"Homage to a Special Kind of Caddie From a Special Kind of Era"
/Michael Bamberger pays tribue to Dolphus Hull, aka Golf Ball, who caddied in a different era.
In his prime, he ran Calvin Peete’s golf game, just as surely as Jack Welch ran G.E.
He had a long, fruitful, volatile relationship with Raymond Floyd—and Raymond’s wife, Maria—going back to the 1960s. “I fired him six times,” Floyd once told me. “Maria hired him seven.”
The caddie-player relationship was different then. The caddie was less of a technocrat and more attuned to the emotional state of the golfer. At least, Golf Ball was like that, as was his running mate, Herman Mitchell. You could fit three Balls in Mitch, who caddied for Lee Trevino for years. They were Mutt and Jeff, but they both could play and they both had the empathy gene—the ability to really understand another person’s plight—embedded in their DNA
