Life on the circuit is no easy merry-go-round

CADDIE'S ROLE/Colin Byrne: It may not sound like much but caddies and players work about 30 weeks of the year. I know that means 22 weeks are free. I know that amounts to almost half the year. Sure that's hardly work at all.

You may well have a point, but I will try to sway your thinking and give a slightly different perspective, and take some of the colour out of the seven-month working year.

Last week is a pretty extreme example of life on tour, but given the extent of the boundaries of the European Tour these days it can happen. From a sludgy English midlands, where the prevalence of web-footed birds gave an indication of the type of terrain that has been transformed into a golf course in the Forest of Arden, the tour went half way around the globe to Shanghai.

If you made the cut you would have played your round on Sunday, mopped the muck off your shoes and bag, packed the golf bag, taken a shower in a chaotic locker-room (that's how it is in the Sunday rush ), caught a lift somehow to Heathrow Airport and boarded a night plane to China.

Assuming there were no delays you would peel yourself off the plane some 13 hours later and face the prospect of a disturbed night's rest in yet another hotel in a country that hadn't heard of golf until its first course was built 20 years ago.

If you are not eligible to play in the pro-am on Wednesday, the chances are you would have had to haul your bedraggled self out of a bed disturbed by a jet-lagged slumber to play a practice round on a course that you almost certainly have not seen, given that the paint is only drying on most courses in China.

To compound the fatigue, if you were playing in Italy the previous week you probably had spent most of the week trying to entertain yourself in a crowded stuffy locker-room and clubhouse surroundings waiting for the incessant rain to abate. Whether you made the cut there or not, Saturday evening was the earliest you would have flown out of Milan's airport.

I know I am using an extreme couple of weeks as an example of the sometimes harsh circumstances that the modern golf pro and his porter put themselves through in order to pay their often high expenses. But this can often be the case, and particularly so early in the year when the European Tour goes on a world expedition until it settles closer to home in April.

As an alternative to the night flight to China, you may have had a relaxing short drive back to the south-east of England, where many of the tour players and caddies reside for the season. You may have been stretching your neck, squinting in awe of the brilliant yellow blankets of rape-covered fields that fill much of the English countryside in May.

You may have been one of the majority that decided a mid-season trip to Shanghai after all the preceding travel in the early part of the year was just the last thing you needed. You were not that desperate to play. Unlike the ones who chose to go there. Of which there were two categories. Those who were on the edge of golfing oblivion and would have gone to Timbuktu if there was a chance of a start and a outside whiff of getting a cheque on Sunday evening.

The others were those who were lured by the sponsors with unmentionable goodies to come and play at the most inconvenient location of the year so far, Heidelberg from Birmingham via Shanghai. See what type of BMWs the players in this category are driving later in the year.

Anyway, if you didn't fall into the above two groups then the chances were that you would have been looking forward to a relatively relaxing week at home.

Catching up on all those things you had meant to do while you were on your last trip but just never got round to doing. Paying bills, sorting out some other banking matters, getting that washing machine fixed, having that leaky tap fixed and the like. That hotel in Italy that overcharged your credit card by a200 last week needed to be dealt with. Where are you staying in Heidelberg this week, have you still got the number of that nice little hotel you stayed in two years ago? What about the flight, did I book that flight I was looking at on the Internet in Bangkok when I was so jet lagged last February? How about the rental car, is that booked for Monday or Tuesday.

What about the events in August? It's a notoriously bad month for getting flights. They are usually booked up half a year in advance. Now did my player say he was going to play in Munich or did he say he probably would or probably wouldn't?

This all depends on how he played in July, which of course hung on how he played in the British Open, that's if he qualified of course.

Oh yeah, what about the digs in Troon. There are about 15 bed and breakfasts and about 1,500 people trying to book them at grossly inflated prices.

What day is it, it's Saturday and you still have not got word back from your player about Munich. Let's take a chance and book it anyway, maybe you could work for another player if he decides not to play, so much for a week off. Unless of course you are a top player in which case you will have a secretary to solve all of the aforementioned travel problems.

Assuming you are a regular player or a caddie, the chances are that on one of your seemingly many weeks off you will have a chance to experience what it is like for those of you in the office dealing with daily bureaucratic problems.

For most of us it is as close as we want to get to the steady life. All those hectic moments and sleepless nights are the compromise of an otherwise adventurous, unpredictable and frequently intense lifestyle.