Alejandro Tosti’s caddie reveals the disagreement that made him quit mid-round at the Biltmore Championship
Jordan Bank
Last week, golf fans watched with a mixture of shock and awe as Alejandro Tosti’s caddie Cliff Ellis took off his bib and quit midway through the Argentine tour pro’s opening round at the Biltmore Championship. Tosti pulled a fan from the gallery to loop for him for his remaining nine holes, and afterward joked to Golfweek’s Adam Schupak that Ellis “couldn’t keep up with eight pars in a row.”
Tosti's comment was seemingly in jest, and Ellis confirmed as much on Thursday, joining the TeeBox Golf Show to reveal what really went down at The Cliffs at Walnut Cove last week. Have a listen.
“The whole week was just ludicrous. A lot of just off-the-wall and insane things were going on all week between him and I,” Ellis explained. “Then Thursday morning we got off to a real hot start. We were on the range getting warmed up and we got into a little tussle over the placement of the bag … So I’m like trying to call him down. Like ‘OK, let’s stay focused on this here.’ So just the day was bad. It was just terrible”
“So we’re coming up the 18th hole, which is our ninth of the day, and I pick the bag up. He [Tosti] looks at me and says, ‘why is this umbrella in the bag?’ I said ‘What if it rains? What if you want to use it for sun?’ Which is something he does often. He’ll pop the umbrella open for the walk and get under it so he doesn’t get in the sun. He said something like ‘well, it would be stupid to have it out here.’ I was like ‘are you planning on carrying this bag? What difference does it make to you?’”
“I just tried to brush it off. We have a hand sign we use to say ‘hey, let’s stay focused’ but he was like ‘no, I don’t understand why you’d bring this.’ He said ‘sounds like you’re a —’. He took a personal attack. He used a word I can’t use here on the radio. In the video you can kinda see me pointing to myself, like ‘you’re gonna call me that over this?’ I said ‘I’m gonna let you walk that back real quick and we can go forward,’ but he doubled down on it so I said ‘you know what, I am done with you, I am outta here, I quit.’ He said ‘are you kidding me?’ and I said ‘I’m not kidding you—who would put themselves through this?’”
Just when you thought this story couldn’t get any stranger, it turns out the whole thing was over … an umbrella? It wasn’t just an umbrella though. Tosti has a long rap sheet of this kind of behavior. He was accused of purposely slow playing Min Woo Lee at the 2025 Houston Open as a passive aggressive response to Lee’s own pace-of-play issues, and then responded to Bones McKay’s report by saying “stop the fake news idiots” and “go f0ck yourself failures.” Tosti also appeared to protest his group’s pace of play at the 2024 Sony Open by sitting cross legged beside the green while waiting for his group to hit their approach shots. Tosti, who has earned the reputation for being muy picante, has also taken rules complaints to X, even filming a ruling disagreement mid-round at 2024 Wells Fargo Championship, and notably made Ellis wear a caddie bib at the Valspar Championship earlier this year that read “NEED A WIFE.”
"I offer a lot of good stuff," Tosti said of the humorous bib. "I love cooking. I fly planes. I can play golf and have fun." Unless, of course, you pack an umbrella. In which case, all bets are off.