Who's Your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great, and Reprobates of Golf »

RICK REILLY is the author of the cult classic Missing Links, Slo Mo, and The Life of Reilly, a New York Times bestseller. A senior writer for Sports Illustrated, he has been voted eight times as the National Sportswriter of the Year by his peers. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

The funniest and most popular sportswriter in America abandons his desk at SPORTS ILLUSTRATED to caddy for some of the world's most famous golfers, and some celebrity duffers, recounting it all in this hilarious and revealing look at the world of golf.

Who knows a golfer best? Who's with them every minute of every round, hears their muttering, knows whether they cheat? Their caddies, of course. So sportswriter Rick Reilly figured that he could learn a lot about the players and their games by caddying, even though he had absolutely no idea how to do it. Amazingly, some of the best golfers in the world including Jack Nicklaus, David Duval, Tom Lehman, John Daly, Casey Martin, and Jill McGill agreed to let Reilly carry their bags at actual PGA and LPGA Tour events. To round out his portrait of the golfing life, Reilly also caddied at the Masters, persuaded Deepak Chopra and Donald Trump to use him as a caddy, accompanied high-rolling golf hustlers in Las Vegas around the course...

The New Yorker

"Just remember the three ups," a seasoned caddy tells the sportswriter Rick Reilly, before Reilly makes his caddying début at the Masters. "Show up, keep up, and shut up." In Who's Your Caddy?, he carries the bag for the likes of David Duval and Casey Martin and listens in on the conversations taking place on those hushed sunlit greens. Reilly quickly becomes attuned to the demands of pros, who can be "just slightly more finicky than the Sultan of Brunei." Still, as he learns how to avoid rattling the clubs or knocking over Jack Nicklaus' bag, he gets plenty of experience approaching not only the greens but the golfers, both the famous and the famously avid. Reilly chats with Donald Trump about building seven-million-dollar waterfalls and asks Deepak Chopra, "Is cheating in golf wrong?"

Don Van Natta, Jr., takes up that same question in a round with Bill Clinton, in First Off the Tee, a look at America's various golf-playing Presidents. Theodore Roosevelt steered politicians away from the sport's apparent élitism, warning, "Golf is fatal." Likewise, John F. Kennedy, probably the best of the Presidential duffers, didn't want voters to know he was any good; unlike his predecessor, the golfophilic Dwight D. Eisenhower, Kennedy vigorously avoided being photographed on the links.

Today, golf has shed some of that high-class sheen; Alan Shipnuck's Bud, Sweat & Tees chronicles run-ins with strippers and gamblers as it follows the ascent of 2002 P.G.A. Championship winner Rich Beem on the pro tour. Beem's philosophy is similarly rebellious: "Pedal to the metal, fire at every flag. It's go low or go home."