"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/I have little time left. I hope my goodbye inspires you..md\"> I have little time left. I hope my goodbye inspires you. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/I am dying at age 49. Here’s why I have no regrets..md\"> I am dying at age 49. Here’s why I have no regrets. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/‘The whole bridge just fell down.’ The final minutes before the Key Bridge collapsed.md\"> ‘The whole bridge just fell down.’ The final minutes before the Key Bridge collapsed </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Evan Gershkovich’s Stolen Year in a Russian Jail.md\"> Evan Gershkovich’s Stolen Year in a Russian Jail </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/A Bullshit Genius.md\"> A Bullshit Genius </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Gangsters, Money and Murder How Chinese Organized Crime Is Dominating America’s Illegal Marijuana Market.md\"> Gangsters, Money and Murder How Chinese Organized Crime Is Dominating America’s Illegal Marijuana Market </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Jan Marsalek an Agent for Russia The Double Life of the former Wirecard Executive.md\"> Jan Marsalek an Agent for Russia The Double Life of the former Wirecard Executive </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/On popular online platforms, predatory groups coerce children into self-harm.md\"> On popular online platforms, predatory groups coerce children into self-harm </a>"
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/‘The whole bridge just fell down.’ The final minutes before the Key Bridge collapsed.md\"> ‘The whole bridge just fell down.’ The final minutes before the Key Bridge collapsed </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Evan Gershkovich’s Stolen Year in a Russian Jail.md\"> Evan Gershkovich’s Stolen Year in a Russian Jail </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Masters of the Green The Black Caddies of Augusta National.md\"> Masters of the Green The Black Caddies of Augusta National </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/I always believed my funny, kind father was killed by a murderous teenage gang. Three decades on, I discovered the truth.md\"> I always believed my funny, kind father was killed by a murderous teenage gang. Three decades on, I discovered the truth </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The (Many) Vintages of the Century.md\"> The (Many) Vintages of the Century </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How Russian Spies Get Flipped or Expelled, As Told by a Spycatcher.md\"> How Russian Spies Get Flipped or Expelled, As Told by a Spycatcher </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How Russian Spies Get Flipped or Expelled, As Told by a Spycatcher - VSquare.org.md\"> How Russian Spies Get Flipped or Expelled, As Told by a Spycatcher - VSquare.org </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/La Louisiane 1.md\"> La Louisiane 1 </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How Russian Spies Get Flipped or Expelled, As Told by a Spycatcher - VSquare.org.md\"> How Russian Spies Get Flipped or Expelled, As Told by a Spycatcher - VSquare.org </a>"
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"02.03 Zürich/Le Mezzerie.md\"> Le Mezzerie </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/‘The whole bridge just fell down.’ The final minutes before the Key Bridge collapsed.md\"> ‘The whole bridge just fell down.’ The final minutes before the Key Bridge collapsed </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Masters of the Green The Black Caddies of Augusta National.md\"> Masters of the Green The Black Caddies of Augusta National </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How Jesse Plemons Came to Star in, Well, Pretty Much Everything.md\"> How Jesse Plemons Came to Star in, Well, Pretty Much Everything </a>",
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"title":":iphone: Backup [[Storage and Syncing#Instructions for iPhone|iPhone]] %%done_del%%",
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"title":":camera: [[Storage and Syncing|Storage & Sync]]: Transfer pictures to ED %%done_del%%",
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"title":"Backup [[Storage and Syncing#Instructions for Anchor|Anchor Wallet]] %%done_del%%",
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@ -55,59 +55,59 @@
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"title":":email: [[Selfhosting]], [[Server Alias|Email Alias]]: Upgrader & Health checks %%done_del%%",
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"title":":shield: [[Selfhosting]], [[Server VPN|VPN]]: Check VPN state & dashboard %%done_del%%",
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"title":":shield: [[Server VPN]]: Backup server %%done_del%%",
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"title":":fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#Backup procedure|backup]] the DB & Files %%done_del%%",
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"title":":fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#PHP versioning|Check the php version]] of the website %%done_del%%",
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"title":":fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: Explore the possibility of webhosting through [[Hosting Tasks#Decentralised hosting|decentralised services]] (Blockchain)",
- [ ] 09:15 :performing_arts: [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]]: Book tickets for the [Colombian exhibition]([](https://rietberg.ch/en/exhibitions/morethangold)) at the Rietberg 📅2024-04-01
- [ ] 09:15 :performing_arts: [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]]: Book tickets for the [Colombian exhibition]([](https://rietberg.ch/en/exhibitions/morethangold)) at the Rietberg 📅2024-04-01
# Evan Gershkovich’s Stolen Year in a Russian Jail
Updated March 29, 2024 12:10 am ET
[Evan Gershkovich](https://www.wsj.com/topics/person/evan-gershkovich) was supposed to be with his friends in Berlin the first week of April 2023.
The Wall Street Journal Russia correspondent was set to stay in an Airbnb in the edgy Neukölln neighborhood, a base to explore the city’s cobble-lined streets with his tightknit crew of journalist pals exiled there from Moscow. He was going to drink coffee in hipster cafes and chat into the night over glasses of beer.
# Gangsters, Money and Murder: How Chinese Organized Crime Is Dominating America’s Illegal Marijuana Market
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive [our biggest stories](https://www.propublica.org/newsletters/the-big-story?source=www.propublica.org&placement=top-note®ion=national) as soon as they’re published. This article was produced in partnership with [The Frontier](https://www.readfrontier.org/).
It seemed an unlikely spot for a showdown between Chinese gangsters: a marijuana farm on the prairie in Kingfisher County, Oklahoma.
