Woods Has All The Breaks In The Bag Caddie ‘Fluff’ Cowan Gives His New Boss A Consistent Shot At Success

Mike Cowan has been reading greens most of his life and can readily identify a break, and so he did not misread this one - the break of a lifetime, as it were, for a caddie with an ailing benefactor.

Last August, his boss, Peter Jacobsen, nursing a sore back at home in Portland, loaned Cowan to Tiger Woods for his whirlwind bid to earn PGA Tour membership. The idea was that once Jacobsen was healthy and playing again, Cowan would return to work for him.

This was the story Cowan told an ABC Sports reporter on the first tee of Woods’ first practice round at the Greater Milwaukee Open, where Woods was to make his PGA Tour debut.

A few hours later, after bearing witness to talent of a breadth he had never seen, Cowan supposedly summoned the reporter to the tee box at the 13th hole.

“Remember what I said back there on the first tee?” Cowan said. “Forget about it.”

It was evident almost from the outset that Cowan could earn a far better living on Woods’ bag than on Jacobsen’s. A few weeks later, he asked Woods for a full-time job and was hired on the spot.

“He is every bit as good as he was being built up to be,” Cowan said. “He’s fulfilling the media hype.”

Cowan will be carrying Woods’ bag at the Masters this week. Woods is grateful to play with Cowan, who has caddied in 11 Masters for Jacobsen and understands the nuances of an Augusta National course that generally requires years of experience before it is conquered.

“Mike knows the golf course from all the years he’s been here with Peter,” Woods said. “Some of the putts out there, you just have to have seen for yourself that they break a certain way. And Mike’s been around long enough where he knows these things, and that’s going to be a tremendous help.

“Plus, Mike knows my game. He knows my temperament. We definitely make a great combo, and hopefully we can win this tournament.”

Cowan, 49, worked for Jacobsen for nearly 19 years, the longest running player-caddie relationship on the PGA Tour, and though he initially was hurt by Cowan’s defection, Jacobsen understood Cowan would be better off financially with an exceedingly talented 21-year-old than an often-injured 43-year-old.

Indeed, it turned out to be a lucrative run for Cowan. Though his deal with Woods has not been revealed, a typical player-caddie arrangement calls for a base salary of $700 a week, plus 5 percent of the player’s earnings and 10 percent of his earnings should he win. Applying this formula, Cowan would have earned $70,780 from the eight PGA Tour events in which he was on Woods’ bag in 1996.

“Fluff is a guy who is very sure of himself,” Woods said. “He knows my game to a tee. When I ask him something he’s not afraid to voice his opinion. Other guys are yes men. He’s not. He’ll give you an opinion straight out. That’s why I have the utmost respect for Mike.”

Cowan is better known by his nickname, “Fluff,” and is identifiable by a bushy white mustache that gives the appearance of a man “in the middle of eating a chinchilla,” Tom Callahan wrote in Golf Digest. Cowan is a celebrity in his own right, courtesy of an ESPN commercial.

Cowan is from Winslow, Maine, and attended William Penn College in Oskaloosa, Iowa, where he played No. 1 on the golf team. For a time, he was an assistant pro at a country club in Maine, but lost the job when he got lost en route to a pro-am tournament at which his presence was required.

A friend suggested he attempt caddying when the PGA Tour came to Hartford, Conn., and a career took root. His early years were spent with a series of players without sufficient skill to ensure that Cowan would earn a living.

“I missed a lot of 36-hole cuts,” he said.

He hooked up with Jacobsen in 1978, the latter’s second year on the PGA Tour. It was the start of a long and fruitful relationship that ended when the opportunity to elevate his standard of living presented itself at the Greater Milwaukee Open.