Matt Kuchar stiffing his caddie was horrible. His response to the backlash is worse.

Kuchar doesn’t understand why everyone is so mad about a Tour pro with almost $50 million in earnings giving his caddie in Mexico an obscenely low percentage of a winner’s check.

Matt Kuchar’s reputation as a gentle and immaculate pro golfer is gone. The 40-year-old veteran PGA Tour pro is now known for an all-time stiffing of a caddie, an unexpected controversy that’s become one of the biggest stories of the early golf year. The rumor of the offensive and disrespectful tip job bubbled up in mid-January on Twitter, as this kind of thing does now. But the amount, which is so low that it’s newsworthy, had not been substantiated until this week, when both the caddie and Kuchar confirmed the transaction from a late 2018 tournament in Mexico.

With the story now substantiated, let’s go through the background, timeline, and what each party said this week on the record. Then we’ll draw the sweeping and damning conclusion about how this has been mishandled and what it does to Kuchar’s previously tidy image.

Some Background

• Last November, Matt Kuchar won the Mayakoba Classic in Mexico. While Kuchar has always slotted high in the world rankings and posted consistent high finishes, it was his first win in four and a half years on the PGA Tour.
• The winner’s payout at the Mayakoba Classic was $1,296,000. This win brought Kuchar’s career on-course earnings to $47,089,107. He’s earned much more than that in off-the-course endorsement deals. He is among the top 10 in the PGA Tour’s career money leaders list. That career cash rank is thanks in large part to the aforementioned consistency of high finishes in the era of the Tiger Woods moneybath, when PGA Tour purses everywhere, even at lower-tier November events like the Mayakoba Classic, skyrocketed.
• Kuchar’s regular caddie, John Wood, did not make the trip to Mexico. Kuchar made the tournament a late add to his schedule and Wood had already RSVP’d to another obligation.
• Kuchar enlisted local caddie David Giral Ortiz, also known as El Tucan at the Mayakoba course. El Tucan caddies at the resort full time and said he makes around $200 per day doing so. After the win, Kuchar called El Tucan a good luck charm and said, “He did just what I was hoping for and looking for.”
• It’s not unheard of for a player to take a local caddie if their regular caddie is unavailable or if they’e not settled enough with a regular caddie. An old policy for the major championships required players to take local caddies, not their usual traveling bagman. But the use of local caddies, even at lower-level PGA Tour events, is now rare.
• There are no set rates for caddies on the PGA Tour. Each player and caddie come to an arrangement, often handshake deals. Some players cover caddie expenses, some may not. Some pay out 8% of any prize money and 10% if the player wins the whole thing. Some go with a variation of the 5-7-10 framework — 5% of cash earned from a made cut, 7% for a top 10, and 10% of a win. But there is no set rule and it’s rarely discussed in public.
• At the time of the win, neither Kuchar nor El Tucan, who became a sensation during the week, disclosed what the local caddie banked from the victory. It would not be shocking for a local caddie to earn a smaller percentage than the regular, traveling caddie that does it every week with his pro.
• 10% of Kuchar’s winner’s prize money at the Mayakoba would be $129,600. El Tucan did not get that. He did not get close to that.

Photo by Rob Carr/Getty Images

A Timeline

• In January of this year, Tom Gillis, a journeyman fringe Tour pro, tweeted a rumor that some winning player from the fall series of events gave his caddie just $3,000 after the victory. With almost every winner’s check over $1 million now, $3,000 is an eye-catching low sum for a winning caddie. A day after Gillis’ tweet, Kuchar was singled out as the winner from the fall events that did this and the rumor took off on Twitter.
• With the rumor now out in the open and gaining steam, Kuchar was approached at the Sony Open and asked about the payment to El Tucan. He responded, “That’s not a story. It wasn’t 10 percent, it wasn’t $3,000. It’s not a story.”
• [Narrator’s voice: It was, at this point, most definitely a story.] This was a legendary non-denial denial of a rumor that was quickly perforating Kuchar’s image as some harmless “good guy” of the PGA Tour. There is a lot of room between $3,000, which would be .23% of the winner’s check, and 10%.
• Gillis again tweeted in mid January that he was now in direct contact with El Tucan and the payout was $5,000, so up to .38% of the winner’s check. A resort guest who spoke with Tucan tweeted the same. There was no official confirmation and the story quieted but the image damage was done to Kuchar, who was now forever associated with this epic stiffing.