# I am dying at age 49. Here’s why I have no regrets.
Last month, I found out I have Stage 4 [uterine leiomyosarcoma](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22059-leiomyosarcoma), a rare and aggressive cancer. Doctors say I may have just a few months to live. Treatment could buy me a little extra time, but not much. My disease is advanced and incurable. My prognosis has left me shocked, sad, angry and confused. I wake up some mornings raging at the universe, feeling betrayed by my own body, counting the years and the milestones I expected to enjoy with my family.
I am leaving behind a husband and 14-year-old daughter I adore, and a writing and teaching career I’ve worked so hard to build. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my life, and in addition to the horror, a surprising feeling has taken hold: I am dying at age 49 without any regrets about the way I’ve lived my life.
###
I learned that lasting love is about finding someone who will show up for you
In my teen years, I fell hard for a boy who broke my heart, not just once, but half a dozen times. It was an obsessive first crush, the kind that made me stop eating and sleeping. He broke up with me and we got back together many times in high school.
The feeling was addictive, although it made me miserable. Even after I graduated, I could not get him out of my head. His story ended tragically — he took his own life at age 21. His death was heartbreaking, but my fraught relationship with him, and the traumatic aftermath, taught me what I ultimately wanted in love — safety, support, fun and adventure.
I needed a partner who would help me feel good about myself, someone steady, reliable, and free from all that romantic drama.
A few years later, I met my future husband, who was insecure and grappling with his own worries. Dan was smart, bookish, funny and kind. His love for me was constant and never in question. He was a writer, but instead of being competitive with me, he supported my career. Dan and I have been together 25 years, never having broken up or even separated, even for a day.
###
I pursued my dream career with passion
“No one can make a career out of writing.” It was a statement I heard from almost everyone I knew, from teachers to parents to concerned friends. I was told I would face a life of rejection and begging for late paychecks.
But I knew I could not survive waking up each day to the morning commute and heading to a 9-to-5 office job under fluorescent lights. I like to be in charge of my own life and schedule.
When I wanted to write a reported history about ice cream in America, some people laughed.
“I can see it as a magazine story, not as a book,” one agent wrote me.
And yet I went on to land a contract with Penguin Random House to travel the country, eating ice cream, gathering research, interviewing Jerry from Ben & Jerry’s, and riding around on the back of an ice cream truck through the streets of Bensonhurst, N.Y. The book contract was lucrative, and the publication of “[Sweet Spot: An Ice Cream Binge Through America](https://a.co/d/6Eei85o)*”* opened up opportunities I never expected, like being on NPR and teaching creative nonfiction writing.
In the last few years, I have been able to mentor and coach dozens of promising writers. In return, these students, with their sincerity and soaring ambitions, helped revitalize my own writing, reminding me why I went into this business in the first place.
###
I have never had a bucket list; instead I said ‘yes’ to life
I’ve always tried to say yes to the voice that tells me I should go out and do something now, even when that decision seems wildly impractical. A few years ago, with very little planning, my family and I got in a car and drove 600 miles to a goat farm in central Oregon, where we camped out for four days to watch a solar eclipse. I once jetted off to Germany on two days’ notice, spending a week exploring Dresden and hiking through the Black Forest.
“Money always comes back, but if you miss out on an experience, the opportunity may never come back.” This has been my mantra since I met Dan. Even when our bank account was low on funds, we decided to move to New York City to pursue our writing dreams. It was ridiculously hard at first, but it worked out because we gave ourselves no other choice.
I’m a good saver but things like retirement accounts were never important to me. When given a choice between taking a family trip to Kauai or squirreling money into a 401(k), I always chose to head for the islands.
###
I found people in my life who can accept me as I am
I don’t try to hide who I am or apologize for it. I am a bit of a hermit. I am sure I have hurt people’s feelings with my behavior from time to time by ducking out of parties early or choosing not to go to Happy Hour. I have spent very little time worrying about it. I think it’s more important to find people who get me and accept me than want to change me. I have done my best to avoid people who come at me with unreasonable expectations. And because I don’t have to spend any time covering up my real self, my friendships are genuine. Since my diagnosis, I’ve had a chance to tell my friends how much I love them. They’ve told me that, too, and I deeply feel it.
###
I live where I want even though the numbers never add up
I love spending time in the redwoods and by the ocean. Just a few months ago, I was walking four miles a day along the sweeping ocean coastline at [West Cliff Drive](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/05/26/california-coastline-changes-cliffs-climate-change/?itid=lk_inline_manual_34) where I could see surfers and otters frolicking, and humpback whales lunge-feeding just off the shoreline. This became my everyday routine.
My favorite spots are within a 10-minute drive of my house, and most are still accessible even as my energy continues to drop off as the cancer spreads through my body.
The flip side of this dream life is the cost. My family and I live in one of the most unaffordable places in America.
Dan and I have talked dozens of times about uprooting, but my friends and our writing community are in Santa Cruz, and my daughter loves her friends and her school, so my husband and I have chosen to stay. My family will never own a house — at least not in my lifetime — but at least I am dying around people who love me and are bringing me meals when I need them. These are people who are willing to show up for me no matter what. And I know they will show up for my husband and daughter, even after I am gone.
The end of my life is coming much too soon, and my diagnosis can at times feel too difficult to bear. But I’ve learned that life is all about a series of moments, and I plan to spend as much remaining time as I can savoring each one, surrounded by the beauty of nature and my family and friends. Thankfully, this is the way I’ve always tried to live my life.
[*Amy Ettinger*](http://amyettinger.com/) *is an author and creative writing instructor living in Northern California.*
# I have little time left. I hope my goodbye inspires you.
This past summer, at age 49, I was diagnosed with a rare, incurable cancer called leiomyosarcoma. Doctors predicted I had just a few months to live. I [wrote about my experience](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/08/27/cancer-diagnosis-life-dying-ettinger/?itid=lk_inline_manual_2) and heard from hundreds of readers from around the world. Their stories helped me get through the last six months.
