack.

I remember with kind of the bigger Afro kind of gray. One of the first ones that ever get any notoriety. I think so.

Yeah. And then we have, I have an interesting Gary Player Caddy story. Let's hear it. I may have heard it, but I want to hear it again.

Opposite Augusta was this tournament called the Magnolia classic in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. My, my rookie year, I'm driving with Steve Pate into this, into Hattiesburg and it's a, not a big town, great town. And rabbit who's caddied for Gary Player for all these years comes and says, Hey, Mr. Nelson, can I get it for you? I'm like, what do you want to get it for me for sure. Yeah. Right on.

Come on. So it's like, he wants these wants to Caddy for you. I go, yeah, cool. So we go along and he shows up real tall, thin guy shows up each day with just like a piece of paper. It's like, Oh, you know, so we're going along and you know, do you remember that golf course?

I don't, it was short and tight right up my alley. I mean, my ball was, Oh, so all those courses, every courses on my alley. That's right. What am I talking about? So every time I hit the ball in trees, which is probably every other hole I get out there like perfect lie. It's like angels, like, yeah. I'm like, Oh my gosh, look at this. So I just whip it on the green and I'm having a decent tournament.

You know, on Saturday I wing another one hook, you know, trying to hit a too hard hook one into the trees. I go down there. I'm like, I can't believe it. And all of a sudden it dawned on me.

I'm like, rabbit is for caddying on every hole. Oh no, really? And I go, can't be. And it is, I know it now, all of a sudden it's in my head. I'm like, I don't care. So, um, now I'm completely freaked out.

I haven't heard this story completely freaked out. So he's moving my ball and he's teeing it up beautifully for me. And like the more on it, I am.

I it's taken me two and a half, almost three days to catch it. So I said to him, rabbit, he said, yes, sir, boss. I said, stay back here in the tea with me. I need you back here. Oh no, sir.

Boss. I do my best work out in the fairway. I'm aware of that.

That's why I want you to stay back here because you know, I can't have that reputation. That's so two, maybe three holes, Pearl, that duck hook smack dab right up against the tree. I knew I was home. I was like, this is what I'm accustomed to. I got to try to figure it out.

Left-handed cross-handed, just to chip it back sideways. And he's looking at me like, and I, I went into the locker room. I remember, and I found Peter because I didn't know that many people on tour at the time. I was like, I think this is happening. And he's like, well, don't, you know, you're doing the right thing.

Just keep them with you and tell them to not touch. Wow. That's scary. Yeah. Very crazy. So, um, that's kind of a, a wild one, you know, another one of the more recognizable modern day caddies has got to be fluff. Mike Cowan.

Sure. He was getting for Peter Jacobson for years and years, and then tiger when he first got on tour and now he's Jim Furyx. So when you see some of those guys like fluff and I'm not going to remember enough names, Joe, uh, Julie Cava, uh, and they kind of just so for people, no, sorry to interrupt you, Joe, the cover went for 20 years for Fred, Fred couples. And now he's working for those guys.

What, what are some of their characteristics, their traits? That's so interesting that the next great or another great player wants their calmness. Because the thing that happens, Pearl, you're great at it, but not everybody is because you you're, if you're aware of what's going on and you know what's, you know, you're getting close to the leader. The last thing you want is to have your caddy be nervous and show you nervousness or, you know, because I've had caddies that are just a bundle of nerves on Sunday or Friday or even third. And I can remember going, take a deep breath. Don't worry about anything.

You don't want to have to try to call your daddy. No, but I mean, Oh, some great guys just get overwhelmed. You know, you're playing in the last group.

You might be playing with some star and they can't read their yardage book. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing.

And the reputation follows those guys around, you know, because you know what the egos are like and what the demand is like. And if somebody's got a caddy for Fred for that long, he's got it. He's, he's with it. I mean, if Jim McKay, who's going to be on this show very soon, still wanted a caddy, he could caddy for just about anybody. He's doing a great job by the way, on NBC.

