CADDIE'S ROLE:The chance to enjoy an overland train trip to the Czech Open is too good to miss out on, writes COLIN BYRNE
THE GIST of travelling ideally is to enjoy the trip. It’s the journey that is important, not just the arrival. Experiencing the trip is something most of us loopers on tour rarely get to do much any more no matter what our original intentions were of travelling the world, carrying a golf bag and maybe sometimes being enlightened about new and interesting cultures along the way.
The intensity of the modern professional game has curtailed the nature of moving between golf courses from week to week. It is a challenge at times to figure out what part of a new country you are in; orientation is course-specific only; range, first tee and clubhouse with a yardage book in our back pocket instead of a tourist guide.
The chances of enjoying an overland trip are greater in Europe when we have back-to-back events in a similar region. Last week’s move from Sweden to the Czech Republic was an excellent opportunity to get back to how we used to travel through Europe in the old days.
Caddies are efficient at finding the cheapest flights from one event to another. It made sense for most of us to do a two-week stint instead of going home for a night. It gave some of us a rare opportunity to spend Sunday night at a venue. There was an unofficial meeting place in a lively square in Malmo town centre where the whole tour seemed to stop in at some stage of the week. The victorious player, Ricardo Gonzalez, dropped in to buy some drinks for the rest of us who were celebrating both the end of the week and the popular Argentine’s win. The problem was the cheap flight from Malmo to Prague left at 7.45am on Monday morning.
One of my enterprising colleagues had organised a bus to take us from the caddies’ hotel to the airport at 5.30am on Monday last. The bets were on early for the amount of no-shows. It was a surprisingly civilised affair, I am told, with some even rising promptly enough to enjoy the early breakfast the hotel had prepared in our honour. Obviously not everyone had been in the celebratory mood the previous night.
Although we had all booked our flights individually it seemed like it was an organised collective trip. Half a plane load of caddies landed in Prague airport on a fresh summer’s morning of a day that was obviously going to heat up in time.
Everything had run smoothly; Check-in, flight and bag collection. We all drifted out of the terminal and started filtering out to our different modes of transport to Ostrava, some four hours away by road. Some rented cars, others hired small vans to take them directly to their destination. Those of us with a sense of nostalgia opted for the public bus into Prague’s elegant central train station and ended up getting a group train ticket to Ostrava. Again, it was all very civilised and easy. Once on board our unofficial leader made a decision that we should splash out and upgrade our little party to a first-class carriage.
The Czech rail catering staff were not ready for the thirsty party they encountered last Monday. We ran out of beer by the time we pulled into Pardubice, an hour east of the capital. The card school started in the central part of the carriage, we had music and banter going all the way east as we soaked in the scenic countryside of a relatively obscure land from a golfing perspective.
There were about 25 of us in the first-class carriage on the 11.23am rattler to Ostrava in the eastern part of the Czech Republic. There was even a couple of players who joined us and partook in the banter that flows when everyone is relaxed and not in a hurry to arrive at their destination. For those of us who used to use trains as our primary from of travel some decades ago, the stories of stolen belongings and the enforced journeys home without tickets, wallets or passports ensued.
At Olomouc one of my colleagues got a call from a player wondering if there was an available tour caddie willing to work for him in the tournament. All caddies on board were gainfully employed for the week, so the player settled for a local caddie.
The card school masterminded by the Sunningdale contingent on the trip was consumed by tales of the British Open Seniors which was held at Sunningdale the previous week. As they gathered their cards up after each round of “crash” they discussed their mates from their home club who caddied for the seniors – “Milky” went with Denis Watson, they couldn’t agree on who “Slug” looped for. A text message came through from a Malmo airport no-show. He was snoozing on his travel bag in a park in the city being softened by a light drizzle as he waited for a later flight.
We eased into Ostrava’s main station just a few minutes behind schedule, Gary Tilston marginally better off with his “crash” earnings and everyone generally relaxed after a painless trip. We congregated in the central station bar and joined some locals for an afternoon beverage as we waited for our connection to our final destination of Frydek-Mystek. The austere grey concrete buildings became more apparent as we neared our terminus. Czech architecture is made up of a mix of aesthetically-pleasing Romanesque to Classicist period buildings of previous centuries, and the harsh, crude and functional concrete blocks of the communist era.
We dragged our belongings across a wasteland around the Frydek-Mystek station and into the grey lump of concrete that was to be our lodgings for the week, the Centrum Hotel. It had a sort of groovy communist chic to its interior that will be back in fashion soon. Meanwhile, we settled into our lodgings from a different era in preparation for a stay in a country that still promotes the view that the journey and not necessarily the arrival is most stimulating.
