Joel Stock says he’s always dreamed of a career at professional golf’s highest level €“ the PGA Tour.
In April he found himself standing on the course at Augusta National Golf Club, considered one of the ultimate venues in the sport. He’d made it, though not exactly in the way he’d fantasized. He was there, not as a player, but as caddy for his former college roommate, PGA Tour pro Ben Crane, a role Stock assumed last fall.
“This is the closest thing to playing,” Stock, 36, said during a recent visit to his parents’ home in Sweet Home, where he grew up. There are only two people inside the ropes, the players and the caddies. This is a dream come true.”
Stock grew up, the youngest of five children €“ the others were Johnny, Matthew, Molly and Jessica €“ in a family heavily invested in the local timber industry. His father Skip Stock and uncle Ted Stock ran two local mills, Clear Lumber, which was founded by his grandfather, and Triple T Studs. Ted Stock still runs a mill in Toledo, where Joel worked for a time.
Golf, though, was Joel Stock’s passion growing up, he said. During his youth Bruce West coached the sport at Sweet Home High School and Bruce’s son Craig was Joel’s best friend.
“We did everything together,” Stock said.
Happily for them, Craig’s mother, Jeannie West, worked as a waitress at Pineway Golf Course outside Lebanon. During the summers, she took the boys with her to work and they spent considerable time honing their games on the nine-hole course.
“Basically, he and I, from childhood, spent every day at the golf course,” Stock said.
“They played from dawn to dusk,” his mother Sylvia added.
The practice paid off as both boys competed in junior tournaments around the state. Stock finished second in the state high school championships one year, losing on the final hole, and was “third or fourth” another year, he said.
Stock played in the U.S. Junior National Championships against Tiger Woods when he was 17 and Woods was 15.
Stock was awarded a golf scholarship to the University of Oregon, where he played all four years, placing in the top 10 at the PAC-10 championships.
“I was a decent, average college player,” he said. “They weren’t sorry they gave me the scholarship.”
After college, he played professionally for a year and a half on developmental tours €“ the Dakotas Tour, the Teardrop Tour and the Golden State Tour in California.
“I was 23 or 24 at the time,” Stock said. “We were four guys in a motel room sleeping together and eating together at McDonalds. I was young, immature. I didn’t get it. I didn’t realize what it took to make it.”
His career as a pro golfer ended when he and his brothers discovered by accident that they could make something of themselves with another talent €“ singing as the Stock Brothers.
Stock said the three had never sung together €“ ever €“ until they were asked to sing at the wedding of one of his friends in 1997. They had all performed individually and with other groups, both at the Church of Christ at 18th and Long and at the Riverside Christian Church, where their father and uncle pastored, and at school.
“I was 23 and my brothers were 25 and 28,” he said. “When we sang together the light went on. We really enjoyed it and other people did too.”
He moved home and started working for his brother Johnny, who was running Triple T at the time, at night along with his other brother Matt.
They would work at night, then rehearse in the mornings.
They traveled “a lot” for the first couple of years and “then we decided that trying to do it full-time was too difficult,” Stock said, noting that his brothers had families by this time. The beginning of one of those occurred when the Stock Brothers appeared at the Crystal Cathedral in Southern California, where they met a musical director at the church named Melissa, who insisted on putting together a small orchestra to back them up, rather than allowing them to use their taped accompaniment.
“She liked Matthew,” Joel Stock said. “The rest is history.”
They were married and Melissa Stock is now an adjunct professor of music at Northwest Christian College, directing college choirs. She also directs a Community Choir of more than 100 singers, which performs in the area, and organizes an annual fund-raising concert for the American Cancer Society and the Relay for Life that features a choir of 120 singers. She also composes and arranges music for choral groups based in Southern California.
Joel Stock said he and his brothers still perform together, but on a more limited basis now. When they quit touring he took a job in his uncle’s Toledo mill, where he worked for five years until last October, when he got a surprise phone call from Crane.
Crane, who had grown up in Portland, had transferred to the University of Oregon after his freshman year at Baylor, at Stock’s behest.
“I became friends with him over the summer and I talked our coach into giving him a spot,” Stock said. “He came to live with me and we were teammates and roommates for two years.”
Crane turned pro in 1999, and worked his way up, first playing the Nationwide Tour and then reaching the PGA in 2006.
“He’s the hardest-working guy,” Stock said. “It’s really difficult to keep your card, to stay out there. It takes consistency and that’s what he has €“ consistency.”
Last September Stock got a call from his old buddy. Crane had just lost his caddy of six years, who had left to work for another golfer.
“It was a hard time for him,” Stock said. “Out there it’s like a marriage. In golf that’s your teammate. You’re 100 percent reliant on each other. It’s so much more than what people see.”
Crane asked if Stock would come out and hang out with him and be his caddy for the week “and see what happens,” Stock said, noting that one indication that this was the right move was the support he got from his uncle, who promised his job back when he needed it.
“We just knew right away it was a God thing. We felt like God had brought us together.”
Stock ended up caddying for Crane through the final four tournaments of 2009 and then rejoined him this season, moving to Dallas, Texas, after Christmas.
Crane won the first tournament of his career in late January with a one-shot victory in the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines outside San Diego. Stock, wearing the traditional white “mechanic’s suit” required by Augusta National Golf Club,
caddied for him at The Masters, where Crane finished tied for 24th.
Being at The Masters, he said, was “what all golfers dream about,” even though it was about 91 at Augusta and “I had to stop in the trees to take my shirt off,” Stock said. “I was about ready to die.”
Crane is married, with two children, and Stock said he tries to help the family out “as much as I can.” With an “intense” practice schedule, the Crane and he spend “a lot of time together,” he said.
On Mondays Stock arrives at the course Crane will be playing and gets a yardage book from the host club, which he uses to chart the course by walking it and taking notes of its various features. Crane usually arrives late Monday or Tuesday and will work on various aspects of his game, with help from Stock.
“I’m very involved in all the technical aspects of his game,” Stock said, adding that he has learned what Crane needs to know and how to tell the golfer what he needs to know.
“Communication is a huge thing,” he said. “We need to be thinking on the same level.”
Crane usually plays a practice round before a four-day tournament starts on Thursday, often nine holes on Tuesday and a full round on Wednesday.
“After I’ve done my work, he plays and I caddy,” Stock said. On tournament days, which are “really long,” they usually arrive at the golf course 2 1/2 hours before Crane is scheduled to tee off, he said.
“We start off our day in the car, doing a (Bible) devotional together and praying,” he said. “Our No. 1 focus for being out there, doing what we’re doing, is to glorify God.”
He said Crane is not the only golfer with those convictions and a “big” group of golfers, golfers’ wives, and caddies gather for a Bible study on Wednesday night, for which Stock and one of the golfers lead the worship time.
He said Crane has emphasized to him the importance of showing Christian love to other golfers, who are “admired by everybody” but are not used to having someone “engage with them, actually take an interest in who they are.”
Stock said his relationship with Crane is not just about “winning or losing, it’s growing together.
“I really enjoy caddying,” he said. “I love being in a supportive role, encouraging him. I’m in a real fortunate place.”