Half the Hands, Twice the Game

At Bel-Air Country Club, where Vic Shapella worked, members had their choice of a few caddies: River Bottom Ed, Indian Gus, Golf Ball Eddie—colorful names that reflected colorful lives often lived on the edge. Vic was different, cut from a more traditional cloth: well-mannered and educated, with a few years of college golf at Michigan State behind him. Perhaps that was what drew stars like Fred Astaire, Jimmy Stewart and Bing Crosby to him. Astaire and others liked him so much that they would call ahead to guarantee tee times with Vic. Add to that list my grandfather and my father, to whom Vic became not only a favorite caddie but an extended member of the family.

“Half of Hollywood wanted him to caddie for them,” my father, Hoagy B. Carmichael, told me. “He was a special human being. And I loved him.”

Vic may have passed before I was born, but I grew up with the stories, many of which ended with my dad pulling out Vic’s vintage yellow-shafted Spalding Calamity Jane putter. After Vic lost his left arm following a bad childhood fall out of a tree, his remaining right was said to be as thick as a stump. A sturdy build, a heavily calloused right hand and an unhurried swing allowed him to send 200-yard bullets from the tee box, no mean feat in the days of persimmon. But in the end, my dad always said, it was Vic’s putting that verged on the mystical.

Such was Vic’s reputation at the club that when Life magazine ran a story in the 1950s about a one-armed golfer touted as the best in the country, Crosby arranged a match at Bel-Air between Vic and the story’s subject. A gallery of locals followed their hometown hero until Life’s lefty relented, finding himself six down after nine holes. To my knowledge, Life never issued a correction.

My dad spent hundreds of hours under Vic’s tutelage. Other than one brief lesson with Claude Harmon, during which Harmon apparently said, simply, “Just keep hitting ’em, kid,” my dad took advice only from Vic. Because of this, he often putts with one hand—even while playing competitively. The two would golf together, sharing a bag, which my dad often would insist on carrying. Vic was there when my dad shot 30 on the back nine at Bel-Air—at the time, a new course record. Vic spent time at my grandfather’s house, and they shared in the good and the bad as close friends do.

“As many famous friends as he had, he never married, never had a kid,” my dad observed. “His life was golf, you know?”

Later, when my grandparents moved to Rancho Mirage, California, and settled at Thunderbird Country Club, my dad introduced Vic to Harmon, then the course pro. When the legendary teacher saw Vic’s game, he offered him a job on the spot. Vic accepted, and happily lived out his days in the desert. He worked the range, spared the effort of lugging a bag under the California sun.

To the very end, he never lost his humor. My dad still recounts a few sayings of his, one of which will be familiar to carpenters and golfers alike: “He hit it twice,” Vic was known to say, “and it was still too short.”

When Vic got older and cancer found him, my dad and grandfather visited him bedside, shortly before Christmas. They recounted old memories and laughed when they could. As they got up to say their last goodbye, Vic gestured to the corner. There leaned his Calamity Jane.

“Hoagy, I want you to have it,” he said.

My dad paused. “And then I realized that it was his way of keeping us together,” he said.

Ben Carmichael has been a Broken Tee Society member since 2023.