Caddy for Life (17 page)

Always a fast player, Watson wasted little time once he was over the ball. He gently dropped the club underneath the ball, hitting it about as softly as was humanly possible while still actually moving it. The ball popped up into the air, landed just on the green, and began rolling—picking up speed as Watson had predicted—right at the flagstick. Halfway there, Watson thought it had a chance. Three-quarters of the way there, he was convinced he had holed the shot. He began running in the direction of the ball while Bruce, frozen to the spot with fear, anticipation, and hope, stood staring at the ball, afraid that if he thought it had a chance it would roll past.

The ball hit the flagstick, paused for a split second, and then dropped into the hole. Watson was in full flight by now, sprinting in a circle around the hole. When he turned back in Bruce’s direction, he pointed his finger at him and yelled, “I told you! I told you I was gonna make it!”

In the scorer’s tent, Nicklaus stared at the TV monitor in disbelief. The late John Morris, then the USGA’s director of communications, was sitting there with Nicklaus, preparing to guide Nicklaus and Watson through their postround media paces, when the ball went into the hole. “You could tell everyone in the tent wanted to throw their arms in the air because it was such an amazing shot,” he said years later. “It wasn’t a matter of rooting for Jack or for Tom, it was just such a stunning shot. I think a few people may have said, ‘Oh my God!’ in disbelief. But then we all looked at Jack and got ahold of ourselves.”

As Morris remembered it, Nicklaus looked around at the other people in the tent, somehow produced a smile, and said, “Just another tap-in for Tom.”

Watson had never in his life celebrated a shot like that when there was still golf to play. Always in control of his emotions on the golf course, he never let loose before the 18th green. This time, though, he did. “It was just instinct,” he said. “It was a miraculous shot and it gave me a one-shot lead with one hole to play in the Open. So I celebrated more than I normally do.”

Bruce was already thinking about the 18th hole, the long par-five with Carmel Bay all the way down the left side. Back then, before equipment changed the game, no one tried to reach the green in two. All Bruce wanted was for Watson to get his tee shot in the fairway, hit a safe layup, and leave himself an easy third shot to the green. “It wasn’t over, because that’s a tough driving hole,” he said. “But he’d hit the ball well off the tee all day, except for the one at sixteen. So I knew he would stand up there and feel confident.”

He did. His three-wood split the middle. Then the layup. Wanting to be absolutely certain he didn’t chunk a wedge into the front bunker, Watson played an easy nine-iron to the green. He caught it a little bit thin and it landed about 20 feet behind the hole. Which was fine with Watson. As he handed the club to Bruce, he thought about something Byron Nelson always said to him.

“Byron always says, ‘Hit it thin to win,’” he said. In other words, if you hit a shot a bit thin it is far less likely to get into trouble than catching a shot fat.

Just shy of nine years after they first met, Watson and Bruce did what they had always dreamed of doing: They walked onto the 18th green together at a major championship with victory close at hand.

“This is exactly where I want to be,” Watson said to Bruce as the crowd engulfed them in cheers.

“Above the hole?”

“No, walking onto the eighteenth green with two putts to win the U.S. Open.”

As it turned out, Watson only needed one of those two putts. After Bruce pulled the pin, his birdie putt curled down the hill, picking up speed as it broke left to right. For a brief moment, both Watson and Bruce had a panicked thought.

“That ball’s really moving,” Bruce thought as he stood holding the flag.

Watson went a step further. “It’s moving,” he thought, “too fast.”

At that stage of his career, Watson didn’t know
how
to lag a putt. He charged every putt he looked at, believing he was going to make them all, but just as convinced that if he did miss, he would make the putt coming back, regardless of the distance. Pumped up by the moment, he put too much speed on the putt. “If it had missed the hole,” he said, “I would have had some serious concerns about the one coming back. It could have been tricky.”

As it turned out, there was no need for concern. Watson’s read of the putt and his aim were perfect. It was moving fast when it hit the hole, but that’s what it did, dropping dead center.

Bruce’s arms were in the air and he was sprinting at Watson for the hug he had fantasized about while watching from the sidelines during those other major victories. When Bruce got to Watson, they wrapped their arms around each other and Watson said simply: “We did it.”