I really, I think he's doing a wonderful job too. I think he's added a lot, a lot to what's going out there and obviously his presence brings the caddy game more into it even more so. And when you had Farity on the show, he talked about kind of knowing all the caddies and how important they were relative to, people don't know this. I worked for NBC, multiple events, particularly the Ryder Cups, and I had to kind of get tied in and I knew them a tiny bit through you. I was always an outsider because I wasn't out there that much, but they're the ones that are giving the TV guys what club's being hit, maybe what shot possibly, you know, with different hand signals. What happens is the caddies will give the hand signals to the TV commentators or the assistant to the on-course commentators to just kind of help with the whole flow because they don't want you too close to the tees, too close to the bags and disturbing players.

No, that's exactly what happens when I'm on the ground. It's if we have a spotter, otherwise the caddies are flipping them right to us. There's a couple of caddies that won't do it, but it's, yeah, it's real interesting. And then how about Steve Williams? We got to talk about Steve Williams.

He became the highest paid, you got to help me with this, athlete from New Zealand by caddying for Tiger. Is that right? Yeah. Well, you just insinuated caddies aren't athletes. I'm not sure what you're playing. I'm not sure what to say. I don't either.

I'm not seeing anything bad, really. I don't think I would consider it an athlete either. That's a stretch. Totally off the track, but when they go down about greatest performances and they throw Secretariat in there in the sports world, this is way off the beaten track. Meat, come on. How the hell are we supposed to compete against a horse? I'll throw the jockey in there.

I'm not going to say the horse is fantastic, but that's another subject. That's upside down. The squirrel. Squirrel. That's right.

We're okay. Well, so, and let's go to more of the modern day, more famous sort of caddies, bones that caddied for Phil, Jim McKay. Michael Greller has made a hell of a name for himself with Jordan Spieth. Now, where was he beforehand? He was a school teacher. So he was just buddies with you? Yeah. And I forget there's a story. I'm not sure if he caddied for him as an amateur or what it was, but there's some sort of connection. And then, you know, he's done very well for himself.

You know, we mentioned Joe, we mentioned Joe LaCava. Well, there's a lot of work too, though, with the caddies. And I guess the players at the same time, I think depending on who the player is, of really mapping out the golf course. I know that the books are good now, but the guys don't always hit it down the sprinkler lines.

So when we're in the trees, we're in different places, caddies got to have a pretty keen sense of different distances and a feel for things. Because sometimes when you guys are all amped up, how do we plug that in? Okay.

Yes, it's 240, but how do we talk about that story? When we come back on the back night, I mean, on our 19th hole about Milwaukee. I would love that.

That's perfect. But what you know, what's what's interesting, though, is it's a caddy needs to know your game. Like, so if you were going through a course, you would go, you might, you might, the way you were was perfect for you wouldn't say it unless I said it. But I said, if I said to you, Pearl, I hate this hole. This sets up poorly. I don't like the look of it, you know, you would probably know that ahead of time. And we would have a plan laid out. And we would and oftentimes than not, those plans paid such dividends for really positive weeks, because you took the right took the stress out of that hole had a real conservative plan off the T or into the green, but made aggressive swings with that aggressive conservative plan. Man, that's gonna wrap it up for the back nine.

We're gonna be heading for a couple commercials and some messages from our sponsor. This is sponsors I should say this is golf with Jay Delsing on one on one ESPN, Jerseyville carpet and furniture gallery are a proud sponsor of golf with Jay Delsing. They've been around since 1973. And it's been family owned and operated the entire way. Father Danny cap started it all now sons Matt and Jared are fully involved and at Jerseyville carpet and furniture gallery. They host the area's largest selection of lazy boy and flex steel furniture. Plus you'll find a full service Mohawk color center featuring carpet hardwood laminate and waterproof flooring. Everything is professionally installed at Jerseyville carpet and furniture gallery plus easy delivery and setup of new furniture however and wherever you want it. They'll also haul away all of your old furniture can't beat that deal going the extra mile. That's what Jerseyville carpet and furniture gallery is all about.

Find them online Jerseyville carpet furniture.net or call them 618-639-9858. I need to tell you about my friend Joe Sieser at USA mortgage. He's been a loan officer for 26 years and over that period of time he has closed over 500 million dollars in loans and specializes in pairing the right loan program for each borrower. He has unique loans for the first time home buyers, VA loans for veterans, no cost loans, for refinances and cash out opportunities for your credit cards. Right now Joe just called me last week and I am refinancing my home from a 30 year to a 15 year fixed and it's going to save me over a hundred thousand dollars over the life of the loan. You've got to call Joe at 314-628-2015 today.

Joe's NMLS number is 281113. It's time for the 19th hole on golf with Jay Delsing. The 19th hole is brought to you by Mike Duffy's Pub and Grill. Mike Duffy's Pub and Grill the best burgers in town since 1986. Mike Duffy's Pub and Grill the best burgers in town since 1986.

Well thanks for staying with us. This is golf with Jay Delsing. Probably we just finished 18 holes and we are headed to our favorite part of the day the 19th hole and our 19th hole we have a brand new official 19th hole of golf with Jay Delsing show Mike Duffy's. I'm looking forward to having when you have your event at Mike Duffy's. I have not I live a little ways outside of St. Louis haven't been to one of his places yet but I am sure as heck looking forward to getting to him and to your event and meeting Mike.

Mike's a great great guy. They opened the first store in Kirkwood in 1986 and they had a simple plan. They wanted to create a friendly family neighborhood Pub and Grill and that's what they did. They wanted a comfortable place to hang out.

They wanted to be able to watch your favorite game. They wanted to have outstanding food and so mission accomplished. So right now there's three locations one in Richmond Heights and one in town and country and you should check out their daily specials. There's trivia nights there's live music expanded menu and huge selection of beer. So when you go to go to the to Mike's Mike Duffy's you got to ask for Mike. He's there and he is a great guy and we're so glad to have him on our show and they've kind of got a motto over there where they wanted to make a place where great food is served by great staff and always your satisfaction is guaranteed. So again ask for Mike if you go over there say hello tell them about you heard about him on the show and we're going to have some events at the Mike Duffy's.

We're going to have a couple beers. We're going to tell some more caddy stories. We're going to ask you if you really did hit the 12th green of Augusta because I'm getting all sorts of flags.

I don't think you did. Hey does Mike play golf? Oh yeah. You got to have him on the show. That's the perfect guy to have on the show when we're talking about CEO's owners what golf means to them and that kind of stuff and if he's a good guy which you already said he is and a character that'd be perfect to get him on the show.

Yeah absolutely. Okay so where were we bro we got to talk about so we're talking about caddies the whole show's about the caddies we just talked a little bit about how how the caddy needs to know the player's game. So let's talk about that that incident we had at the 18th. I'll go ahead and set up and you chime in because we need we need to have like a horn or like something that says like whenever you start sensing that I'm making stuff up you know Pearly can throw up his head and they just go you know and but we're coming down the stretch of having a nice tournament I think top seven or eight place finish and the 18th hole at Brown Deer up in Milwaukee is an uphill par five little dogleg to the right and when I wasn't hitting the ball in the right trees which was fairly often I put it in the fairway we get we direct we devised a plan for staying out of the right trees which worked beautifully anyway so I'm kind of pumped up smash your drive down there.

Now you're playing with Stewart Sink and Kenny Perry that day. Yep Stewart Sink and Kenny Perry and I can remember the flagstick being on the front right and we have those massive bunkers to carry and we do our math and it's like we come up with the effective number of 240 yards right? 225.

I remember 225 and we figured 15 of up uphill. Okay and so I say to you this is a perfect five iron and you and your wisdom say right on. If Jay said what he was going to hit with conviction with confidence I don't care if I thought it was the worst idea on the face of the earth I was going to say yes.

