In The End Matt Kuchar Still Looks Bad
Photo Credit: SB Nation
So over the past few weeks and especially the past few days it came to light that Matt Kuchar stiffed his caddie big time from back in November when he won the Mayakoba Golf Classic. And by big time, lets just say that it would’ve been the equivalent of leaving a $0.38 tip on a $100 meal. To give a little back story here, Matt Kuchar played in the Mayakoba Classic back in November and used a club caddie for the event. A club caddie is someone who works at that particular golf course, usually very upscale courses, and caddies for the members on an everyday basis. So Kuchar used club caddie David Ortiz for the event and agreed to pay him $3,000 for the weekend. Well it just so happened that Matt Kuchar won this event which has a payday of $1,296,000, which is an insane payday considering I’ve never heard of this event. So Kuchar decided to be the nice guy and give the caddie a whopping $2,000 bonus, for a weak total of $5,000 to carry his bag. I can’t even begin to comprehend how one could reason that this is appropriate, nevertheless a guy whose won over $40 million in his career playing golf. I’m nowhere close to being a millionaire yet, but if I somehow won over a million dollars in a golf tournament I would definitely throw my caddie a bone of somewhere between $50,000-100,000. I mean $50,000 is only 3.8% of what you’ve just won and your such a jerk that you only pay the caddie $5,000.
So with the mainstream media catching wind of this over the past few days and the caddie coming out and requesting $50,000 for the event, again only a 3.8% of the payday, Matt Kuchar turned down the notion that he deserved $50,000. Even among the heavy criticism from everybody with a brain, the cheapskate himself said that he won’t be losing sleep over the issue and that $5,000 for a weekend of work is good money for somebody who makes $200 a day.
Well folks, a day later and guess who backtracked? Kuchar came out today with an apology as you can see above and will indeed pay Ortiz the $50,000. While it’s good that he ended up making this situation right, it’s definitely a black eye for the long time PGA pro’s reputation. Kuchar has little to no personality on the golf course to begin with so this story does him zero favors. I mean I can’t think of anybody I’ve ever met say that they are a Matt Kuchar fan, and I’ve worked at a golf course for 5 years. This wasn’t nowhere close to a 50/50 issue, I’d say that 95%+ of the reaction was that he was in the wrong. Kuchar really could have avoided all this if he had just realized he was wrong and paid the $50,000 a few days ago, instead of turning this into a PR nightmare with his comments about not caring because there was a deal in place. This will easily cost him more that $50,000 in future sponsorships that he will miss due to this ordeal. Call it a mistake all you want but in the end there’s really no denying that Kuchar would’ve never paid the money had the public not found out about this. His first reaction to this shows what kind of a jackass he really is.
Thanny