CHERRY HILLS VILLAGE — When caddie Neil Wallace pulled the yardage book from his back pocket Friday and calculated that Sergio Garcia was precisely 126 yards from the pin on the seventh hole at Cherry Hills Country Club, Wallace knew he could rely on that detail.
“There are a lot of different things that go into club selection, but when you see Mark Long’s yardage, you know it’s right on and you can trust it,” Wallace said Friday after Garcia carded a 6-under-par 64 to take the lead after the second round of the BMW Championship.
Garcia trusted it too. Enough that he holed a lob wedge to mark one of only three eagles in the second round.
“He makes our work a whole lot easier,” Wallace said, acknowledging Long’s years of caddying for former PGA Tour pro Fred Funk.
The 50-year-old Long has turned a one-time hobby of creating the precise yardage books into an in-demand business, one where his topographically accurate measures are a must-have for any PGA Tour caddie.
Mike “Fluff” Cowan, Jim Furyk’s caddie and a longtime professional who’s worked with Tiger Woods, was very clear about Long’s work.
“It’s a great book,” he said Friday.
The universality of TourSherpa booklets in the caddies’ back pockets is at monopoly level. Long said the tournament ordered 400 of the books, enough for all of the players. The rest stay with the sponsors and staff.
“His books are as good as they get,” said Damon Green, who mused that he’d happily pay more for what’s become as important to his boss, Zach Johnson, as his putter. “We still have some of our own stuff to mark down, to make the adjustments for the player — and today it was a 7 or 8 percent change for the altitude and temperature — but this takes a lot of the work out of it.”
Long explains the book’s worth is from a precision that comes only through modern technology — and spending hours on a golf course.
“A lot of people think I’m using hand-held lasers, but it’s not that. It’s very sophisticated equipment,” Long said in a telephone interview from the TPC Sommerlin in Las Vegas. “It’s about 70 hours from start to finish for each course.”
The books are not for sale to the public. Long said the books typically cost $30, but can go up to as much as $100 if a player requests additional information.
And the information is immediate. His latest book detailing the yardages of Cherry Hills was completed about two weeks ago — an update from the one he had made for the 2012 U.S. Amateur played there.
“You have to update it all the time,” Long said. “The fairway lines changed, there’s a new tee at No. 5. Everything has to be checked.”
The books become increasingly valuable when the course isn’t a regular stop along the tour and players and caddies become even more reliant on them. Estimates are that as few as seven of the players in the tournament had an opportunity to play the course before this week.
Some, such as Phil Mickelson, who won the U.S. Amateur here in 1990, have had a taste of what the William Flynn design could bring. But most have not, and that puts additional pressure on the caddies — and by extension Long — to get it right.
Caddie Eric Meller said the yardage books are an integral part of the game the golfers play.
“All the work he’s done on these makes us very confident that it’s done in a way we’d do it ourselves,” Meller said just after his boss, Jerry Kelly, completed his first round Friday after a rain delay the day before.
That’s because Long was a tour caddie for about 25 years and knows what the bag carriers want — and need.
“It was a nice part-time thing that became ridiculously time consuming,” Long said. “I can’t remember the last time I played a round, but I’m on a golf course every day.”
For that, the caddies are thankful.
“Time and again he’ll save your (butt) on a par-5, with a look from a fairway that doesn’t match up or carries don’t look right,” Meller said. “It’s critical to us. And he’s right all the time.”
David Migoya: 303-954-1506, dmigoya@denverpost.com or
Staff writer David Krause contributed to this report.
