Matt Kuchar created a controversy in 2018 when he won paid a local caddie, David Ortiz, $5,000 after winning $1.26 million in the Mayakoba Golf Classic. He later was shamed into upping that to $50,000, still half of what a regular caddie would have received. This illustrates a point that caddie pay and rights have always been an issue. In 1966 Don January got bad press at Philadelphia Classic for giving his caddie only $500 after earning $21,000 for the win. Nicklaus had given his caddie $1,500 in 1963 and $2,000 in 1965 after winning the same event.
PGA tournament regulations say the caddie fee at each pro event shall be $1 per round above the normal fee with a maximum fee of $5 ($38 today.) Any tip above that was not to exceed five percent of the player’s winnings. It was an outmoded and unenforced system. Around that time the average daily pay for a caddie was $10 a day. Bobby Nichols, 1964 PGA champion, felt caddies were becoming spoiled. “It’s a little hard to take when some of these caddies glower and feel they have they have been abused when they get a modest tip.” 1963 British Open champion Bob Charles paid $10 a day, saying, “If I were ever to win the Masters, U.S. Open or PGA I might share my good fortune with a caddie, but I have to take into account the years I didn’t win big purses and had to struggle.” Doug Sanders was one of the best paying players then, at $25 a day.
Players 40 or 50 years ago didn’t rely on their caddies as much as today. In 2017 an anonymous PGA Tour pro said he thought that Michael Greller, Jordan Spieth’s caddie, “has more input per shot than just about any caddie out there,” adding that before Jim “Bones” Mackay left Phil Mickelson to become an announcer, talked “through shots maybe too thoroughly.…” This professional also stated that several talented players “simply need a lot of reinforcement. If they’re not told what they’re doing right, they can’t pull the trigger .” What a change from 1970, when players were asked their opinions of caddies.
Al Geiberger, the first man to break 60 on the Tour and the 1966 PGA champion, said he didn’t like having a permanent caddie. “After a while, they become a real nuisance. They start asking to borrow money, or they call you up in the middle of the night and want you to bail them out of jail.” He paid about $12 a day plus three percent of his winnings. “I don’t care much for a caddie trying to help me. I find if a player relies too much on his caddie he is more apt, in the long run, to wind up the poorer for it.”
Frank Beard won 11 times on the Tour, and believed a permanent caddie was like a crutch…If a permanent caddie is like heroin, if you’re going to break out in a cold sweat because you don’t have him” by your side, he suggested to his fellow pros that they better get one. George Archer, winner of the 1969 Masters, said he “never asked a caddie how to do anything on a golf course.” Orville Moody won the U.S. Open the same year and spoke of caddies being tempestuous, explaining that his caddie quit when he wouldn’t take him to the British Open. “There is no way. They wouldn’t tolerate an American caddie in England.”
At that time the major tournaments in this country, the Masters, U.S, Open, and PGA championship, all required players to use local caddied furnished by the club that hosted the event. “It is not only ridiculous,” said Johnny Miller in 1974, “it is unconstitutional to bar my caddie from his job in specific tournaments. How can they tell us who we should or should not employ? It is in these big tournaments that I need my caddie the most that I can’t use them. After all, we are a team out there on the course.” Two years later the U.S. Open allowed players to use their own caddies, and the Masters followed in 1983. Del Taylor, Billy Casper’s caddie, pointed to a lack of clout by the caddies as a whole. “If we had some type of union to give us some clout we could force the issue. Instead, we just sit out that week.”
The first organization came in 1983, when a group of 90 caddies formed the Professional Tour Caddies Association, an informal “union” directed by Joe Grillo and Mike Carrick (its numbers grew to 140 by 1990, open to anyone who had caddied 25 times over the past three years on Tour.) They wanted modest improvements – like better parking privileges, reduced hotel rates, and a place to gather at tour sites (since caddies weren’t allowed in the clubhouse.) Mike Hicks, who caddied for he late Payne Stewart, could remember at Memphis, “we were literally required to stay inside a pen in the parking lot until our player arrived.” In the early 1980s, Carrick estimated only 15 caddies made a decent living on the Tour. But as one put it, “The Tour existence is like malaria; it gets into your blood and is difficult to shake.”
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