iStockphoto / Christopher Hanewinckel-USA TODAY Sports
Jun 9, 2017; Memphis, TN, USA; Phil Mickelson and his caddie Jim MacKay during the second round of the FedEx St. Jude Classic golf tournament at TPC Southwind. A stock image of U.S. currency sits between the two.
So you want to be a caddie on the PGA Tour? Well, you’d better have deep pockets in order to do so, or hope that the player you’re caddying for has a ton of early success; otherwise, you could quickly find yourself in debt.
PGA Tour caddies are not salaried employees. Instead, most caddies make a base rate of anywhere between $1,500-$3,000, then they make a percentage of whatever the golfer wins on top of that.
If the golfer wins the tournament, the standard tip is 10 percent. If they finish highly, that number is usually between seven and eight percent, and if they finish poorly, it’s typically around five percent. However, if the golfer misses the cut, the caddie often goes home with nothing at all above their base rate.
But what does it actually cost caddies to attend and work events? Thanks to veteran Jim “Bones” Mackay, who famously spent years caddying for Phil Mickelson before a brief stint with Justin Thomas, we now know the answer.
Jim Mackay Explains The Pricey Life Of A PGA Tour Caddie
Since retiring from caddying, Mackay has moved into a role as a TV analyst for NBC Sports. In a recent interview with Front Office Sports, he explained that life as a caddie isn’t as glamorous as some may believe.
“When I talk to people about caddying, one of the things that surprises them is the caddies pay for all their own expenses. So it costs [about] $40,000-50,000 a year to do what caddies do,” Mackay said.
“There are no contracts in terms of the ability of a caddie to stay with a player [long-term]. You’re literally week to week with those guys. Though you’ll have caddies that sometimes spend 5, 10, 15 years with a player. And I think that the public might be a little surprised by how much input, in some cases, caddies have with the players.
“I mean, you know, as great a player as Scottie Scheffler is, and he’s also got a world-class caddie in Ted Scott—he does very little on the golf course without kind of running it by Ted. So they’re one heck of a team, as many player-caddie duos are on the PGA.”
If you’re caddying for a star player such as Scheffler, who passed Tiger Woods atop the all-time PGA Tour money list this season, then that $40-$50 thousand isn’t a big deal.
But for most caddies, that’s a pretty large chunk of change. So life as a PGA Tour looper may not be quite as glamorous as may have been led to believe.