Graham DeLaet wanted a caddie. He got a hockey player, sprinter and prankster.
It’s the second round of the 2016 Olympic golf tournament, first hole, and DeLaet’s both in the fairway and near the top of the leaderboard after an opening 66. His regular loop had chosen to stay home ahead of the 2016 Olympic golf tournament, but the fill-in had admirably carried them to this point. DeLaet asks for a pin sheet.
And Ray Whitney, his friend, a fellow Canadian and recently retired after 1,350 games in the NHL, bolted like Usain (more on him in a sec).
“Canada has a golfing coach that isn’t Graham’s coach in any way, but he’s incorporating everybody, he’s a great man and he was putting the pins in the green-reading book,” Whitney explained on this week’s episode of GOLF’s Subpar podcast. “He must have figured that was enough because he didn’t put the pin sheets back in there, in our books. And I didn’t think anything of it.
“And Graham, I’ll never forget it, though, Graham hits a 307-yard drive up the right side and we get out to the ball and he’s looking for his pin sheet and he goes, where’s the pin sheet, give me your pin sheet. And I look at him, I don’t have a pin sheet. I’m like, he put the pins in here already. He goes, I need a pin sheet. He had a little bit of a panic look to his face.
“I’m like — he’s laying it up anyway, it’s a par-5, so I just put the bag down and said pick what you want, leave it there, I’ll be right back. I got a gold-medal 614-yard sprint. And nobody would have run it faster than me.”
Which brings us perfectly back to Bolt.
Never an Olympian as a hockey player, Whitney did all he could as a caddie in Rio. But all isn’t just staying in the Olympic Village, taking pictures with Canadian basketball players, boxers and tennis players and watching Michael Phelps, which he did, too.
Before Bolt won gold in the 100, DeLaet dared Whitney to go on the Olympic warm-up track.
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“I look like an athlete still,” Whitney told co-hosts Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz. “I had retired, but I hadn’t let myself go just yet. So I was still fit, or I looked fit. So we were going to a track and field event, and on the track and field bus, and it drops you off right at the warm-up track. So we kind of go in the back door; we don’t actually have to go through the main gates or anything. So we walk up the ramp, we find ourselves watching these great athletes warming up, and Usain was on the other side; he was going to go in an hour and a half.
“So we sat there and I said to Graham, you want to see me get out there and just do a couple warmups and a couple knee tucks and some ass kicks. So he goes, I dare you to go out there. So I get there and I start doing the big arm swings and I’m stretching a little bit — and I never stretch, as you know. And I walk across the track, now I’m inside the track where all the athletes are and I’m just going back and forth and I’m doing high knees, I’m doing ass kicks and I’m doing quick little sprints. And meanwhile my credentials are juggling all over the place and these guys are laughing. There are serious athletes out there actually warming up.”
“Meanwhile there are people out there actually getting ready to race,” Knost said.
“That have worked for four years to be in this position and this little a–hole is out there joking around. And these guys are just dying laughing, though.”
For the complete interview with Whitney, please click below.