Sir Nick Faldo has had rather a lot of caddies in his time so I feel relatively safe that the story I’m about to tell you will remain cloaked in secrecy. It probably needs to!

I’m not even sure that Sir Nick is aware of this particular occurrence which relates to a tournament in the States that was subject to a storm delay that meant rounds needed to be finished the following day.

Faldo had marked his ball on the 15th green before Friday play was suspended and would not return until the following morning. He spent the evening knowing that he needed to make one more birdie to make the cut. The caddie in question, many years later, then related to me what happened next.

‘We sneaked back onto the course during the night. There were a couple of us and we headed over to the 15th where, by the light of the moon, we had a close look at Nick’s putt.

‘I even had a go at it several times so I knew exactly how much break there was. We then went ahead to the other holes and rolled balls on the green around the holes so that we had a better idea of which way it was going to go.’

When play resumed the next day something unusual happened. Our caddie was not in the habit of crouching down with his man to line up putts, but there he was suddenly on Nick’s shoulder.

‘Two inches to the right and firm,’ he whispered into Faldo’s ear.

Who knows what was going through Nick’s mind but he didn’t question the call and made the 10 footer for birdie using the line that he’d been given.

‘We made the cut, which was nice,’ said our mystery caddie winking at me and smiling.

I feel like it’s about time that I said something about caddies. They are, after all, integral to the professional game. There’s not a tournament winner or Ryder Cup star who has not, at some point, extolled the virtues of having an accomplice to lean on. From a media perspective they all tend to keep themselves to themselves. It’s not worth talking to the press if you value your future employment, it’s rather like football in that way. If you ever approached Fanny Sunneson, for many years Faldo’s caddie, she would have just said ‘You’d better ask Nick’. Caddies, more than players, would always have treated a journalist with deep suspicion.

I did once find out for myself just how hard the job can be when I flew out to cover the German Masters and bumped into the Kent based tour pro Peter Mitchell. His caddie was suddenly unavailable and he managed to persuade me to take over.

Let me tell you, carrying the bag is the least of your problems, especially when it rains. You have to keep everything dry, be prompt with an exact yardage, replace divots, rake bunkers, clean balls and keep up. It’s a tough gig.

Peter missed the cut that week which was unfortunate, but it meant I was a tad better prepared for a nine hole stint carrying Padraig Harrington’s bag during an exhibition game at Wentworth some years later.

“My water is in the bottle on the right and yours is on the left,” he said, showing me round the bag, like an estate agent shows you round a house. “Oh, and you’ll find some food in this side pocket. I need to eat at three hole intervals starting on the 2nd, then the 5th and the 8th,” he explained. 

I still have the white overalls at home which Harrington kindly signed on the breast pocket. I’m not sure I’ve worn them more than once since, handing out leaflets at Oxted train station in an effort to gain more members for Limpsfield Chart Golf Club.

I still remember that morning well. The one at Wentworth, not the train station. Padraig looked up at me from a bunker on the left of the first fairway and gave me my first lesson.

“I repair the worst myself and then you step in and rake over the rest,” he said, in the way that a driving instructor might teach you about clutch control.

On the 2nd tee, the Irishman started muttering about hitting a slight cut with a three-quarter swing. He clipped the ball off the tee and watched it with avid attention, his tongue just poking out of the corner of his mouth. The ball faded a little too much and came up short in a trap at the front. He handed me his 7-iron and I looked for a suitable spot in the bag.

“Are you fussy about where they go?”

“No.”

“I am.”

“Yes, well caddies tend to be fussy, but they all come out in the same order, so it doesn’t bother me,” said Padraig.

“The tee shot looked quite good in the air,” I say, an observation that was half peace making and half to bolster his confidence.

“Yeah, it did, it was nice.”

“So what went wrong?” I couldn’t help the question, it was out before I could swallow it back in.

“I just didn’t hit it…I wouldn’t say I was quite warmed up.”

“You didn’t middle it then?”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t middle it. I’m just not…if I was in a tournament I’d be hitting it 10 yards further by now, having prepared properly on the range.”

On the 3rd hole, the Irishman had missed the fairway on the left, his ball disappearing into claggy rough with a tree overhanging his line to the hole.

Having witnessed him grab his laser distance finder on more than one occasion, I was ready with it as I put the bag down.

“We have 190 yards and 11 yards uphill,” he announced, like an infantry captain spotting an enemy gun emplacement. But this time we had a more sinister problem – there was mud on the right side of the ball.

“So how’s this going to come out?” he asked me.

I find myself thinking out loud. “Well, the mud’s on the right, so that’ll slow the right side of the ball down, so you’d think that it might go right, but I think it’ll go left.”

My Irish logic seemed to confuse even Padraig and a puzzled expression appeared on his face. But then the fog cleared: “You’re right, when there’s mud on the ball the shot will tend to veer the opposite way. So this is a good mud ball.”

“I didn’t know there was such a thing.”

“Well, if it goes left that’ll help my draw and I might even get a flier from this lie,” he added with remarkable optimism.

Quite how he managed to propel the ball 190 yards uphill from that lie was a secret only known to professionals, but the result was a tricky chip over a bunker that he did miraculously well to get within 10 feet.

It’s time to read the putt and Padraig was in two minds. He told me that he thought the ball might come a touch from the left, while I felt that it might break an ounce from the right.

“What kind of a helpful caddie is that,” he said. “Listen, if I say it’s left, you say ‘that’s just what I was thinking’. Then if I change my opinion and say it’s straight, you go ‘yes, that would work too’.”

Padraig took his usual cack-handed grip and rolled the ball into the centre of the cup for an unlikely par.

“Actually, you helped me there,” he said, “Your opinion moderated mine. Instead, of aiming left edge, I went for the middle and it ran straight.” At least I managed to get something right. 

My only other experience of caddying came on a Callaway Day at Remedy Oak in the New Forest when I took Thomas Bjorn’s bag for nine holes and then swapped to Nick Dougherty. The change couldn’t have come sooner because Bjorn’s bag was at least three times heavier. I wouldn’t have put it past him to have filled it with lead weights.

After that I decided it was a job best left to the experts and there’s no one more expert than Billy Foster. He’s worked with Seve, Lee Westwood, Darren Clarke and a host of others and I remember interviewing him out in the States.

Remarkably, I discovered his phone number on my mobile as he was helping Matt Fitzpatrick grab a dramatic victory at the US Open last year. It was Billy’s first Major win. 

Cheekily, I sent him a text. Amazingly he replied: “Many thanks Peter. I guess dreams can come true.”

In my research for this Substack piece – yes, I do sift through old mags and articles – I found a transcript of the chat I had with Foster and this section caught my eye.

Here’s what he told me when I asked him about the closest he’d ever come to death.

“Driving through the desert with Darren Clarke on our way to the World Matchplay, which he ultimately won, beating Tiger in the final. We’d flown to Los Angeles and, in his wisdom, he decided to hire a car to drive the five hours to Las Vegas, but with the time change, it was like driving five hours in the middle of the morning. 

“I was in the passenger seat with one eye open, like Chief Sitting Bull, and we moved from the outside lane to the middle lane, then the middle lane to the inside lane. I looked across and he had his three chins in the middle of his chest and he was snoring. 

“At that stage I grabbed the wheel and pulled us out of the desert at 90mph when we were probably three seconds from death. I didn’t stop the car, but I did shout ‘Clarkey’ at the top of my voice. We then pulled over and I drove the rest of the way.”