By Christopher Powers
BROOKLINE, Mass. — Billy Foster’s heart sank.

On the 72nd tee, where Matt Fitzpatrick (the boss man) arrived with a one-shot lead over Will Zalatoris and Scottie Scheffler, who was already in the clubhouse at five under, Foster and Fitzpatrick decided on 3-wood. It was a debate the two had been having throughout the week at The Country Club, Fitzpatrick leaning toward driver each day. Anytime the Englishman has a chance to let the big dog eat, the big dog is gonna eat.

But this was the final hole of the United States Open. With a one-shot lead. Allowing Fitzpatrick to bring trouble into play in that situation would be borderline caddie malpractice. So 3-wood it was.

“We had a difference of opinion there all week,” Foster said afterward. “Today we said if you drive it straight down the middle [with a driver] it’s going to run out into the rough—just hit the 3-wood. It’s one of those where if you hit the fairway, you know it’s going to be a 9-iron.”

Fitzpatrick, however, did not hit the fairway. As his ball sailed directly toward one of the bunkers down the left side of the hole, Foster, already in a helpless position just by the nature of the job, was just about ready to vomit on Brookline’s hallowed ground.

“It’s in the air turning toward the trap and I’m just like …,” said Foster, who then made the face-palm motion.

Surely, ghosts of majors past crept into Foster’s brain, and he’s got more than a few that have kept him up nights. This is a man who was on the bag for Thomas Bjorn at the 2003 Open Championship at Royal St. George’s, where Bjorn took a two-shot lead to the 16th hole when catastrophe struck, with Bjorn leaving two shots in a greenside bunker. He made double bogey and lost by one to Ben Curtis.

RELATED: Matt Fitzpatrick became a major champion by turning his shortcomings into strengths

Foster was on the bag of Lee Westwood for 10 years, a relationship that featured nine top-three finishes in majors, including three runners-up. The 2010 loss to Phil Mickelson at the Masters was among the most painful, but none surpassed the anguish of Westwood’s three-putt on the 72nd green at the 2009 Open Championship at Turnberry, knocking him out of a playoff for the claret jug with Tom Watson and Stewart Cink.

“I’ve probably had six or seven really close calls, a couple heartbreaking losses,” Foster said. “It was tough to stomach sometimes.”

An 18th hole Fitzpatrick collapse would have ranked right up there on the sick-to-the-stomach list, another unfortunate what-if in a caddieing career full of them. When the duo arrived to find the ball in the bunker with Zalatoris safely 30 yards ahead in the middle of the fairway, Foster had his doubts.

“”It was sort of like, behind a steep lip, so he couldn’t go at the flag,” Foster said, “but he could just go to the left edge of the green. And he sort of plum-bobbed the ball at a tree at the back of the green that was probably like three or four yards inside the left edge of the green. Hit a good solid cut-off that. What a golf shot. The weakness in his game this season has been his fairway bunker play, which has been about as good as mine, and I’m rubbish. But if you’re going to hit a good one, it might as well be the last hole of a U.S. Open.”

Fitzpatrick’s shot, which has already become the stuff of U.S. Open legend, led to a two-putt par. That wound up being enough to clip Zalatoris, whose birdie effort slipped by the left edge of the cup and somehow didn’t fall. Knowing he still had to tap in for par, Foster and Fitzpatrick couldn’t quite start celebrating, but the tears were already flowing down the longtime looper’s weathered face.

“Just pure, utter relief,” Foster said. “I have the monkey off my back, but it feels more like a gorilla.”

Making this one that much sweeter was that it came in the major after Foster’s (and Fitzpatrick’s) latest close call a month ago in the PGA Championship. Fitzpatrick entered the final round at Southern Hills three shots off the lead, with a even-par final round good enough to have won it, and one over getting him in a playoff. It was not to be that day, and “not to be that day” is something Foster has gotten a little too used to on Sundays at majors over the years.

“I ain’t got many more years left in the game,” Foster said when asked if he thought the major may never come. “The disappointing thing about the PGA was that it was there to win. We didn’t have to do anything special at all. He just didn’t quite perform on Sunday, didn’t have his ‘A’ game and he missed too many fairways. Yeah, it’s disappointing, but through the experience of losing, you knew it was coming. He obviously won the amateur here, I just thought there was every chance he could compete again, and sure enough he did.”

