Meet Sergio’s new caddie

Mark Johnson tweeted his hero for 206 days... then the Spaniard said yes

Mark Johnson is living proof that dreams do come true. The 40-year-old postman has always wanted to caddie for Sergio Garcia, so he decided to ask. Via Twitter. Every day. Nearly seven months later and Garcia caved in, and Johnson will carry his clubs at the 2017 British Masters pro-am. We caught up with him to find out exactly how he convinced the Ryder Cup star to let him don the white bib at Close House in September.

I’m not a big Twitter person, but I saw one guy on there who was trying to get Gary Barlow to sing at his friend’s 40th birthday. He was sending a tweet to him every day, and it got me thinking. My dream has always been to caddie for Sergio Garcia, so I thought why don’t I tweet him every day with the hashtag ‘let me caddie for you’. I then added the hashtag Day 1 or Day 2 at the end of every tweet and I carried it on for 206 days.

My brother-in-law Steve was the one who told me to keep it going. I almost gave up, but all of a sudden Sergio liked one of my tweets. I knew then that he was reading them. Occasionally, I tweeted his girlfriend Angela and she’d always like them so that kept me going.

I was in the bathroom cleaning my teeth before work when he tweeted me and said I could caddie for him. I ended up dancing around the bathroom with my toothbrush at 5.30 in the morning. All my family were fast asleep, so I had to wait until they woke up before I could show them the tweet on a text.

The week after the story broke was absolutely crazy. My phone was going nuts and radio stations in Australia and New Zealand were messaging me. I was in the New York Times and Washington Post, and I was getting bombarded with messages and requests. The reaction was unbelievable.

Plenty of thinking actually went into messaging him. If he was teeing off at midday, I’d tweet him three or four hours beforehand. If he had a good round, I’d always tweet about golf. If he didn’t have a good round or wasn’t playing that week, I’d tweet about my family life or my game. I tried to show that I’m just a normal bloke trying to fulfil a dream. There was only one day when I didn’t tweet him, and that was when I went away for my 40th birthday. And the only reason I didn’t was because I had no wifi.

I’ve got leave booked for the week of the British Masters. My missus has the day off work, my son has the day off school. My mum and dad and my brother are going to come up, and hopefully my mates are going to be there too. We might even have t-shirts printed with the hashtag ‘Let me caddie for you’ on the front.