Few people attending Royal Birkdale this week have better stories to tell than Billy Foster. Or tell them better.
The veteran looper, who has caddied for everyone from Seve Ballesteros to Darren Clarke to Matt Fitzpatrick over the course of a peripatetic career he likens to “a 40-year stag do”, will be back at The Open for the 43rd time in a professional capacity.
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Foster first caddied at The Open in 1984 for Hugh Baiocchi. This week he will be on the bag of journeyman pro Matthew Southgate. “But I’ve been coming to The Open even longer,” he stresses. “I’ve been to every Open since 1975.”
Foster is back at Royal Birkdale this year with Englishman Matthew Southgate – Andrew Redington/Getty Images
If locker rooms could talk. Foster’s tales from inside the ropes are so funny he is regularly booked as an after-dinner speaker, regaling audiences with anecdotes such as the time Seve choked on a piece of fruitcake during Nick Price’s backswing, or the time he rescued Tiger Woods from a toilet paper disaster at the 2002 Ryder Cup at The Belfry. Realising Woods was stranded in the adjacent cubicle without paper, Foster slid some sheets under the door, jokingly telling the American “Europe 1 up” before leaving. “It’s a strange job,” he admits.
As the Woods story suggests, caddies find themselves in some pretty intimate spaces. They see and hear everything – both on the course and off it. They are privy to conversations, flashpoints and incidents from which the general public is shielded.
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Generally, they keep their counsel. Caddies are seen and not heard. Although they can, of course, take centre stage, as at the 2023 Ryder Cup in Rome when Rory McIlroy got into a heated row with Joe LaCava after he felt Patrick Cantlay’s caddie had gone too far celebrating in his face while he was waiting to putt.
McIlroy’s scuffle with another long-time looper, Jim “Bones” Mackay, in the carpark at Marco Simone later that evening went viral.
Other stories leak over time. Or get published in books. After their abrupt 2011 split, Steve Williams got into a very public spat with Tiger Woods, accusing his former boss of lacking loyalty, especially after Williams had stuck by his side through Woods’s highly publicised infidelity scandal. The New Zealander later expanded on these thoughts in his 2015 memoir, Out of the Rough, in which he claimed that working for Woods felt at times “like I was his slave”.
We are talking professional golf here, where big money and even bigger egos are in play. Partnerships are forged and destroyed in pressure-cooker situations. Foster’s five-year run with Ballesteros ended after he advised the Spaniard to take a six-iron rather than a seven-iron on his approach to the 17th green at Augusta in 1995.
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Ballesteros went long, failed to get up and down and spent the rest of the round accusing Foster of giving him the wrong club. “I bit my tongue until eventually I could feel the bubbles coming up through my throat into my ears and he had another go,” Foster recalled later. “And I shouted at the top of my voice: ‘I f—— heard you, alright!’
The Yorkshireman got a call from Ballesteros’s manager the following Tuesday informing him his services were no longer required.
Foster found himself on the receiving end of several Ballesteros rollockings during his time as the Spaniard’s bagman – Phil Sheldon/Getty Images
A few years earlier they had had a similar incident at Augusta where Ballesteros hit a nine rather than a pitching wedge on Foster’s advice, and found his ball “at the top of three tiers, putting down a marble staircase from 80 feet”. On this occasion, Ballesteros trickled a putt down the hill to six inches and came off the green smiling. “It’s not your fault Billy, it’s mine for listening to you.”
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At an amateur level, the pressures are completely different. This is more like the wild west compared with professional golf, which has TV cameras and spectators and rules officials. Here, caddies never know what they are going to get from one day to the next. Cheating, drunkenness, swearing, fighting. The sort of behaviour you might expect if you ever watched Caddyshack growing up and appreciated Danny Noonan’s attempts to impress Judge Smails and his niece Lacey Underall. Kids trying to make money looping during their school holidays for country club members.
Tales from these sorts of rounds are legion. From caddies waiting by greens on blind approaches to move their clients’ balls closer to the hole – or even in the hole – to generate bigger tips, to players surreptitiously dropping balls down their trouser legs in the rough à la Oddjob in Goldfinger and then miraculously shouting “Aha, found it!”
