Chris Kirk and his caddie have an awesome non-golf use for their yardage book

Any lasting relationship, whether romantic, platonic, or that of PGA Tour player and caddie, can be attributed to a few key traits:

Trust, open communication and the willingness to try new things.

For Chris Kirk and caddie Michael Cromie, who have held down a successful partnership since 2020, that last one is particularly important. “We spend so much time together,” Kirk said this week at Bay Hill, “It’s pretty easy to run out of things to talk about.” So instead of rehashing what they ate for dinner each day, Kirk asked Cromie to start insering a page of trivia within their yardage book to keep him on his toes.

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Each page is usually themed. For instance, one page from the 2023 Players Championship consists entirely of music questions, including a query about which member of Mötley Crüe divorced and then married two different Playboy Playmates in the span of two weeks in 1996. This week at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, Cromie challenged Kirk with a Civil War-focused category. Unfortunately, Kirk says he only went one for four, correctly guessing that the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.

We don’t know if pondering the love life of Nikki Sixx is a distraction while staring down a tricky tee shot with OB looming left, but hopefully we will see more of this kind of thing moving forward. As golf slowly ebbs away from its Conan-the-Bombarian era, perhaps the muscle golfers will begin exercising is the brain.

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