Nick Price: Caddie was joking about drunken 1986 Masters story

It turns out veteran caddie David McNeilly was kidding about being drunk while on the bag for Nick Price during the third round of the 1986 Masters.

Over the weekend, McNeilly recalled the Friday night after his boss made the cut, saying, “I actually overdid it, and I was way, way too drunk when I arrived on Saturday.” Price then told Golf Digest the story was actually just a joke.

“That whole thing was done very tongue in cheek,” Price said. “It just shows the power of social media. I’ve had probably a couple hundred messages from people saying, ‘Oh, Nick, I can’t believe this is true.’ And I say, ‘Exactly, and the Russians landed on Mars yesterday.’”

During that second round, Price carded a course-record 63 to make the weekend. While McNeilly may have celebrated accordingly that night, it wasn’t to the extend he had claimed.

“He was 100 percent normal,” Price said. “If he’d been that drunk, he’d have been looking for another job. The only thing that’s true about that whole 8-minute speech was the fact that I shot 63 that day. The rest of that is absolute rubbish. It’s David McNeilly to a T.

“I told him, ‘You should have written a book, David,'” Price laughed. “‘You would have been right up there with J.K. Rowling.'”