Auric Goldfinger looks over his club as his assistant Oddjob holds his clubs in Goldfinger – Getty Images/John Springer Collection
Even at the smarter clubs, behaviour can be ropey. Conor Keenan, who caddied for 15 years at Royal County Down in Northern Ireland, says he regularly used to get guys “spewing on the tee boxes” after a heavy night on the Guinness. Golfers can be even ropier. One caddie at St Andrews recalls a tourist hitting a shot at 18 on the Old Course and smashing a car windscreen. “The car alarm went off, the player looked gutted,” he recalled in Golf Digest. “The group walks down the hole and over the Swilcan Bridge and arrives next to the car. The caddie puts down the bag, and the player unzips a pocket, presumably to pull out another ball. No. He pulls out his car keys, switches off the car alarm, opens the passenger door, retrieves his ball, and drops it in the fairway five yards from his own car that he had just smashed with a tee shot.”
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Keenan says his job when caddying for tourists was “70 per cent about the experience, 30 per cent golf”. Yes, he was there to advise on clubs and lies and lines, but his goal was mainly to relax his player, get them to enjoy their day. After all that was more likely to lead to a bigger tip at the end of it.
Sometimes tempers could spill over. Keenan remembers one group of “very loud, very boisterous New Yorkers who were playing for $25,000”. They had a heated argument on the 13th green which “almost turned into a fistfight”.
“Sometimes the caddies get involved in stuff like that,” Keenan says. “Sort of, encourage the s— talking, just to improve the general banter in the group. And then there’s other times in which you know just to sort of stay out of it. This was one of those times. Fortunately my guy won and I think I ended up with £200 that day, so that was a £140 tip!”
Cheating is a tricky one for caddies, particularly if they want to keep their jobs. One caddie, who declined to be named for this piece, recalls being put in a very difficult position when his player – this was in the British Senior Amateurs – swung at a ball in the rough, went under it, then pretended like it was just a practice swing. This went down badly with his playing partner who queried his score at the end of the hole, accusing him of cheating.
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“I was young at the time,” the caddie recalls. “It was awful, I didn’t know what to do. I sort of knew he had done it. But also a part of me was like, I would like to make the cut here because then I’ll get another round of caddying in and I’ll make another £80!”
In a 2019 interview promoting his book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, author Rick Reilly said he interviewed several of Donald Trump’s caddies. He recounted asking them whether Trump cheated, and said they responded: “No, he doesn’t cheat, we cheat for him.” Trump’s long-time bagman is an ex-Marine named AJ who makes various wild claims for his boss, including that he shot 73 on a course where Tom Watson never shot better than 74.
Donald Trump does not cheat according to several of his caddies, ‘we cheat for him’ according claims in Commander in Cheat – John McDonnell/Getty Images
Another of Trump’s former caddies, Dan Scavino, was a 16-year-old summer caddie when he was given Trump’s bag one day in 1990, at Briar Hall Golf and Country Club (NY), which was to become Trump Westchester. “I’ll never forget the day his limo first pulled up,” Scavino told Westchester Magazine. “I was star-struck. I remember his first gratuity. It was two bills – two hundred-dollar bills. I said, ‘I am never spending this money.’ I still have both bills.” Scavino is now director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office.
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Clearly there are significant differences between the amateur and professional game (although, interestingly, one anonymous poll in the Caddie Confidential series on The Caddie Network, responding to the question “Is cheating an issue on the PGA Tour?” found more than 30 per cent of respondents reply in the affirmative). But one thing is consistent: caddies are at the heart of the action.
Foster says the job has changed beyond all recognition in the time he has been doing it. “Obviously when I started caddying there was no money in it whatsoever. We did it for the love of the game, and to try to learn things off the best players in the world to make your game better. But now you’ve got caddies out here earning millions.” He is not wrong there. Steve Williams was the richest sportsman in New Zealand at one point, while the likes of Ted Scott and Harry Diamond make substantial sums off the back of their players’ success.
Foster still loves it. “I always compare it to being on a 40-year stag do myself. It’s good craic. Obviously that side has changed as well, it’s getting more professional all the time. But it’s still amazing. This is the best tournament in the world and if you get the chance to caddie in The Open it’s just a pleasure to be there. It makes any other European Tour event look like a monthly medal.”
After so many near-misses, notably with Thomas Bjorn in 2003, when the Great Dane relinquished a two-shot lead to Ben Curtis with just three holes remaining, and Lee Westwood in 2009 when the Englishman three-putted the 72nd hole to miss out on a play-off, Foster is not kidding himself that Southgate will break his duck.
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“I’ll just be happy for him to have a half-decent week, make the cut and grab himself a nice cheque,” he says. “But never say never in this game.”
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