Danny Sahl and Dave Markle are Canadian caddies who carry more than golf clubs

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The thing you have to do as a professional golfer in a tournament is empty your mind and think about absolutely nothing but the moment in front of you. For that the professional needs an assistant.

Which is why Danny Sahl and Dave Markle are walking down the otherwise empty third fairway of the Hamilton Golf and Country Club at 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, two days before the opening round of this weekend’s $9.4-million purse RBC Canadian Open. Torrential rain fell all day Monday: the ground is as squishy as a middle-aged bottom. The grass and the trees and the bushes are hallucinogenically green.

Sahl and Markle are professional caddies. Sahl carries the bag for Listowel, Ont.’s very own Corey Connors, the 49th best golfer in the world, according to the Official World Golf Ranking. Markle loops (that’s caddie talk) for Nick Taylor, the Abbotsford, B.C., hero who won the Open last year, the first time a Canadian had managed that miracle since 1954. Markle’s the caddy into whose arms Taylor leapt when he dropped his 72-foot putt to win, the caddy who stood in the middle of the crowded green afterward, holding the pin and weeping.

The two of them are walking the course to make detailed notes in their official yardage books – the fat leather-bound wallets caddies haul out of their back pockets to consult before their players take any shot. You wouldn’t do this for a living if you didn’t adore golf to the point of lunacy.

In the old days, caddies – the original Scottish word means “one who does odd jobs” – were just locally knowledgeable servants. “Their motto was wake up, show up and shut up,” says Sean Foley, the Canadian golf coach who has advised golfers from Lydia Ko to Tiger Woods. “Today there are caddies out here who cannot only play the game well, but who completely understand course set ups and distances.”

And why have they come to the fore (heh!) today? “I think it’s just because there’s so much money out here in golf now.”

The ideal professional golfer is a human metronome who cranks out drives and putts like a robot. But in the money-drenched business of professional golf, where ever-grander purses and new data technologies (not to mention more forgiving equipment) have created a sport so competitive that two strokes can mean a six-figure difference in payout, the ideal caddy is the metronome’s brain.

“The caddie is huge,” insists Scott Rosenthal, the Seattle-based coach of golfer Andrew Novak, who was tied for third at seven under at the end of his second round. “It’s a lonely game.”

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The first thing a caddie does is carry his or her player’s bag. The bags weigh roughly 40 pounds. Hamilton is an exceptionally hilly course: even some younger haulers are finding it a slog. Mike (Fluff) Cowan, who caddied for Jim Furyk for 25 years and is carrying C.T. Pan’s bag this weekend, is 76 years old: he is slight, has a massive white mustache and glasses, and resembles a 19th-century miner in the Klondike. But you won’t hear him complaining, partly because he doesn’t talk to reporters. I did ask him, however, whether the invention of the two-shoulder golf bag strap by Wilson Sporting Goods in 1992 was an improvement on the one-shoulder version. “Yes,” he said.

Dave Markle and Danny Sahl are now halfway down the third fairway. Markle is tall and thin and loping, a highly focused and yet slightly hippie-ish 39-year-old given to gnomic utterances while emanating an aura of universal gratitude. Sahl, 44, born in Moose Jaw, is shorter, compact and more garrulous. Both have beards, both attended Kent State on golf scholarships under the coaching of the famous Herb Page (as did fellow Canadians Corey Connors, Mackenzie Hughes and Taylor Pendrith). Both played professional golf at the most exalted level. Markle was ranked 12th on the world amateur golf circuit, where he first met Taylor, who was No. 1. Markle then joined the tour, but missed a long string of cuts and discovered he had Type 1 diabetes. He struggled on the tour for a year longer than he should have, and then eased back to caddying. It’s a measure of how much he loves the game that he never seems to resent the step-down.

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Sahl, meanwhile, played in 75 tournaments after college, and won the Syncrude Boreal Open in 2009. But despite his hard work he made only $26,815. In the years since, he has carried the bag for the likes of Mike Weir and Vijay Singh. Does he miss playing? “That competitiveness has by now faded in us,” he says. But he still plays regularly, and plans to take the game up again at 50.

One challenge the third hole presents is that at 269 yards out the fairway drops sharply onto a wider plain you can’t see from the tee. From there it’s about 112 yards across a stream and nasty sloping rough to the vast and wobbling green, which is a nightmare all on its own, especially since the caddies don’t know as yet know where the pin will be placed each day.

The average PGA pro drives the ball 305 yards, which would put him down on the wider, lower but wetter plain with a tricky 80-ish yard chip. Taylor’s excellent at wedge length, but will the ground still be soaking in two days? Connors is best from further out, which means he should hit a three wood off the tee, even with the narrower landing zone. All these details go into the yardage book. Sahl is also marking “eyebrow traps” – sand traps so deep the grass on their upper edge looms like supercilia. (One morning I watched a twosome in the Pro-Am climb out of such a sand trap on the first hole. They reminded me of Edward Whymper’s ascent of the Matterhorn. That didn’t go so well either.) Meanwhile Sahl is checking his weather app to see what the wind will be in two days, and where it will be coming from, noting possible consequences for various shots, while Markle tosses golf balls into the rough. The balls stop immediately and disappear from sight. (The rough at this year’s Canadian Open is already the talk of the tour.) There are so many variables to consider and record, it’s dizzying.

“That hole plays tricks when you start thinking about the whole hole,” Markle mutters. Better to stay in the moment and think only about each shot. With that they move on to inspect the green.

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“The fact is,” John Updike wrote in an essay on caddying, “most Americans are uneasy with servants. In our democratic fashion we keep thinking of them as people.” It is now possible to be less uneasy, given how much professional caddies can make.

Nathaniel (Ironman) Avery – caddies love nicknames – carried Arnold Palmer to four Masters victories. Avery earned the then-standard US$1,400 a tournament, even though Palmer didn’t trust the caddie’s estimates of distance. He was a bit of a wild man, a reputation that a lot of early caddies and golfers shared. After the fourth Masters victory, Palmer handed him a US$5,000 bonus. That’s the equivalent of US$50,000 today.

Caddies today are relentlessly professional. The gold standard of the moment is Scottie Scheffler’s caddie Ted Scott, who started lugging Scheffler’s bag before the 2022 PGA season. Since then, Scheffler has won roughly US$31-million on the tour. If the silver-haired Scott (he’s 50) gets the current caddy rate of $2,000 to $4,000 a week base salary, plus somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent of earnings (depending if the player is simply in the money, in the top ten, or a winner), he has earned US$1.8-million this season alone – more than the average PGA golfer makes.

In 1996, when Tiger Woods joined the PGA Tour, the winner of the Canadian Open made $200,000. Today the winner hauls in $1.63-million. “Tiger’s been the biggest needle mover for caddies,” Markle says. “Every caddie should send Tiger a Christmas card, every year.”

Of course, if your player is off their game, or not in the money, or doesn’t make the cut – known in caddie-speak as “making the weekend” – things get bad fast. A caddie whose golfer wins on the Korn Ferry Tour (the Double A farm team of the PGA) can make $10,000, which is more than, say, the 23rd best golfer makes in the Canadian Open. Split-ups are common: the average player-caddy relationship on the PGA Tour lasts a year. These are the broken love stories of professional golf. “You hope you can keep your guy going as long as you can,” Markle says. “I hope I work for Nick for 10 more years. But you’re never the last guy to carry the bag.”

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The most delicate job a caddie has during a tournament is the one that’s impossible to precisely gauge: maintaining a grip on the mood of their player.

Markle knows this at a personal level. He played the HGCC course when he was new on the tour. “There was this huge crowd,” he says as he lopes along. “And I was nervous, and said to my caddie, give me the biggest club I’ve got, so I went with driver. And I put it over the downslope into the rough, and that cost me two strokes that might have won me the tournament.”

By now Markle and Sahl are on the eighth green, a long par 3 over a deep gorge filled with Lord of the Rings-style rough that will tempt golfers to overclub to reach the green. Chaos will ensue: the edges of the green run off like a bad haircut. Markle paces off every edge of the putting surface, to find out where it starts to flatten, and writes it down; Sahl, who tries to establish a visual picture of every green to augment his notes, rolls two balls across the furze at once to determine where the ridges are and how fast the greens will run.

Like most other professional players of a fiendishly difficult game that, in Rory McIlroy’s words this week, is getting “more and more competitive,” Taylor employs a growing phalanx of data-centric advisers: a swing coach, a physiotherapist, a sports psychologist, a trainer. (Golfers are fitter today, for instance, because strength yields higher swing speeds; higher swing speeds correlate directly to greater distance; distance correlates to lower scores.)

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“Dave wears all those hats,” Taylor says, even if the caddie’s effect on his score can’t be quantitatively measured. “A lot of teachers can help us outside the ropes, but they can’t do anything inside them, during play. Dave’s the only person there that can give me advice where my mindset is at. So caddies are extremely necessary.” Caddies are the human antidote to data-overload. Markle will tell Taylor he’s walking too fast, and to keep his head up while he does – anything to break whatever spell of darkness might be forming in the cranium of a professional golfer trying frantically to stay calm. Markle tells Taylor he’s a good golfer every single day. “Probably the hardest time for Dave,” Taylor says, “is when to step in, if things aren’t going great – what to say, and how to say it.” Or as Sahl puts it, “We’re not going to advise them where not to hit. We’re going to tell them where to hit it. They prefer that.”

Back in the tent known as the caddies lounge (all-day hot meals, masseuse, barber, WiFi, golf-related pinball, two TV screens, clothing shop), Nik Kroisi, the Boston-based caddy of Utah golfer Zac Blair, has just come in from walking the course. The pair arrived last Monday, played a round at the Toronto Golf Club, slipped in nine holes of practice in Hamilton on Tuesday and played in the Pro-Am exhibition Wednesday. Kroisi also walked and noted the course over those two days. Something must be working: as of this writing, the 33 year old Blair – 10 years in the PGA, no wins, but nearly $7.5-million in winnings, mostly from top 10 finishes – was tied for 15th at three-under par.

Kroisi’s thrilled. He wants to caddy as long as he can. He loves golf – the strategy, the mental challenge, the details, the lush green links. “It’s like a dream job for me,” he says, quietly rubbing water on his head to cool down. “I get to be inside the ropes, feel the juices. But I don’t have to make the shots.”

That’s the professional caddie’s silver lining: if you carry the bag, you don’t have to endure the agony of playing.