Even after a lifetime of near-misses, Foster did allow himself to wonder if today was finally the day.

“Two or three times it flashes in front of your eyes and you have a little tear filling up and you say ‘stop that, stop that. Don’t even go there, just get on with it,” Foster said. “But I’d be lying if it didn’t cross my mind two or three times out there today. You just want it so badly you can’t help but think about it. But we both did very well, we worked well out there today. There was no mistakes, not one. Everything was perfect.”

By now, Foster’s well-earned celebration has already begun. He had a flight out of Boston Sunday night that he happily missed, and his next one, scheduled for 2 p.m. on Monday, might leave without him, too. Who knows where the night will take him.

“I’ll start with a beer in the caddie shack,” Foster said while standing in the 18th fairway. “Followed by another 20.”

After 30 long, major-less years, Foster has earned all 21 of those beers. Hell, if he wanted to polish off a whole 30 rack himself, nobody would blame him.

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The post U.S. Open 2022: Caddie Billy Foster gets ‘gorilla’ off his back after years of major championship anguish appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Daniel Rapaport
DUBLIN, Ohio — Turns out, Bones still knows what he’s doing.

Jim (Bones) Mackay, who spent more than 25 years as Phil Mickelson’s caddie before becoming an on-course analyst with NBC/Golf Channel, decided to dust off the trainers and return to the caddie ranks for the Muirfield Village double. He knew Matthew Fitzpatrick was in search of a fill-in looper—Fitz’s full-time guy, Billy Foster, remained in England due to the COVID-19 pandemic—texted the young Englishman, and soon they had an agreement to work together for the back-to-back starts in Ohio.

Two profitable weeks, as it turns out.

Fitzpatrick shot a four-under 68 on Sunday amid brutal conditions to vault up the Memorial leader board, all but assuring himself a top-five finish as the leaders were just beginning their back nines. This comes one week after Fitzpatrick and Mackay teamed for a T-27 finish at the Workday Charity Open.

In typical caddie fashion, Bones was quick to redirect any credit to his player.

“He’s a very, very good player, and it was a joy to be with him,” Mackay said. “He was great out there. I mean, 68 today, what more could you ask for from the guy?

“He’s got a ton of shots,” Mackay continued, “and to me the most underrated skill a professional golfer can have—which he has in spades—is the ability to read greens. He’s an amazing green reader, and I think that’s going to take him a long way in this game. He’s longer than I thought he was going to be. He’s good. He’s really good.”

Fitzpatrick said having Mackay on the bag was rather helpful given the conditions, which were among the toughest you’ll see on a golf course. The wind blew a consistent 25 miles per hour all day, with gusts north of 30, which only exacerbated the already brutal setup that included juicy rough and concrete-like greens.

“I mean, he’s seen conditions like this plenty of times, and to have him on the bag was brilliant,” Fitzpatrick said. “I definitely learned a couple things off him, and I’ll be picking his brain to see what I can improve on.”

Despite their success, the partnership will not be extended. Foster, who spent years on the bag as Seve Ballesteros and Lee Westwood, will return to Fitzpatrick’s bag for the WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational later this month.

But Mackay stopped well short of closing the caddie door.

“I work 22 weeks a year,” Mackay said. “That means there’s 30 other weeks I can go caddie if I want to. You know, if someone says that their caddie has got a twisted ankle, that’s something—I love caddieing. I consider myself a caddie, even when I’m doing TV.”

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But it is not surprising in that Fitzgerald, unlike Jim “Bones” Mackay with Phil Mickelson, was occasionally tagged as a poor fit for McIlroy. This perception began as early as 2011, when McIlroy carried a four-shot lead into the final round of the Masters, imploded on the back nine and Fitzgerald appeared to do little to pull him out of the funk. When the BBC’s Jay Townsend, a former European Tour player, suggested that McIlroy should hire a more reputable caddie like Steve Williams, McIlroy fired back on Twitter, and then elaborated on his response in greater detail.

“I’ve got to stand up for my caddie. JP is one of my closest friends, and I’ve had to deal with it for three years and not really say anything and he’s just kept at him and at him. I just had to say something,” McIlroy said at the time. “You know, it’s unfortunate that some people are so opinionated. It started in Switzerland back in 2008. JP has taken me from 200th in the world to major champion and now fourth in the world. I don’t know what it is about Jay or if he has something against JP but some of the criticism that JP takes from him is very unfair.”

