This player-caddie partnership is finishing year 27 and still going

LOS CABOS, MEXICO – The phone rang last Wednesday with the New York Yankees in free-fall in the fifth inning of game 5 of the World Series and Mark “Ziggy” Zyons answered it because that’s what you do when the boss calls.

Billy Andrade explained he had been extended a sponsor exemption into the World Wide Technology Championship from the title sponsor, who had signed him as its first player ambassador nine years ago.

“I kind of need a wingman,” Andrade said. “What do you say?”

After getting the green light from his wife, Ziggy said he was ready for one more week of lugging the bag for his meal ticket of the last 27 years.

“I had just gone fishing for a couple of days and was getting into vacation mode,” Ziggy said, but then again there are worse ways to spend a week than playing a PGA Tour event at the southernmost tip of the Baja California Peninsula. For Andrade, who turned 60 in January, it marks his 886^th career start across the three major tours and first start in the big leagues, where he won four times, since he played in the 2014 Canadian Open at Royal Montreal at age 50.

Nearly all of them have been in the company of Ziggy, who is two months younger than his boss, since the 1997 Phoenix Open. That’s a longer-running player-caddie partnership than Phil Mickelson and Jim “Bones” Mackay or Jim Furyk and Mike “Fluff” Cowan.

“It has to be the longest,” said Ziggy, who got dropped off at the caddie yard at Kirkbrae Country Club in Rhode Island as a kid and seemingly never left. He developed into a pretty good player in his own right, winning the Rhode Island State Amateur in 1985 and pulled off the equivalent of the U.S. over Russia at the 1980 Olympics in hockey when he knocked off Andrade, the No. 1 junior in the country, in 19 holes in the semifinals of the Rhode Island Junior in 1981.

Ziggy caddied for club pro Eddie Kirby while he was still in college at the 1984 and 1987 U.S. Opens and when Kirby earned status on the 1990 Ben Hogan Tour, Ziggy took off on an adventure that still is going strong. He helped Jim McGovern win his lone title at the 1993 Houston Open, but by 1996 McGovern had decided to use his brother and Ziggy had found temporary work for Tim Herron at the Lincoln-Mercury silly-season event at Kapalua on Maui and they got paired with Andrade in the final round.

Billy Andrade chats with his caddie on the seventh hole during the second round of the Sanford International 2024 at Minnehaha Country…