IN A SMALL CARDROOM AT THE BACK OF A MUNICIPAL GOLF COURSE CLUBHOUSE in Augusta, Georgia, a handful of old men gather and reminisce.
Do you remember when…? How about that time…? What about when Willie Peterson wound up on the cover of Sports Illustrated back in seventy-two? Wasn’t that something?
All prompts, meant to bring back sweet memories. As they deal cards, the men talk about their golf games and trade good-natured jabs. They have known one another for more than sixty years, gave one another their nicknames.
Jim “Big Boy” Dent. Robert “Cigarette” Jones. Tommy “Burnt Biscuits” Bennett. Ike “Stabber” Choice.
As long as ailments don’t keep them confined to the house, they can be found here a couple of days a week, playing bid whist, ribbing one another, and recalling the days when they were part of Augusta National Golf Club’s all-Black caddie corps, which players were required to use during the annual spring Masters Tournament. From the competition’s inception in 1934, the caddies—born of Augusta and attuned to the land—could be a golfer’s secret weapon coming around Amen Corner or for surviving other notoriously tricky holes like No. 4, Flowering Crab Apple, or No. 10, Camellia.
These men were no beasts of burden, but talented prognosticators who turned a racist policy, rooted in subjugation, into a livelihood and a source of esteem—one that, ironically, first added diversity to the game of golf. Men like Willie Peterson, who was on the bag for five of Jack Nicklaus’s six Masters victories. Or Willie “Cemetery” Perteet, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s personal caddie at Augusta National during the fifties. When the club bent to pressure in 1982 and dropped the ban on outside caddies, the change rocked the corps—many of its members, including those who counted on that crucial tournament paycheck to tide them over till the seasonal club reopened in October, had to look for other work.
In the four decades since, recognition for the pivotal part these men played in the game, until recently, scarcely existed. Even today, they aren’t heralded in the Augusta Museum of History, or mentioned in any of the historical milestones or records on the Masters’ website. But as their numbers dwindle—of the seventy-six caddies enlisted in 1982, only twenty or so are still living—they’re at long last beginning to be honored as what many of yesteryear’s golfers always knew them to be:
