When Felipe Romero followed his friend to a potential job in Texas as a teenager in the 1950s, he’d never heard of a caddie. He wasn’t entirely sure what a golfer was, in fact; country club sports were just about the furthest thing possible from the minds of the young Mexican-American and his migrant worker family.
But Felipe, along with his friend Mario Lomas, quickly took to caddying, learning the sport and growing to love it in the process. It wasn’t long before the boys and caddies Lupe Falen, Joe Trevino and Gene Vasquez began to play themselves, forced to build their own ramshackle practice ground because their ethnicity barred them from playing on the course at their place of employment. That policy also prevented their school superintendent JB Peña from joining the club, a snub that paved the way for him to start the first-ever golf team at San Felipe High School and recruit the caddies.
