Bryson DeChambeau’s bizarre pitch to his caddie? ‘Dude, I’m lost’

If Bryson DeChambeau weren’t a showman, he might well be a salesman.

In many ways, the current U.S. Open champ already is a salesman — a seller of golf to the golfless, the golf-ambivalent, and the golf-adjacent. Between his YouTube channel and his time inside the ropes, Bryson has shown us his skill for crafting — and delivering — his pitches with impressive precision. Often, you’re rooting along before you even realize you’re being propositioned.

This quality is what makes it so funny, then, to hear the story of how Bryson found his way to perhaps the most impactful piece of his recent resurgence: caddie Greg Bodine. As Bodine tells it, Bryson approached to get him on the bag during a career low, and, well, he didn’t exactly talk up the gig.

During a recent appearance on The Par-3 Podcast, Bodine talked through the path that led him from Tony Finau’s bag to Bryson DeChambeau’s — a journey that began with a bizarrely uninteresting sales pitch.

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Bodine says the call first came ahead of the 2023 PGA Championship at Oak Hill. After an ugly first season with LIV, Bryson had gone through a transformative offseason that included losing 18 pounds in 24 days as part of a newly restricted diet. The problem, though, was that he had come out the other side of it looking … mostly the same. His LIV finishes weren’t improving, and his golf swing felt a long way removed from the player who tormented the 2020 U.S. Open at Winged Foot.

“I went into the Bryson thing — he was playing really poorly,” Bodine said. “He even said — and I respect him and his agent for this — he was like, ‘dude, I’m lost, I have no idea what I’m doing with my game.’ I think he even used the words ‘rock bottom’ and stuff, but, he said, ‘I promise you I’m grinding as hard as I ever have. You know what kind of player I am and you know what kind of worker I am.'”

Bryson was looking for a change, and Bodine represented much more than a bib shift. Bodine exudes a quiet cool that runs counter to Bryson’s number-crunching intensity, and the caddie’s laid-back latitude ran antithetical to the type-A obsessives DeChambeau had long employed on the bag. But the search of new vibes cut both ways. Bodine and his wife had just lived through the unimaginable heartbreak of a miscarriage, and he was uninterested in returning to a PGA Tour caddying life that involved too many long hours and too few trips home.

“LIV was interesting, but I couldn’t do the PGA Tour thing anymore,” Bodine said. “I’d had good players ask me to caddie for them on the PGA Tour, but I was just like I can’t do 30 plus weeks again with everything going on with my family.”

The two golfers saw very different things in one another, but they shared a common spirit. Eventually, Bodine decided to test the waters.

“He took a chance on me, too. I’d never caddied for him before, and he’d seen me in the groups I was paired with him, and so we both were in a really interesting spot in our lives,” Bodine said. “I didn’t know if I would go out there for a week or two and I’d hate every second of it, or I didn’t know if I’d be caddying for Bryson when he was 45.”

They lasted through those first few weeks, and then again through the year that followed. And then DeChambeau’s game started to come online, and the golfer-caddie tandem bonded into something much more than that.

When DeChambeau won the U.S. Open in June, Bodine was among the first people he thanked in his post-round presser. He thanked him when the cameras were off, too — sending the U.S. Open trophy to be with Bodine back home in Seattle for a few weeks. It was a small gesture from DeChambeau, sure, but a telling one for the caddie who proved so instrumental in the turnaround. Thankfully, the feelings are mutual.

“Obviously looking back 14-15 months ago, it’s gone really well,” Bodine said. “He started to play really well, he got this equipment that changed his life. He’s won a handful of LIV events, and obviously the U.S. Open went really well. I’m thankful that door opened and I walked through it.”

You can listen to his whole interview with the Par-3 Podcast here.