It’s more of a trend than a coincidence that three top-20 players, all in their 20s, parted ways with their caddies this year and put one of their BFFs on the bag. Rory McIlroy was the first, trading out J.P. Fitzgerald for childhood mate Harry Diamond at the WGC-Bridgestone in August, saying “sometimes to preserve a personal relationship you have to sacrifice a professional one.” Along the same lines, Jason Day sat down father-figure Col Swatton in September but retained him as swing coach. Day’s replacement was Luke Reardon, his roommate at a golf academy in Australia who was working roof construction near Day’s home in Ohio before lifting Jason’s tour bag at the BMW Championship. Day framed it as McIlroy did, not wanting on-course tension to turn his relationship with Swatton into a toxic one. “I love him too much not to have him in my life,” Day said. In a lower profile but producing more immediate results is the chemistry between Tyrrell Hatton and Jonathan Bell. Since turning their friendship into a work relationship at the British Masters, the Hatton-Bell team has produced a third, an eighth and back-to-back wins, vaulting the 26-year-old Englishman to 17th in the world. This after a long season with Chris Rice caddieing that included missed cuts in four majors. “It was definitely a positive move. I was supportive of it,” Hatton’s father and swing coach, Jeff, told me after his son produced wins at the Dunhill Links and Italian Open. “I thought it would be a good thing. Jonathan has the benefit of knowing what worked with [Tyrrell’s] previous caddies, what they did that worked well or didn’t work well. … He’s a fun guy, a likeable character and a good golfer, so it’s worked pretty well.” That’s an understatement. As Hatton noted after winning the Dunhill, “It’s good fun having Jonathan on the bag.” Sometimes that’s all it takes, having somebody the same age who you can relate to, somebody that listens to the same music and somebody who simply represents a change.

Stanley Chou/Getty Images
Bradley finished runner-up at the 2017 CIMB Classic, his best showing in a PGA Tour event since 2014.

I Saw…
A familiar face on my TV screen in the middle of the night last week from Kuala Lampur, playing the type of golf he did when he was winning the 2011 PGA Championship in his major debut and backing it up with a WGC-Bridgestone victory in 2012. Five winless years later, Keegan Bradley is 31 years old and expecting his first child with wife Jillian next month. The kid from St. John’s who partnered with Phil Mickelson in a high-energy Ryder Cup performance at Medinah is at different stage of his life and career than some of the younger guys who are his neighbours in the Jupiter corridor. But that doesn’t mean his desire has waned.
Besides the incoming baby, there are two other recent motivations that led to Bradley to shooting 20 under at the CIMB Classic for a second place showing behind runaway winner Pat Perez. Coming off his best finish since the 2014 Arnold Palmer Invitational, Bradley told me while boarding a charter to South Korea for this week’s CJ Cup that he wants to start making Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup teams again. He and Mickelson chat about what it’s like. He wants to feel some of that team energy, too. Moreover, there was the impressive win by best friend Brendan Steele in the Safeway Open, a performance that had Keegan glued to the television after a missed cut. “He played flawlessly,” Bradley said. “I’ve never seen him play better. He brought a new level to his game and any time you see a friend you play with a lot playing like that, it only gives you motivation. You know you can do it as well.”

Courtesy of Ted Antonopoulos
What remained of Antonopoulos’ home after the wildfire engulfed his neighbourhood.

I Heard…
From Ted Antonopoulos on Saturday night. Ted has been head professional at Mayacama Golf Club in the Sonoma Valley for 17 years. We go back 30-plus years to his days in South Florida as director of golf at the TPC Eagle Trace, PGA National, Fisher Island in Miami and Cypress Links (now Dye Preserve) in Jupiter, before this dream job came along in Northern California. That dream became a nightmare on Oct. 8 when Ted’s house at 2130 Vintage Circle in Santa Rosa was destroyed in the wildfires and with it the memorabilia he collected over the years from books autographed by Bob Jones and Ben Hogan, hickory-shafted clubs that go back to Old Tom Morris, balls made by McEwen and Auchterlonie, and a replica of the Cleveland putter Ben Crenshaw used to win the 1995 Masters in the trunk of his car.
At 63, Antonopoulos and his wife, Susie, were thinking about downsizing and donating the collector’s items to his club. “But that’s not how we wanted to do it,” Ted told me on his way to dinner in San Francisco. Through a member, Antonopoulos has been staying at The Fairmont and is exploring places to live in Sonoma once the club re-opens. He was in the city celebrating Susie’s birthday at a grass concert the night flames engulfed his neighborhood. The plan was to get up early and drive to Mayacama for a fundraiser for Ronnie Lott’s charity on the pre-dawn hours of Oct. 9, but Mayacama had been evacuated. Knowing everything was lost, reps for Peter Millar and Straight Down have brought Antonopoulos clothing. Mayacama, which sustained relatively minor damage, is looking at a re-opening date as much for the club’s employees as its members, the caddies especially since it’s a walking club. Among those who have reached out were Paul Levy, PGA of America president, reminding Antonopoulos of the association’s disaster fund. “I’ve seen pictures. I’ve even seen satellite photos,” Ted told me. “We haven’t actually seen it, but not in person. We kind of need to do that, to put closure to it. We’ve kind of come to grips that everything is gone.”

