Throughout the year, Shaw golf stars Graham DeLaet and Adam Hadwin will check in and present insights from the PGA Tour.
The relationship between a caddie and a golfer varies with every player.
I’ve worked with my caddie, Julien Trudeau, for several years now.
Julien is a very good player—he almost got his PGA Tour card in 2009—and has been on Golf Channel’s Big Break, but he decided to start caddying and worked for Chris Baryla.
Chris was playing on the Web.com Tour, but wasn’t getting many starts and has battled with a lot of injuries. I called and told him I was looking for a caddie and he said Jules works his butt off. That’s certainly true. Julien really puts in a lot of time—he’s really good at his job and he really loves it at the same time.
I remember when we first started working together that he’d never have seen the courses, so he’d be out all day looking for the details of the course. He still goes out every week to make sure nothing has changed on the courses from year to year. He still does his due diligence every week.
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When we started we had mutual friends, but that’s as far as it went. But we’ve become good friends in recent years. We can still make our relationship about work when it needs to be. I can say, ‘Hey, let’s stop messing around,’ and we can get at it. He understands the dynamic between us. The great thing about our friendship is that even after seven or eight hours we can go out and get a bite to eat and not even recognize we’ve spent most of the day together.
The fact that Julien was a great player is also a big bonus to my way of thinking. It is nice to have a good player on your golf bag because they recognize the details. Having a good player like Julian brings that little extra that a 10-handicap might not understand.
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At the end of the day, every shot I hit and every club I use is my decision. But it is to my benefit to have Julien’s input. He’ll say, ‘Bud, this is just like that punch 6-iron you hit at Hilton Head.’ He’s able to put great thoughts in your head relating to a shot you might have hit before. There’s more to it than hitting the shot—it is the kind of shot you want to hit. Pretty much any PGA Tour pro, when he’s not dealing with wind, can hit the shot, but you have to know the shot you need given the conditions.
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