I started a treatment that was still in clinical trial phase, which gave me temporary relief from the growing tumors in my lungs. The drugs shrank some of the masses, but the primary tumor in my uterus kept growing. Soon it began to affect my kidneys and other organs, with no signs of relenting. I was offered the choice of continuing the chemo or starting hospice.
My symptoms were getting worse. I had swelling in my abdomen and legs that couldn’t be treated. After a while, I could no longer walk up the stairs of my house. I decided I wanted comfort, and this week I made the decision to transition to hospice.
After choosing this path, I reflected on some of the things I was able to do since my diagnosis:
Saw a live performance of “Mamma Mia!” with my daughter in San Francisco.
Marveled at 500-year-old sketches by [Sandro Botticelli](https://www.famsf.org/stories/five-things-about-botticelli) at the [Legion of Honor museum](https://www.famsf.org/visit/legion-of-honor).
Ate my favorite pastry, a [sacripantina](https://www.sfweekly.com/dining/sweet-beat-stella-pastrys-sacripantina/article_16396884-d548-5fa2-aafb-d9b82e311c03.html) cake, from a North Beach pastry shop.
Took daily rides along the cliffs of Santa Cruz on a gifted motorized scooter.
Visited the monarch butterflies during their yearly migration.
Taught three creative writing classes through Stanford Continuing Studies.
Celebrated my daughter’s 15th birthday.
People are often afraid when they hear the word “hospice,” but for me it’s been a positive experience. A nurse comes to my house to wrap my heavy, swollen feet. Social workers help get my paperwork in order. I can let go and focus on feeling as comfortable as I can.
Most people in the United States enroll in hospice for just a short time, many after pushing the limits of their chemo regimen. About half of the people enrolled in hospice [die within three weeks, and 35.7 percent of patients die within a week](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4118712/).
Others, such as former president [Jimmy Carter](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/01/jimmy-carter-99-birthday-plains-georgia/?itid=lk_inline_manual_22), survive in hospice for a year or more. That’s always a hope, but unfortunately for me, it doesn’t seem likely.
My ability to get around is limited, but I look forward to daily meals with my family, and the hour a day we spend in the living room watching TV. Afterward, my daughter gives me moisturizing face masks and combs my hair. I have important conversations with my husband about life and death and the 25 years of memories we have built together.
I’m not going to pretend I’m not afraid of what comes next. I’m saying goodbye to friends, and for most of them, it’s the first time they are losing someone in their age group. For friends who are far away, we are sharing our thoughts via long text messages and emails. A friend of 10 years writes me: “Goodbye my dearest friend. I wish I was better at articulating what I want to say. Thank you for always being there for me. Thank you for being you.”
These conversations are essential even though they often feel awkward and a little unfinished. We are all learning, in our own ways, how to let go.
I am choosing to focus my limited time and energy on doing the things I love with the people I care most about. It’s a formula that works, I think, no matter where you are in your life.
# Masters of the Green: The Black Caddies of AugustaNational
Arts & Culture
For almost fifty years, they carried the bags of golf legends but also masterminded victories from the tees to the holes. Then, with one decision, their lives shifted, and the legacy of their glory days went unheralded. Finally, that’s changing
Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
John H. “Stovepipe” Gordon (center) with his fellow caddies at the 1935 tournament.
In a small cardroom at the back of a municipal golf course clubhouse in Augusta, Georgia, a handful of old men gather and reminisce.
*Do you remember when…? How about that time…? What about when Willie Peterson wound up on the cover of* Sports Illustrated *back in seventy-two? Wasn’t that something?*
All prompts, meant to bring back sweet memories. As they deal cards, the men talk about their golf games and trade good-natured jabs. They have known one another for more than sixty years, gave one another their nicknames.
Jim “Big Boy” Dent. Robert “Cigarette” Jones. Tommy “Burnt Biscuits” Bennett. Ike “Stabber” Choice.
As long as ailments don’t keep them confined to the house, they can be found here a couple of days a week, playing bid whist, ribbing one another, and recalling the days when they were part of Augusta National Golf Club’s all-Black caddie corps, which players were required to use during the annual spring Masters Tournament. From the competition’s inception in 1934, the caddies—born of Augusta and attuned to the land—could be a golfer’s secret weapon coming around Amen Corner or for surviving other notoriously tricky holes like No. 4, Flowering Crab Apple, or No. 10, Camellia.
These men were no beasts of burden, but talented prognosticators who turned a racist policy, rooted in subjugation, into a livelihood and a source of esteem—one that, ironically, first added diversity to the game of golf. Men like Willie Peterson, who was on the bag for five of Jack Nicklaus’s six Masters victories. Or Willie “Cemetery” Perteet, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s personal caddie at Augusta National during the fifties. When the club bent to pressure in 1982 and dropped the ban on outside caddies, the change rocked the corps—many of its members, including those who counted on that crucial tournament paycheck to tide them over till the seasonal club reopened in October, had to look for other work.
Photo: Augusta National/Getty Images
Willie Peterson and Jack Nicklaus walk the greens in 1973.
In the four decades since, recognition for the pivotal part these men played in the game, until recently, scarcely existed. Even today, they aren’t heralded in the Augusta Museum of History, or mentioned in any of the historical milestones or records on the Masters’ website. But as their numbers dwindle—of the seventy-six caddies enlisted in 1982, only twenty or so are still living—they’re at long last beginning to be honored as what many of yesteryear’s golfers always knew them to be: the Pride of Augusta. An elite group of men who changed the game forever.
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For thousands of years, the Savannah River’s overflowing waters dumped sand, silt, and detritus onto what would one day become Augusta, leaving fertile soil in their wake. By 1858, three hundred or so particularly arable acres landed in the hands of Louis Mathieu Edouard Berckmans and his son Prosper Jules Alphonse, Belgian immigrants and horticulturists with an interest in fruit and ornamental trees and shrubs. All told, the Berckmans cultivated more than three hundred varieties of peach trees alone and grew a million-plus fruit trees, turning Berckmans Nursery into the first large-scale plant source of its kind in the Southeast. A “horticulture Mecca,” heralded the American Pomological Society, “serving the entire nation.” Folks around Augusta simply called it “Fruitland.”