 

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“I never wanted it to turn into a toxic relationship where he’s taken me from where I am as a 12-year-old kid to where I am today, and I’m not talking to him anymore,” Day said Wednesday in explaining why he has replaced Colin Swatton, his swing coach and his only caddy since he turned professional, on his bag starting at this week’s BMW Championship.

“I was worried if I kept it going, it was going to head that way, and I love him too much to have him not in my life because of how special he is to me.”

While Swatton will remain Day’s swing coach, his departure from his star pupil’s bag might be the most surprising in a year that hadn’t already seen Phil Mickelson and Rory McIlroy split with their longtime sidekicks.

Swatton has been more than just Day’s instructor and caddie. He was the golf instructor at the Kooralbyn International School in Queensland, Australia, when Day, then 12, arrived shortly after his father’s death. In essence, Swatton has been a surrogate father to the 2015 PGA champion and former World No. 1.

As far back as 2012, Day had been contemplating making a switch, but after going winless this year and falling to No. 9 in the world, the 29-year-old Aussie felt that he could wait no longer, and he made the switch last week. He has brought in a friend from home, Luke Reardon, who was his roommate at the Hills International College in Australia.

“He came over [and] my buddy Andy got him a job roofing. Now he’s on the bag for me in the third FedEx playoff event,” said Day, who plans to employ another friend, former Web.com Tour player David Lutterus, in two weeks at the Presidents Cup at Liberty National.

Swatton, Day said, was stunned by the decision. Day, wanting to finish the year strong, figured he finally had to pull the trigger after marinating about a change in his mind for so long. Just to extend his season, he will have to perform well here at Conway Farms Golf Club to reach the Tour Championship. He enters the week 28th in the FedEx Cup points standings; the top 30 advance to the season finale at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta.

Good thing Day knows the course. Two years ago he blitzed it with a 61-63 opening on the way to a 22-under 262 total and six-stroke victory. It was his fifth win of 2015 and elevated Day to No. 1 for the first time.

“Obviously, this is a very hard time for both of us,” said Day, whose last win was the 2016 Players. “It’s hard because we’ve been a team for so long. Like I said, he was an amazing caddie, amazing coach, amazing person.

“He’s done pretty much everything he can to get me where I’m going. He’s a father figure for me ever since I was a kid, and I wanted to make sure that it’s still there.”

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But there goes Dustin Johnson, who, naturally, doesn’t mind one bit that the spotlight is on British Open champion Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy, who created a stir by jettisoning his longtime caddie J.P. Fitzgerald last week.

“What do you think?” Johnson responded with a grin when asked about the attention being expended on two of his closest rivals.

We’re thinking no, he doesn’t mind.

Johnson then shrugged in that carefree way he has. Nobody shrugs better than Dustin Johnson.

That he proved on Thursday at Firestone Country Club, when he opened defense of his WGC-Bridgestone Invitational title with a two-under-par 68, three off the pace set by Belgium’s Thomas Pieters. Johnson was four under on the South Course through 12 holes and tied for the lead until a couple of bogeys dropped him back, including on his penultimate hole, the par-4 eighth.

Afterward, he fulfilled all the requisite media requests, and then waited by the podium as McIlroy was finishing his interview. The Ulsterman noticed Johnson hovering and wondered if he had a question.

The exchange was playful.

JOHNSON: How was your round today?

McILROY: D.J., my round was good. It could have been a little better but holed some good putts, had some good up-and-downs. Wedge play was a little off, I’m going to go work on that this afternoon on the range. I might need to borrow your TrackMan. How was your round?

JOHNSON: About the same.

Except McIlroy didn’t have a drive of 439 yards, which Johnson unleashed on “The Monster,” the 667-yard par-5 16th hole, which not only was the longest drive of the year, but longest on the PGA Tour since 2013. Johnson, by the way, put a new driver in play this week, one with 12 degrees of loft (up from 10.5 degrees), which helps him fade it easier.

RELATED: Watch Dustin Johnson hit a 439-yard drive

If there are any lingering doubts about Johnson’s health, he answered them.

Golf being perhaps the ultimate what-have-you-done lately pursuit, Johnson, despite his ranking, isn’t the favorite for next week’s PGA Championship. He is third behind Spieth and McIlroy, with 10/1 odds. Then again, Johnson hasn’t looked like the same golfer since he fell and injured his back on the eve of the Masters and was forced to withdraw. Before that, he had won three straight starts, including the WGC-Mexico and WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play championships.

