Il golf dei caddie: Anatomia di una professione

Up until the 1990s, the experience of caddying at a golf club was an extraordinary opportunity for many young Italians to develop work and life skills. The Ryder Cup, to be held for the first time in Italy in 2023, will be the perfect occasion to stress the importance of the role that caddies have played in this sport and to determine whether it is possible to modernise and reintroduce, as is being done in some US universities, a pedagogical model that can better combine intellectual/cognitive skills, social/emotional skills, and manual/application skills. This book is based on the results of an ethnographic and social research project that drew on input from several disciplines – the history of golf, the sociology of sport, historical sociology, the sociology of work, and the sociology of organisations – and revolves around two primary focuses: the first one explores how caddies learn to play golf and how they were able to access golf tuition before the National School for Professional Golf Players was established. The second one, instead, analyses the relationships between golf club members and caddies in order to show how the latter, through close and prolonged contact over time with individuals of a different social class, are able to learn rules of behaviour that are foreign to their class of origin. The book ends with 13 professional stories told by the interviewed caddies.