An endless supply of Rolling Rock beer
After the 1972 PGA Team Championship at Laural Valley, it was back to caddying daily at Oakmont Country Club. And there were many golfers playing daily.
Besides the members, there were tons of guests coming in who wanted to play the upcoming U.S. Open course. And the key to caddying and getting good jobs was your relationship with the caddymaster.
This is the sixth in a 10-part series of recollections by Ed Wieszczynski, who caddied at Oakmont Country Club near Puttsburgh from 1967 to 1975, including at the 1973 U.S. Open. While looping, he encountered the likes of Arnold Palmer, Byron Nelson, Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle
My caddymaster at Oakmont was Joe Stoner. Joe had been at Oakmont a long time and every caddie knew that you needed to stay on his good side. The caddie bullpen back then was not like the movie “Caddyshack,” but on some days it was pretty close.
I understand they schedule caddies now, but back then it was just show up and wait. And if it was a slow day, there were dozens of caddies in the bullpen with nothing to do. Many times, yapping, arguing and fighting ensued and Joe Stoner would come out for the umpteenth time and say, “If you guys don’t shut up, you will be among the missing.” Things would quiet down but not for long.
To stay on his good side, you needed to be there every day. The worst thing for him was not having enough good caddies available to handle the load. Matching the right golfer with the right caddie affected his tips. If you got on his bad side, you needed to just be quiet and take your lumps.
There was a time, the summer before, that I had caddied for 67 straight days. I was a student at the University of Pittsburgh and we were typically finished in mid-April and I usually got a jump on a lot of the other caddies in college whose semesters finished later than Pitt.
Even though the course was typically closed on Mondays to the members, and the caddies and employees were allowed to play for free, many times there were outside parties on Mondays that brought in a lot of revenue. That year, there were a lot of outside Monday parties and I caddied in all of them, which gave me the long streak of consecutive days
There was a public course two-ball tournament at Champion Lakes that I promised my friend I would play in. I came back to work the next day and was told there was a huge amount of players the day before that I had missed, and Joe had run out of caddies.
He came out to the railing and told all the caddies that all the fair-weather caddies were going to be sitting for a while. Surely he didn’t mean me. Before yesterday I had caddied for 67 straight days.
Wrong. As group after group went out, Joe did not choose me for a job. I sat from 7:30 a.m. until mid-afternoon when he assigned me to two elderly lady members who played slow and tipped badly. What did I do? I took my medicine.
I sat on the bench for a few days but slowly worked back into Joe’s good graces. That is all you could do, as he was the boss. But when you were in his good graces, it was great.
One day in May, Joe assigned me to caddie for Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, two of the most famous modern-day New York Yankees.. They were so nice and had so many great stories. Mickey Mantle used golf balls that had baseball-like stitches painted on them. And both of them loved Rolling Rock Beer, a local brand brewed in Latrobe, Pa.
They came out with a cooler with a six-pack each. After 9 holes, it was all consumed. They sent me into the clubhouse for two more six-packs. After the 14th hole which was near the clubhouse, they sent me in again for one more six-pack.
Coming Tuesday
‘Confessions of an Oaknont caddie’
Watching Arnold Palmer,
caddying for Byron Nelson
There were a couple of bottles left at the end of the round, so I figured they each went through 14 or so bottles each in 18 holes. I thought that was the limit of consumption until I got to caddie for Louis Prima and some of his orchestra. That was more hard liquor and they were a lot of fun. So I always did my best to do whatever the caddymaster required because he had the power to set you up with great job or sit you down for days.
Featured photo illustration of Ed Wieszczynski at Oakmont wearing his 1973 U.S. Open jumpsuit created with ChatGPT
Ed Wieszcznski lives in Pittsburgh
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