Mike Cowan is making the most of his extended COVID-19 pandemic-induced layoff. On March 26, he underwent elective surgery to have a stent inserted in his right leg to open up a partially-blocked peripheral artery. It instantly relieved the pain in his right calf.
If the name Mike Cowan doesn’t ring a bell, you’re not alone. His boss Jim Furyk guesses only about 10 percent of golf fans would recognize that name and says, “I’d be curious how many Tour pros would know it.” One of Cowan’s previous bosses, Tour veteran Peter Jacobsen, says that any time he mentions his former caddie by his name during a speaking engagement he gets the same response.
“I get blank stares,” Jacobsen says.
As soon as Jacobsen mentions his nickname, there’s a collective look of recognition.
To the man better known as Fluff, all that matters is this: “The guys who’ve written checks to me have known,” he says.
Everybody loves Fluff, perhaps golf’s most famous caddie. He’s certainly the hippiest caddie and one of the Last of the Mohicans, dating back to the days when loopers found work in the parking lot and subsistence living meant bunking four to a room and eating under the golden arches. And yet Fluff keeps showing up with a smile and his trademark fluffy, walrus mustache, which he last shaved off in 1984 and makes him the spitting image of actor Wilford Brimley.
“If you told me 10 years ago that Mike would still be caddying at 72 years old, I’d have chuckled and said, ‘C’mon. Get out of here,’ ” Furyk says. “But he’s still going strong.”
Let’s start with the nickname.
A couple of otherwise long-forgotten Eddies from Jacksonville, Florida – Eddie Davis and Eddie Fletcher – coined the name in the late 1970s because they thought Cowan bore a resemblance to Steve Melnyk, the 1969 U.S. Amateur champion, Florida Gator and former PGA Tour pro turned broadcaster. Melnyk’s nickname in college was Fluff, and they started calling Cowan “Short Fluff.”
“Pretty soon it was shortened to Fluff,” Cowan says. “I think they were trying to get my goat because Steve Melnyk isn’t exactly the most handsome man.”
Fluff accepted it as something of a rite of passage, noting, “It’s almost like you haven’t made it in the caddie world until you’ve got a nickname.”
Fluff’s first PGA Tour event was a Monday Qualifier for the 1976 Greater Hartford Open long before it became known as the Travelers Championship. He caddied for Dave Smith at Tunxis Plantation (now known as Tunxis Country Club) in Farmington, Connecticut.
“I was so green that when he didn’t qualify I didn’t know enough to go to the course and see if I could get a bag there,” Fluff says.
Smith asked him to go to the Buick Open the next week and Fluff, who learned the game from his father growing up in Maine, played small-time college golf at William Penn University, and had recently been fired from his job as an assistant golf pro, couldn’t think of anything better to do that summer than follow around the pro circuit. For his first half dozen or so events he never worked for the same guy twice. He showed up at the next stop and worked the Monday qualifier. Back then, it was easy to find a bag in the parking lot. No one was out there to make a living – his first bag paid him $20 a day and 3 percent of earnings.
“Cesar Sanudo was the first pro that actually paid me $100 when we missed the cut. That was huge,” he says. “Gypsy (Joe Grillo) and I stayed together a lot, almost regularly. A bunch of us would share a room, low round of the day would get the bed and the rest of us would make do. If you had a good week, you partied hard; if you didn’t, you got by. It wasn’t like we were out there saving money. But I didn’t have anything but me.”
At the last event of the season, Fluff looped for Ed Sabo at Walt Disney World, and after Sabo paid him he asked Fluff a question that would come to define his life: “What are you doing next season?”
“I had no intentions of turning this into what it has become,” Fluff says. “I’ve never planned anything in my life. I always have gone with the flow. It must be the Grateful Dead in me. Every time I went home to see my dad, he’d ask me, ‘When are you going to quit this caddie thing? When are you going to find yourself a real job?’ After four, five years working with Peter, my dad quit asking me that question.”
Peter would be Peter Jacobsen and they first met at Silverado Country Club in Napa, California, in the fall of 1977.
