Tour caddie Geno Bonnalie shares hotel-room horror story

While there are often plenty of travel perks for PGA Tour players, the same can’t always be said for their loopers.

It’s not uncommon for Tour caddies to band together to rent houses, hotel rooms and cars, and sometimes, the digs are decidedly less than stellar. Joel Dahmen’s caddie Geno Bonnalie has gone viral in the past by posting videos of the sometimes questionable accommodations he’s spent time in over the years, documenting the episodes on social media as “Caddie Cribs.”

Just how bad has it gotten in the past? On this week’s episode of Subpar, Bonnalie shared a particularly icky hotel room situation from earlier this year with hosts Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz.

“So we get to New Orleans, and I’m not gonna say the property because it was free,” Bonnalie began. “So I got comped a place at a hotel. It was like 1 o’clock in the morning. We had some flight delays coming from Dominican Republic.

“And I get in, and I’m at the edge of the bed and you know, you plug your phone in here, and I was just kind of laying here because I, you know, it’s a short little cord, and I’m watching “Suits” or whatever I’m into at the time, and now it’s like 1:45, I’m like, I have to go to sleep.

“So I set my phone down and I roll into the middle of the bed. It is sopping wet. And I’m like, no way. And I’m just praying that somebody spilled a water bottle in the middle of this bed. But what are the odds of that happening? It’s not on the top cover, it’s just the mattress. And it’s 1:45 in the morning. And I’m like, if I go down to the front desk now, they’re gonna make me change rooms. And I already unpacked my stuff. I had showered, I got all my stuff in the bathroom. I’m like, you know what? F— it, excuse my language.

“I curled up over in the corner and I closed my eyes and go to sleep.”

Bonnalie said he had a roommate who, when he heard the story the next morning, suggested that they switch rooms. But Bonnalie contended that the staff would be unlikely to believe that it wasn’t Bonnalie himself who wet the bed. So, the pair decided to stay in the room and make the best of it.

“I stripped the covers and I put a do not disturb on the door because I didn’t want housekeeping to come in and find that supposedly I had wet the bed, and when I got back from the course on that Tuesday, it didn’t have a bad odor at the time,” Bonnalie said. “Like I smelled it. It could be water. So I went into the bathroom and got a hair dryer and I put it under the sheet and I started just letting it run and as it warmed up …”

“Oh God, that’s disgusting,” Knost chimed in.

“Now we’re 24 hours into this hotel, and there’s no way anyone’s going to believe that I didn’t p— the bed,” Bonnalie continued. “So I curled up into a ball in the corner again and my roommate’s just laughing at me. I’m like, I don’t have another option. I’m not gonna sleep on the floor. I just kind of scoot over here, I guess. And by day three, I finally got it dried out.”

“That is unbelievable,” Knost said.

“I am so gross,” Bonnalie said. “My wife judges me for that, but I did it.”

For more from Bonnalie, including some less cringey stories, like why he’s in the Guinness Book of World Records and what is was like to be on “Full Swing,” listen to the episode in its entirety below.

Golf.com Editor

As a four-year member of Columbia’s inaugural class of female varsity golfers, Jessica can out-birdie everyone on the masthead. She can out-hustle them in the office, too, where she’s primarily responsible for producing both print and online features, and overseeing major special projects, such as GOLF’s inaugural Style Is­sue, which debuted in February 2018. Her origi­nal interview series, “A Round With,” debuted in November of 2015, and appeared in both in the magazine and in video form on GOLF.com.