The Shadows That Follow Angel Cabrera

It can be challenging to be a golf fan. Your favorite player might get a DUI or appear on the back page of the New York Post in a tawdry sex scandal or become mixed up in an insider trading case or do time for tax evasion. How do we separate the flaws of the person from their mastery as golfers? Maybe we’re not supposed to. Or maybe it’s okay to recognize that imperfect people can still thrill us as golf fans, however uncomfortable that may be. Angel Cabrera is a particularly vexing case.

He does not have the starpower of Tiger Woods or the charisma of Phil Mickelson or Jim Thorpe. Brooding and mysterious, Cabrera has always seemed like the living embodiment of the gauchos who populate the folklore of his native Argentina. His golfing genius is undeniable, as only four Hall of Fame talents have similarly conquered both Oakmont and Augusta National: Jack Nicklaus, Ben Hogan, Sam Snead (the ‘51 PGA Championship!) and Dustin Johnson. But while golf’s fallen heroes have tended to harm only themselves, Cabrera’s trespasses were more heinous:

Beginning in 2016, his ex-wife, Silva Rivadero, and two former girlfriends, Micaela Escudero and Cecilia Torres Mana, accused Cabrera of making menacing threats and being physically abusive. Across separate trials in 2021 and ‘22, he was convicted of “causing minor injuries” and “intimidation in a gender-violence context.” Cabrera spent 30 months in jail for his crimes, in three different prisons in Argentina and Brazil.

Cabrera in 1997 at Royal Troon.

By all accounts he was a model prisoner. Drinking had been his devil and he blames it for the violence he brought to his relationships; since being released from jail, in late 2023, Cabrera has maintained his sobriety. He apologized to his victims in court and remains appropriately contrite. Cabrera, 55, didn’t touch a golf club for three years, though he says he took a few swings with a broomstick in the prison yard just to remember what it felt like. In recent months he has rediscovered his old magic, winning three times on the Champions Tour, including a pair of majors. It is a comeback for the ages, but is it a redemption story? “He paid his debt to society,” says Champions Tour player Billy Andrade. “I think everyone needs and deserves second chances in this life. He’s making the most of his.” Andrade has detected no misgivings from the crowds cheering on Cabrera. “It’s been nothing but love,” he says.

His colleagues appear to be more ambivalent: seven Champions Tour players declined comment for this story, with one of Cabrera’s Presidents Cup teammates saying, “Respectfully, I’d like to stay out of this.” Steve Flesch is slightly more expansive: “I’d say most players are cautiously supportive and polite to him.”

As the U.S. Open returns to Oakmont, it is a reminder of Cabrera’s victory there at the ‘07 Open, during which he dusted Woods in a taut final round. Cabrera will not be in the field this time and pointedly absent in the celebrations of Oakmont’s rich history; the gentlemen’s game is still struggling with how to reconcile his reemergence. Cabrera served much of his sentence in Carcel de Bouwer prison in Argentina, which is nicknamed El Penal del Infierno. “He has quite literally been to hell and back,” says Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee. “The level of violence and degradation he faced every day is unimaginable, even if he won’t publicly acknowledge it. To return and play at the level he has is almost unprecedented in the game’s history. Does that make it okay to cheer for Angel Cabrera? I think each person has to decide that for themself.” To do so, it is instructive to know more about Cabrera’s long, tortured journey to the forefront of the game and his unlikely return.

A month after Cabrera’s U.S. Open victory I traveled with bilingual reporter Luis Fernando Llosa to Cabrera’s hometown of Villa Allende to try to understand a champion who has always been shrouded by a language barrier. As with every Friday night back then, Cabrera gathered with two dozen of his compañeros in the backroom of the Almacen y Bar Condor, a local dive. They were caddies, carpenters, gardeners, handymen and other hard-living, hard-drinking characters from his old barrio of Mendiolaza. Women, and strangers, were not welcome in the backroom. The front doors were barred once the usual gang arrived, for safety and exclusivity. Dinner was served on rickety wooden tables. Cabrera’s appetites are like his tee shots — prodigious. He homed in on a heaping platter of bifes a caballo, a dish of succulent beef buried under a blanket of runny fried eggs. Tableware was considered an extravagance with this crowd so Cabrera grabbed a chunk of the messy fare with his fingers and jammed it into his mouth. He gestured for all to join in, egg yolk dripping from his hand. This was washed down by a Cordobese specialty: Coca-Cola with Fernet Branca, a bitter, aromatic spirit. Fernet is made in Italy, and Cabrera likes to tell the story about a long-ago Italian Open during which he was kicked out of a restaurant because the proprietor considered it vulgar to mix Coke with such a prized digestif. At the Condor the concoction was chugged out of sawed-off two-liter plastic soda bottles.

