Lorcan Morris was only seven or eight when he watched Ian Woosnam win the 1989 Carroll’s Irish Open at Portmarnock, close to his family home in north Dublin, but two things stood out.
Firstly, seeing Philip Walton, a fellow Dubliner, take world number six Woosnam to a play-off suggested that he too could grow up to compete at the very top level. If Walton could do it...
Also, the thought struck the youngster while watching caddy Pete Coleman lug Bernhard Langer’s big red and white Wilson bag around the old links that there were more ways than one to get to the PGA Tour.
“I remember thinking, it doesn’t matter if I don’t play golf, I can caddy, I just want to be inside the ropes doing this,” said Morris, 32 years later and now a PGA Tour caddy living in Boiling Springs outside Charlotte, South Carolina.
“For the rest of my life I’ll tell people that was the day, there was no way at all that I was not going to be on the PGA Tour as a player or a caddy, it just wasn’t an option. Failure was not an option, it just wasn’t. I don’t know how to explain it other than that. It sounds so stupid.”
Morris is currently on Englishman Ben Taylor’s bag but if this sounds like a straight line story from boyhood dream to realisation as an adult, it really isn’t.
For starters, Morris initially did his level best to make it as a top player and, with that end goal in mind, made a ballsy, perhaps even reckless, career move at the age of just 18 to try to make it happen.
By the teenager’s reckoning, he’d need to follow the well-trodden path of college golf in the US to make it onto the PGA Tour so sold his spare set of clubs, bought a plane ticket to the States and pitched up at Miami Airport with 100 dollars in his pocket and the aim of securing a scholarship.
Once out of arrivals, he found a taxi man and asked for the nearest golf club which happened to be the Miami International Links, about a well struck driver away. There’s a Sheraton Hotel nearby too and Morris blagged an arrangement with the golf club manager Charles DeLuca, whom he’d just met, to collect balls at the driving range each morning in return for lodgings in the basement of the hotel.
“I remember I said, ‘Man, I swear to God, this is what I have, I have 100 dollars’ and, you know, I think it might have been down to like 60 dollars because of the cab!” said Morris on The Caddie Network’s Under The Strap podcast.
“I said, ‘This is what I’ve got’. He said, ‘I can’t believe it!’ I said, ‘Yeah, I want to play college golf in America, I think I’m good enough to play college golf’.”
He lived there for 18 months and got to play in a series of amateur events, one of which he finished runner-up in behind a player whose father was the head golf coach at Wingate University in North Carolina. Bingo!
“So his Dad came up on the weekend and we met and he said, ‘We’d love to have you if you’d consider going to our university’,” said Morris. “It could have been UCLA, UFC, anywhere! He showed me pictures, this four-page pamphlet that was folded over, everybody was smiling, it looked like a scene from Beverly Hills 90210.
I said, ‘Yes, I’m going there, that is the college for me!’
Morris studied broadcast journalism from 2001 to 2006 and his golf improved considerably. A former member of the devilishly difficult The Island in Donabate, he won the prestigious 2005 Amateur Golf Tour Championship in Myrtle Beach. “This was make or break for me,” Morris told a reporter at the time. “I told myself if I didn’t win, I was not going to turn pro”.
But he did win and he did turn pro and, for a while, his graph kept nosing upwards in the direction of the PGA Tour.
“I won seven or eight times on mini-tours,” he said. “I was playing against very good players, players that are now on the PGA Tour.”
One of those players was Kevin Streelman, currently ranked 59th in the world, and he and Morris often travelled together to events to save money.
Streelman hit his first shot as a PGA Tour rookie at the 2008 Sony Open in Hawaii. He enjoyed full use of a courtesy car that week, free gloves and golf balls and a specially made Scotty Cameron putter that was left in his locker for him. Morris, meanwhile, was forced to pack it all in shortly after.
