“He can f*** right off. No way I’d ever work for that t***” That was how a colleague let us all know that he wouldn’t be taking the bag he’d just been offered.
Eyebrows were raised as the guy offering it was, at the time, bordering on what tour caddies label an “ATM,” and our colleague was probably kissing goodbye to a small fortune.
But in the end, everyone nodded their heads sagely as it was a fair point well made because the guy in question was indeed a “t***” of the highest order, not because he was a cheat like those of his colleagues who got a mention in my column the other week, and not because he was the one who put that cigarette out on his then caddie’s arm: for which he’d have got locked up had he done it in the street.
Nor was he the one who claimed Barclays online banking had been down to explain away why he’d not managed to pay his caddie in a month, or the one who missed a 0 off the end of a bank transfer so his caddie got £500 rather than the £5,000 he was owed, and then claimed it was the bank’s fault.
Caddie abuse is more common than you think
It also wasn’t even the guy who technically assaulted his caddie live on TV one Sunday afternoon, before doing pretty much the same thing a few years later again in full view of the TV cameras. Proving that leopards don’t change their spots.
Or the guy from yesteryear who actively tried to make his caddie’s life as miserable as possible on the course every single day, blaming him for literally everything even though everyone else (players and caddies) knew what a fantastic job he was actually doing.
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And amazingly, it wasn’t the guy who soon forgot where he’d come from the minute he got a taste of the big time out here or the one who famously requested a BMW 7 Series courtesy car that night because “there is no way I’m spending an hour in a 5 Series ever again.”
Or, the one who was basically throttled by another player’s wife and told to clean up his act. No, it was none of these people. But it was a (still) well-known DP World Tour player who was looking for a new caddie at that time.
The problem was that for all he came across as Mr Nice, Mr Happy-Go-Lucky and Mr Funny on TV, for our colleague, and any other candidates for his bag, in real life he was in fact Mr Cantankerous, Mr Obnoxious, and Mr “About a 100 personality defects that you wouldn’t want in a Boss.”
This was something we’d all observed at one time or another over the previous few seasons which, not for the first time, did leave us all thinking that the slogan for professional golfers really ought to be:
“Tour pros: they might all be good at golf, but they’re not all nice human beings.”
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