The US Ryder Cup team, which simply has uniformed staff, is larger than you could imagine. There are 12 players and their 12 caddies, and the Caddies have a captain (veteran looper Scott Vail), so that is 25. The team captain and his five assistants take you to 31. You could count women and girlfriends, although they are usually not in the team room or in the ropes. But you should definitely count Johnny Wood. Wood, the Caddie-Bochtcaster, is the American team manager, the first ever. In terms of employment opportunities and in all other ways, the Ryder Cup is a growth sector. A ryder cup in screaming distance from the Empire State Building, as is this year, is a colossus.
On Wednesday evening, Wood boarded a non -stop overnight stay Jetblue flight from Sacramento, California, where he lives, and arrived early on Thursday morning in JFK. He received a cold brew, gathered his suitcase and Uberde to Bethpage Black, the first team officer through the doors of the team room. In his excited, he tore a series of stuck boxes open without the advantage of a knife. All the while a kind of mantra ran through his head, a theme he had picked up from Keegan Bradley, the American captain.
You never know when you are doing anything for the last time, so make every second.
John Wood has been on stage for a dozen Ryder cups, back to 2002, like a Caddy or a broadcaster. Now he has this new performance. Will he be in the Ryder Cup 2027 in Ireland? Who can say? But there he was, Thursday in Bethpage Black, in the dressing room of the home team, in the break before the storm, and he could not have been happier. “There are many great things in Golf,” Wood will tell you. “Nothing goes beyond the Ryder Cup.”
Wood is one of golf Interesting characters. Before he became a PGA Tour Caddy, starting with a long period that worked for Kevin Sutherland, he was the manager of the Tower Books Bookstore in Sacramento. He is a compulsive book reader; He and Davis Love will sometimes compare notes about the life and times of the writer Hunter S. Thompson. There is probably no one in Golf who knows more about the Black Sox gambling scandal from 1919 than wood, and when wood is in Chicago, he visits the grave of Buck Weaver, the short stop of that infamous Chicago White Sox team. Weaver was played by John Cusack in the film Eight men out. Great film, but Wood has some problems with the book of the same name. Some things are reported as a fact when they look more like theory.
Before you went on that Jetblue Redeye flight, Wood had spent two days walking and camping in the Sierra Mountains. It was just wood, only with a package of 30 pounds (nothing for a former Caddie), a tent, what rei-eating and the novel JamesBy Percival Everett, a modern view of Huckleberry Finn, who is the favorite literary character of Wood. His second favorite literary character is Calvin, from the late, great “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon strip. Small blond child, often reading a book or saying something witty. Wood is drawn to Holden Caufield, from The catcher in the ryeForever, tired of the “phonies” in his midst. Holden escaped from one of his schools because he was ‘surrounded by phonies’.
Before his short camping trip, Wood was, together with the majority of the American Ryder Cup team, in Napa, California, during a PGA Tour event there. During an informal team dinner that week in a private house, Bradley offered his comments for the climb of everything. The easy version is that this, quote, is the team of Scottie Scheffler, since the squadrons in Tiger’s Prime, quote, the teams of Tiger Woods were. But Bradley, Fidgety and excited and half a New Yorker, is the greatest personality in this American team. Few would not agree.
Seth Waugh, the former CEO of the PGA of America, was the first person to think of Bradley as an unlikely captain for this team. But before he even drove Bradley’s name, Waugh Wood asked to be the team manager. That was in May last year, in a period when it was expected that Tiger Woods would be the American captain of Bethpage, where he won his first US Open. Woods and Hout have an easy report and their mutual interest in baseball is part of it. (Tiger’s father was a university matcher in Kansas State.) Once asked Woods at the Presidents Cup 2017, Woods to take a photo of Barack Obama with the Caddy. Woods mandatory – and Obama did that too. Wood has a kind of casual, but also present way that has made him an easy fit in Caddy recruitment, TV connections and in 20 or so over the years.
Getty images
John Wood’s first order Out of things, on arrival at Bethpage Black, was to view the team room, the lockers, the lounge chairs, the dining tables and the rest. He tore open a long series of boxes without the advantage of a knife. (Wood is now strong.) He has checked in the team hotel and checked out, where he will have a stay of 11 nights.
The players and caddies are all on the same floor. Wood suggested the place, through the lift sofa on the team floor, where two mannequins will act as sentences, of a kind. One will wear the player uniform of that day, the other the Caddy uniform of the day. Yes, there have been problems in the past. No, John Wood does not get a credit for this important innovation. The idea came from Kelly Ford Cameron, daughter of Longtime Oakmont Pro Bob Ford, who works for Ralph Lauren, official uniform suppliers of the US Ryder Cup team of 2025.
Wood made a special small book for each of the American Caddies who reprinted the exact language of Golf’s Rulebook as Rule 22, which treats an alternative-shot game, and rule 23, which treats the best ball game. Both forms are used during the first two days of playing. Kerry Haig, who runs the Ryder Cup as a competition for the PGA of America, saw the Rulebook of ‘Cliffnotes’ style in Wood on Thursday and said, “I did the same for the rules of rules.” Great spirits, etc.
Lots of Wood’s work at Bethpage will include logistics, and that is already. If a player needs an extra umbrella, shoeline, ticket, wood, there will be an item in the hand. Upon arrival in the dressing room on Thursday, Wood surprised at what it looked like, as he had hoped that, as a large common room, everyone who looked outside would not silence anyone. That, Wood said, is really the whole thing about the Ryder Cup experience. Win or loss, you are in a uniform. You are in a selection.
“Everyone in these teams played high school golf or university wave,” Wood said in a telephone interview. “Then you become Pro, and maybe you will never play Team Golf again. And that is really what makes this Ryder cups so special. All these guys, who pull the same rope.”
Pull the same rope. A sense of physics, tug of war, maritime novels. And now Ryder Cup Golf.
The Ryder Cup 2025 starts on Friday 26 September, first ball in the air shortly after 7.10 am It is a three -day event. John Wood, team manager for the American team, came there early.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments on michael.bamberger@golf.com
#exCaddie #FixIT #Ryder #Cup #team #hes #busy