Caddie

I Stealing is against the law in Louisiana, unless you happen to be a politician. Since I didn't qualify for that exemption, the authorities in Baton Rouge understandably took a dim view of my taking $602 from the cash register at the driving range where I worked. I wish I could tell you what made me do it, especially since the money belonged to one of my best friends, a guy named Emile Boudreau. If I deserved to be in jail for stealing, I deserved to be under it for stealing from Boo. That's what everyone called him when we played together on the golf team at LSU. Boo came from Houma, which is "down on the bayou," as they say in south Louisiana, and he had a swing that was more suited for skinning nutria than playing golf. But the guy could get up and down from an orbiting satellite, if you know what I mean. Heck, he was the only player I ever saw who could hit only four greens in a round and still shoot 68. That isn't what made me like him, though. The fact is, Boo stuck by me when nobody else on the team would. Not that I would have blamed him if he hadn't. To be honest, I didn't have a very good attitude at LSU. I spent more time pulling the tabs off beer cans than I did working on my game. The fact that I was good enough to skip practice and still post the best scores on the team didn't help, either. I suppose Coach Sicks shouldn't have let me get away with it, but he did, and that made the other players just resent me even more. Not Boo, though. Even counting the time he decked me at the Tulane tournament (all I'll say about that is I had it coming), he was my best friend. That is, of course, until I rifled his cash register. They say opposites attract, and you couldn't find two people less alike than Boo and me. He was a year ahead of me, studied hard, and got his degree in business. I, on the other hand, did what I had to do to stay eligible and not much more. It was no coincidence that I left school to chase golf prizes as soon as Boo graduated. While Boo was back home becoming one of the more successful insurance agents in the state, I was paying $350 entry fees to play in mini tour events where I had to beat a hundred other guys just to get my money back. I know it didn't make a whole lot of sense, but math was never my strong suit. It took me years to realize that the only one who really came out ahead on those deals was the guy who ran the tournaments. After expenses, he made more from the entry fees than the player who finished first. Boo obviously understood this a lot better'n I did. Instead of fighting those odds, he maintained his connection to golf by buying a driving range outside of Baton Rouge. When I ran out of money to pay entry fees, he gave me a job there, giving lessons and minding the store. I rewarded his trust by stealing his cash and heading to Florida. I don't know how I ever expected to get away with it. It wasn't like Boo didn't know where I was going. There are only so many small-time professional golf tournaments, and the nearest ones at the time were in northwest Florida. Of course, when you're drinking a lot, you don't think those kinds of things through. The folks at Alcoholics Anonymous call it "crooked thinking." That's pretty accurate; I was so drunk at the time I must have figured Pensacola was gonna grant me political asylum. In any event, the cops there caught up with me on the putting clock at Tiger Point and escorted me to the Escambia County Correctional Center. After a sleepless night sharing a cell with an ill-tempered Cuban who spit on the floor and cursed me in Spanish, I was glad to see two uniformed deputies from the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office arrive the next day to take me back to Louisiana. At least those guys spoke English. They were a whole lot friendlier, too, even to the point of removing my handcuffs about halfway home. (Turned out one of them played golfVeron, Michael is the author of 'Caddie', published 2004 under ISBN 9780312325619 and ISBN 0312325614.