The first rule of caddying is also the simplest: Don't be late. For 17 minutes I had been standing at the ready beside the 1st tee at Pebble Beach, clean towel in hand, yardage book in pocket, 2004 AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am caddie badge around my neck. The only thing missing was my man.

This was borderline alarming because actor and comedian George Lopez was downright giddy to be playing in his first AT&T. For Lopez, who grew up poor in a hardscrabble section of California's San Fernando Valley, being invited to play in the Super Bowl of celebrity golf was beyond imagination. Yet there he was. Or was supposed to be.

Our playing partner, Billy Andrade, teed off and was halfway up the fairway when George finally appeared. "I couldn't get a shuttle!" George exclaimed. "They had to hit," I said, pointing to Andrade and his caddie up ahead. "Good thing this is only a practice round."

With AT&T reigning jester Bill Murray stuck on a film set in Italy, the comedic klieg light shone squarely on George this year. George drew fellow fashion plate Jesper Parnevik as a partner and said, "We are like Starsky & Hutch. We're going to nauseate the competition into submission."

Paul Stankowski and Andy Garcia rounded out the foursome. "Andy and I are the first two Latinos to play together here," George joked. "They were going to put Robert Gamez in our group, but three Latinos is a gang."

We arrived at the 1st tee at Poppy Hills on Thursday morning brimming with confidence. As George got ready to hit I ran down my check list: scorecard, pencils, pin sheet, tees, ballmarkers. A weed whacker would've come in handy after George, a 14-handicapper, faded his opening tee shot into a lateral hazard. I chalked that up to jitters. For the 2nd hole, an uphill par 3 that I marked at 142 yards, we agreed 6-iron was the club, but George came up 20 yards short and made bogey. Then he hit his drive into the rough at the 3rd hole. "Are you anxious?" I asked.

"I ain't anxious," he said, "but I ain't having any fun either."

Jesper carded birdies at the 7th and 12th to get Parnevik-Lopez to two under, which is where we finished the first round, though not before a near-disaster. As George prepared to hit his approach at the par-4 14th, I took my eyes—and hands—off the bag for a moment. I watched his clubhead swing down in horrific, synchronized slow motion with his toppling golf bag. Miraculously, I caught the brass ring at the top of the strap a nanosecond before shattering the silence.

George never knew. No harm, no foul.

On the long walk up the par-5 home hole, I told George how I'd once sought help for my ailing golf game from a voodoo high priestess in New Orleans named Bloody Mary; she made me a grigri bag filled with brick dust, horsehair, tobacco, sassafras, copper, snakeskin, lodestones, cornhusk, olive oil, sugar and holy water.

"Did it help?" he asked.

"I shot 10 strokes better the next day," I said.

"Have you got that bag with you?" he said.

But it was back at the hotel; his was my only bag that day. After the round I asked George for an honest assessment of my performance. "You did good, man," he said. It felt a bit like being critiqued on American Idol, and I held my breath hoping George would not go the way of mean Simon Cowell. "You noticed I was having some trouble and stayed out of my way, but you came back when I started to hit the ball good. You didn't get too excited, you just corralled me. You didn't let me completely lose my game, like I could have." Then he paid me the ultimate compliment: "You had my back."

Friday we were the first group off the 10th tee at Spyglass Hill. With my grigri bag in his back pocket, George smoothed his drive into the fairway. "The absolute worst-case scenario," I said as we walked off the tee, "is we get to play Pebble tomorrow." George hit what looked like a solid approach—yes!—but as we waited for the pros to hit, I sensed something wasn't right. Uh-oh. We were playing the 10th hole, but I had been looking at the pin sheet for the 1st. My heart sank.

Mercifully, both pins were cut in about the same place. George made par for net birdie, and we were off and running.

At the 17th, George backed away from his approach. Pointing at a man pushing a loud lawn mower beside a fine home along the fairway, he yelled to the gallery, "You'd think the Mexicans would try to help me!" Unfazed, he made net birdie and followed with another at the 18th after his tee shot ricocheted off a tree into the fairway. "My caddie and I planned that!" he said.

On the front side (our back nine) the sun was brilliant and the golf gods were kind. At the par-4 4th George had 165 yards to the pin. I suggested an easy 6-iron on line with a fat guy in a white sweatshirt. Just as I'd envisioned it, George landed his ball on the top tier and it trickled down to the flag. George made the four-footer for net eagle, then repeated the feat at the 7th hole to get us back onto the leaderboard.

On Saturday the stars played Pebble, and George thrived in the limelight. He made net birdies at the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th and 9th holes. Still, driving was his bugaboo, and we were quickly out of a half-dozen holes right off the tee. At the par-5 14th hole, CBS's roving reporter Peter Kostis questioned our decision to lay up with George's third shot and take the bunker out of play, to which George cracked back, "I took the bunker, Salinas, Carmel and most of Monterey out of play!" After draining an 18-footer from the fringe for a net bird that galvanized the crowd, he handed me his putter, smiled and said, "Looks like we got the last laugh."

We weren't done yet. George's long putt for net birdie at 15 and Jesper's bird at the 18th moved us to 21 under, two strokes clear of the cut line. Boldly going where the star-crossed Jack Lemmon had never gone, we made the cut and were playing on Sunday.

As the sun fell behind the driving range, Tour pro Woody Austin suggested that George might gain distance if he moved the ball back in his stance. It seemed to work, though how well was hard to judge in the gloaming.

That night, i drove to a cigar shop in carmel and picked up a fancy wind-resistant lighter. George loves a good stogie, and all week he'd waged war with a cheap butane lighter. So when I arrived at his house the next morning, I handed him the box and said, "A gift for making the cut. We are going to be on fire today."

Were we ever. George and Jesper picked up six strokes on the first six holes, capped by George's net eagle at the par-5 6th. Austin's tip worked—though that was not necessarily a good thing. The day before, at the famed par-3 7th, George had hit pitching wedge safely to the center of the green. But with the same club and his newfound length, he flew the green on Sunday. George and Jesper bogeyed.

At the 10th hole, our approach was 175 yards. George thought 5-iron, but all week 175 had been an easy 4-iron, and with the pin cut deep I convinced George to hit the four. And he striped it. Turning to me as the ball sailed over the green, he said, "That was too much club." Now I knew how Steve Williams felt at the 2003 Masters after he fatefully talked Tiger into hitting driver at the 3rd hole. The walk up that fairway was like the Green Mile. But the fear was worse than the reality—the ball sat in light rough just behind the green. Steamed, George dipped his chip (gulp!) and couldn't get up and down. "That's it," George said, stalking off to the next tee. "I'm pulling my own clubs from now on."

The crisis soon passed, and we got back on track with net birdies at the 11th, 13th and 16th holes. Jesper's deuce at the 17th vaulted us to 30 under par, four shots back. We were not going to win, but for a celebrity rookie and an amateur caddie the notion of flirting with first place was beyond imagination. Yet there we were.

George lit us a couple of Cohibas for the walk up the most famous finishing hole in golf. Savoring our smooth cigars and a sunny day at Pebble, George asked, "How do you top this?"

By winning it next year.

George Lopez's autobiography, Why You Crying? My Long, Hard Look at Life, Love and Laughter, was published in May.