Caddies recall false alarm ‘missile alert’ during 2018 Sony Open
By T.J. Auclair · January 12, 2021
Aaron Flener, caddied for Stephan Jaeger, who finished T54 at the Sony Open:
I was still in my bed at the hotel at the time the alert came to my phone. My roommate Matt Erwin (Tom Lovelady’s caddie) was also there and he was like, “did you see that alert?”
I said, “sure did.”
“What do we do?”
“It’s a ballistic missile, bud. I’m unaware how to combat one of those so I’m just gonna stay in bed.”
“We’ve had a good run, I guess,” he said.
I figured it was a false alarm, so I didn’t alert my family because I didn’t want them to worry. I tweeted the screenshot of the alert out, so I had a few friends text me about it. But overall, we stayed pretty calm. After all, there wasn’t really anything we could do.
— Aaron Flener (@AaronFlener) January 13, 2018
After about 30 minutes or so, they came back and officially said it was a false alarm, so we got up and walked out to breakfast. When our waitress came over, I congratulated her on surviving the missile threat and she laughed. And that’s when my wheels got turning.
I said to Matt, “We gotta make a t-shirt.”
And what I meant by that was, “YOU’VE gotta make us t-shirts.”
My guy had made the cut so I had to go to the course and work, but Matt had the whole day free. So, we mapped out what we wanted it to say. This was the result:
