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Who's Your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great, and Reprobates of Golf | 
 enlarge | Manufacturer: Doubleday
Category: EBooks
List Price: $9.95
Buy New: $7.96
You Save: $1.99 (20%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  64 reviews
Sales Rank: 4177
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.352
ASIN: B000FBFNHO
Publication Date: May 6, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Amazon.com Review
To really know someone, as the saying goes, you must walk a mile in their shoes. But to really understand a golfer, you've got to work as their caddy. Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly managed to get some very intriguing golfers to let him lug their bag and write what he learned both about the game and the folks who play it. Going hole to hole with them let Reilly know a different side of veterans such as John Daly, David Duval, Tom Lehman, and Jack Nicklaus. But Reilly also went beyond the pros to caddy for Deepak Chopra, Donald Trump, professional gambler Dewey Tomko, and Bob Newhart. In some cases, the portraits that emerge fall directly in line with the popular image but at other times it's just the opposite. Daly is sober but has shifted his addiction to massive amounts of Diet Coke, candy, and marriages; Duval is intensely driven during rounds but surprisingly laid back and friendly off the course; Chopra's inner peace is locked in a mortal battle with the inherent frustrations of golf; and Trump manages to be both an egomaniac and a pretty nice fellow. And although he's on assignment to profile his temporary employers, Reilly emerges as an entertaining figure in his own right as he commits numerous faux pas, breaks taboos, infuriates multiple golfers and caddies, accidentally dumps all of Nicklaus's clubs onto the turf in the middle of a round, and discovers that caddying is tougher than it looks. Reilly walks a nice line with the tone of Who's Your Caddy?: it's reverent to the game without becoming a misty-eyed poetic ode, and it's laugh-out-loud funny without being nasty or low brow. And while golf fans will certainly appreciate it, Who's Your Caddy? is an impressive book for fans of biography in general. --John Moe
Product Description
The funniest and most popular sportswriter in America abandons his desk at Sports Illustrated to caddy for some of the world’s most famous golfers, and some celebrity duffers, recounting it all in this hilarious and revealing look at the world of golf.
Who knows a golfer best? Who’s with them every minute of every round, hears their muttering, knows whether they cheat? Their caddies, of course. So sportswriter Rick Reilly figured that he could learn a lot about the players and their games by caddying, even though he had absolutely no idea how to do it. Amazingly, some of the best golfers in the world—including Jack Nicklaus, David Duval, Tom Lehman, John Daly, Casey
Martin, and Jill McGill—agreed to let Reilly carry their bags at actual PGA and LPGA Tour events. To round out his portrait of the golfing life, Reilly also caddied at the Masters, persuaded Deepak Chopra and Donald Trump to use him as a caddy, accompanied high-rolling golf hustlers in Las Vegas around the course, and carried the bag for a blind golfer.
In Who’s Your Caddy?, Reilly chronicles his experiences in the same inimitable style that makes his back-page column for Sports Illustrated a must-read for more than twenty million people every week. From his laugh-out-loud portrait of Deepak Chopra decomposing on the green, to his portraits of good ol’ boys who bet $100,000 a round, to his hilarious descriptions of his own ineptitude as a caddy, to his insights into what
makes the greats of golf so great, Reilly combines a wicked wit with an expert’s eye in a most original and entertaining look at golf.
Who’s Your Caddy? is the next best thing to a great round of golf. It is sure to delight low-handicappers, high-handicappers, and everyone in between.
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 59 more reviews...
 Score This One an Eagle June 3, 2008
Outstanding look at the whacky, wonderful and seldom thought about behind the scenes life of a caddy on the pro tour.
Rick Reilly at his best--humor, sincerity, and warmth...a splice of life, the good life, the real life.
You will come away with a new and greater appreciation of those who play the greatest game of all, the "loopers" who help them play it, and, in the last chapter, the game itself, why we all love it so.
An excellent book...Don't miss this one!
 He phoned this one in May 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
As I finished the book, I realized that it annoyed me that Reilly took up caddying without really trying to learn how to do it. He started at the Masters with no experience and didn't do very well. He didn't seem to improve much . . . even with experience. I thought he showed a fundamental disrespect for his craft, the game and for the golfers he served by taking this approach. Thinking about my reaction, I thought about the responsibility we all have to do our best to serve others when that is our task. I'll try to do it much better after reading this book.
Who's Your Caddy - A review February 26, 2008
Who's your Caddy? By Rick Reilly - A Review.
Rick Reilly, the long time, highly popular sportswriter from the famous Sports Illustrated magazine, and author of "Missing Links" and "The Life of Reilly" hooks you like a stoutly struck drive off the first tee on a glorious summer's morning, in " Who's your Caddy?" his latest book.
Rather like the famous travel writer Bill Bryson, Rick is honest, normal and down to earth in his description and assessment of himself and regales us constantly with little jokes about all his monster mess-ups while researching for this book. To garner material for "Who's your Caddy?" Rick assumes the persona of a `caddy-for-a-day', to the "great, the near great and the reprobates of golf", getting into the skin of a "looper" (as caddies are known in the land of Mac Burgers and Coke) and thus, getting closer to the `larger than life heroes' of the golf course. Written in a semi hard-boiled, often irreverent and typical American style, Rick manages to infuse each page with a peculiar brand of humour, all his own.
The book moves at a fast pace through the golfing and other celebrity lives we all know about, read about, wonder about and hear about on the leader board and otherwise. Beginning with Grouchy old Tommy Aaron, the 1973 Masters Champion and moving to the humongous hamburger and diet coke swilling, but hugely capable John Daly, the book then picks up a great deal of speed, trumpeting loudly through the equally loud and ostentatious golfing life of Donald Trump, who it appears, habitually lives life at a 100 miles an hour and is as noisy about himself to boot! (Rather a cad and a crass sort of chap, I thought.)
We receive an interesting insight into the polite, gentlemanly and generous Tom Lehman, whose children really appear to be his life, panning then to a sensitive portrayal of the reclusive and garbo-esque David Duval and his long estranged father Bob with his apparent flamboyance and style which only exists in order to shield from the public gaze, the dark side of his terrible personal tragedy of losing his son, David's older brother Brent, to aplastic anemia.
There is an interesting series of anecdotes about the Las Vegas Hustler and super gamblin' man Dewey Tomko and his buddies who play stakes far beyond the dreams of avarice and indeed earn far more than the super golfers of competitive golf today but with a whole new twist to the Royal and Ancient Rule book! I learned here, a whole new meaning to the expression `greased lightnin' - apparently Dewey and his high rollin' pals grease up the grooves of their drivers, to enable really long and really straight shots, since the grease apparently cuts off the spin imparted to the ball on impact which causes a typical slice! (I may tell you by the way, that this doesn't really work - I tried it this morning and where normally I'd have thunked my trusty Cleveland straight down the middle, I ended up slicing it into some trees on the edge of the fairway, so according to me, it ain't such a good idea, after all and anyway it is a completely illegal practice.)
The chapter on one of my all-time personal favourites, the "Golden Bear" is one of Reilly's best, ever, extolling Nicklaus's legendary politeness with the press, his devotion to his kids, to the extent of missing tournaments to watch his kid play in a ball game and with a particularly moving anecdote about his generosity to his long time real life caddy, the perpetually improvident inveterate gambler, Angelo Argea.
Deepak Chopra on Golf, like most else about the New Age Guru, came across as, "Well, listen to him, sure, but hey, I'll kind of reserve my own opinion" and indeed, proves to have feet of clay, (as far as golf is concerned anyway), since apparently he needs to check with his coach Wendy Werley the former LPGA Pro, before he does anything, anything at all, including keeping his mind and eye on the ball, when he's on the course!
Appropriately named "Hell on Wheels", comes an excellent and sensitive series of snippets on the tragically physically disadvantaged but superbly resilient and spirited Casey Martin - a real moving chapter, I may say, with his frightful disability and having to battle against the insensitive attitudes of the powers that be on the PGA Tour, apart from the pressure to perform on the Golf course.
A whole raft of information on the famed and mysterious "Bel-Air Club" follows, with all its big timer celebrity members through the ages, information shared with Rick who is now caddying for the super polite, self-effacing Bob Newhart - so much so that you begin to wonder how such a diffident man as Bob is a such a celebrity under the arc lights as a TV Personality! The quintessential opposite of Donald Trump- (in this book the chapter is aptly named "The Anti-Trump" - Brilliant!)
The penultimate chapter on Jill McGill, the only top LPGA golfer Rick caddies for, comes as a bit of a surprise and a bit of a let down, because at first blush, while humorous, it appears just a tad chauvinistic. However, Rick contrives to redeem himself by sharing the truth with us about the fact that while the lady golfer may not hit very long, in a manner calculated to put the wind up a typical testosterone filled Macho Man, she is still incredibly accurate and that's what drops those vital strokes off her game, leaving Macho Man in the garage cleaning the old irons, as it were!
The best is saved until the last with Rick's glowing tribute in a deeply moving chapter on a blind Vietnam Veteran, Bob Andrews, his never-say-die spirit, his movie star good looks, tragically marred by his loss of sight, his beautiful manners on and off the tee, the enduring and endearing mutual devotion between Bob and his wife Tina and the fact that for a Blind golfer, the Caddy is the equivalent of a "seeing -eye dog".
The book is absolutely, side-splittingly funny and at the same time, achingly painful as well, with a healthy mix of both pathos and bathos liberally interspersed with a strange language called caddy -speak, which frankly sounds like Double-Dutch to the un-initiated, but thankfully, Rick provides the key below each such example.
Rather like a master conductor with his orchestra, Reilly manages to take you up and bring you down, with a touch as light as a feather and with the style unique to him, one of the most popular sports writers in the world!
All in all, a very good book, heartily recommended for your library list and I would certainly agree with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in that it goes down faster than a cool Bud on a 100-Degree day!
The Life of Reilly December 29, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
For years, I've been hearing that Sports Illustrated magazine features the crispest writing on the newsstand. I don't spend a lot of time watching or tracking sports, so SI wasn't exactly a "must read" for me.
Rick Reilly, it turns out, is one of SI's one of the reasons for the magazine's reputation. He's a terrific writer. Not only that, he's funny. Who's Your Caddy? serves as Reilly's journal as he "loops" for an impressive string of famous people from David Duvall to Bob Newhart on some of the most beautiful golf courses in the world.
The funniest chapter recounts the time Reilly spent with John Daly. You don't have to be a golfer to enjoy this book, but you should probably have a sense of humor.
for golfers October 20, 2007
This was another gift for my grandson and he hasn't had a chance to read it yet but if it has to do with golf, he'll love it!
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