Cricket’s Legendary Assist
In every Masters Tournament victory, there is a key swing thought, a lucky charm, or a moment that puts the player at ease, a simple antidote to get rid of the jitters or convince the player that this is his week.
For Charles Coody, the 1971 Masters brought the usual assortment of superstitions: his favorite sweet potato biscuits, a pair of lucky old green trousers, and an English halfpenny his eight-year-old daughter had given him to mark his ball. But more than anything, the path to the green jacket was paved by Walter Pritchett, better known in caddie circles as Cricket.
Cricket worked occasionally for Coody at other events on the PGA Tour and was his caddie for the 1969 Masters when they almost won. But Coody, one stroke ahead with three holes to play that year, bogeyed in to allow George Archer to sneak in. Coody placed in a tie for fifth, two strokes back.
Cricket didn’t come back to Augusta National in 1970. He deferred for a steady job as a bus driver in his hometown of Atlanta. Coody started out with another caddie in 1971, but that caddie and Coody didn’t mesh.
“After a practice round on Sunday, I was walking through the parking lot, and there was Cricket,” Coody remembered. “He had gotten off from his bus-driving job in Atlanta and was just looking for a bag. So, since they assigned caddies, I had to go down to the tournament office and really discuss the situation. I eventually convinced them to let Cricket work for me.”
The everyday Augusta National caddies didn’t care too much for an “outsider,” albeit a former Augusta National regular, moving in on their turf for this one week. But Coody wanted his lucky charm.
Coody surprised many by taking the first-round lead with a 6-under-par 66. Nobody was more shocked than Cricket come the third round.
As the duo walked up the par-5 eighth fairway on Saturday, the possibility of a tense weekend loomed. Coody was in contention, vying with Jack Nicklaus and Johnny Miller for the lead. But Cricket had other things on his mind.
“What time does the TV coverage start, Mr. Coody?” Cricket asked.
It seemed that Coody didn’t hear.
“What hole does the TV start on?” Cricket came back again.
“Huh? I don’t know,” Coody muttered in his slow Texas drawl, then paused and looked at Cricket. “Why do you need to know that?”
There was another moment of silence as Cricket pondered Coody’s question.
“Well, I told my boss in Atlanta that I needed time off to go visit my sick grandmother in Houston,” Cricket said rather sheepishly.
“To be honest . . . I didn’t expect that you would play this well.”
That broke the ice. Coody laughed all the way to the green and couldn’t escape the thoughts of his caddie ducking his regular payday. As the back nine came during each weekend round, Coody was reminded again and again of Cricket’s secret identity. As the players teed off the eleventh hole, the caddies got ahead of the players and waited for them to walk from the tee set back in the woods.
Cricket would appear from the right of the fairway in “his disguise,” a small green-and-white Masters golf towel that he had acquired on the range before the Saturday round began. He had taken the towel off Coody’s bag and draped it over his head under his Masters caddie cap to hide from the CBS-TV cameras. All you could see were his wire-rimmed glasses and his nose poking out. Coody laughed out loud as the team viewed the second shot on the long par-4 eleventh, one of the course’s most difficult holes.
“It looked like I had some kind of Arabian caddying for me,” Coody said. “It kept me from worrying about Nicklaus and Miller all the time.”
Coody, tied with Nicklaus to begin the final round, fashioned a closing 2-under-par 70 to beat Nicklaus and Miller by two strokes for his only major championship. This time, with Cricket urging him on by reminding him that three final pars would win the tournament, Coody birdied the par-3 sixteenth, the place where his trouble began two years before.
After the win, where Coody pocketed twenty-five thousand dollars, Cricket was ready to get back behind the wheel of his bus on Monday morning in Atlanta. As he innocently strolled into the bus office, his supervisor peered over the counter with a big smile.
“You had a nice week, didn’t you Cricket?” the supervisor said with a laugh. “Hope your grandmother didn’t miss you.”
Cricket died in December 2018 at age seventy-five while playing golf in Huntsville, Alabama. Coody, eighty-six, attended his fifty-third consecutive Masters Champions dinner in 2024, never missing one since his 1971 win when his caddie all but stole the show.
Originally published in The Legendary Caddies of Augusta National: Inside Stories from Golf’s Greatest Stage, Durham, NC: Blair, 2024.
Ward Clayton, the former sports editor at the Augusta Chronicle and director of editorial services for the PGA Tour, wrote Men on the Bag: The Caddies of Augusta National (2004) and produced the 2019 documentary Loopers: The Caddie’s Long Walk. Clayton owns Clayton Communications and resides in St. Johns, Florida. For more on the book, go to blairpub.com/shop/p/legendary-caddies
Photo Courtesy of Ward Clayton/”The Legendary Caddies of Augusta National”