Bruce was shouting and crying all at once. “Damn right,” he said. “We
did
do it.”

It was one of the most extraordinary finishes in the history of the U.S. Open. Watson had finished birdie-birdie on two of the most difficult closing holes in championship golf to beat the greatest player of all time.

Nicklaus was one of the first people to greet Watson after he and Bruce untangled and shook hands with Bill Rogers and his caddy, John Griffin.

“You did it to me again, you little son of a bitch,” Nicklaus said, a huge smile on his face, an arm around Watson’s shoulder, his voice filled with admiration. “I’m really proud of you.”

Watson remembered Nicklaus adding one more sentence. “If it takes me the rest of my life, I’m gonna get you one of these times.”

At that point neither Watson nor Bruce really cared if Nicklaus did get them one of those times. Both men felt completely fulfilled by this victory.

“I missed the others,” Bruce said years later. “But the one I got made up for the rest. Because it was so
hard
and it meant so much to both of us. I mean, come on, Pebble Beach, the Open, Nicklaus, the chip-in, what more could you possibly ask for?”

Not a thing.

Since that day, few people play Pebble Beach for the first time without pausing at the 17th green, dropping a ball or two to the left of the green, and chipping it in the direction of the spot where the flagstick was that day. Most who follow golf can point to almost the exact spot where the ball was and to the spot where the pin was too, especially since that moment has been replayed thousands and thousands of times through the years, always punctuated by Watson pointing at Bruce and saying, “I told you . . .”

Very few people chip it anywhere close to the spot where the flag was that afternoon.

Years later Watson and a group of friends were having dinner at Club 19, which is on the Pebble Beach property. They were celebrating the work they had just completed on a new golf course for The Inn at Spanish Bay, which adjoins Pebble Beach. A good deal of champagne had been passed around the table and the subject of The Chip came up.

On that June day in 1982, Bill Rogers had declared the shot one in a hundred. Nicklaus had said it was more like one in a thousand. When reporters asked Watson about those odds, he smiled and suggested he wouldn’t mind going back out to 17 to see if he could make the shot more than one time in a thousand. “It was an impossible shot,” he said in a rare moment of immodesty, “for most mortals.”

Now when his friends asked what the chances were of ever getting the ball close to that spot again, Watson shrugged and said, “Why don’t we go find out?”

He went up to his room, pulled a wedge and some golf balls from his bag, and the group walked down the 18th fairway to the 17th green. There, with the moon providing the only light and waves crashing behind them off Carmel Bay, they all took a few swipes. No one—including Watson—came close.

“It was the champagne,” Watson insisted, laughing as he told the story.

Perhaps. Or maybe he simply made a once-in-a-lifetime shot.

8

Tough Times

THE OPEN VICTORY
in 1982 took Watson to yet another level of stardom. He had now won three of the four major championships, and three of his six major victories had come in head-to-head stretch duels with Jack Nicklaus. Two of them had produced endings that would go down in golf history as among the most dramatic of all time. Buoyed by that victory—and aided by a late Sunday collapse by then twenty-five-year-old Nick Price—Watson won his fourth British Open a month after Pebble Beach. By this time ABC was televising the British Open live on Sunday (the last day had been moved to Sunday in 1980, when Watson won at Muirfield), and Bruce was parked in front of a TV set watching Watson watch Price as he stumbled through the final holes. This time, though, it wasn’t so hard to be at home, because when he got up from the couch and walked into his den, the flag from the 18th green at Pebble Beach was hanging on the wall.

It is an old caddies’ tradition to take the flag home from the final hole after a victory, and Bruce had made certain to hang on to the flag at Pebble in the aftermath of the win there. “Looking at that, thinking back to everything that happened that day, it was impossible not to have a smile on my face,” he said. “I still hoped the day would come when I’d get to work the British again, but having that Open really made up for feeling as if I’d missed anything.”

Watson also finished tied for ninth at the PGA, marking the second time in his career (he had tied for fifth at the Masters in April) that he had top-tenned in all four majors. After the disappointing way 1981 had ended, 1982 was quite a bounceback year: four wins, two in majors, and the knowledge that—finally—when a father and son played “Name the Open Champion” in the future, the correct answer for 1982 would be “Tom Watson.” And then the father could fill in the remarkable details if he so desired.

