Want more from Front Office Sports
in your search results?
Jim “Bones” Mackay revealed that caddies are tasked with paying a lot of their expenses out of pocket.
Mackay was famously the longtime caddie for Phil Mickelson and also worked with Justin Thomas for a couple of years. He’s currently an analyst for NBC Sports and Golf Channel, which are airing the Presidents Cup from Medinah Country Club outside Chicago Thursday through Sunday.
“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 told Front Office Sports.
“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 worldclass 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.”
Mackay declined to discuss specifics of how much caddies for the top golfers get paid.
FOS reported last year that PGA Tour caddies can earn about $1,500-$3,000 per week depending on experience, with the total climbing to $2,000-$4,000 for major tournaments like The Masters. There are also performance bonuses where caddies get 10% of their golfer wins, 7% for a top-10 finish, and 5% for other finishes. This means Scott earned $360,000 when Scheffler took down the $3.6 million winner’s share of The Masters in 2024.
Mackay also spoke about how the Medinah course has changed dramatically since the BMW Championship was held there in 2019.
“Since then it’s undergone a significant restoration or redo, if you will, ironically by Geoff Ogilvy, who’s the captain of the international team,” Mackay said. “So it’s a completely different look. It’s a completely different style of play. A lot of trees have been taken out, and in my opinion, it’s a significant improvement to what it was previously.”
In the Presidents Cup, the U.S. is captained by Brandt Snedeker with Scottie Scheffler, Cam Young, Wyndham Clark, Sam Burns, Russell Henley, Colin Morikawa, Chris Gotterup, Justin Thomas, Xander Schauffele, Patrick Cantlay, Jackson Koivun, and Jacob Bridgeman. Si Woo Kim, Hideki Matsuyama, Ryan Fox, Tom Kim, Min Woo Lee, Adam Scott, Sungjae Im, Nico Echavarria, Corey Connors, Nick Taylor, Christiaan Bezuidenhout, and Ryo Hisatsune are competing for Ogilvy’s international team.