On a scale of one to ten how bad did you think this play was? I didn't know that you could I thought leaving it short was a good idea too. I thought leaving it short would be okay you know because at some point I mean again I've carried for you I've seen some of that and I knew you're jacked up it was going to be it's a top 10 finish you're playing with two of the top guys on tour at the time uh so there's so much going on and yeah. So I take this five iron hit this beautiful high fading shot and I'm like man just be right and you're over there going get up get up and we get up there and it's on the back edge of the green unbelievable make a real slimy two putt and and have a nice tournament and we're walking to the car after maybe a cold one and clean up my locker and stuff and and you say to me if you ever give anybody trouble about trying to club you you're crazy and I'm like what are you talking about you're like how in the hell did you hit your five iron that far in the last hole and like oh I don't I don't know you know we thought about it and you're like how did you how did you pull that club and I said well because I thought four was too much yeah you got it I know how stupid that sounds but that is really it but you you plug in and that's where when the caddy's working well I'm plugging in um and you know I think I mentioned another show the one time you had I don't know 180 the front green over water down in Shreveport that time downhill lie and you're like give me a seminar I'm thinking what are you gonna hit it that way across the lake what's what's the plan here and he knocked it on the dang green and made a long putt and had another really nice finish so that's that's a huge part is is plugging into that did we tell the story already about uh Montreux up in Reno did we tell that story we did tell that story you love that story thank god I'm sure we will I bet we will well let's talk about Phil Mickelson Tim Mickelson and John Romm most may not know this connection so Phil and Bones go their separate ways why which pretty much shocked everyone why it's never been you don't know I don't know I asked him and he said it was just time he's such a classy guy if something happened you know physically his knees were going because I think he had one or both knees replaced right afterwards right he's had yes that's right and um but he physically he's getting along okay of course he's not carrying a bag he's just got the back the the pack around us which is only like 10 pounds but um and so Tim Mickelson who was coaching at ASU he was the head golf coach at ASU who just saw his best player John Romm leave college to turn pro Tim's going to start getting for Phil while at the same time he's John Romm's agent so Tim Mickelson is the good and the good the bad and the ugly he is the good because he's carrying around a golf bag and probably making somewhere between two and four million bucks well there's some history on that because wasn't Steve Loy that's exactly okay go ahead so Phil Mickelson's coach at ASU was this guy named Steve Loy kind of a different sort of looking guy but he was his he was his coach and as soon as he got wind of Phil and what Phil's town looked like he submitted that resignation to the ASU and he became Phil's agent and living pretty much happily ever after pretty well yeah very very well so uh that's an interesting story though um where you know that Tim is using the influence of his brother to get John deals and John is a world-class player in his own right and needs very little help and uh you know they're kind of going happily ever after down the trail um winning a tournament at 48 at pebble beach and you know um given given anybody any trouble they can like uh what what was the uh was a comment Phil made on social media to uh oh yeah because let's just go to the ugly then sure because that was a good the ugly on this thing you guys is is the Matt Kuchar incident down at the Myakoma championship well you and I bantered that back and forth a couple times and apparently uh Kuch something like agreed to uh to five three thousand dollars before the tournament started with the caddy and he's just a local guy i don't know how skilled he is not skilled he is but three thousand probably seemed pretty good to that guy compared to other it went like this i'll give you a thousand dollars if for for the two days if in the practice in the practice if we miss the cut two thousand if we make the cut uh three thousand on a on a you know a percentage of a finish over 20th place or something and they didn't even mention the win so when he won the tournament and he won how much 1.2 1.3 1.3 1.3 million dollars that's what Matt Kuchar took home not to mention all the bonuses associated with his shoes and his irons and his and he paid the caddy four thousand dollars now one side that was the agreement it was actually a thousand dollars more than the agreement however it wasn't exactly the agreement okay because winning wasn't mentioned that's where it just gets a little bit tough but at the end of the day it could also be and obviously if matt had to do it over again oh he took a beating on the social media he would