Caddying is little more than calculated gambling at this time of the year. After a long season on the European Tour, mysteriously spanning four continents over 10 months, most of us reckon its time for a little non-golf time. Deciding to miss out on a few weeks looping may be costly. For those of us on the road for most of the year, the idea of a month off washing, ironing, cooking and general household duties seems like an exotic break. The mundanity of it all is so appealing.

I'm in one of those moods now, I can hear the tumble dryer droning away in the kitchen as I write. There is a downside to these months of sanity and security; your player may be golfing in the Southern Hemisphere oblivious to the grim backdrop of a December morning up in the colder half of the globe, as you await the next load of ironing to tackle. Even worse, he may be winning with some other caddie "on the bag", while you are up to your elbows in unfamiliar household chores.

My boss found himself in the peculiar situation of packing his bags for his winter sojourn in New Zealand without having satisfied his quota of tournaments to fulfil his yearly Ping contract. He had, in his nonchalant way, under-estimated his workload for '99. He was one week shy.

Now I have no idea what Ping pay him to get me to lug his clubs around the world's fairways in an oversized bag with all sorts of manufacturer's nonsense scrawled all over it, but it's obviously enough to shake him out of his summer slumber in Queenstown, NZ and present himself in Melbourne for an extra week's work. Don't forget, the Rugby World Cup wounds are still festering in NZ, Australia is still not an easy destination for a sensitive New Zealand rugby fanatic to choose for a week's anything, let alone a sports event.

So Greg Turner arrived in Melbourne last week with his reserve caddie, his elder brother, no, not Glen the former Test cricketer, but Brian the ex-NZ hockey player, poet and mountaineer. Who said talent runs in families? You can rest assured that the conversation between this duo was not about the latest in golf couture; there were more profound matters to discuss in between shots. Which, of course, was a welcome break from the idle banter Greg is accustomed to engaging in with his regular rat, me.

The weather turned nasty on the weekend in Melbourne, it got cold and the wind blew, no surprise for Victorians. Nor the Turner brothers. Greg had advised me before I had ever met Brian that he was a man of the earth, a rugged mountaineer from the southern province of Otago who revelled in nothing better than the challenges that nature could present. A skilled sportsman himself, he understands the importance of technique, respects the discipline of temperament and indulges himself when stamina is the requirement.

Thus the main thrust of his caddying input, apart from lugging the sack and checking the wind direction like an old mariner by moistening his thumb and holding it upright, is to remind his younger brother of the three T's: technique, temperament and tenacity.

The third of these vital qualities was tested to the limit apparently last week at the Australian PGA. Greg told me that Brian had eased off the mountain and onto the relative comfort of a racing bicycle after his 50th birthday. He won most of his over-50 road races in Otago when the wind was at its strongest and the rain drove at its hardest.

The snarly conditions of last weekend were obviously the type that the Turners were at ease with. Greg didn't need to hear any words of inspiration from his bag-toting brother at his side, he just had to look in his eyes above his weather-beaten face. That was influence enough.

Taking a three shot lead into the last round, I was confident that Greg would complete his task. He has a very good record of winning from the front and I know that he is not afraid of being in that position. This coupled with the knowledge that the tenacious brother was at his side led me to write a congratulatory message to him somewhat prematurely, before the final round. As it happened, Craig Parry's double bogey on the 17th hole sealed victory for the New Zealander and it was not as smooth a passage to victory as I had anticipated.

My confidence in Greg's eventual win was compounded by an old theory that we have in the caddie-shack. If a caddie takes a week off from his regular player, the rest of us can't get down to the bookies quick enough to place our bets on that player winning without his trusty toter at his side.

And if my boss hadn't spent so much time in the rivers of southern New Zealand fly-fishing at the start of this year then he would never have been testing his tenacity on the Victoria course last Sunday, I would have been tending to my household chores without conscience and Ping wouldn't have got such good value out of Turner's marginal tournament.