More than seventy years later, in 1931, the Georgia-born golf champion Bobby Jones and his partner, Clifford Roberts, a Wall Street investment banker, bought the nursery’s spread with plans to fashion a golf course from its landscape. Fruitland Manor became the clubhouse of the new Augusta National Golf Club. Many of the plant varieties the Berckmans developed and improved still grow on Augusta National’s meticulously curated grounds.
Immediately south, sandwiched between the Augusta Country Club and a campus of what is now Augusta University, lies Sand Hills, a Black neighborhood listed on the National Register of Historic Places where most of the caddies grew up. Much of their lives back then took place there “up on the hill,” three miles from downtown as the crow flies, looming hundreds of feet above the then flood-prone city. Close enough to the city’s seats of power that the residents could work in them, even if they could not walk through their front doors. Still, the community felt like “one big family,” recalls Jim Dent, filled with adults who cared about his well-being and corrected his wrongdoings. But “the grandfather of caddies” came from even closer: Fruitland itself.
Arnold Palmer with Nathaniel “Iron Man” Avery, alongside other caddies, in 1965.
Willie Lee Stokes was born in 1920 on a parcel of the property where his family tended cotton and corn. Eleven years later, in need of work, he headed to the golf course under construction, where men were hauling away trees and reshaping the terrain, making way for hazards and bunkers. “I remember cutting down trees on No. 10 and No. 11,” Stokes, who died in 2006, once told the *Augusta Chronicle*. When Augusta National opened, in 1932, Stokes became the personal caddie for Clifford Roberts, who dubbed him “Pappy.”
Stokes’s roots on the land gave him an advantage—he knew how to read the fairways and greens better than others. Take Rae’s Creek. Over the years, Augusta National has modified the course many times, but some water features are too ingrained to redirect. That was the secret of Rae’s, a ten-mile-long stream—up to sixty feet wide and four feet deep—that still cuts through the course. Surrounded by azaleas and dogwoods, the waterway is a major element of the infamous three-hole stretch, filled with hazards, called Amen Corner. Stokes understood that every putt would break toward Rae’s, the pull of gravity sending balls toward the lowest point on the property. Stokes also followed falling water: He became noted for studying how rain streamed across the greens, rendering the nuances of the topography visible.
Augusta National first put on what would come to be called the Masters Tournament in 1934 with its rule in place—attributed to Roberts—that golfers would always be white, and the caddies would always be Black. The segregated course had support from the top: From that same year until 1961, the Professional Golfers’ Association of America had a “Caucasian-only” clause in its bylaws, preventing non-whites from membership and thus from competing on the PGA Tour.
In 1938, the seventeen-year-old Stokes won his first Masters as a caddie for eventual Hall of Famer Henry Picard. He won again in 1948, with Claude Harmon; in 1951 and 1953, with the legendary Ben Hogan; and in 1956, with Jack Burke Jr. Stokes ties with latter-day caddies Steve Williams and Willie Peterson for the greatest number of Masters wins (five), but he remains the only one to do it with four different golfers.
Photo: Mark Kauffman/Getty Images
Ben Hogan at the 1954 Masters with his caddie.
Stokes decided to teach the Black youth in Sand Hills what he knew. Caddying, after all, could provide consistent income and food on the table, even if most chalked the job up as low-skill menial labor, in the realm of domestics and servants. (Back then, even if a caddie had a better assessment of the lay of the land, some golfers only wanted someone to carry their heavy bags over miles of terrain. In those instances, there were just three rules: Show up, keep up, and shut up.) By the time the second generation of caddies was born in the late thirties and early forties, interested boys could attend Pappy Stokes’s Saturday caddie school to learn how to read the greens and anticipate the forces at play in golf. Stokes “was like the godfather of us young kids,” Robert Jones says. “Knew that golf course like the back of his hand.”
Illustration: Charly Palmer
Robert “Cigarette” Jones. When he wasn’t caddying, Jones played saxophone on tour with James Brown.
Many in Sand Hills worked in one of the area cotton mills, bringing home a mere fifteen or so dollars a week for the hot, backbreaking job. A strong young boy, eager to please and willing to work rain or shine, could make more than that caddying. The kids could also earn around a dollar a day “shagging balls,” golf-speak for chasing balls hit from the practice tee. “Oh, it was fun,” says Jim Dent, who’s now eighty-four, relishing the memory. “We were young. We didn’t know what we were doing. We just enjoyed life. You make five dollars there, and that was a big payday back then.”
But it was also “survival,” Tommy Bennett emphasizes. He was raised by his grandmother after his mother left the city in search of a job. To ease the hardship, Bennett used to sneak onto Augusta National as a boy of eleven to seek out work. Back then he was so small that his body routinely gave out—he didn’t have the energy to finish walking the course. Clubs made of wood and steel weighed more than modern materials like titanium and graphite. A bag could weigh as much as fifty pounds with rain gear. “I was happy to start and happy to finish,” Bennett says. But he put on a little weight and acquired a better attitude. He polished up his manners and learned how to talk to people. Those kinds of skills could come in handy for a caddie—some golfers, frustrated by hazards or bunkers, might throw clubs, or turn the air blue with their cursing.
Photo: *Sports Illustrated*
Caddie Willie Peterson and Jack Nicklaus celebrate their Masters win on the 1972 cover of *Sports Illustrated*.
