“It would be my suggestion,” Jackson, 65, said, “to try to be the player.”

Jackson worked his first Masters in 1961, at age 14. This week, he will work his 51st Masters, toting the golf bag of Ben Crenshaw for the 36th time. While Woods, the pre-tournament favorite on the strength of his first official PGA victory since 2009 two weeks ago, pursues Nicklaus and his record 18 major victories, Jackson will be chasing ghosts who answered to names like Stovepipe and Cemetery.

Richard Lapchick, an internationally recognized expert on diversity in sports, likened the caddie situation on the PGA Tour to what happened in women’s college basketball once it came under the auspices of the N.C.A.A.

“Until the N.C.A.A. took over, all the coaches were women,” Lapchick, the director of the DeVos Sports Business Management Program at the University of Central Florida, said in a telephone interview. “As the jobs became prominent and more lucrative, the men went after them. I have the feeling something pretty analogous to that is happening in golf with caddies.”

The advent of the golf cart made caddies expendable at private courses looking for new revenue paths. Among the clubs that remain golf cart holdouts, including Augusta National, most use contract companies for their caddies, which squeezes out the independent bagman.

Jackson, an Augusta native with eight siblings, began caddying at age 11 to help his mother, a housekeeper, feed the family. It was either pick clubs for golfers or pick cotton, he said.

“In a sense, golf raised me,” said Jackson, who dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

Jack Stephens, an Augusta National member who later served as the club chairman, became a mentor and father figure to Jackson. Stephens, a Little Rock financier who would hire Jackson at Alotian Club in 2003, encouraged Jackson to complete his high school degree and employed him as his personal caddie. At Stephens’s suggestion, Jackson was paired with Crenshaw at the Masters in 1976. Twice, Crenshaw won the green jacket with Jackson at his side: in 1984 — the year after players were permitted to use caddies from outside Augusta National — and in 1995.