When Arnold Palmer faced his final round as a Masters competitor in 2004, he delivered one of golf’s more poignant lines.
“I knew it was time,” Palmer said. “But I never wanted it to end.”
On Thursday morning at the Wyndham Championship, Joel Dahmen found himself sharing his own version of Palmer’s words as he spoke for the first time about his separation from longtime caddie and best friend, Geno Bonnalie.
Two weeks ago, as the golf world turned to the Open Championship, Dahmen announced that he and Bonnalie had parted ways. This has been the year of the player-caddie split, with several other high-profile pairs going their separate ways, but this partnership was among the sport’s most enduring and perhaps most beloved. Neither Dahmen nor Bonnalie announced the reason for the split, though as with most player-caddie breakups, there was little explanation needed. Golf is a sport played under the auspices of eat-what-you-kill, and both caddie and player were entering the dog days of a lean year.
Still, the news from Dahmen and Bonnalie — best buddies from childhood, right-hand-men through thick and thin — sent shockwaves through the sport. In a year defined by looper changes (Max Homa and his caddie/best friend Joe Greiner, Collin Morikawa and his longtime looper JJ Jakovac, Matt Fitzpatrick with Billy Foster, Morikawa again with Greiner), and in a sport defined by its many long hours alone on the road, Dahmen and Bonnalie’s was the most striking departure.
As Dahmen spoke from the podium after the low round of his year, a Thursday 61 at the Wyndham that pushed him into the opening-round lead, not even the euphoria of a nine-under start in a do-or-die PGA Tour event was enough to wash away the emotion he still felt about the split.
“Man, I love Geno,” Dahmen said post-round. “We still text almost daily. He’s doing well. Yeah, I mean, I miss him but sometimes the hardest — you have to do something hard to —”
He paused.
“Look, it wasn’t an easy decision,” Dahmen said. “I won’t say I’m not happy about it but it’s hard. He’s my best friend, he’s still my best friend.”
As Dahmen reflected upon the caddie change in the aftermath of his best round of the year, he was quick to dismiss the suggestion that Bonnalie’s looping had been in some way responsible for his poor play.
“I had to change something with me,” Dahmen said. “It was more about me. It was my mentality, it was what I was doing and I need to take ownership of what I was doing. I was not doing a good job of that. So a way for me to do it is as simple as just playing golf on my own a little bit.”
Dahmen has always been a streaky player, and in a strange twist, the move from Bonnalie does seem to have sparked something in his game. He finished T17 in his first start without Bonnalie at the Barracuda Championship, and followed that up with a T39 at last week’s 3M Open. He enters Friday at the Wyndham Championship with a surprising 18-hole lead, and needing a win or runner-up finish to vault a surprise bid into the FedEx Cup Playoffs.
“I mean, I’ve had like three top-2s in my career. I mean, it’s not even a thing, right?” He said when asked about the odds of making a late playoff run. “The Playoffs would be a bonus for me.”
They would be a bonus, sure, but a meaningful one. Dahmen and his wife are expecting a second child soon, and a handful of weeks of big-money paychecks to close out the year would go a long way in setting up Dahmen’s future competitive status … to say nothing of padding the toy selection in the nursery.
Still, these are uncharted waters for Dahmen, who has never experienced life as a PGA Tour pro without Bonnalie on the bag. Thankfully, Geno will remain in his guy’s corner this weekend in Greensboro. He’ll just be taking on a different role.
“So yeah, I love him, I miss him,” Dahmen said. “I think we’ll see him out here again soon.”