“He looked like a cross between Grizzly Adams and Jerry Garcia,” Jacobsen says. “He introduced himself and said he was impressed with my game.”
Fluff didn’t start packing for Jacobsen until the following spring at the Heritage Classic. At the time, Fluff was living in his car with a dog named Shivas and hoping just to earn food and gas money to get from one tournament to the next. He was (and remains) a loyal “Dead Head,” and anytime they drove to a tournament together, Fluff cracked open his case of cassettes of bootleg Grateful Dead concerts. (Fluff has since upgraded to a hard drive with every concert the band has ever played.) Jacobsen, who once joined Fluff at a concert in Providence and eventually converted into a fan of the band, loved to push Fluff’s buttons and saw the Dead as an easy target. He’d say that he listened to a one-hour special on the Dead last night. “They played all their greatest hits for two minutes and talked to them for the other 58,” Jacobsen recalls. “He’d get really pissed at me.”
For more than 18 years, Fluff was as important as any club in Jacobsen’s bag. Fluff claimed his first winning bag with Jacobsen at the 1980 Buick Open before many of today’s players were even born. In August 1996, at the PGA Championship at Valhalla Golf Club, Jacobsen withdrew midway through the second round. He could barely walk. That Friday afternoon as Fluff packed Jacobsen’s golf bag, his boss said he was going home and didn’t intend to play again until he was healthy.
“I didn’t know whether that was going to be two weeks or two months. I went home to wait it out. During that time, I got a call from Tiger. It was right after he won his last U.S. Amateur in Portland. Tiger basically said to me, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m not doing nothing.’ He said he was turning pro and asked me to work the next six, seven events. I said, ‘I don’t know when Peter will be ready again but I can work the next couple, for sure, and then go from there,’ ” Fluff recalls. “It was two, three events into working for Tiger and I’m seeing stuff that is blowing my mind, the shots he hit, the distance he hit it. Everything about his golf game was ‘Oh my God, what is this?’ I knew from the get-go it was special.
“I still hadn’t come to grips with anything until I caught wind that there was a caddie – and I’d just assume not name him – that wanted to make a play for Tiger’s bag. It was at that point where I thought, I can’t let this go by. I’ve got this job right now. All I thought I had to do was tell Tiger I was ready to go full time.
“It was at that point that I called Peter. I hated doing it over the phone but that was the only way to do it. I said I was going to go to work for Tiger. That’s kind of how that all went down. I was family with Peter. I changed his kid’s diapers. I lived with them in the off-season in Portland back when we used to have an off-season. Peter took it in stride and (his wife) Jan said to me if I didn’t take it she was going to fire me.”
Fluff still calls it one of the hardest decisions he’s ever had to make in his life. To this day, he will see people point at him and say, ‘That’s Tiger’s old caddie.’ Usually Fluff will let the remark pass but sometimes he’ll correct them and say, “No, I’m not Tiger Woods’ caddie. I’m Peter Jacobsen’s caddie. I had a stint with Tiger, which was wonderful, and when I was Tiger’s caddie I was his caddie, but in my mind I was always Peter Jacobsen’s caddie.”
Fluff was on the bag for Tiger’s first major championship as a pro at the 1997 Masters. That’s the one when Tiger famously shot 40-30 in the opening round and then cruised to a 12-stroke victory. As they made the turn after shooting 40, Fluff delivered the following pep talk. “I don’t know what it had to do with anything but walking to the 10th tee, I said something to the effect of it’s nothing more than the start of a long tournament. Let’s go shoot something in the red and we’ll be all right, and from there he just dominated that golf course.”
“Tiger was fun to work for,” Fluff continues. “He never put the blame on me for anything that happened. I’ve been very fortunate because there are a lot of players that, for whatever reason, can’t take the blame for their own actions. So, who is the closest one to them? Their caddie. They get blamed. I’ve never had that out of a player. Not one of them has ever blamed me for something that happened. Jim may be the best at it.”
