What can you say about a guy whose nickname pretty much says it all? I had known The Weasel for two years by the time I started to work directly for him in the pro shop after the close of the golf season. He was a decent enough player and people seemed to get along with him well. The bag staff had more interaction with him than with the other pro’s as he was designated to be our direct boss. For that reason, we all had a pretty good idea of who he was. A typical assistant pro. Pray tell, J.M., what is a “typical assistant pro”? You had to ask, didn’t you? I will break them down for you.

1. The Intern – Interns are college students that are majoring in golf sciences. I have no idea if “golf science” is a thing but it sounds cool, and I just made it up so let’s run with it. These guys are either unpaid or get a little stipend so that they can buy soap, toothpaste and club apparel from the pro shop. Normally they are housed at the club and fed by the club. These kids would come to us wide-eyed and full of excitement and by the end of the Summer they’d leave desperate to get back to school. I can understand. College-aged young men (I am sure there are female interns as well, but we only ever had guys) are not hard-wired to kiss as much ass as is required to hold a position of rank at one of these places. They have long days for little to no pay, and at the end of their hitch have only experience as the one by-product of their virtual indentured servitude as a reason for having endured it in the first place. Most of these guys were great and Hayseed was one of them. He would eventually return to the club after his year as an intern as the second assistant pro. A southerner, good golfer, incredible boozer and all-around good guy, he was universally liked at the club by members and staff alike. We had some others as well who were good eggs. We also had some born-again Christian kids who came to us. They were fine but a little tough to read. Once, Hayseed and a couple other guys and myself took two of our holy rollers to a bar. After about a half hour of solid drinking, I noticed that one of them had disappeared. The other, sat at the bar and drank diet coke. He looked like he was carrying three pounds of heroin taped to his leg and had been stopped at the border by Interpol. Nervous doesn’t begin to describe this poor kid as he sat there sweating into his diet coke while the rest of us pounded down Jameson and draught Budweiser. I went looking for our lost little duckling only to find him in the nearly empty restaurant portion of the place on his phone with his mom. I think he was talking to her about temptation. I instantly felt nothing but revulsion towards this little toad. Now, twenty years since, I admire him. Nevertheless, not a great way to get in good with a bunch of guys who call a dude named The Weasel their boss, but we gave him his space and then proceeded to avoid him for the rest of the season. Interns are OK in my book.

2. The Assistant – These guys are good golfers, there is no doubt about it. There is a ranking system in a club or municipal course of assistants. 1st, 2nd and then the others along with the interns. The head pro sits at the top. The first assistant takes care of the pro-shop, scheduling, the other assistants and sometimes the bag staff. They are the head pro’s second in command. The second assistant is the sergeant of the operation and delegates jobs to the bag staff, other assistants and is usually in charge of the interns. All of them teach golf lessons to the membership. Like in every industry, some of them are good people. Spicoli was a good guy. He was honestly one of the best bosses I have ever had. A couple others were nice guys as well. Irish was a good guy. Red was a good guy. The Rook was a sad sack. A lot of random names from my ever-fading memory. A lot of them, however, weren’t exactly winning any humanitarian awards. A friend of mine from college who ended up working at the club for a season or two told me a story about an assistant who worked at a club that he had worked at in high school. The assistant gave my buddy advice on life in the most assistant pro way possible. He took him aside and said, “kid, you only need the 3B’s in life to be happy. Booze, broads and barbiturates.” He might be right but I sure as hell don’t want to find out. I am married, I like beer, but I haven’t slid into the hole of downer addiction luckily. You have to feel for assistants. It is a transient life. As an assistant who works in the northeast, you will be moving at least once a year. When the weather gets too cold, you will be heading out west or down south. For this reason, a family, solid roots and all of that jazz can be exceedingly difficult for these guys to establish. I noticed a lot of them are gamblers as well. Perhaps the nature of the business lends itself to sports betting as there is always a group on the course at any given time thinking of ways to make each shot, each hole and the entire round “more interesting.” I don’t know. I just know a lot of these guys are heavy betters. Assistants are the backbone of a country club, and they know it. They tend to throw their weight around here and there but that is to be expected. Since they were generally close to us in age, we all got along relatively well.

For the most part, assistants are alright. We usually got lucky with some decent ones, and I was friends with a couple. It’s like anything else; you’ll get some good guys and some bad guys. I am trying to rack my brain to remember if we ever had a female assistant. I swear we did, and I think I sort of remember her. If we did, she was short lived. The golf world is very much a male dominated slice of the cosmos. For that reason, most of our pros and most of the members who came up to play regularly were men.

The Weasel fell into category that was truly unique. He was a decent enough golfer, who treated the staff really well. But he was also a degenerate gambler and a functional alcoholic. So, when he and Hayseed got an apartment together, it was like adding chocolate syrup to milk. Or in this case, grain alcohol to rubbing alcohol. Perfection! Hayseed once drank over 20 beers in a three hour stretch just to win a bet for the rest of a Subway sandwich from his roommate, the assistant superintendent whom I called Hacksaw. I was there. It wasn’t pleasant. By the end of the night when we went to head home, he was unable to speak and just put his hand up to let us know that he had registered that we said we were going to leave. Hayseed drank so much on a nightly basis, that once while we were hanging out at his house, we spotted a gentleman of the street walking by collecting bottles and cans. We asked him if he wanted some extras, and he was more than happy to take them. When Hayseed opened the front door, the stairway that led to the second floor where his apartment was, was quite literally piled with garbage bags full of cans almost all the way up the stairs. The collector’s eyes nearly exploded out of his head. This was the motherlode. It would take him three trips on his Huffy back and forth from Hayseed’s place to wherever he lived in order to collect all the bags. Hayseed is a great guy, and I haven’t spoken to him in a while, but I hope he is well. I also hope he is also on vitamin supplements for liver health. The Weasel and Hayseed lived together for a full season I believe. This was because The Weasel was going through a divorce. I can’t blame his wife. Whenever she would call looking for him, I was instructed to tell her that he was “running errands on the course.” In actuality, he was in a sport’s bar on the other side of town opening up his book and watching multiple televisions to keep an eye on his business. We’ll revisit that again down the line.

While trying to figure out how to cover the Winter where I worked in the pro-shop and the experience of working for The Weasel, I decided that it would probably be a good idea to break this post up into two parts. The first, an intro to the assistants and a little background on The Weasel. The second post will get into the weeds with what went on that off-season. So, I apologize if this post wasn’t as juicy as you thought it would be. It gets better moving forward. No one wants to open a post that takes an eternity to read and for that reason, you are just going to have to wait for the next installment. The Weasel … Part Deux!