7 minute read
Back On The Bag
Greg Bodine does double duty as Bryson DeChambeaus new caddie and as co-owner of Evergreen Golf Club with Jermaine Kearse
BY BART POTTER • FOR CASCADE GOLFER
Greg Bodine will tell you he can hold up his end of a conversation, and then some, which you’ll know if you get on the other end of it. It’s a nice quality to have in the partnerships he’s forged, in golf and the business of golf. He can chat it up, he says, and he tries not to be annoying. It’s served him well rising through the ranks of professional golf-caddying, where communication and rapport are as important as technical golf expertise. He’s now on the bag of major-winner and iconoclastic student of the game, Bryson DeChambeau.
Whether he wanted it or not, Bodine has also been adjacent to the conversation in golf about the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, about which it could never be said they agreed to disagree because it would have meant they agreed on something. As of early June 2023, LIV and the Tour have agreed to agree — on exactly what no one is sure.
And Bodine is growing a new golf business, an enterprise and partnership that might never have taken shape if a conversation begun in a Starbucks hadn’t lasted and lasted and finally ended with a handshake.
Let’s start here. Two Lakewood guys talking business on a couch in the Starbucks just off I-90 near Newcastle. The other guy on the couch in that April 2021 meeting was Jermaine Kearse — Lakes High School, University of Washington, Seattle Seahawk/New York Jet wide receiver.
Despite their common roots in Lakewood, Bodine and Kearse didn’t know each other when they sat down together. Andrew Putnam, Bodine’s cousin, best friend and fellow Life Christian Academy alum, had brought them together.
Putnam, now a PGA tour regular, gave Bodine his start in caddying when he was playing on the then-Web.com tour in the early 2010s. By 2021, Bodine was out of caddying, having lost his six-year gig with Tony Finau.
Kearse was newly retired from the NFL after an eight-year career and reached out to Putnam to say he was contemplating a new golf business. To Putnam, it sounded remarkably similar to what he knew Bodine had in mind — a multi-purpose indoor golf and instruction facility, a sort of golf lifestyle center. Putnam saw to it that Bodine and Kearse connected.
So, they talked, and talked, on that Starbucks couch, and four, maybe five hours later, Bodine remembers, they were partners.
Today, Evergreen Golf Club is a premier indoor golf facility in Redmond with eight Trackman simulators, two full-time swing coaches, and professional golf fitness instructors. The EGC short-game area features a chipping green and a sand bunker with real sand. Memberships are available (visit evergreengolfclub.com/memberships/ for complete information) and, as of mid-June, the membership roster was at 153 and counting. A full junior program of 32 learners aged six and up are all returning for the next session this fall. In the meantime, EGC’s series of four-day junior summer camps launched in July.
In early May, DeChambeau, one of the most prominent players on the LIV Tour, came calling. Would Bodine consider coming on as his caddie? The two, known to each other from the insular world of players and caddies, talked for about two hours to get a feel for each other before DeChambeau made an offer.
Yes, Bodine was interested, but he needed a night to think about it. This decision would need a couple more conversations. The first was with his wife Kelsey. The couple’s sons — Brooks, 6, and Parker, 4 — were in on the discussion. The second was with Kearse, his business partner.
All parties gave their blessing to Bodine’s return to working a bag. “Jermaine took a load off me so I can go out and caddie,” Bodine says.
Four days later, he was on DeChambeau’s bag for the LIV Tour’s event in Tulsa. Only days after that, he was in Rochester, N.Y., for the PGA Championship, his first major as a caddie since 2019. In June, he worked the U.S. Open in Los Angeles.
The thing about partnerships is they can dissolve. The working relationship between a top-tier PGA Tour player and his caddie rarely seems destined for permanence. Cases in point: Tiger and Fluff, Phil and Bones and Tiger and Stevie.
Jermaine took a load off me so I can go out and caddie, Bodine says
Or Bryson and Tim Tucker and Finau and Greg Bodine. Bodine had been on Finau’s bag since 2014 and was there when Finau earned his first PGA Tour victory in Puerto Rico in 2016.
By 2020, Finau was ready to make some changes, hoping to step beyond a raft of second-place finishes on tour. He changed his equipment company. He changed his putter. He changed his body. Finally, in the summer of 2020, he changed his caddie.
“I was one of the last few pieces,” Bodine says. “I don’t think it was anything personal toward me. I didn’t take it that way.”
Now, with DeChambeau, who had parted ways with Tucker, Bodine has a firsthand perspective on an unusually interesting golf professional.
DeChambeau is known for his intense, metric-heavy theories on how to move his game and the greater game of golf forward.
DeChambeau saw, and studied, what LIV Golf had to offer. The money played into it, Bodine says. So did the three-round, no-cut tournaments. LIV’s team concept, Bodine says, is no joke. The players and the fans enjoy it, he says. When the LIV-PGA Tour merger happened, DeChambeau wasn’t surprised, though it happened a couple years earlier than he expected.
“His thought was it makes sense,” Bodine says. “It was what he thought would happen all along. He told me he thought a merger was the endgame to all this.”
For the foreseeable future, Bodine has a thriving business and a caddie job with a top pro. He tries not to lose sight of what he believes makes him a good caddie and helped him get where he is in life.
At a tournament, a caddie spends hours upon hours a day with his pro. You’d better get along. It helps that DeChambeau has fun out there. “I have a blast with him. At the core, he is a very, very, very good person.”
So far, caddie and player are a good match.
“One thing that makes me a good caddie is being good company, honestly,” Bodine says. “When you’re around someone 12 hours a day, you’d better keep things light, keep things funny.
“To not be annoying … I think that’s a job well done.”
Evergreen Golf Club is a premier indoor golf facility in Redmond with eight Trackman simulators, two full-time swing coaches, and professional golf fitness instructors.