Although Fitzgerald, who previously caddied for Paul McGinley and Darren Clarke, has been on the bag for all four of McIlroy’s major wins, he continued to contend with speculation that the player could do better. That sentiment was echoed by players and insiders quoted for a Golf Digest story in this year’s Masters preview. When assessing McIlroy’s chances of contending at Augusta National and completing the career Grand Slam, an underlying theme was that McIlroy needed a stronger voice by his side.

“How often do you see him and [caddie J.P. Fitzgerald] looking at each other in shock after his ball has finished 20 yards over the back?,” the story quotes an observer saying. “If you listen to them on the course, you often hear Rory asking, ‘What happened there?’ More than once I’ve heard J.P. saying something like, ‘OK, hit a soft draw with a 6-iron off that tree.’ And I’ve immediately thought, This ball is going over the green. And sure enough, it does. So you have to wonder. I see Rory up close only occasionally, and I know he’s going to hit the ball over the green when his caddie clearly doesn’t. It makes no sense.

“Rory needs someone to tell him what he needs to hear, not what he wants to hear.” . . . “Why he doesn’t employ Billy Foster is a mystery. Rory would have 10 majors by now if he did.”

“Of course, we know what Rory is like. He’s as stubborn as anyone on tour. The more people tell him that J.P. is not the right caddie for him, the more he’ll keep him on.”

The post Why Rory McIlroy’s caddy switch was something we should have seen coming appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

Still, the 43-year-old Englishman will need to re-write history if he is to is to kick-on from his fine opening 66 around Earth on Thursday and join Rory McIlroy (2012 and 2015 ) and Henrik Stenson (2013 and 2014) as a two-time champion at Jumeirah Golf Estates (JGE).

No winner has ever gone wire-to-wire on Earth but Westwood’s seven birdies and eventual signature on a six-under round hints at a serious 2016 title tilt from the inaugural Race to Dubai champion.

“This is as good as I’ve played for quite some time,” said Westwood whose 66 matched his opening round in 2009 when he went on to win by six but remains two strokes shy of the best Thursday score at the DP World Championship, a sizzling 64 carded by Swede Peter Hanson  in 2011.

“I’ve found a couple of keys in different parts of my game and I’ve been working in them hard. It all came together today. 66 is a good round of golf… [it] didn’t seem that easy out there.”

Care to elaborate on the little triggers you’ve found in the last week or so Lee, the tweaks that have you in pole position for a $1.3 million pay day?

“Not really,” said Westwood who went 0-3 in Europe’s 11-17 Ryder Cup reverse at Hazeltine National in October and has enjoyed just one top 10 on each side of the Atlantic Ocean in 2016, a runner-up finish to Danny Willett at the US Masters and third at the British Masters.

“I don’t particularly want to go into it. I’ve been working with a few different people and I’ve been getting clear ideas of what I need to do and I’m doing those and working on them.”

Westwood is also having to work doubly hard at JGE with regular bagman Billy Foster icing his dodgy knees back in England. Foster will be back after treatment for the HSBC Abu Dhabi Golf Championship in late January but for now Westwood is learning to trust Ken Herring, normally the bag man for Scotsman Marc Warren.

“Yeah, I probably have to do more, think a little bit more. Billy normally thinks for me which is probably a good thing,” said Westwood who tees it up at 12.50pm (UAE time) Friday with Frenchman Julien Quesne who was a shot back in a share of second place overnight alongside big hitting Belgian Nicolas Colsaerts.

“Obviously a different caddy doesn’t know my game. He’s only had one round on the bag and that was in the Pro-Am on Tuesday and I wasn’t particularly sharp then.

“He’s sort of making it up as he goes along. I have full confidence in him and his yardages and the way he reads the wind and stuff like that. [I just] put my game to his information.”

Herring will be keen to keep the chemistry going for the next 54 holes but not as much as Westwood who hasn’t won on the European Tour since the 2014 Malaysian Open and has to go back to April last year for his last title, the Indonesian Masters. – Kent Gray

The post Can Westwood go wire-to-wire? appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.