CBS Sports analyst Peter Kostis said earlier this week he hasn’t seen the same swagger in Johnson’s step since before the Masters, but the 33-year-old South Carolina native is buoyed by his T-8 finish at last week’s RBC Canadian Open, where he shot 17-under 271.

“The game’s there, it’s there for sure,” he said. “I’m starting to play golf again. I’m not out there trying to find it. I feel like I got it. Last week was really solid every day. I didn’t hole any putts last week, and didn’t drive it that great, but really hit my irons well.”

Another sign that Johnson is feeling better, aside from how well he is striking it, is his schedule. He is in the midst of four tournaments in a row culminating with the PGA at Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte, and then after a week off is the playoffs and Presidents Cup. He’d better be healthy.

“It’s definitely a big couple of months coming up here … but I’m ready,” he avered. “I feel good, body feels great and I’m starting to play well.”

It doesn’t hurt coming back to a place where he won a year ago. “Yeah, it definitely gives me confidence,” he said.

And he’ll be prepared. He missed the Masters, had his second son with girlfriend Paulina Gretzky the week of his U.S. Open title defense, and still didn’t seem quite like himself at the British Open at Royal Birkdale. So, the year’s final major takes on a bit more importance. With the level of play Johnson was displaying in March, a second major title this year seemed inevitable. Now it can salvage a year that – hard to believe when he’s won three times and become No. 1 – has been a slight disappointment.

“Obviously, I feel like I’m playing well going into there [the PGA], so yeah, I want to contend,” he said. “I haven’t seen the [changes to the] golf course, but from what I remember it, the old course was just fine, I liked it. If I’m playing good, I like any golf course.”

He shrugged.

No one shrugs better than Dustin Johnson.

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“I still consider J.P. one of my best friends, one of my closest friends, but sometimes to preserve a personal relationship, you might have to sacrifice a professional one, and that was sort of the decision that I came to in the end,” McIlroy said during a press conference at the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational at Firestone Country Club. “I was getting very hard on him on the golf course and I didn’t want to treat someone that – I don’t want to treat anyone like that. But sometimes this game drives you to that, but I felt like it was the right thing to do, and I don’t think there was any good time to do it.”

McIlroy phoned Fitzgerald last Tuesday with the news that he was making the change – two days after finishing T4 in The Open at Royal Birkdale following an awful start in which the Ulsterman bogeyed five of the first six holes of the championship. It was a pep talk from Fitzgerald that helped McIlroy make a remarkable turnaround and get in contention the final day, but that wasn’t enough to help Fitzgerald preserve a job he has had since 2008.

The split of McIlroy and Fitzgerald was the second high-profile team to dissolve this summer, following the break-up of Phil Mickelson and Jim “Bones” Mackay after the U.S. Open after a 25-year run.

McIlroy first picked up Fitzgerald after the 2008 U.S. Open when Fitzgerald stopped working with Ernie Els.

He admitted to being surprised that they remained a team for more than nine years, considering they missed the cut in their first three events together. But with Fitzgerald on the bag, McIlroy won four major titles, including back-to-back in the British Open and PGA Championship in 2014. Sandwiched in between a victory here at Firestone’s South Course. Currently, No. 4 in the world, McIlroy held the No. 1 spot for 95 weeks.

“I think we did as well as we could. We maybe could have won a couple of more times and we probably want a couple of rounds back that got away from us,” said McIlroy, who refrained from specifics, but probably would list the final round of the 2011 Masters as their nadir when McIlroy crashed to an 80. He won the U.S. Open in record fashion two months later at Congressional, but McIlroy still needs a green jacket to complete the career grand slam.

McIlroy, 28, has turned to childhood friend Harry Diamond to caddie for him the next few weeks, though it remains to be seen if Diamond, a fine golfer in his own right, having played with McIlroy on the youth team in Northern Ireland, is nothing more than a stop-gap selection before McIlroy turns to a more proven commodity.

In the meantime, McIlroy, who has been hampered by a rib injury for much of the year, said he is enjoying doing more of the legwork and computations on his yardages. It’s of a piece with the decision, in which he explained that he wanted to “take more ownership of his game.”

The split with Fitzgerald was amicable enough, however, that McIlroy wouldn’t rule out rehiring him.

“There’s nothing to say that J.P. mightn’t work for me again at some point, but right now I just felt like I needed a little bit of a change,” McIlroy added. “I hate the term fired or sacked or axed, because that’s definitely not what it was. I just changed my path a little bit, but maybe in the future that path might come back to where it was. Right now I just needed to mix things up a little bit, and J.P. understood that and we’re still all good.”

But who will give him that pep talk at the crucial time, he was asked?