Cabrera breathed it all in, just another Friday night with his boys. “Just because I won the U.S. Open doesn’t mean that I’m going to change the way I live,” he said. “I’m going to continue living in Villa Allende, eating asados, drinking Fernet. I’m going to do what I’ve always done.” In fact, he imbibed so much Fernet that at one point he fell over backward in his chair, hitting his head on the concrete floor.

He drank to forget about his past. His boyhood home was on a quiet dirt road in Mendiolaza, on the edge of an arroyo strewn with garbage. On the day we visited, stray dogs wandered about listlessly, ignoring the packs of children running through the streets. Cabrera’s father, Miguel, was a changarin (handyman) who is said to have shared his son’s taste for spirits. His mother, Luisa, was a dark-haired beauty who worked as a maid. Angel was three or four when his parents split up. His mom took custody of his younger brother and sister, while Angel was left in the care of his paternal grandmother, Pura Concepcion, to sleep on a bunk bed in the living room of the tiny, tin-roofed house. He would live with her until he was 16, and it was a hand-to-mouth existence. Pura Concepcion was a housekeeper, and as a boy Cabrera would sometimes tag along with her to the homes of Villa Allende’s elite. He did some work as a gardener for Juan Cruz Molina, a local real estate magnate. That gig ended the day Cabrera took a nap on Molina’s porch. “His wife found me there and ran me off,” said Cabrera with a hearty laugh. “She fired me.”

When Cabrera was 10 he found a calling that would change the course of his life: He began caddying at Cordoba Country Club, an exclusive enclave that dates to 1922. Cabrera could make 25 pesos per loop. To him this was a living wage. “I didn’t become a caddie because I wanted to be a caddie,” he says. “I was a caddie because that was how I could make money and feed myself. It was work. It was a dignified job.”

When he was in sixth grade Cabrera dropped out of school to caddie full time. As a member of the club, Molina liked to use Cabrera as a looper, but concerned for the boy’s future, he offered to pay Cabrera to stay in school, to no avail. “Why should I study?” Cabrera said. “In order to carry clubs?” (It has long been whispered among the golf press that Cabrera is illiterate but he shrugs this off. “I can read and write,” he says. “I went to school for six years. I just couldn’t continue.”)

The walk from his grandmother’s house to the club was only 10 blocks uphill but for Cabrera the journey was transforming. “I was very lucky because hanging out at a golf course was much better than being on the streets,” he says. “Golf taught me a great deal. I grew up surrounded by people who were professionals—lawyers, doctors, engineers. Around them I learned how to behave, speak, eat, dress. I had nothing at home. The club was my home.”

Cabrera got a different kind of education every Monday, when the club was closed and the caddies took over the place for spirited money games. In this milieu he learned to play golf and to compete. By his late teens Cabrera had honed a smashmouth game. Cordoba Country Club is a par-72 of 6,786 yards, with its primary defense being the small, sloping greens. It is wide open off the tee, and Cabrera says, “I learned to swing away. I didn’t care. I was always going for it.” With a nod to two other preeminent feel players Eduardo Romero and Andres Romero (no relation), Cabrera’s swing coach Charlie Epps says, “There’s not a swing thought in all of Argentina.”

The old-timers in the caddie yard all had their favorite stories of the young Cabrera, who earned the nickname El Pato (The Duck) for his waddling gait. Still, he projected the menace of a raging bull. In Cordoba there is an indigenous dance called the cuarteto, a lively, rhythmic step similar to the merengue. The cuarteto is a staple of the Cordobese social scene, and Cabrera forged quite a reputation at the dance halls. “He was always in the street fighting,” said Rodolfo Monjes, a longtime caddie at Cordoba Country Club. “Usually over a girl.” Those who knew Cabrera back then retain vivid memories of his ferocity. “There was no holding Pato back,” says Molina. “You could try, but he would run right through you.”

Cabrera doesn’t deny his pugilistic past — how could he, given the three scars that adorned his face when he won the U.S. Open? “I fought all the time,” he says. “Here the barrios are very divided, so when we went to the cuartetos, guys from different barrios would fight if someone was looking at someone else’s girl. Or simply because they were drunk and wanted to fight.”