In those early days, ever one step away from being called “boy,” this second generation of caddies became a cast of characters known instead by the nicknames they gave one another, often sparked by funny childhood moments. Bennett got called Burnt Biscuits because he tried to steal one of his grandmother’s biscuits and burned himself so badly, he wound up in the hospital. Jones became Cigarette after he got caught smoking while underage. Dent, though smaller in stature than he used to be, still stands a head above the other caddies, hence Big Boy. Choice’s sobriquet, Stabber, came from his golf technique: He just kept stabbing the ball.
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The best caddies employ the properties and laws that govern space, time, energy, and matter—but using only their eyes and ears to assess equations that are always changing. Every day they wake up, walk the greens, and run their calculations again, adjusting for a golfer’s fortes, foibles, and equipment. Caddies must be naturalist, physicist, and psychologist, all wrapped in one white coverall.
That dynamic played out during the 1979 Masters, when Jariah “Bubba” Beard was on the bag for Fuzzy Zoeller. “As far as having a plan when I got to Augusta…I had no plan,” Zoeller admitted in *Loopers: The Caddie’s Long Walk*, a 2019 documentary about the worldwide history of caddies, also known as loopers. “\[Beard\] told me where to hit it, where not to hit it…it was like a blind man with a Seeing Eye dog. He led me around that golf course.” By relying on Beard, Zoeller became the last Masters player to win the tournament on his first try—a feat that, without a local caddie, no one can seem to repeat.
Photo: Augusta National/Getty Images
Jariah “Bubba” Beard advises Fuzzy Zoeller to a Masters win in 1979.
“When I met Carl Jackson, I said, what a gift this is,” recalled Ben Crenshaw in “Vanishing of the Black Caddie,” a news segment that ran in 2021 on the Dallas television station WFAA. “I can’t tell you how many times he helped me in so many instances.” Crenshaw’s 1976 pairing with Jackson, a talented, meticulous, trusted golf companion, became a lifelong working relationship. “It was pretty simple for me,” he says. “I had the best, and I never saw any reason to change whatsoever.” Jackson, who had caddied his first Masters at age fourteen, was on the bag for fifty-four of the tournaments and remained Crenshaw’s caddie until the golfer retired. The two remain tight. Jackson himself said last year would mark his final appearance at Augusta.
“We were the best caddies in the world,” Beard said during his *Loopers* interview, “and we challenged each other \[over\] who could read the greens the best, who could pull the best clubs.” But Beard recounted bitterness alongside the pride. “We were not allowed in the clubhouse,” he says, even after a win. “We were in the caddie pen; that’s where you better stay—‘Boy, you stay in the caddie pen.’” Despite the disrespect, the caddies often used their work as a stepping stone for a better life, for themselves and their families. Jim Dent even parlayed his talents and know-how into becoming a pro golfer himself, in 1966; the game enabled him to send all of his children to college and to buy a house for his aunt Mary, who had raised him after his mother’s death.
Illustration: Charly Palmer
Jim “Big Boy” Dent. Dent made the leap from caddying to playing, winning twelve tournaments on what was then called the Senior PGA Tour.
In later decades, as golf modernized and television networks broadcast more tournaments, the prize purse swelled, and players began to build personal teams with nutritionists, chefs, psychologists, swing coaches, and caddies who followed them everywhere. Many began to feel that using a local caddie at the Masters instead of someone they collaborated with year-round worked to their detriment. Those complaints came to a head at the 1982 tournament, after a heavy spring rain caused a delay of the third round until Sunday morning. Confusion about the start time left some players without their assigned caddie. One golfer even sent his wife out to shag balls for him.
The PGA players asked Augusta National’s chairman at the time, Hord Hardin, to lift the ban on outside caddies. Hardin, at last, complied.
The next year, only eighteen of the tournament’s eighty-two players used Augusta National’s Black caddies. Not only that, but white caddies, now eager and able to work at the country’s most prestigious course, began to take spots in the course’s corps.
“Money,” Robert Jones says, “changed the world.”
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Golf and the PGA Tour follow the sun, and after the ban was lifted, some of the younger Black caddies tried to remedy the financial hit by traveling all over the world, advising golfers in Hawaii, Scotland, Japan. When Bennett first hit the road, “we had a van,” he recalls. “We might’ve had ten people in it. It was hard living—there wasn’t no money in it yet.” Some caddies might sleep four to a room.
Bennett made his way to New York. Though he had caddied in eighteen Masters Tournaments, after 1982, he settled for watching the competition on television, “just like everybody else.” He got married, then divorced. At times, he found his way to a course or a driving range, golf his only constant. He never got used to the cold, though, and with no reason to stay, he lit out for Los Angeles and began caddying in Palm Springs. That taste of the game made him want back in. He even caddied for Tiger Woods in Woods’s first Masters, in 1995.
Dent found even more success as a player on the Senior PGA (now Champions) Tour, winning twelve tournaments in the late eighties and early nineties. “When you start at the bottom and work to the top, that makes it taste so good,” Dent says. And he brought some old buddies along, including Jones, who recalls caddying for Dent at a big win in 1983, in Chattanooga. “It was amazing,” says Jones, a talented saxophonist who toured with James Brown when he wasn’t on the bag. “I was glad to be part of it.”
Some of the men, though, past their prime and unwilling to pull up stakes, instead picked up odd jobs or learned a new trade, leaving the fairways forever. Others remained part of Augusta National’s caddie corps. Carl Jackson helped Ben Crenshaw to his two Masters wins, in 1984 and 1995. Charles “Bull” Williams helped George H. W. Bush get around the links—the pair got on so well, bonding over fishing, that they exchanged letters for decades.
The world of caddying, naturally, dramatically changed in the forty years after the Masters ban was lifted. Jones says the biggest check he ever earned was “maybe forty-five hundred or forty-six hundred dollars.” Now, Dent muses, “caddies make more money in one win than a man might see in his lifetime.” Black faces on the greens, too, have all but disappeared. “We only have two Black people on the PGA Tour right now,” Dent points out. “When I was out on tour, we had fourteen at one time.” That’s the irony of the Masters’ all-Black-caddie rule: It was archaic and steeped in racism. And it also, the men admit, granted them entry to a gilded world where they had a chance to learn the game.