Michael Barrett Watson was born on December 15 of that year, climaxing a near perfect year. Watson was still only thirty-three years old and, with seven majors in the bank, appeared almost certain to become only the third professional in history (Nicklaus and Walter Hagen were the other two) to reach double digits in professional major victories. The following year wasn’t all that different, except that this time Watson was the victim of a remarkable shot at the U.S. Open rather than the perpetrator. Playing at Oakmont, the site of his nearest PGA miss, in 1978, Watson had come from behind on Sunday to take the lead from Seve Ballesteros (the one and only time Ballesteros seriously challenged at the Open) and looked to be on his way to a second straight victory when Larry Nelson, playing several groups ahead, started making birdies. Rain came late and the players had to return Monday morning to finish. Soon after play resumed, Nelson faced an 83-foot birdie putt at the 16th hole. He would have been delighted, if offered, to accept two putts and a par and proceed to the 17th tee. Instead he holed the putt, took the lead, and went on to beat Watson by one shot.

Watson bounced back from that disappointment to win yet another British Open—his third in four years and fifth in all—this time aided by Hale Irwin whiffing on a two-inch tap-in that allowed Watson to win by one shot. That was Watson’s eighth victory in a major. He had no way of knowing—nor did Bruce—that it would be his last. Exactly what happened to his game over the next few years is difficult to pinpoint, even for Watson and Bruce. It wasn’t as if he simply stopped playing well or got old all at once or completely lost his putting touch. His putting woes would come later.

It was all so gradual that it was almost impossible to see. In fact there was little sign of it in 1984. Watson won three times. He finished second at the Masters and looked on his way to a sixth British Open title before Ballesteros charged late at St. Andrews and Watson bogeyed the 17th, the Road Hole, to lose any chance of catching Ballesteros. Watson still won the money title for the year—for the fifth time—and Bruce was still making an excellent living. It was also in 1984 that Bruce again dated Marsha Cummins, the former Nelsonette he’d dated briefly in Dallas in 1975.

After graduating from high school in 1976, Marsha Cummins had gone to Houston Baptist University, where she technically majored in nursing but actually majored in partying for a year and a half. Then she dropped out when she fell in love—or at least thought she had fallen in love. The relationship lasted five years and produced a daughter, Brittany, born in 1979. It was just about the time that she got pregnant that Marsha decided she was with the wrong guy.

“I left him and went to work for a real estate agency,” she said. “I was very pregnant and very confused. My parents were losing it. I mean, I’d never married the guy, now I was pregnant and about to try to raise the baby on my own.”

That never happened because she met someone else while working in real estate. “I was like the girl everyone felt sorry for because I was single and pregnant,” she said. “We started out as friends, because he was just very sweet and helpful. After Brittany was born we ended up moving in together.”

And they ended up having a baby together, Taylor, born in 1982. Almost like déjà vu, Marsha decided the relationship wasn’t working soon after finding out she was pregnant with Taylor. Confused and upset, she took her two children and moved back to Dallas so her mother could help with their care. “Then I decided I needed some space and moved to Fort Worth,” she said. “I was living there in 1984, struggling to figure out what to do with my life when I looked up in May and realized that the Colonial was coming to town.”

The Colonial is one of the great traditional stops on the PGA Tour. Colonial Country Club is known as Hogan’s Alley because Ben Hogan won four of the first seven tournaments played there and five in all. The club also became his headquarters, the place where he spent most of his time in his later years. Marsha called her old friend Kay Barton and asked if she would mind contacting Bruce to see if Bruce could get her a pass for the Colonial. Bruce not only got her the pass, he showed up at her front doorstep to deliver it.

“I thought, ‘Uh-oh, something’s going on here,’” Marsha said. “Next thing I know, it’s 1975 all over again.”

Bruce either had a girlfriend at the time or didn’t—depending on whose version you believe—but he spent that week with Marsha. “I had already broken up with her,” he now says of the girlfriend.