“It took me a while
to get used to
caddying, looking at
the [yardage] books
and deciphering
them … watching
how the other
caddies would go
about what they
were doing.”
“If you’ve ever run that much, you know
you constantly have to tell yourself ‘I can
do this, I can do this’ … every part of your
body hurts and you’re just telling yourself,
‘I have to do this, I have to do this. I have to
keep going, keep going.’ He’s kind of used
that Jedi training on me saying, ‘look, you
can do this, you can do this, you don’t ever
give up’ so he’s helped me out a lot.’”
Says Urbanek, “No matter what I’m
saying to him, it takes a special person to
believe it and you have to believe it yourself … then to get under the gun like that
after not playing on the weekend for three
months and to hit the shots he did … It was
pretty special to be a part of it for me.”
Urbanek, 36, is one of two PGA Tour
caddies with Virginia connections. The
other is Dustin Groves, 30, of Keswick, a
2008 Wake Forest University graduate
who has caddied for former teammate Kyle
Reifers for about 14 months.
Through the Dean & DeLuca Invitational at the end of May, Hahn ranks 31st
in the FedEx Cup standings and is 57th in
the World Golf Ranking. Reifers is 40th
and 117th. Reifers was a contender and
eventually recorded his best finish of the
season, fifth at the Dean & DeLuca.
24
Both spoke to Virginia
Golfer via telephone
during the week of the
Byron Nelson Classic.
Urbanek and Groves
got into the caddie side
of the business in similar
fashion. Both turned professional after graduation
and played mini-tours but
didn’t have any success.
Urbanek, who is from
Princeton, N.J., and is
now based in Jacksonville
Beach, Fla., is single and
was thinking about joining the business
world when a good friend he had grown up
with qualified for the 2005 PGA Tour season.
“He asked me to caddie for him,” Urbanek
said. “It sounded like a really cool experience. He didn’t have a great year, but I was
exposed to the inside workings of the Tour,
and I fell in love with it. … I started working
with a guy named Charlie Wi a year later
and that turned into seven years.”
In early 2015, a fellow caddie set up
Urbanek and Hahn for a one-week trial run.
“It turned into a few more [weeks] and
a few more,” Urbanek said, including their
V I R G I N I A G O L F E R | J U LY /A U G U ST 2 0 1 6
first victory in the Northern Trust Open.
Groves grew up playing junior golf in
Virginia and won the 2003 VSGA Junior
Boys Match Play Championship over Chris
McCartin, who won the Junior Match
Play in 2002 and went on to win the 2006
VSGA Amateur. They were teammates at
Wake Forest.
Groves is married and based in Durham,
N.C. He failed to make it through Q-School
in 2014 and was looking for something
else to do when he attended McCartin’s
wedding in January 2015. He ran into
Reifers there.
vsga.org
ASSOCIATED PRESS (ABOVE LEFT, AND AT RIGHT); GETTY IMAGES (LEFT)
Past VSGA Junior Match Play champion
Dustin Groves has been on Kyle Reifers’ bag for
about 14 months. below: Groves and Reifers talk
strategy at the Dean & Deluca Invitational.