God bless the Murray brothers, all six of them!
They are to golf and the young laborers who make the sport work as the Egyptian slaves were to the Pyramids.
Wednesday night the entire half dozen—Bill, Brian, Ed, Andy, John, and Joel—were inducted into the Caddies Hall of Fame at a private dinner at the BMW Golf Tournament at Conway Farms in Lake Forest.
As youths, the Murray boys basically lived the “Caddyshack’’ movie from their home base in Wilmette. Bill was never Carl Spackler, the loony groundskeeper he played, the muckle-mouthed idiot with a vendetta against gophers, but he saw groundskeepers and he saw gophers, and he made the role historic.
The Hall of Fame honors caddies, obviously, and it is sponsored by the Evans Scholars Foundation, which grants full college scholarships to former caddies who are smart, dependable, and never threw their hosts’ bags into the pond.
(As an aside, let me mention that fellow Sun-Times sports columnist, Rick “the Viper’’ Morrissey was an Evans Scholar at Northwestern, and I will be leading the charge to get him and his damaged back into the Hall, since he is a credit to loopers everywhere!)
Of the first day at the tourney, Bill Murray said, “ The greens are perfect. The rough is much harder than it looks from outer space, and the crowds were relatively well-behaved.’’
A perfect Murray-ism.
Ed Murray, 71, who was an Evans Scholar at Northwestern and graduated in 1971, is the oldest of the nine Murray children. He played an orange-pants-wearing, beer-swilling golfer in “Caddyshack’’ and still finds the film pretty amusing. He also notes the curiousness of the Murray boys’ careers.
“Ironically, my sister Nancy, a Dominican nun, is the only one in the family with an acting degree. She’s traveled the country portraying St. Catherine of Siena in a one- woman show.’’
They didn’t have female caddies back in the day. But maybe “Caddyshack II: the Religious Side’’ might have been made by now, had Nancy had her day.
It’s been 35 years since the original came out, and there’s not a golfer anywhere who doesn’t know Spackler’s famous line: “Freeze, GOPHER!’’
Hit `em straight and long, Murray boys. And congratulations!