have given him a half million dollars if he had to do it over again he got stubborn in the middle of that pearl and really didn't do himself any favors none at all so he cleaned it up he he choked he choked his uh he sent him down there forty thousand forty forty five thousand dollars more still you know a great a great payday for um oh gosh i can't remember his name the caddy's name but great he's he's a club caddy at myacoma and like their best caddy sure there and um so they they've cleaned it up um but that was definitely the ugly that what's the standard though jay standard caddy is it true that they're going to get ten percent of a win not not if you pick a guy up in the parking lot but you would give him i mean think about it sure you would get i would i would probably give him five to seven percent yeah i really would i mean that would be the last thing on my mind after making that kind of money not to pay the guy that went through the battle with me right right well and sometimes we all just make kind of funky decisions you know maybe we don't make the next cleanup stuff very well either but uh i think they got it cleaned up pretty much right now and his name was david ortiz david ortiz and um david ortiz to to to speak to what we talked about with a as you caddied and david ortiz went to his main boss the guy he typically caddies for my coma and he helped him compose a letter and sent it to coucher's agent who happens to be a tiger's agent um uh stiney mark steinberg and there's allegedly there was like the mention of oh we'll give you a 15 grand and that didn't sit well with david ortiz and his friend either so that's where social media got a hold of it and i think everything got kind of handled so the big the thing reason you kind of brought this up was when phil was at the masters and uh he was going to play with uh with kuch with kuch and uh hit his bombs and all this kind of stuff and said yeah there won't be any side action because even if he did he'd probably only pay me 0.06 of a percent of what he owes me or something pretty harsh but i guess uh apparently matt kuch is pretty good at putting the needle out there as well yeah he really is he he really is but um boy we've had uh some great uh great stories with the caddies let me give a quick tip this week um pearl we talk about this all all the time folks know what your strengths and your weaknesses are and whatever those strengths are play to them and try to maximize those things if driving the ball is your strength then drive the ball if it's not then quit forcing the driver on yourself and get that ball into play um we want to work on our weaknesses and definitely get them better but we don't want to abandon our strengths we can't just say oh i'm great at driving the ball i don't need to practice it because then we've all seen that then that part can leave you as well so so really try to figure out you know it might take you're in the 19th hole just like we are here it might take a minute have a beer and go over your round where did you lose the most strokes there's a lot of value in that you and i have talked about that many many times and i think the strength-based you're that strength-based coaching you hear that in business all the time i think that's great advice yeah i mean and so just go over that briefly and go man you know here's a couple things you got to remember folks don't let one swing cost you more than one stroke quit hitting the ball in the hazards and quit hitting them out of bounds and knock off your three putts man if you can eliminate those two huge misses you are going to see your scores go down perfect for sure great advice man that's that's going to do it for the show the caddies well it's our caddy show but we're going to be talking a lot more about caddies in future shows because they're an integral part of the whole game and sometimes the funniest part of the whole game absolutely and some of the stuff i do with jay delson golf where we go on these trips the caddies are fantastic they walk down the fairways with us they tell us stories they're one thing i wanted to throw out there if you ever have a chance if you've never played golf having a caddy got to it's fun even if the caddy is not totally versed and great and stuff it's just a different experience i i absolutely love that part and i can remember us amateur and some things like that early on with caddies it really adds a different flavor to the game and it allows somebody else to learn the game i always loved having young kids uh caddy for me because they could learn the game or at least part of the game some of the game well john thanks for being with me this morning big says thanks for the board and uh drew thanks for the live streaming and um man right is it uh jay at jay delson golf.com it's jay at j-a-y-d-e-l-s-i-n-g-g-o-l-f dot com and uh man enjoy the weather and hit them straight st louis that was golf with jay delsing brought to you by whitmore country club tune in next sunday from seven to eight for more from jay john and the other pros and experts from the golf world in the meantime you can find all of jay shows at 101espn.com as well as at jaydelsinggolf.com