The longest-running player-caddie partnership in golf is wrapping up its 27th straight season (and isn't done yet)

11/07/2024 10:00 AM

LOS CABOS, MEXICO – The phone rang last Wednesday with the New York Yankees in free-fall in the fifth inning of game 5 of the World Series and Mark "Ziggy" Zyons answered it because that's what you do when the boss calls.

Billy Andrade explained he had been extended a sponsor exemption into the World Wide Technology Championship from the title sponsor, who had signed him as its first player ambassador nine years ago.

"I kind of need a wingman," Andrade said. "What do you say?"

After getting the green light from his wife, Ziggy said he was ready for one more week of lugging the bag for his meal ticket of the last 27 years.

"I had just gone fishing for a couple of days and was getting into vacation mode," Ziggy said, but then again there are worse ways to spend a week than playing a PGA Tour event at the southernmost tip of the Baja California Peninsula. For Andrade, who turned 60 in January, it marks his 886^th career start across the three major tours and first start in the big leagues, where he won four times, since he played in the 2014 Canadian Open at Royal Montreal at age 50.

Nearly all of them have been in the company of Ziggy, who is two months younger than his boss, since the 1997 Phoenix Open. That's a longer-running player-caddie partnership than Phil Mickelson and Jim "Bones" Mackay or Jim Furyk and Mike "Fluff" Cowan.

"It has to be the longest," said Ziggy, who got dropped off at the caddie yard at Kirkbrae Country Club in Rhode Island as a kid and seemingly never left. He developed into a pretty good player in his own right, winning the Rhode Island State Amateur in 1985 and pulled off the equivalent of the U.S. over Russia at the 1980 Olympics in hockey when he knocked off Andrade, the No. 1 junior in the country, in 19 holes in the semifinals of the Rhode Island Junior in 1981.

Ziggy caddied for club pro Eddie Kirby while he was still in college at the 1984 and 1987 U.S. Opens and when Kirby earned status on the 1990 Ben Hogan Tour, Ziggy took off on an adventure that still is going strong. He helped Jim McGovern win his lone title at the 1993 Houston Open, but by 1996 McGovern had decided to use his brother and Ziggy had found temporary work for Tim Herron at the Lincoln-Mercury silly-season event at Kapalua on Maui and they got paired with Andrade in the final round.

As the story goes, Andrade squinted into the sun after hitting his tee shot on the first hole and wondered where it went. His caddie didn’t know, but Zyons offered up, “Just down the left side, nice little draw.”

Andrade, who was wrapping up his sixth season with veteran caddie Jeff Burrell, took note of the way Herron and Ziggy communicated. He decided it was time to make a change and fired Burrell a few weeks later at the end of the season.

"So I called Ziggy up and said, 'Hey, I’m coming up for Christmas to Rhode Island, let’s meet for lunch.' So he came up to Bristol. We went and had lunch. Just said, 'Hey, I’m looking for a caddie, and I know that you and Jimmy split up.' "

Ziggy signed on, and he met Andrade at TPC Scottsdale for the Phoenix Open in 1997 and has been by his side ever since. Andrade enjoyed his best West Coast swing with a joint seventh at Pebble Beach and a joint 11th at San Diego, and ended up missing out on the top 30 and berth in the Tour Championship by the grand total of $4.95.

"I really felt a lot of pressure on me, that I had a prove to him that I was a good player, because I didn’t want him to go back to Rhode Island and bad mouth me," Andrade said.

Asked for the secret of their longevity, Ziggy didn't take long to answer. "I was never scared of getting fired," he said. "That’s why it works."

Andrade echoes that sentiment and adds, "too many caddies are too worried about getting fired when they should be worried about doing their job right."

Like any great marriage, Andrade and Ziggy had a few disagreements along the way, but it is a relationship built on trust and mutual respect.

"Sometimes I can be a jerk and he'll tell me I'm being a jerk and to snap out of it," Andrade said. "It's a high-pressure job, you're trying to hit golf shots and get the ball in the hole. He always speaks his mind, which is why I'm paying this guy and the reason he's out there in the first place."

That and he’s a pretty good wing man to have if you’re going to tee it up on the PGA Tour for the first time in 11 years.