Rory McIlroy confirms split with caddie JP Fitzgerald

Sport360 staff 23:16 02/08/2017
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  • Rory McIlroy and JP Fitzgerald.

    World number four Rory McIlroy has revealed he split from JP Fitzgerald because he was increasingly taking out his frustrations on his caddie of 10 years.

    The pair worked together during all four of McIlroy’s major championship victories, but the last of those was in 2014 and McIlroy has endured a winless, injury-plagued season in 2017.

    “It’s a big change,” McIlroy told a pre-tournament press conference ahead of the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational at Firestone Country Club, where he won three years ago.

    “JP has been a huge part of my life for the last decade.

    “We started in July 2008 and went all the way to July this year, a lot of great times on and off the golf course. I still consider JP one of my best friends but sometimes to preserve a personal relationship you might have to sacrifice a professional one and that was sort of the decision I came to in the end.

    “I was getting very hard on him on the golf course and I didn’t want to treat him like that.

    “It was a really tough decision to make but I thought, ‘I’m coming to Firestone, I have four tournament rounds to get to know someone or get used to having someone else on my bag going into the last major of the year’.

    “I thank JP for everything. He knows how much I think of him, what we’ve achieved together but at the end of the day it was a change I needed to make because I got to the point where if I didn’t play a good shot or made a wrong decision I was getting more frustrated at him than I was at myself.

    “I’d much rather be angry at myself for making a wrong decision than being angry at him.”

    Harry Diamond, the best man at McIlroy’s wedding and a former top amateur player in his own right, will caddy for McIlroy at Firestone and in next week’s US PGA at Quail Hollow.

    It remains to be seen whether that arrangement will become permanent, but McIlroy did not rule out working with Fitzgerald again in the future.

    “I hate the term fired, or sacked or axed because that’s definitely not what it was,” the Northern Irishman added. “I just changed my path a little bit but maybe in the future that path might come back to where it was.”

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