I rang an old acquaintance late on Thursday night, though it was early evening for him.
“Where are you right now,” I ask.
“I’m sipping a beer on the terrace of the Players and Caddies Lounge at Trump National Golf Club in Virginia.”
We’re not talking Virginia, County Cavan.
“A nice evening?”
“Great. Had lobster and a tomahawk steak for dinner. The lobster was a bit salty but still nice.”
“And of course, you didn’t have to pay?”
“Oh, no. Absolutely not.”
Oosthuizen hands his putter to Byrne during a LIV tournament at The Oaks in Bolton, MassachusettsPatrick Smith/LIV Golf via Getty Images
Colin Byrne is my acquaintance. He’s a caddie, now well into the back nine of a career that stretches back to 1983. Then it was a summer job to help him through university. In ’86 he was on David Feherty’s bag when the Northern Irish player won the Scottish Open. I’ve heard of one other man who caddied for a Northern Irish golfer (Ronan Rafferty) to help finance his university years. That was Doug King. He is now the owner of the soon-to-be Premier League football club, Coventry City.
Byrne had spells with Retief Goosen, Alex Noren, Edoardo Molinari, Ernie Els, Paul Lawrie, Rafa Cabrera-Bello and, most recently, Louis Oosthuizen. Like every frontline caddie, most of Byrne’s stories are untold. Caddies, he says, can’t afford to burn bridges.
His great moment came in the 2004 US Open at Shinnecock Hills on Long Island where he was on the bag when the South African Goosen won his second major. For the caddie it was his first and only. There were tough times too, mostly in the early years, when the challenge was to make enough money to get to the next tournament. He hitch-hiked, travelled on inexpensive overnight buses and became expert at finding one-star pensiones. His parents wondered why he’d ever gone to Trinity College, Dublin, and got a good degree.
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Els hired Byrne because he needed someone calm. Cayce Kerr, who’d caddied for Ernie, described him as two bears wrapped in one: a teddy and a grizzly. Once at Arnold Palmer’s tournament in Florida, Byrne got the grizzly, verbal abuse so bad that by the 15th hole, he’d had enough. He walked in, leaving the player to carry his own clubs. “We all have a line, and Ernie happened to cross it on that occasion,” Byrne would later explain.
The rift soon healed. “You know, given the nature of the caddie/player relationship, it’s important that you don’t spend too much time with each other. With Retief, when we played Bay Hill, he’d invite me to stay at his home in Orlando. I’d say, I don’t want to be offensive but you see me all day on the golf course. And you don’t want to see me again when you go home at night. I mostly managed to avoid it.
“Ernie loved me staying at his place because we’d play tennis at night.”
“Were you able to give him a game?”
“Ernie’s a good tennis player. All these guys are so good at everything. I mean, we had a good time. Yeah we did. I’d say he was generally winning comfortably. On a rare occasion, I’d give him a game.”
In 2021, Oosthuizen asked Byrne if he would job-share with his regular caddie Wynand Stander. In his mid-fifties, a job-share was what Byrne’s body ached for. That first year with Oosthuizen, Byrne was on the bag when the South African was runner-up to Jon Rahm at the US Open, and then at the Open Championship at Royal St George’s, where they were in a tie for third behind Collin Morikawa. In May 2022, a month before LIV Golf’s inaugural tournament at the Centurion Club in Hertfordshire, Oosthuizen joined the new tour and Byrne’s life changed.
Byrne, during a topsy-turvy relationship with Els, says that he once walked off the course at the 15th in response to verbal abuse from the South AfricanJamie Squire/Getty Images
With business-class flights, paid-for car rental, excellent hotels and free bars, caddies have been treated differently on LIV. They have access to the clubhouse and the locker room, and the players’ dining area became the players’ and caddies’ dining area. More important was the huge prize money, and knowing that no matter how your player performed, you couldn’t lose money as even the last-placed finisher was guaranteed $120,000 (£88,000).
“The caddies love it,” the veteran caddie Billy Foster says. “Why wouldn’t you? The LIV Tour has obviously been designed by the Caddies Association because everything is paid for. As a caddie [on the PGA Tour], if your player misses the cut you lose money because you pay your own expenses.
The 100-acre estate in North Carolina that Rahm’s caddie Hayes has put on the market for £10.26million
“You’ve worked all week, miss the cut so you get nought. Then flip it to the LIV Tour, where your flights are paid for, your hotels are paid for, you eat with the players and you’re not treated like a rat tied up outside the clubhouse, which I’ve had for most of my career.”
Byrne says that when he started out, things weren’t bad on the European Tour but the US was a different story. “In Europe, you were always let in the locker room, allowed in the clubhouse,” he says. “I remember being shocked when I came over to the States for the first time. We were in some grubby old tent or waiting under a tree to be picked up by our master coming out of the luxurious clubhouse.
“I was a bit shocked. It was horrible. You know, those horrible stink bins for toilets, no running water That’s how it used to be. But it was like anything, people get used to being treated like that. Over the years, as our status was elevated our circumstances got a little bit better. I always felt that was driven by, ‘What’s the least we can do to appease them,’ as opposed to really wanting to make things better.”
After becoming part of LIV in 2022, Byrne felt for the first time in his working life that the caddie was no longer a second-class citizen. “A lot of it came from Greg Norman. Everyone has their opinions [about Norman, the former LIV chief executive]. He was certainly a divisive character. He was a tough person to be around on the golf course and particularly tough on his caddies. But off the course, he really looked after them.
Chase Koepka, brother of Brooks, celebrates a hole in one at the 12th of an LIV event in Adelaide in 2023 Mark Brake/Getty Images
“I remember talking to Tony Navarro, who worked for him for many years, and Bruce Edwards. They’d have the big watches, nice cars and in a quiet way, they’d allude to the fact that it all came from Greg. Their message was, ‘Yeah, we take a lot of shit but he looks after us.’ ”
Byrne and his fellow caddies aren’t looking for sympathy. How could they when one of their brethren, Rahm’s looper Adam Hayes, has just put his 100-acre North Carolina estate on the market for $14million (about £10.25million). Still, before LIV, Byrne would spend 32 weeks on the road, making his way to far-flung venues for weeks that lasted eight or nine days.
As it does for every caddie, the travelling and the weight of the golf bag took their toll. Then LIV came along, and, sharing Oosthuizen’s bag with Stander, Byrne’s schedule was down to ten tournaments a year. He did two full seasons on LIV with Oosthuizen and in each of those, he earned more than he’d ever done on the PGA Tour.
“I remember saying to myself quite a few times, ‘I just hope this lasts another year.’ At my stage it was just idyllic,” he says. “It was the perfect way to start looking forward to retirement as opposed to keeping on the treadmill. It means I no longer have as much concern about the future as I would have had. It’s transformed so many caddies’ lives; their earning ability, their quality of life.
“For us, this has been a revelation, the best thing that could have happened and I think every caddie out here will tell you that.”
It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow some good.