Jim would be Jim Furyk, his employer since 1999. After the final round of the Nissan Open at Riviera Country Club that year, Tiger ended their 29-month partnership in the parking lot.
“I don’t hold a bit of animosity because he fired me. I don’t know why he did it exactly. I’ve never asked him and I never will. I don’t care,” Fluff says. “It happened and you move on. You can’t worry about what isn’t. All my life, I’ve hated ‘What if.’ Deal with what comes along. I never went, ‘Oh jeez, I could’ve won that Open.’ ”
Instead, he went home and waited. Well, there was a short-term flirtation. Fluff is passionate about playing the game and toyed with the idea of turning professional.
“Be it the mini tours or try to Monday into some Senior Tour events. At that time, I still felt like I could play, but nothing ever came of it,” he says.
The week of the 1999 Players Championship, after Furyk had parted ways with caddie Steve Duplantis, Fluff got a phone call. Furyk’s wife Tabitha and father Mike made the initial overtures to see if Fluff was interested.
“Jim and I started at a small, little tournament in Augusta,” Fluff jokes of their debut at the Masters. “That was my first week. It helps that I’ve had a great deal of success with Jim. As it turns out, I’ve done just fine.”
Together, Furyk and Fluff won the 2003 U.S. Open, the 2010 Tour Championship and FedEx Cup and shot a 59 at Conway Farms and the Tour’s all-time low 18-hole score of 58 at TPC River Highlands. To commemorate those sub-60 rounds, Fluff framed his pin sheets for his boss. When ticking off a list of what makes Fluff exceptional at his job, Furyk compliments him for never being late – “not once” – and loves that he has the demeanor of a sphinx.
“He’s the same guy whether I’m shooting 60 or 80,” says Furyk, who has employed Fluff for 21 years as of next week, “although his (Maine) accent comes out when he gets excited.”
Back to Fluff, who still remembers one instance at the par-3 16th at Augusta National where they were in-between clubs and Fluff recommended a comfortable 5 iron over nuking a six.
“So, he hits 5-iron over the green, which is not a good place to be on that hole,” Fluff says. “His comment to me was, ‘I hit that harder than I wanted to.’ He put the blame on himself rather than my decision.”
Fluff is golf’s iron man. (Only Pete Bender and Andy Martinez who started in 1969 have been caddying on Tour longer, but both took extended breaks.) He’s like the Energizer Bunny; he keeps going and going, losing weight and ditching the Mountain Dews that used to fuel him.
“My dad used to say to me the world belongs to those who show up. And that’s what he does,” Jacobsen says. “He shows up, and I’ve never seen him have a bad when he’s caddying.”
Even his peers marvel at his endurance and longevity.
“It’s not possible,” says Paul Tesori, caddie for Webb Simpson. “And when Jim takes time off he’ll go find another bag and keep working.”
“It blows me away,” says Neil Oxman, a longtime caddie, most notably for Tom Watson. “And let it be known that Furyk has one of the heaviest bags.”
How much more mileage is left in Fluff? Three years ago, he said he wanted to hang on long enough for his daughter, Bobbie, to graduate high school. That would be next spring. Earlier this year, Fluff hobbled around and missed a few pro-ams and practice rounds. But he could be in store for a new lease on life later this year, when Furyk turns 50 and becomes eligible for PGA Tour Champions. Whenever Furyk makes the jumps, Fluff will be able to use a golf cart until the tournament starts on Friday (the vast majority of senior tournaments banned the use of golf carts during tournament play in 2015) and most of them are only 54 holes rather than the typical 72-hole grind on the junior circuit. Still, even after successful surgery, Fluff knows he’s deep into the back nine of a legendary career.
“If you saw me after the round getting out of my car at the hotel, you’d say, ‘How the hell is he going to caddie tomorrow?’ But somehow or other I get out here and I put one foot in front of another. How many more years? I can’t really say. Until I’m a hindrance. I’m thinking I might outlast Jim. I’m thinking he might retire before me. Just imagine if I can make it to 80, then I can be really crotchety.”