A cart gets you to your ball. A caddie gets you into the round. We have said it before, and we have built a program around believing it: a good looper is worth three or four shots a side and a markedly better afternoon, and we are training ours now, before we open, so they are ready on day one.
You cannot fake course knowledge, and you cannot buy it overnight. Our caddies are learning the property the only way it can be learned — by walking it, in every wind and light, until they know which side of the fourth fairway is correct without thinking, how the grain runs on the small greens, and exactly how much the lake will let a player get away with at the fourteenth. That knowledge is the real luxury we are building. The bag is just where it lives.
The best caddie talks you out of the hero shot before you know you were going to try it.
It would be cheaper to hire loopers the week we open and hope. We are not doing that. A caddie program is a culture, not a roster, and cultures take a season to set. By the time the first guests walk to the first tee, the person carrying the bag will have walked these eighteen holes a hundred times. That is the kind of thing you cannot rush, so we started early.
