The First Bag: A History of the Caddie

Before the Cart

The caddie was the person who made the round possible: who read the wind, who knew the course, who understood which club produced which result in a player's hands and was willing to say so at the moment it mattered. The relationship between a player and a caddie was one of the more interesting partnerships in sport: unequal in almost every social dimension, intimate in the ways that only shared pressure can produce.

The word itself arrives from the French cadet, meaning a younger son or junior officer, which traveled to Scotland in some form in the seventeenth century and was applied to the boys and men who carried bags on the links. By the time golf was being played formally, the caddie was already a fixture, already a professional of a particular and under-appreciated kind.

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