How do you manage all the travelling during the year? Billy: It’s just been part and parcel of life, I’ve been doing this since I was 16 years old. I started off getting busses from Bradford to London and sleeping on the bus, then you’d get on a train for two days to get to Portugal or southern Spain. You just learned to sleep on a washing line! You have to learn how to eat any food and sleep in any bed. I slept in a bush on the side of a motorway once trying to hitch a lift to Biarritz one year. It was a hard upbringing, those first few years caddying, because you couldn’t afford to do anything. You didn’t earn a lot. You just did it to travel and learn a bit more about the game. So, regarding flying on planes and getting your head down and then getting off and doing a job – it’s just part and parcel of what I’ve grown up to do. I don’t need your private jets and first-class cabins, I just get my head down, have a couple of G&Ts to knock myself out, get some sleep and then wake up and get on with it. You have been traveling to Dubai since the Desert Classic started but what are your standout memories? The two standouts would be Seve winning the Desert Classic at Emirates in 1992 and obviously Westwood winning the inaugural DP World Tour Championship and the Race to Dubai – it was like winning two tourna-
ments on the same day. Dubai’s always been a special place to me and one of my best mates, John Goodwin, who sadly died a couple of years ago, he always used to be there in front of the Emirates clubhouse playing the guitar and singing Neil Diamond songs. So,there’s lots of special memories and every time I go there I can still see him there singing ‘Sweet Caroline’.
From a playing perspective, how have the courses changes in those intervening years? The Majlis at Emirates hasn’t really changed that much at all. It’s still the same layout. It’s one of those courses that isn’t really a bombers course because you’re hitting across a lot of fairways, with a lot of dog-legs, so it still plays very similarly to how it always has, to be quite honest.
If Seve was a better driver of the ball, do you think his chipping and short game wouldn’t have been as good? Probably not, but he did grow up with just the one club and he used his imagination to feel shots. There is an argument to say that if he never missed greens he wouldn’t be chipping as much, obviously, but he had imagination like no other player I’ve ever worked for. He could see the shots and feel the shots, and, regardless, he would always be an unbelievable chipper.
You have managed to get Westwood and Fitzpatrick over the line at the Earth course at Jumeirah Golf Estates but how does it play compared to the Majlis? Earth is one of those courses you need to play a few times. A lot of the greens you can’t see from the fairway – you can only see the top of the flag. So it plays different. If you play in the morning it’s hard to catch up, especially at the DP World Tour Championship. In the morning there’s a bit of dew on the ground and it’s colder, so it plays a lot longer than when the leaders tee off at lunchtime. So you need to try and get off to a decent start in that tournament, otherwise you’re behind the 8-ball a little bit.
What was your first memory of Dubai? I think it was 1988, the first one. I was on the bag of Gordon Brand Jnr. We stayed downtown, right in the middle of town, which was obviously about 20 miles away from the golf course and it was just a two-lane highway full of camels and desert, with no buildings the whole way there. It’s incredible the way it’s changed.
Worldwide GOLF 36
Do you have to recalculate yardages and the way you read the greens depending on whether it’s morning or afternoon play? Yeah for sure, if the temperature is a lot hotter in the afternoon the ball is going to fly a bit