Cabrera showed enough promise as a golfer that he was staked financially by a handful of club members, allowing him to travel to tournaments at which he quickly distinguished himself. The notion of becoming a touring pro became increasingly attractive because Cabrera had a family to support. At 16 he had left his grandmother’s house to move in a block away with his girlfriend, Silvia, who was a decade his senior. When Cabrera was 20 she gave him a son, Federico. Cabrera turned pro the next year. He allowed himself a year to make it as a touring pro or else he would find a real job. In 1995 he won the Paraguay Open and the Colombia Open, and in ’96 he took the Volvo Masters of Latin America. By then he had another son, Angel. Cabrera exported his game to the European Tour and won three times in the early- to mid-2000s. It is a measure of his insularity that he never bothered to learn English. “I’m not interested in learning,” he said. “Anyway, do you know what [Roberto] De Vicenzo” — the patron saint of Argentine golf — “said to me? ‘Don’t worry, if you shoot in the 60s, everyone will understand you. If you shoot 72 or higher, you will starve to death.'”

But Cabrera couldn’t outrun his past, even as he became Villa Allende’s most prominent citizen and a fixture on the International Team at the Presidents Cup. After leaving the young Angel in the care of Pura Concepcion, Miguel remarried and had four more children. In such a small town it was inevitable that Cabrera would cross paths with his father, but they studiously ignored each other. “I don’t want to have anything to do with that guy,” Angel said. He had similarly cut out of his life his mother and the two siblings she took with her after the separation from Miguel. It was harder to deny the existence of other blood relatives. Cabrera became a dues-paying member at Cordoba Country Club, where Miguel’s other two sons—Angel’s half- brothers—worked as caddies. Approached for interviews, Patricio had nothing to say about his celebrated brother. Guillermo allowed only that “we don’t have any connection with him. He’s hard-headed, tough, but he did grow up all alone.”

Back at the Condor, Cabrera finally departed at 1 a.m. but his night wasn’t over yet. A few hours later he was banging on the door of a house belonging to a longtime friend, Juan Domingo Monjes. Inexorably, Cabrera had wound up in his old barrio. Three blocks away was the shabby little house he grew up in with his grandmother, and just up the hill beyond that the Cordoba Country Club. Why here, why now? Cabrera has just spent a long day and night talking about himself and his life. Maybe he needed to connect with his past in a visceral way. Then again, maybe he was just drunk and had the munchies. When he awakened Monjes, he informed him that they were going to have an asado. Right now.

In his own hilltop mansion, Cabrera had an expansive wine cellar and a four-by-nine foot indoor brick grill on which he cooked only the best cuts of meat from a local rancher who fed his animals special grains. Under the stars with Monjes, he was not nearly as picky. They didn’t have a grill so Cabrera dug one out of the dirt, using rocks and anything else he could scavenge in the yard to construct his parilla de asado.

Later that morning Monjes recounted his tale, sounding as if he couldn’t quite believe it really happened. Cabrera was nowhere to be seen, but the embers he left behind were still smoldering.

The 2007 U.S. Open came amidst the second great peak of Tiger Woods’s career. Cabrera, then 37, held the 36-hole lead but shot a shaky 76 on Saturday, while Woods hit 17 of 18 greens during a 69 that lifted him to second place, only two behind callow Aaron Baddeley. Following the third round, Woods's swing coach, Hank Haney, was asked where it ranked in the pantheon of Woods's ball-striking performances since the two began working together in 2003. "The best," said Haney. "On the hardest course in the world, when he absolutely had to have it? It's the best. It has to be."

That Woods would win felt like a foregone conclusion but someone forgot to tell Cabrera. He had tangled with Tiger before, at the 2000 World Cup of Golf at Buenos Aires Country Club, with Cabrera and Eudardo Romero representing the host country and Woods and David Duval flying the Stars and Stripes. Tiger was at the tail end of the greatest season in golf history, and his appearance was billed as the biggest thing to happen to South American sport—non-fútbol division—since Muhammad Ali fought a pair of exhibitions in Buenos Aires in 1971. The Americans won the Cup, but Cabrera and Romero battled them to the final putt. "For my confidence it was a very big thing," Cabrera said.

