Matt Kuchar: Paying El Tucan was the right thing, for the wrong reasons

Matt Kuchar finally put an end to the drama surrounding his payment to David “El Tucan” Ortiz following his victory at the Mayakoba Golf Classic in November. He did the right thing, but was it for the wrong reasons?

Matt Kuchar has long been known as one of the PGA TOUR’s “good guys”. And really that’s saying something when you consider that the Tour has a huge number of players, caddies, employees and partners who are known for doing good in their local communities, as well as for golf overall. Unfortunately, the ongoing drama surrounding his payment of his substitute caddie after November’s Mayakoba Golf Classic threatened to turn that around seemingly overnight.

To catch you up: Kuchar’s normal caddie, John Wood, was unable to make the trip to Mayakoba in November. Kuchar worked with the tournament organizers and wound up making a deal with local caddie David “El Tucan” Ortiz. The two hit it off, and Kuchar wound up winning the tournament, his first TOUR win in more than four years.

Last month, former PGA TOUR player and current Champions Tour member Tom Gillis took it upon himself to take Kuchar to task for what he believed to be unfair payment to Ortiz, and the story snowballed from there. For the past month, Kuchar has been defending his payment, and that only seemed to make things more complicated.

Matt Kuchar’s version of the story was always quite simple, and frankly, easy to understand. He stated that his agreement with Ortiz allowed for a sliding pay scale: $1,000 even with a missed cut, $2,000 for a made cut, $3,000 for a top-20 finish, up to $4,000 for a top-ten. His statement on the final payout of $5,000 was that “the extra thousand was a ‘thank you – it was a great week'”.

Of course, that not only didn’t smooth things over, but it may have made things worse. To be fair, so did statements from Kuchar about how a $5,000 payday was good for a guy who usually makes $200 a day. While he’s really not wrong, it also came off as tone-deaf at best, and elitist at worst. Remember, Kuchar has made over $46 million in prize money alone in his PGA TOUR career. He can afford to drop a few extra bucks, especially for a win. But the question still remained: did he really need to?

I understand the “traditional” Tour looper deal is 10 percent of a player’s earnings for a given week. Find your way to a top guy’s bag, and you can easily make hundreds of thousands on a deal like this, but there’s really only a couple dozen players – at most – that really reach this mark somewhat consistently.

In the 2018 season, 24 players cleared $1 million in earnings. Of the 224 players on the PGA TOUR’s official list, 166 made $500,000 or less. That math is pretty simple: those caddies didn’t even clear $50,000 for the year. And that’s before you take travel expenses and time away from home into account. It seems more than reasonable that a fill-in caddie with none of those sacrifices might expect a slightly lower payday, doesn’t it?

Allow me to be clear: Kuchar should have paid Tucan more, simply because he’s one of the guys who could afford to. But I also understand why he didn’t at first. He hadn’t been playing particularly well, and it’s not like Ortiz knew him and his game, certainly not the way John Wood does. He knows the course, but that was no guarantee of anything. I believe that Kuchar thought he was being fair to Ortiz at first. I also believe that, frankly, other people’s business is none of ours.

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Right or wrong, the mob descended on Kuchar, and while he defended his actions at first (along with some support from Brandel Chamblee, among others), Kuchar either saw the light of his misdeeds, or succumbed to the pressure of said mob, depending on your perception. His statement was perfectly contrite, even if it did come out too late. And while, again, paying Tucan was the right thing to do, I can’t shake the feeling that he did it for the wrong reasons.

Matt Kuchar is a guy who has 20 years of experience, and has barely so much as sniffed true “controversy” in that time. He may have been “stubborn and hard headed” in his business dealings in this instance, but I really don’t think that he had any idea how to deal with such a quick, aggressive and negative backlash.

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At the end of the day, all’s well that ends well, I imagine. Matt Kuchar is still one of the good guys, and if this situation is the worst thing that ever happens to him, I think we can all agree that things will smooth out incredibly quickly. Here’s hoping that we can get back to focusing on golf and less on what comes out of other people’s wallets.

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