This ex-caddie is U.S. Ryder Cup team’s Mr. Fix-It (and he’s been busy)

The U.S. Ryder Cup team, just counting uniformed personnel, is bigger than you might imagine. There are 12 players and their 12 caddies, and the caddies have a captain (veteran looper Scott Vail), so that’s 25. The team captain and his five assistants get you to 31. You could count wives and girlfriends, though they are not typically in the team room, or inside the ropes. But you definitely have to count Johnny Wood. Wood, the caddie-turned-broadcaster, is the U.S. team manager, the first ever. In terms of employment opportunities and in every other way, the Ryder Cup is a growth industry. A Ryder Cup in shouting distance of the Empire State Building, as this year’s is, is a colossus.

On Wednesday night, Wood boarded a nonstop overnight JetBlue flight from Sacramento, Calif., where he lives, and arrived at JFK early Thursday morning. He got a cold-brew coffee, collected his suitcase and Ubered out to Bethpage Black, the first team official through the doors of the team room. In his excited state, he ripped open a series of taped boxes without the benefit of a knife. All the while, a kind of mantra ran through his head, a theme he had picked up from Keegan Bradley, the U.S. captain.

You never know when you’re doing something for the last time, so make every second count.

John Wood has been on the scene for a dozen Ryder Cups, going back to 2002, as either a caddie or a broadcaster. Now he has this new gig. Will he be at the 2027 Ryder Cup in Ireland? Who can say? But there he was, Thursday at Bethpage Black, in the home team’s locker room, in the calm before the storm, and he could not have been happier. “There are a lot of great things in golf,” Wood will tell you. “There’s nothing like the Ryder Cup.”

WOOD IS ONE OF GOLF’S interesting characters. Before becoming a PGA Tour caddie, starting with a long stint working for Kevin Sutherland, he was the manager of the Tower Books bookstore in Sacramento. He’s a compulsive book reader; he and Davis Love will sometimes compare notes on the life and times of the writer Hunter S. Thompson. There is likely nobody in golf who knows more about the 1919 Black Sox gambling scandal than Wood, and whenever Wood is in Chicago he visits the gravesite of Buck Weaver, the shortstop on that infamous Chicago White Sox team. Weaver was played by John Cusack in the movie Eight Men Out. Great film but Wood has some problems with the book of the same name. Some matters in it are reported as fact when they are more like theory.

Before getting on that JetBlue redeye flight, Wood had spent two days hiking and camping in the Sierra mountains. It was just Wood, alone with a 30-pound pack (nothing for a former caddie), a tent, some REI food and the novel James, by Percival Everett, a modern take on Huckleberry Finn, who is Wood’s favorite literary character. His second-favorite literary character is Calvin, from the late, great “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon strip. Little blond kid, often reading a book or saying something witty. Wood is drawn to Holden Caufield, from The Catcher in the Rye, forever weary of the “phonies” in his midst. Holden escapes from one of his schools because he was “surrounded by phonies.”

Before his short camping trip, Wood, along with most of the U.S. Ryder Cup team, was in Napa, Calif., at a PGA Tour event there. At a casual team dinner that week in a private home, Bradley offered his climb-every-mountain remarks. The easy take is that this is, quote, Scottie Scheffler’s team, as the squads in Tiger’s prime were, quote, Tiger Woods’s teams. But Bradley, fidgety and excitable and half a New Yorker, is the biggest personality on this U.S. team. Few would disagree with that.

Seth Waugh, the former CEO of the PGA of America, was the first person to think about Bradley as an unlikely captain for this team. But before he even floated Bradley’s name, Waugh asked Wood to be the team manager. That was in May of last year, in a period when the expectation was that Tiger Woods would be the U.S. captain at Bethpage, where he won his first U.S. Open. Woods and Wood have an easy rapport, and their mutual interest in baseball is part of it. (Tiger’s father was a college catcher at Kansas State.) Once, at the 2017 Presidents Cup, Wood asked Woods to take a photo of Barack Obama with the caddie. Woods obliged — and Obama did, too. Wood has a sort of casual, but also present, manner that has made him an easy fit in caddie yards, TV compounds and in 20 or so team rooms over the years.

JOHN WOOD’S FIRST ORDER of business, upon arrival at Bethpage Black, was to check out the team room, the lockers, the lounge chairs, the dinner tables and the rest. He tore open a long series of boxes without the benefit of a knife. (Wood is plank-and-stretching strong, these days.) He checked into, and checked out, the team hotel, where he will have an 11-night stay.

The players and caddies all are on the same floor. Wood imagined the spot, by the elevator bank on the team floor, where two mannequins will act as sentries, of a kind. One will be wearing that day’s player uniform, the other the day’s caddie uniform. Yes, there have been issues in the past. No, John Wood does not get credit for this important innovation. The idea came from Kelly Ford Cameron, daughter of longtime Oakmont pro Bob Ford, who works for Ralph Lauren, official uniform suppliers of the 2025 U.S. Ryder Cup team.

Wood made a special little book for each of the American caddies that reprints the exact language of golf’s rulebook for Rule 22, which covers alternate-shot play, and Rule 23, which covers best ball play. Both forms are used throughout the first two days of play. Kerry Haig, who runs the Ryder Cup as a competition for the PGA of America, saw Wood’s “CliffsNotes”-style rulebook on Thursday and said, “I did the same thing for the rules officials.” Great minds, etc. 

A lot of Wood’s work at Bethpage will involve logistics, and already has. If a player needs an extra umbrella, shoelace, ticket, Wood will be there, item in hand. Upon arrival in the team locker room on Thursday, Wood marveled at how it looked exactly as he had hoped it would, as one large communal room, everybody facing out, nobody siloed. That, Wood said, really is the whole thing about the Ryder Cup experience. Win or lose, you’re in a uniform. You’re on a roster.

“Everybody on these teams played high school golf or college golf,” Wood said in a phone interview. “Then you turn pro, and you might never play team golf again. And that’s really what makes these Ryder Cups so special. All these guys, pulling on the same rope.”

Pulling on the same rope. A phrase of physics, tug-of-war, maritime novels. And now Ryder Cup golf.

The 2025 Ryder Cup begins on Friday, Sept. 26, first ball in the air shortly after 7:10 a.m. It’s a three-day event. John Wood, team manager for the U.S. team, got there early.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com