CADDIE'S ROLE:The shade of the plush caddie shack in Dubai was an ideal venue to reflect on a caddie's lot

CONTRARY TO popular belief we caddies on tour rarely get to play golf. On a tournament week we never get to play and practice is not allowed at the tournament practice range. As most of us caddies are golfers it can be slightly frustrating to have a manicured range with a selection of perfect golf balls to hit.

On weeks like the Dubai World Championship we would have had the range balls of our choice from Callaway to TaylorMade. That is if we were allowed to hit balls on the vast range.

Caddies are reduced to standing on “the paddock” for half the day looking at almost perfect swings without having the opportunity to try to emulate them. Therefore you are likely to notice a trait amongst many of us that could be described as the caddie’s nervous sub-conscious twitch.

Many of us stand and chat idly while casually having little practice swings without clubs as we engage in time-wasting banter. So in a distracted kind of way we have our own little practice sessions without ever hitting a ball.

There was a wonderful end-of-season feel to the final event of the year in Dubai last week. For a number of reasons players and caddies alike were happy to be at their place of work; to be in the limited field of 60 players meant it had been a relatively good year and there was a chance of consolidating that with a good finish in the biggest event of the year.

The weather was almost perfect for play and practice.

Our facilities were exceptional, with caddies having their own locker-room and personal lockers. The caddies lounge provided us with excellent food from dawn to dusk, with a drinks happy hour as we neared the end of each day. The lounge was so good a number of players opted for our hospitality over their own players lounge.

The tables on the lawn outside the caddies lounge were almost perfectly placed to take a beer in the fading evening light and talk about the day past amongst colleagues.

The fact it got dark by 5.30pm meant we could not be stuck on the range till late evening so the whole set-up in the desert was conducive to spending a thoroughly enjoyable last week of the year.

Not that we don’t get to spend some idyllic weeks in other exotic locations around the globe year round but last week just seemed to generate a warm and harmonious atmosphere befitting the last week of the season.

There is another small group of people on tour who play the waiting game besides the caddies. The players’ managers, the manufacturers, the coaches and the physiotherapists.

All of us spend most days at the course but are only productive for just part of that day. The rest of the time they are like the caddies in lurk mode, waiting for their main men to arrive. If one is busy it means that the chances are the rest of the support group is inactive.

So we all congregate and engage in more idle banter, or benefit from the rest of the support team’s time.

On a couple of occasions last week I noticed two of the most respected coaches on tour giving lessons to caddies around the chipping green.

Given the small number in the field there was plenty of space to do that and not get in the players’ way, therefore the authorities were not too concerned with the minor infringements.

The interesting aspect of these chipping lessons was the coaches were happy to give the caddies their time and knowledge so freely.

There are a number of us on tour who consider some of these coaches as opportunists jumping on the gravy train of players’ talent. There are some like that but Peter Cowen and his assistant, Mike Walker, are not in this category.

They have a genuine love of the game and in particular thrive on imparting their knowledge to the inquisitive.

You could hear them passionately explaining their theories of downward pressure and applying the appropriate right-to-left spin on the ball from the tricky Bermuda rough surrounding the practice chipping green at the Earth Course in Dubai last week.

They were not thinking of time or money – they were simply expressing themselves to people who have spent years looking at talented golfers getting up and down from seemingly the most impossible of situations and now they were having their own private lessons from the guys who taught their bosses how to accomplish these Houdini-like feats.

Mike and Pete are like the schoolteachers on tour, always on hand to give guidance to players and even us caddies when time permits.

In a game that can frequently get muddled in a sea of prize money and contracts it is refreshing to see such genuine golf enthusiasts having such an important influence on the big money game of golf.

Chris Wood, the tall young English golfer, literally went home in an ambulance having collapsed on the course during the final round with a serious bout of food poisoning.

Those of us enjoying happy hour outside the caddie shack in the perfectly-shaded terrace remarked, as he was wheeled by us on a stretcher, that normally this image is preserved for capitulations with the golf clubs on the back nine of the last round.

The unfortunate Englishman had brought a new understanding to a final-day collapse.

The Dubai World Championship was an ideal venue to observe, from the shade of the plush caddie shack, what a frequently pleasant and enriching job we have as international porters.