Column: ‘Rise Above' is about the surprisingly upbeat life of a Masters caddie for more than 50 years

Chicago Tribune

19-03-2025

To help support his family, a tiny 11-year-old named Carl Jackson took a walk. He walked from the scraggly neighborhood where he lived with his parents and eight siblings in a rural town named Sand Hills in Georgia to the pristine greenery next door.
The little boy had dropped out of school and was looking for a job, which he found after walking through a fence that bordered the famous Augusta National Golf Club where the Masters Tournament is annually held, this year's beginning on April 10. He became a caddie, and that is what he would proudly be for the next 54 years.
It's been some journey, usually with a heavy golf bag on his shoulders, and it has brought him a decent living, a stable family, many encounters with wealthy golfers and talented professionals and some powerful mentors and friends, including golfer Ben Crenshaw, whose bag he carried to two Masters titles (1984 and 1995), and induction into the Caddie Hall of Fame.
Now, nearing 80, he is a movie star, the compelling center of a tender and inspiring documentary available on Amazon Prime and Apple TV+ titled 'Rise Above: The Carl Jackson Story.' It has been a hit on the festival circuit, a 10-time official selection in international fests. It won for best feature documentary at the Cannes Indie International Film Festival last year.
'I appreciate all of that. It is touching people, and not only festival judges. I think people are impressed, even amazed that Carl has never forgotten his humble beginnings,' says the movie's director, producer and writer, whose name is Maryilene Blondell, who lives on Chicago's North Side.
Before becoming involved with Jackson and his story, she knew little about golf, her experience limited to a teenage visit to watch one round of the Masters years ago. But she knew journalism and television. And she knew people and knew a good story.
'Carl is so genuine and sincere,' Blondell says. 'There wasn't any person I asked to be in this film — Gary Player, Scottie Scheffler — who turned me down.'
Raised in Glenview, she studied journalism in college, became a New York-based network television news producer and freelance writer, moved to Los Angeles where she produced sports and entertainment programs, worked in the nonprofit world, came back to the Chicago area where she co-founded a production company and has started to dip her creative feet into features films, including with 'The Road Dance.'
She has two adult sons and a daughter still in high school.
She met Jackson through a friend who knew Carl's brother. Carl had signed an entertainment contract for an independent production company to make a feature starring Denzel Washington. Big talk, typical of dreamy deal makers.
'I helped him get out of that deal and we kept in touch,' says Blondell. A couple of years later and a handful of Hollywood's empty promises, Carl told Blondell that he was ready to tell his story. 'And he asked me to do it.'
That she has done and it has been quite a learning experience, more about how to live a life than how to read a green. 'We got a lot of help,' says Blondell, who tells of a Chicago financier named Paul Purcell. He called out of the blue and said, 'I hear you're making a documentary about my friend Mr. Jackson. If he says he believes in you, I believe in you. What do you need?'
Blondell tells me, 'There would not be a 'Rise Above' without Paul Purcell.'
And so you'll watch and learn the rather amazing story of Jackson's friendship with Augusta member and former club chairman Jack Stephens, an oilman and investment banker, philanthropist and Arkansas resident. He employed Jackson not only on the golf course, but as a jack-of-many-trades personal assistant and confidant, and Jackson moved with his wife and increasing number of children to spend part of each year in Little Rock, where Stephen lived. When Stephen invited Jackson to play Augusta as his guest, he became the first Black nonprofessional to play the course and the first to stay in one of Augusta's 12 guest cabins.
There are, of course, other stories that could be told about the Masters. 'I know that if anyone had reason to be filled with rage and anger over racism and poverty, it was Carl,' Blondell says.
The Masters did not invite a Black competitor to play until 1975, when Lee Elder broke the color barrier. Augusta, which is secretive about its membership roster, didn't admit its first Black member until 1990.
'Carl and I were determined to tell an inspiring story that might bring people together rather than tear them apart,' Blondell says.
In any case, caddies are likely due for extinction. In many parts of the U.S., caddies have gone the way of bowling-alley pin setters, available at less than 10% of the country's 15,000 golf courses. Jackson retired in 2015. What has steadily diminished their number and threatens, some would say, their very existence, is the golf cart As I have written, 'If the most aggressive assault on the status of caddies is technological, the other is more subtle and psychological. Most golfers stink — an oft-cited statistic has it that 70% of golfers can't manage to shoot below 100 — and who wants a stranger observing their ineptitude?