Cabrera attacked Oakmont relentlessly during the final round of the Open while Woods made a series of little mistakes. By the time Cabrera cleaned up a kick-in birdie on 15 his lead was three strokes. But it was down to one as Cabrera reached the 18th tee, from where he launched one of the most memorable drives of the 21st century, a 350-yard missile that split the fairway and set up a textbook par. His 69 was one of only two subpar rounds on a brutal Sunday. Woods missed a 20-footer at the last and just like that Cabrera became the first man from South America to win a U.S. Open. He was hustled out of the clubhouse for the trophy ceremony on the 18th green. (The former Cordoba caddie also took possession of a $1.26 million winner's check.) Cabrera was led across an elevated footbridge. Before descending the steps to the green, he stopped to take in the sweeping view of this famous course. The grandstands surrounding the 18th green were still packed and the crowd erupted at the sight of the man who had vanquished Tiger. With a huge grin Cabrera took off his hat and waved it in the air. For a minute he looked a little like Eva Perón on the balcony of the Casa Rosada, but Cabrera didn't make any speeches. He didn't have to. His fearless play said it all.

Cabrera secured his place in the pantheon with his Masters victory two years later. Across the golf world there was (and still is) an appreciation that borders on awe for his golf swing. “First of all, he’s a monster of a man, just a big ol’ guy with a really long swing,” says Chamblee. “He has this beautiful way of moving in two directions at once—as he glides to the top, he begins to glide in the other direction. Jon Rahm does it too, but it’s violent, like cracking a whip. With Angel, it’s lovely and and lyrical.

“Every once in a great while a player comes along who knows where the middle of the clubface is and can find it every single time. I imagine Angel looks around with… not disdain but maybe dismay at how difficult golf is to everybody else. He’s like the character in Good Will Hunting: ‘Do you know how fucking easy this is for me?’”

Cabrera had one last moment in the sun at the 2013 Masters, when he took Adam Scott to a playoff and stole the gallery’s affection with his showmanship. But things would soon go pear-shaped. A nagging shoulder injury compromised Cabrera’s swing and for the first time in his career he struggled to keep up with the young guns. “When I realized I couldn’t win, I started to lose interest,” Cabrera told Luis Fernando Llosa in a 2023 interview. “I was OK while I was competing, but whenever I returned to Cordoba, my life would unravel, and I’d end up hanging out in the wrong places with the wrong people. I started to separate myself from the good folks I’d met in the golf world. As I surrounded myself with unsavory types, things got worse until it was me and nobody else… I made serious mistakes. I ask Micaela for forgiveness. I ask Celia for forgiveness. They had the bad luck of crossing paths with me when I was at my worst. I wasn’t the devil, but I did bad things. I’ve apologized to them both in court, and I do so again now. I am deeply embarrassed because I disappointed the people closest to me—and everyone who loves me through golf.”

Cabrera returned to the Champions Tour in February 2024 and struggled to find his form as he rehabbed a wrist that was operated on shortly before he went to prison. He had to go to Q School in December to secure his playing privileges for 2025. A man never known for his work ethic became obsessed with maximizing his second chance. In April he broke through with his first Champions victory, at the James Hardie Pro Football Hall of Fame Invitational. Last month he won the Tradition with a rousing final round 64. That was a weather-induced Monday finish and six days later Cabrera became the first person to win two majors in the same week when he took the Senior PGA Championship, conquering a brutally difficult setup at Congressional Country Club. “I feel very emotional,” Cabrera said in victory. “Maybe you cannot see but I'm very, very emotional inside, especially after all the things that I went through. I can't believe that I made it but I'm here and very happy with myself.”

Others have detected a heaviness that follows Cabrera like a shadow. “I’ve been around him a good amount since he came back and to me he’s not the same guy,” says Andrade.

“He’s a little hardened, a little reserved, not as fun-loving. He’s just different, which makes sense given everything that’s happened. But my god, what a talent. He’s so fucking long, he hits shots the rest of us can’t. He’s hitting wedge, I’m hitting 6-iron. He’s just one of the great talents in the modern world of golf. He will probably be in the Hall of Fame. Just thinking about it now, he has to be a Hall of Famer.”

That verdict has yet to be rendered. Despite Woods' run-in with the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office and Mickelson's run-in with the SEC, they're both in the Hall. Cabrera's crimes were more violent and reprehensible than each of their transgressions, and he paid a steeper price for them. The Masters welcomed him back this year, an important act of forgiveness from the establishment. “The world loves a redemption story,” says Chamblee. “In general, we watch athletes to be inspired and awed and entertained. But we also love to see people dig themselves out of the pits of hell. We watch them go from being extraordinary to being humbled and even humiliated by life. And then they have to figure out how to come back and be extraordinary again.”

Somehow, Cabrera has made it all the way back. It’s okay to have mixed feelings about it. For his part, Cabrera has landed on a powerful emotion: gratitude. “Life has given me another opportunity,” he said from Augusta. “I get to take advantage of that and I want to do the right things in this second opportunity.”