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Living in Augusta means holding these kinds of multiple truths at once. The municipality is a place of great beauty, with flowering plants on every corner underscoring its nickname, Garden City. It also once fostered an atmosphere so oppressive that in 1970 it led to the largest urban uprising in the Deep South during the civil rights era, known as the Augusta Riot. And though the Black caddies played a pivotal part in the city’s reputation as a golf mecca, they went without commemoration or celebration for much of the past four decades.
Even Black residents didn’t always understand the significance of what the caddies had achieved. Leon Maben, who has collected oral histories of the Black caddies since 2019, grew up in downtown Augusta, away from the greens. Sports like baseball, basketball, and football ruled in his section of town. “Golf was for the guys up on the hill,” he explains. “Growing up, we always said, ‘Man, that’s a white man’s sport.’”
But then a business opportunity led the entrepreneur, then based in Atlanta, to the golf course, to sponsor an HBCU clinic and tournament, and there he began to reconsider the history of his Augusta childhood. Now, with the help of a local university student, Courtney Wilson, he interviews any caddies he can find in order to immortalize them. “This is Black history,” he says. “Nowhere else could you say, ‘Black people dominated this facet of the sport for fifty years.’ That’s what makes the story so interesting.” He doesn’t himself play golf, but Maben spends time at the Augusta Municipal Golf Course, known as the Patch, and its clubhouse and cardroom, where the men gather, to hear those stories—while he can.
Photo: Augusta National/Getty Images
Palmer, Hogan, and caddies including Nathaniel “Iron Man” Avery.
The numbers of the old-school Black caddies have decreased, and recognition has come but lately. Lee Elder—a former caddie who also broke the Masters race barrier as a player, in 1975—died in 2021, not long after Augusta National and Paine College, an HBCU in Augusta, partnered to create endowed scholarships in his name. In 2023, Jariah Beard succumbed to cancer, and John Luther Elam Jr., a caddie who helped desegregate the Patch, died too.
The small Lucy Craft Laney Museum of Black History and Conference Center, housed in the former Augusta home of a prominent African American educator and activist, has also played a mighty part in recognizing the caddies. Since early 2023, on one weekend a month, the museum has presented “Men on the Bag: The Stories of Augusta’s Famous Black Caddies.” Through the artistic direction of the Augusta Mini Theatre, young actors portray three of the now-deceased iconic caddies. Corey Rogers, the Laney’s executive director, wrote much of the script, taking cues from *Men on the Bag*, a book by Ward Clayton that delves into the caddies’ backstories. Clayton will publish a revised version, *The Legendary Caddies of Augusta National: Inside Stories from Golf ’s Greatest Stage*, in early April.
Even though now-gone greats like George “Fireball” Franklin, Nathaniel “Iron Man” Avery, John H. “Stovepipe” Gordon, and Frank “Marble Eye” Stokes may not appear in golf ’s official record, they are celebrated throughout the museum. Six-foot-tall banners bearing photographs of caddies in their element, or in a moment of victory, frame the room. Here they get to live large.
Photo: *Sports Illustrated* via Getty Images
Golfers Gil Morgan and Gary Player with their caddies in 1981.
“The caddies did not let a lot of their surroundings define who they were or allow that to be a ceiling on what they wanted to accomplish,” Rogers says of the images. “Some people think that these men were performing this subservient role by toting the bag. It was much more complex than that. We don’t want people to get the impression that these individuals were downtrodden. Some may be bitter or upset over the treatment and work conditions, but everybody’s story is different, with many emotions in it. We want to tell each individual story and not paint things with a simplistic broad brush.”
But that legacy isn’t limited to the past. When asked about the future of Augusta’s Black golfers, Bennett and Jones both point to one man: André Lacey II.
Lacey is Jim Dent’s grandson, but he insists he came to the game of his own accord, without fully understanding his grandfather’s place as a pioneer. Lacey is now forty; while he grew up “on the hill,” by the time he was born, the heyday of the Black caddies had ended. He learned to play golf at what is now the E. W. Hagler Boys & Girls Club in downtown Augusta. After a rough patch in his twenties led to a divorce, he came back to the game, eventually becoming a PGA of America Golf Associate in 2015.
Now, when he’s not working as an assistant men’s and women’s golf coach at Paine College, his grandfather’s alma mater, he spends much of his time volunteering with youths, making sure they’re aware of all of the business opportunities golf can provide. He runs a PGA Jr. League, a program he started with three kids that has now swelled to some sixty boys and girls at a time. Through his nonprofit, André Frantz Golf, he also provides free instruction, equipment, and other resources to people who want to learn more about the sport, lowering the economic barrier to access. “I take a lot of pride in being an ambassador and spreading the game,” Lacey says. “Golf is a game for everyone to enjoy. I want to help as many people as I can.”
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The pride of Augusta is a double-headed, sunshine-colored cultivar of *Gelsemium sempervirens*, or what Augusta National Golf Club calls yellow jasmine. Others around these parts call it yellow jessamine.
The Fruitland horticulturists probably introduced the cultivar. Like the caddies and their ancestors, it existed on this land before Augusta National, a Southern plant then shipped around the world. Native to the terrain, it will use any challenge it encounters—fences, a loblolly—to gain a foothold. In the winter, the plant bronzes like a melanated body in the sun. When spring arrives, the buds will be in bloom, alongside the course’s emblematic azaleas, just in time for the Masters, which begin practice rounds in early April.
That week, some fifteen hundred private jets will fly into the city, many of them on a flight path that leads right over the Patch, the propellers close enough for people on the ground to feel their wind. While the crowds surge and roar behind the ropes at Augusta National and a golfer gains a green jacket, André Lacey II will be mentoring local young people and teaching the fundamentals at his Nike Junior Golf Camp nearby.
