I said play nice. 
It's ok JC just doesn't want another piece of me in Jones-Hodgdon IV. Probably because he's only getting 4 a side this time.
If you'd care to post a little bio info, that always helps to feed the animals.
A Little Bio:
I grew up in Minneapolis caddying at Interlachen Country Club at the age of 12. For the first summer some of the bags were bigger than I was. Back then I was more excited to tell my dad about the fact that the course had a halfway house and that the member buys you a coke "and you can grab as many pretzels and chips as you want!" than I was about the $25 I had just made.
I fell in love with the game so much that I quit baseball soon after starting caddying and started to spend my entire summer at ICC. For 5 years I put in 14 hour days as I would come in early and open up the driving range, then do an early loop in the morning, and then work on the driving range until it closed. And if we cleaned up the range fast enough we'd even go play as many holes as we could before it was pitch black.
When it came time to pick a college to go to I had a number of options with a good gpa and a high SAT but ultimately "golf" won out in a sense because I chose to go to a small Catholic University that was being started in Naples, FL. My best friend from high school and I both went down and got to continue caddying at Calusa Pines while going to school.
My dad is fond of telling the story about how I came home one day at age 16 and announced that I was either going to work some day in commercial real estate or investment banking. He asked why and I simply replied "Those guys have the most money and play the most golf!" As such I was able to network through people I had met through the wonderful game of golf and caddying and land an internship in each of my selected fields.
I graduated in May of '08, got married in June, and moved back to Minnnesota in July to work in commercial real estate where my interview was also the fruit of a golf connection. Alas the CRE market hit the tank hard in early '09 and without any deals to be done my career was short lived. At this time (last summer) my wife who is from FL made it known that just one winter was enough for her and that we were officially moving back to Naples. I knew I would miss my family but not the weather and we packed up and moved back down last fall.
In the meantime I've been hunting for a job and just recently found one as I will be starting this month working for Scratch Golf as their sales representative in South Florida. I couldn't be more excited to be working in the golf business and with such a great company with a bright future ahead.
Patrick, the standard 3 apply:
What brought you to golf?
Golf course architecture?
This website?
1) I started to play golf at age 10 when my dad brought me to a local executive course in Edina called Fred Richards. My first set was a wonderful old set of Billy Casper blades that had been my dad's and my grandfather's before him. My grandfather cut them down for me and put brand new grips on them for me.
I didn't really get hooked on the game however until I started caddying at Interlachen.
2) I had always been thinking about golf course architecture I just never knew it! I was constantly thinking about ways to improve holes at Interlachen and always liked when the guys I was caddying for would talk about the changes. When they did their big tree removal (over 750 they took out) it opened up some wonderful views all over the course and really improved it. I was the only caddy who thought so and was in agreement with only the very few members who had been behind the decision.
I also being a caddy was always interested in the subtleties of the greens and how they were an integral part of the game. Being interested in them led to becoming one of the better green readers out there which obviously leads to happier golfers and bigger tips.
3) I found this website in an interesting way. I'd been reading Hugh Hewitt's blog for some time and stumbled on a wonderful post by the late Dean Barnett who would guest post on HH's site. He wrote about the wonderful Golf Club Atlas back in October '07 and I quickly fired off an e-mail to Ran to see if there was room. There wasn't at the time but he said to check back in in a couple of months which I did in February of '08 and to my great satisfaction I became a member of this esteemed tree house.