Four-Iron In The Soul

It takes a roguish character to survive life as a caddy on the circuit. Buried deep within his sub-conscious, Lawrence Donegan - more acquainted with a gentler life as a sub-editor on the news desk of the Guardian - obviously knew he had the necessary mischievous tendencies to haul someone's bag around the fairways of Europe for a year and, more than that, chase his dream of becoming "a professional sportsman".

After all, here's a man who'd been to the same school as Brian McClair; and the fact that he admits to being "crap at golf and past it at football" isn't exactly a hindrance to being a bag-carrier. So it was that he convinced and cajoled Ross Drummond, a fellow Scot and professional golfer, to entrust him with the caddying duties on the PGA European Tour for the 1996 season.

What turns a good idea into a fine book is that Donegan doesn't fall into the trap of making out that everything is a bed of roses on the tour. Indeed, he succeeds in demonstrating the harsh realities of the master-servant relationship.

Caddies are a special breed and it is to the author's credit that he manages to infiltrate them and explain why men like Irish caddy Myles Byrne - who "could do the Daily Telegraph crossword in the time it took the rest of us to tie our shoelaces . . . the cleverest caddy on tour" - pursue such a life.

The dream of any caddy is to get a good bag, the ultimate is to emulate someone like Pete Coleman, who has carried Bernhard Langer's clubs for an age, or `Wobbly', who is Ian Woosnam's trusty servant. Donegan's master Drummond is a journeyman, and the irony is the season he spent by Drummond's side was the golfer's most successful - by far - in almost two decades on the tour.

Donegan doesn't give a sermon on the good life. He may have appeared on BBC Grandstand and spoke to Jack Nicklaus, but reality took over.

Towards the end of the season, he even split up from his paymaster. In the British Masters, he'd told his boss that there was no room in the bag when Drummond took off his sweater. "There was enough room for a Chesterfield settee," conceded the author, and the gesture was the straw that broke the camel's back.