“I don’t know what it takes to get to the next level, all I can tell you is I gave it 10,000%,” he said. “My whole existence was based on trying to play on the PGA Tour as a golfer. I didn’t get there, Streelman got there, many other guys have got there, G-Mac (Graeme McDowell) got there, Graeme and I played amateur golf together against each other.”
The economic crash forced Morris’ hand at the time too.
“I think having the money to hang in there is huge, I spent a lot of my professional career not knowing if I was going to have the money to play next week.
A guy would come up and give me the money for the entry fee this week or maybe for the next three weeks but where was I going to be in four weeks’ time? Constantly being broke is not much fun.
Morris could have returned to Ireland. Instead, he rang Laura Davies, once the world’s best female golfer and someone he’d struck up an unlikely relationship with as a kid.
He was clearing rubbish at the 11th tee-box of St Margaret’s Golf Club in the week of the 1994 Ladies Irish Open, when he first encountered the English woman who would go on to win the tournament.
“She said, ‘You should caddy for me for the last eight holes’,” recalled Morris. “I probably looked like the guy who gets pulled over after drinking 20 beers by the highway patrol man! Total deer in the headlights stuff.”
But he caddied for Davies, got her contact number and kept in touch. In 2009, after packing in pro golf, he rang again about a caddying job.
“She said, ‘Listen, I’ll be in Arkansas next week, I’m going to get you a job and it’s up to you to keep it’,” said Morris.
She said, ‘Let me be clear, I’m getting you your first job, I’m not getting you another one if you lose it’.
The gig was with Colombian LPGA Tour player Marissa Baena.
“I worked with Marissa through the end of ‘09 when she retired, I pretty much figured it out from there.”
For the next few years, Morris skipped between the PGA and LPGA Tours, on the bags of Len Mattiace, Robert Damron, Sydnee Michaels, Ryan Brehm and Taylor.
He even looped for Michelle Wie for a while but in early 2016 jacked the caddying game in. His daughter, Trinity, was growing up fast and he was missing so much by being away for so long. A second child, Fergus, was on the way too.
Ireland wasn’t an option this time, nor Laura Davies. Instead, he signed up for the local firefighting academy. His brother Conor is a fireman in Ireland and his parents had been at him to settle down with a ‘proper job’ for years.
The first day of class, the academy director said that the number one graduate would be guaranteed a job and they’d get to speak at the graduation.
“My parents were coming over for the graduation,” said Morris. “I made it my life goal, again, nothing was going to stop me graduating number one. The average age of my class was 19.7 years of age. I was 35 and I graduated number one and got to speak at graduation. I remember saying to my Mam and Dad, ‘Anybody can be a fireman - when is Conor going to caddy on the PGA Tour?!’”
Morris worked at that for a while, got his amateur status back - he won a competition using one of Wie’s old drivers and was the low man at the 2017 Connacht mid-amateur championship off +4.1 when he returned to play in Athenry - before getting an offer to work for Brehm on a week’s trial.
“I think that caddying is like a drug, I was hooked again right away,” smiled Morris. He’s since moved onto Taylor’s bag and to supplement his caddying income now works shifts as a firefighter when he’s not at tournaments.
He was in Bermuda last October with Taylor for the $4m Bermuda Championship on the PGA Tour. Brian Gay won it and pocketed $720,000. Taylor shot 71-72-70-70 for a T49th finish and a $10,180 payout.
Morris spent Monday relaxing on the beach before jetting back home that night. He’d signed up for a Tuesday morning shift at the firehouse, figuring he might have a quiet day and avoid the inevitable list of jobs waiting for him at home after the Bermuda trip. About 20 minutes into the shift, the call came in to attend a house fire.
“Serves me right,” he thought.
Still a young man, Morris retains big ambitions. Win a major on someone’s bag, experience the Ryder Cup, the President’s Cup. He wants it all. Just like he always has.
- The full interview with Dubliner Lorcan Morris on The Caddie Network’s Under The Strap podcast is available on Spotify.
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