Caddie's role: Rain delays have become the order of the day for the US Tour. There have been few exceptions to the phenomenon this year and we are well into the third month on tour.

An interesting camaraderie enveloped the more traditional divide between caddies and players in Orlando last week.

The players were bored after about an hour and a half of hanging around the inner sanctum of the locker room and the caddies were closest at hand for entertainment, being assembled outside the locker room because there was nowhere else for them to go.This in the year 2005 at a $5 million event.

And so the two groups got together to discuss some of the inefficiencies of the tour. The general consensus was that the original decision to "play the ball down" as opposed to "lift, clean and place" put the whole tournament in an uncompromising position.

By placing the ball you can at least get some holes played if the course is still very wet and the ball is gathering mud each time it hits the ground .

Of course, if you get 50 per cent of the morning groups half way through their first round when a delay occurs - as happened at Bay Hill - you don't have the option to adopt the "lift, clean and place" rule any more because half the field have already "played the ball down" for part of their first round.

There is a stigma attached to the notion of the world's best picking their ball up, wiping chunks of mud off it and propping it up on a nice lie. When people feel their course is of a high standard, they don't want this to happen at it.

The reality is that no matter how well a newer course is designed, it can rarely sustain the kind of weather experienced in America in the past few months.

The Tour are usually good at making a clear and quick decision in times of bad weather. They at least let the competitors go back to their hotels and rest, in preparation for a long following day's play, when players will try to make up for lost time. We waited five hours at Bay Hill before we were told there would be no play and the first round would resume at 7.15am the next day.

The ducks splashing around the 18th fairway by mid-afternoon should have cleared all doubt about there being any activity on the course.

Unfortunately, the Bay Hill Invitational and its legendary Arnold Palmer tradition has a dated custom attached to it; caddies shall be ignored when it comes to basic conditions . In recent times more and more events have tried hard to accommodate us toters, for which we are extremely grateful . Meanwhile, others have tried hard to ignore us.

So as the rain washed over the eves of the Bay Hill Country Club, us bagmen squashed up against the clubhouse walls to avoid yet another soaking having endured non-stop rain on the course for two hours .

There was an awning next to the travelling caddie wagon which can accommodate about 15 caddies at a time. If you were huddled under the awning provided by the tournament you would have been up to your ankles in water, such was the extent of the deluge.

There was nowhere to leave a change of clothes, nowhere to dry off after hours in the rain. The toilet facilities had no running water.

Many of these events have missed a century when it comes to some basic considerations. Allowing the professional caddie a modicum of dignity is surely not a tall order.

With events like the Ford Championship at Doral offering us a big discount on the purchase of one of their cars, setting up a couple of hotel rooms for us to hang out in at the venue, hosting a caddie party and even throwing in a gift for each participating caddie, there is no doubt about the ranking of Arnie's event. The gushing nostalgia for Palmer stops at the entrance to the caddie shack.

And it still is very much a shack in Bay Hill.