El Tucan Speaks

• On Tuesday, Golf Magazine senior writer Michael Bamberger published a story confirming the $5,000 amount.
• According to the local caddie, the two had a deal for $3,000 for the week plus a bonus unspecified percentage of the winnings.
• El Tucan wrote to Kuchar’s agent, Mark Steinberg, on January 24th:

“I am not looking to disparage Matt or give him a bad name. Fair is fair, and I feel like I was taken advantage of by placing my trust in Matt.”

• El Tucan told Bamberger that he has since been offered an additional $15,000 but he turned it down as unacceptable, saying, “They can keep their money.” He was hoping for $50,000 and had reached out to Steinberg, also Tiger Woods’ agent, on three different occasions via email.
• El Tucan told Bamberger that Kuchar handed him an envelope on Sunday night of the win in November with bills from $100s down to $5s that added up to $5,000. Kuchar left the country and El Tucan, who lives in a “small cinderblock house” near the course, was intiailly under the impression a larger bonus payment would be coming.

Kuchar Responds

• Confirmation of the story on Tuesday prompted a response from Kuchar on Wednesday at Riviera, site of this week’s Genesis Open on the PGA Tour.
• In his own interview with Bamberger, Kuchar said the deal before the week was $1,000 for a missed cut, $2,000 for a made cut, $3,000 for a top-20, and $4,000 for a top 10. The $1,000 was “extra” for a good week and brought the total to $5k.
• Bamberger described Kuchar as “slightly embarrassed” about the later offer for $15,000, saying that was all “the agency” and Steinberg trying to do damage control.
• Kuchar told Golf Channel’s Will Gray that the $5,000 was “more than we agreed upon” and that “people have got it in his head that he’s deserving something different than what we agreed upon.”
• He also expressed no regret for the sum that he paid, saying he does not lose sleep over this and that you can’t “buy people’s ability to be OK with you.” He also added to that it was now more a social media issue than anything (seems like more than a social media problem!) and capped it off to Gray with, “Making $5,000 is a great week.”

Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

The Impact

Kuchar looks like a bad person! He looks horrible! Those quotes are not making it better! He should feel bad!

His one flimsy defense is that a “deal is a deal.” That does not change how objectively horrible he looks stiffing his caddie with .38% of the winner’s prize. No one expected him to go the usual 10%, but there is a reasonable number somewhere in the middle for a player with $48 million in on-course earnings. When you get the win, you simply have to chip off a bit more to the looper and in this case, that could have been a life-changing amount.

Instead, he’s dug-in on a headline-grabbing obscenely low number and the fact that he does not recognize that and is also somehow perplexed by the backlash is indicative of the kind of obtuse, insulated level on which he operates. His agent looks bad for how he botched something that so easily could have been handled and disposed of by now. It’s a bad look for the sport and the PGA Tour. He has almost no defenders and that backlash is near-unanimous.

The image as an inoffensive good guy is gone. Up until now, Kuchar’s defining character trait as a high-profile golfer is that he’s “nice” and says things like “golly” when he hits a bad shot. Now? He’s taking an absolute beating in the press, on social media, and from golf fans. A drip of unsubstantiated stories and rumors about his cheapskate ways started, perhaps an unfair corollary but expected consequence. Caddies will forever look askance at him. A fellow player called it “embarrassing.” Fans at tournaments will let him hear it for the rest of his career. His initial response makes him look worse and cleans up nothing for him. And now that this is all being confirmed and aired out in LA, where is he headed next week to confront those fans? A World Golf Championship back in Mexico.