In his element, Lacey is loose and expressive. Six foot one, sure-footed and graceful, with a radiant smile that seems to amplify the warmth of his voice as he talks to the group in front of him. “There’s no other sport as natural as golf,” Lacey will explain. “That’s why golf transcends from one country to the next. It’s the only life sport, where you can play it at a hundred years old.”
The camp will end at noon, and depending on what the sky looks like, Lacey might head to the Patch afterward, to the beloved clubhouse with its treasured card games. Perhaps he’ll even join the old caddies for a round. “Every day is a good day,” one might remind the other. And as they prepare to play, the private jets will rocket over their heads on their way to somewhere else, the aircraft disappearing beyond the horizon as the Black golfers of Augusta shoulder their bags and head toward the first tee.
# ‘The whole bridge just fell down.’ The final minutes before the Key Bridge collapsed
It was just after 1 a.m. on Tuesday, and the Dali was loaded down and headed south on the Patapsco River, toward the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, bound for Sri Lanka, halfway across the globe.
Under a full moon, tugboats escorted the Singapore-flagged container ship out of the Port of Baltimore into the bay. The tugs peeled off at 1:10 a.m. and chugged back to port.
Two miles south, a construction crew of at least eight Latin American immigrant workers were repairing potholes on the Francis Scott Key Bridge, a 1.6-mile-long, 185-foot-high steel structure connecting the southern tip of Baltimore City to Dundalk, in Baltimore County. They worked in the middle of the night, so as not to inconvenience the more than [35,000 motorists who cross the bridge](https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/transportation/who-uses-francis-scott-key-bridge-baltimore-traffic-DO6KPUOTIVBMNLQZGPAC2BMCZQ/) each day.
The moments leading up to and immediately after the [Key Bridge’s destruction](https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/transportation/key-bridge-collapse-YDNMRSLMDREE7ADUZJQFQJ3WDA/), one of the largest infrastructure disasters in Maryland’s history, are detailed in video, police and fire dispatch audio, ship location data and in statements from officials.
Late-night drivers and truckers who crossed the Key Bridge at 1:20 a.m. Tuesday might have looked north and seen the Dali approaching, a routine spectacle on the waters outside the port. [Millions of tons of cargo](https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/transportation/baltimore-key-bridge-collapse-shuts-down-port-UWTGE4KLJ5HUXDX2OTEETMW3EY/) — coal, cars, sugar, gypsum and construction equipment — pass under the bridge each year, going to and from a port system that employs more than 15,000.
Drivers along the bridge passed the flashing yellow lights of the construction vehicles parked in the southbound lanes near the bridge’s midpoint. The Dali approached like the countless other boats before it that had passed underneath without issue.
Then, at 1:24 a.m., [something went wrong](https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/transportation/dali-cargo-ship-hits-baltimore-bridge-QY2M32XFPRDMHM34RKVPK3TR3Y/). The Dali’s lights went out, possibly the result of power failure. The giant ship, 984 feet in length, drifted in the dark for a minute before the lights flickered back. Dark smoke poured out of the vessel.
At 1:25 a.m., The Dali veered off course. Ship tracking data shows the boat went to its starboard, or right, side, putting it on a tragic path.
The Dali, at some point, signaled mayday, the maritime code for distress, as the plumes of black smoke, larger now, rose above the deck of the approaching bridge.
Power on the Dali failed again, the ship went dark as it continued to list forward toward the Key Bridge. Its bow lined up with the bridge’s pylon.
A nearby Coast Guard station had received the mayday call; the crew knew impact with the bridge was imminent.
By now, the Maryland Transportation Authority Police were aware of the ship’s condition and quickly moved to stop oncoming traffic. They were calm and decisive, but seemed unaware of the impending peril.
“I need one of you guys on the south side, one of you guys on the north side,” an officer radioed at 1:27 a.m. “Hold all traffic on the Key Bridge. There’s a ship approaching that just lost their steering. So until they get that under control we gotta stop all traffic.”
A second officer headed to the south side of the bridge where he radioed back that he’d stopped traffic for the northbound lanes.
Southbound traffic continued to flow, and the workers remained on the bridge deck. Precious seconds ticked by.
“Is there a crew working on the bridge right now?” one of the officers asked around 1:28 a.m.
“Just make sure no one’s on the bridge right now. … If there’s a crew up there, you might want to notify whoever the foreman is to see if we can get them off the bridge temporarily,” he said.
The last two cars to cross the bridge headed south. Forty-nine seconds later, the Dali crashed into the bridge.
[Read more: Full coverage of the Key Bridge collapse](https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/tags/key-bridge-collapse/?utm_campaign=kb_artpg)
A third officer on the north side of the bridge offered to ride up and tell the workers as soon as another unit came to relieve him.
He did not get the chance.
The Dali, lights off once more, black smoke still spewing, struck the pylon at 1:28 a.m. An engineering professor at the University of Michigan estimated the blow carried the force of 10 million pounds.
Just 20 seconds after the collision, the Key Bridge collapsed into the Patapsco River.
“The whole bridge just fell down,” the second officer said over the radio, his voice in apparent disbelief.
He struggled to find words.
“Start, start whoever, everybody — the whole bridge just collapsed,” he said.
The officer on the north side, the one who offered to ride up and tell the workers, said he couldn’t get to the other side to make sure the lanes on both sides were closed. Luckily, they had been.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore gives an update to reporters at a news conference in Dundalk after a cargo ship crashed into the Francis Scott Key bridge early Tuesday, March 26, 2024, collapsing the bridge into the Patapsco River. (Ulysses Muñoz/The Baltimore Banner)
Gov. Wes Moore later declared the officers heroes.
“They saved lives,” he said at a mid-morning briefing.
