What happened at the Sony Open in Hawaii?
Matt Kuchar had to wait to wait four years between his seventh and eighth wins on the PGA Tour. There were just 64 days between eight and nine.
Kuchar, who won the Mayakoba Classic in November, looked to have blown it when he bogeyed three of the first five holes on Sunday to hand Andrew Putnam the advantage, but survived the wobble and birdies at 9, 10, 12, 15, 16 and 18 were enough for a back-nine 30 and a four-stroke win.
Full Sony Open in Hawaii leaderboard
But over the weekend accusations that Kuchar had not paid his caddie after that win two months ago surfaced on social media. More on that now…
What was the big talking point of the week?
It all started in the early hours of Saturday morning when former PGA Tour player Tom Gillis tweeted the following:
Who’s going to be the one to identify the player that paid his caddie $3,000 after winning a PGA Tour event last fall?
If you don’t know, the standard caddie payment on top of their usual salary – if they’re lucky enough to have one – is 10% of the player’s winnings.
Now $30,000 is what you’d get for finishing way down the field, so $3,000 seems rather stingy when you’ve just won a tournament.
A couple of names were bandied about before No Laying Up’s Tron Carter outed Matt Kuchar as the culprit:
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Kuchar, you might remember, had entered November’s Mayakoba Classic in Mexico at the 11th hour. And with his regular caddie already on holiday, he hired a club bagman known locally as El Tucan.
Kuchar went on to win the $1.3 million first prize, but it was never revealed how much his temporary caddie had made for his efforts.
Gillis’s tweet and the ones that followed garnered a huge response, and when one reply indicated that Gillis was wrong, he replied:
Nothing false. [My] source couldn’t be any closer to the caddie.
He then tweeted:
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And it got most of golf’s illustrious media talking about it. This, from SB Nation’s Brendan Porath, was fairly typical:
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Or, if you want something lighter, this from CBS scribe Kyle Porter:
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Now Kuchar isn’t on Twitter. So who, bearing in mind he was leading a golf tournament at the time, was going to actually ask him about it?
That would be Golf Digest’s Brian Wacker:
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Me? Well my initial reaction was that they were trying to protect the caddie. A man who suddenly becomes wealthy in Mexico? I don’t think I need to spell that one out.
And scrolling through social media it seems I’m not alone in these thoughts, but Gillis is adamant he has spoken to the caddie via a direct source and he’s said he was only paid the $3,000.
Again, he could be protecting himself. But either way Kuchar or Gillis are going to come out of this looking pretty bad.
Watch this space.
Best quote
Kuchar spoke to reporters after and described his feelings in a way only he and Ned Flanders know how:
I’m tickled, thrilled to have won two events this early in the year.
And then this:
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If anything is going to distract from the caddie saga, it’s Kuch talking about Jay-Z…
The winning moment
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Gimme? No thanks – they should be banned
