Caddie's Role: I was squatting low to the right of the eighth fairway during the World Matchplay at La Costa last Friday looking for my player's ball.

It was the shortest distance I ever remember having to scour the ground for; the shot only travelled about 40 yards.

The rough was brutally tough. A mixture of seemingly endless rain and a truck load of fertiliser meant that you needed a shovel to extract your ball from it.

Retief is about as strong a player as you can get and even he could only manage to shift his ball this short distance when he missed the fairway well right in our second round match against Fred Couples. The ground was obviously starting to decay in the swamp that Retief's shot disappeared into. I resorted to fumbling around the stinking, soupy mess with my fingertips in order to locate his ball. We found it, but lost the hole to Freddie, so it was a waste of finger fumbling.

You tend to get one hole on a course that somehow causes regular problems. It was the eighth for us last week. In the semi-final against Chris DiMarco, Retief sprayed his tee shot a bit right of the fairway and it came to rest in a stubbly pine tree. We arrived at the tree to find a gaggle of marshals wondering where to put their little flag.

You see, the marshals have flags to stick by errant balls that come to rest in the calf-high rough. Most of them stick it by the ball and stand bolt upright and expressionless waiting for the player to come and claim it, as opposed to years back when most of them had enlightening insight into the lie and how bad it actually was. They were always dying to tell the already irate golfer just how hopeless the situation was.

The way around this is the little flag and the stance of silent attention. The trouble was Retief's ball had entered the tree and didn't reappear.

So the flag remained tentatively in the marshal's hand. The ball, meanwhile, was still unidentified, up the tree. Being the loyal porter I am, I took it upon myself to leg it up the tree and see if I could either identify our ball or somehow dislodge it.

A golf tournament is obviously a fairly dull event if the sight of a caddie climbing up a tree in search of his master's golf ball is a noteworthy occurrence. Apart from the hoots and hollers from the crowd, half of them already the worse for drink, I was feeling a little unsteady given it has been quite a few decades since I used to scale apple trees in summertime in the traditional Irish youthful pastime of robbing orchards.

I took the two-iron with me in order to give the old branches a stir. It's amazing how resilient a relatively small tree is. All I was doing was making myself dizzy and increasing the volume of the cheering crowd.

The mind wanders in these situations. A number of tunes entered my head.

Peter Gabriel's Shaking The Tree as I rattled furiously. Autumn Leaves, as the foliage started to dislodge due to my disturbing it. Living On The Ceiling by Blancmange seemed particularly appropriate as I looked down on the amused heads below me.

The line: "Up and down, I'm up the wall, I'm up the bloody tree" seemed apt as the official said I had less than a minute to shake the ball free.

The directors below could see one ball wedged between some debris near where I was waving my two-iron and they were trying to guide me towards it. I managed to dislodge it only to be told as it fell at Retief's feet that it was indeed a Titleist but not the one he had hit off the tee.

By the time I scurried down the trunk, the gaggle of observers had dispersed and we were marching up the fairway having conceded the hole. It seemed to mark the end of our contention of the semi-final as Retief never performed anywhere near his capability after that.

I had my suspicions about the semi-final when the honorary observers (people who walk inside the ropes with the match because they pay a lot of money or are invited by sponsors)were announced on the first tee.

The starter spoke like a raconteur with not much of a story to tell, but whose voice and deliberate delivery were the most important part of the spiel.

The players were laboriously announced, then the official, and finally the observers who turned out to be Mr and Mrs Angst from California.

They got a bigger welcome from the crowd than Retief or DiMarco. The Angsts turned out to be perfectly charming people and nowhere near as anxious as their name might have suggested.

I squatted low and leaped high in an effort to save my man a shot last week in the Accenture World Matchplay championship at La Costa, Carlsbad, California.

Just some of the many duties we are called upon to perform in the mystery tour that is professional caddying.