The crew, however, never made it off the bridge, cast into the [frigid, dark water below](https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/local-news/rescue-francis-scott-key-bridge-RJ5UX5CDC5H3XOYX7H3ZVIBFIQ/). In the immediate aftermath, two workers were [removed from the water](https://abcnews.go.com/US/video/baltimore-bridge-collapse-search-yields-rescues-108500880), Baltimore Fire Chief James Wallace said Tuesday morning. One was taken to the Maryland Shock Trauma Center, treated and released. The other declined treatment and left the area.
Rescue teams, boats and divers and helicopters, armed with infrared cameras and sonar and underwater vehicles, searched through the night and the day. There was no sign of the six missing workers.
Water in the bay Tuesday morning was around 47 degrees, according to the National Weather Service. At that temperature, the effects of hypothermia can set in within minutes, and a person may lose consciousness after an hour. It is unlikely someone would remain alive much longer.
But officials, in a news conference early that morning, projected hope. Never mind the cold temperatures, changing tides and water so dark and murky divers could barely see in front of them, Wallace said.
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Baltimore Fire Chief James Wallace gives updates on the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse at a news conference on Fort Smallwood Road Tuesday morning. (Kaitlin Newman/The Baltimore Banner)
Wallace, along with a slew of government officials, addressed the world at 6:30 a.m. On a normal day, the construction crew’s shift would have ended. They might be back home, already in bed.
“We’re going to rely on our experts, our dive teams that are here, to tell us when they’ve reached that nonsurvival point,” Wallace said in the predawn hour.
The sun rose along with the tide. The workers had likely long been dead.
*Banner reporters Justin Fenton, Giacomo Bologna, Hallie Miller, Daniel Zawodny, Alissa Zhu, Brenna Smith, Emily Sullivan, Ramsey Archibald, Wes Case and Pamela Wood contributed to this article.*
<spanclass='ob-timelines'data-date='2024-04-02-00'data-title='Arrival at PPZ'data-class='blue'data-type='range'data-end='2024-04-02-00'> Sally just arrived at PPZ from Felix’s (Germany). Worming to be done this day and irons to be put on.
</span>
```toc
style: number
```
 
---
 
[[2024-04-02|Today]], [[@Sally|Sally]] arrived at [[Polo Park Zürich|PPZ]] with [[Felix Hoffmann]].
[[Juan Bautista Bossio]] to worm her & put irons on
@ -69,12 +69,14 @@ Tasks and potential enhancements for the webhosting of lebv.org
- [x] [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: Explore the possibility to [[Hosting Tasks#Self-hosting|self-host]] ✅ 2021-09-16
- [ ] :fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: Explore the possibility of webhosting through [[Hosting Tasks#Decentralised hosting|decentralised services]] (Blockchain) 📅 2024-12-31
- [ ] :fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#Backup procedure|backup]] the DB & Files %%done_del%% 🔁 every 3 months on the 1st Wednesday 📅 2024-04-03
- [ ] :fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#Backup procedure|backup]] the DB & Files %%done_del%% 🔁 every 3 months on the 1st Wednesday 📅 2024-07-03
- [x] :fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#Backup procedure|backup]] the DB & Files %%done_del%% 🔁 every 3 months on the 1st Wednesday 📅 2024-04-03 ✅ 2024-04-03
- [x] :fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#Backup procedure|backup]] the DB & Files %%done_del%% 🔁 every 3 months on the 1st Wednesday 📅 2024-01-03 ✅ 2024-01-05
- [x] :fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#Backup procedure|backup]] the DB & Files %%done_del%% 🔁 every 3 months on the 1st Wednesday 📅 2023-10-04 ✅ 2023-10-03
- [x] :fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#Backup procedure|backup]] the DB & Files %%done_del%% 🔁 every 3 months on the 1st Wednesday 📅 2023-07-05 ✅ 2023-07-05
- [x] :fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#Backup procedure|backup]] the DB & Files %%done_del%% 🔁 every 3 months on the 1st Wednesday 📅 2023-04-05 ✅ 2023-04-06
- [ ] :fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#PHP versioning|Check the php version]] of the website %%done_del%% 🔁 every 3 months on the 1st Wednesday 📅 2024-04-03
- [ ] :fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#PHP versioning|Check the php version]] of the website %%done_del%% 🔁 every 3 months on the 1st Wednesday 📅 2024-07-03
- [x] :fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#PHP versioning|Check the php version]] of the website %%done_del%% 🔁 every 3 months on the 1st Wednesday 📅 2024-04-03 ✅ 2024-04-03
- [x] :fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#PHP versioning|Check the php version]] of the website %%done_del%% 🔁 every 3 months on the 1st Wednesday 📅 2024-01-03 ✅ 2024-01-05
- [x] :fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#PHP versioning|Check the php version]] of the website %%done_del%% 🔁 every 3 months on the 1st Wednesday 📅 2023-10-04 ✅ 2023-10-03
- [x] :fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#PHP versioning|Check the php version]] of the website %%done_del%% 🔁 every 3 months on the 1st Wednesday 📅 2023-07-05 ✅ 2023-07-05
- “Everybody behaves like an electron of unicity moving erratically in the world and repulsing one another for not celebrating each other’s unicity enough”
- 👩🏽🎤Party being an escape from the boredom of an uncertain life –> documentaries in the 80s-90s about raves and the use of recreative drugs. Social inflexion point happening around that time & the emergence of hip hop
- > la musique prends un autre sens
- House music speaks on 3 levels, the bass line, the other rythm line and the melody –> connecting and it is an experience in itself, some djs know how to play these 3 lines to touch you personally – dialogue with the friend out of the scene
**Closing remark**
- “As he closed his eyes, he was happy to have finished to recount his journey and started to mentally organise how he would approach publishers with this story, hoping for a better destiny than that of Martin Eden.”
iOS
8 months ago