“Hopefully,” McIlroy said with a grin, “I won’t need it.”

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According to the Telegraph, McIlroy has tabbed friend and businessman Harry Diamond to be on the bag this week in Akron at the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational. Diamond is also expected to be with McIlroy at next week’s PGA Championship at Quail Hollow. While sources say it’s a temporary move, others have speculated the pairing could last longer depending on the performance of the next two weeks.

Diamond is a childhood friend of McIlroy’s, playing on the same Ulster youth team and going on to represent the Irish senior team. He was reportedly McIlroy’s best man at his recent wedding.

RELATED: Why Rory McIlroy’s caddy switch is something we should have seen coming

He’s also been on McIlroy’s bag in the past, once at the 2005 Irish Open when Rory was an amateur and again during McIlroy’s rookie season.

The Telegraph notes that McIlroy’s split from Fitzgerald — who gained notoriety during the Open Championship for delivering an in-round pep talk to McIlroy — may possibly stem from a wrong club selection during the tournament’s final round, one that ultimately led to a double bogey.

McIlroy is scheduled to speak to the media on Wednesday at Firestone C.C. Though he hasn’t won since last fall’s Tour Championship, Rory is one of the favorites at the PGA Championship, thanks to two wins, a runner-up and six top-10 finishes in seven appearances at Quail Hollow’s Wells Fargo Championship.

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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.”

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His one-over-par 71 was no great shakes in terms of where it put him in the field (T-58 and six strokes behind the leaders), but it felt so much better than that. When the final putt went in, the Northern Irishman gave a fist pump discernibly more emphatic than what is usually seen on a Thursday, even at a major.

Afterward, McIlroy was candid about his fragile state of mind, and how his caddie helped him go from negative to positive.

“Yeah, like I was nervous going out — a little anxious, timid,” McIlroy candidly admitted. “Just really, probably not as much belief in myself as I should have had.”

McIlroy was referring to the affects of a so-far winless season that began with high hopes—coming off his dramatic victory at the Tour Championship last September that won him the FedEx Cup—but has been disappointing. His performances in the first two majors of the season, a T-7 at the Masters and a missed cut at the U.S. Open, where the wide fairways at Erin Hills seemed tailor-made for his dominating driver, were a letdown, and then missing consecutive cuts at the Irish and Scottish Opens made a mental shambles of his preparation for Birkdale .

“Just a bit of lack of confidence just over the last couple of weeks, and just letting that get in my head a little bit,” McIlroy further confessed. “Yeah, it’s a major championship. I’m always more nervous playing in these four tournaments than I am anything else. And I felt that out there today just because of the lack of self belief I had going out.”

It manifested early, with McIlroy driving poorly off the first hole, only saving bogey with a 30-foot putt from off the green. He parred the second, but then got on a four-hole bogey train.

He was four over par on the sixth tee when his longtime caddie, J.P. Fitzgerald, decided to go to his emergency psychology kit – his 28-year-old charge’s record of four major championships, two of them by eight shots and one of them the 2014 Open Championship. “You’re Rory McIlroy,” the caddie said. “What the —- are you doing?”

Although decidedly subdued at the moment—he could only mumble “whatever” in response—McIlroy said Fitzgerald’s prod “helped, it definitely helped. It kept me positive. I couldn’t look within myself. I was trying to look within myself. But J.P. kept me positive out there, so that was very much appreciated.”

The effect had a slight time delay, as McIlroy would also bogey the difficult sixth, and then pulled his tee shot on the 7th. But he made a good up and down for par and from that point showed the kind of superbly powerful ball striking that is his trademark.

“The up and down was big,” McIlroy said. “There’s a big difference between five over par and six over. It was a big momentum, if you can say you have momentum being five over after 7.”

McIlroy, who in addition to a slow recovery from a rib injury has been fighting a two-way miss off the tee along with decidedly mediocre putting and wedge play, said that his rebound was also due to “trusting what I was working on on the range. I sort of felt I was caught in between (techniques) on the first six holes. Yeah, I found a little swing thought or a little trigger that I think is going to help.”

Might McIlroy’s turnaround become the start of a larger turning point? He didn’t dispute the possibility, and even used a historical moment as a parallel. “Yeah, I could be standing here and have hit 18 greens and shot 1-over and missed every putt and feel terrible. But because of the way I started, I actually feel really positive.

“It’s a bit like Ryder Cup at Medinah in ’12. We’re 10-6 down on Saturday night but we feel like we were right in with a chance, because we won the last two points. It’s sort of like that. Even though there’s a lot of golf left, in other circumstances it might have been a disappointing day. But just with the way I finished, I feel really good about it.”

Who knows? Perhaps what J.P. Fitzgerald said on the sixth tee at Royal Birkdale in 2017 will also become a moment in golf history.

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