Caddy for Life (18 page)

“Which would explain why there were women’s clothes all over your place,” Marsha responds. “All I know is, whenever we went over there, I was very, very nervous that she was going to show up.”

“We were just friends,” Bruce says, grinning.

“I know, that’s what worried me,” Marsha answers, “that she was going to show up and find us being friends.”

That week’s friendship soon faded just as 1975 had faded.

Bruce turned thirty that November and perhaps for the first time wondered how much longer he wanted to caddy. “I still loved it, loved being out there,” he said. “But I did start to think a little about having a family and maybe someday settling down. Seeing how much Tom’s children meant to him and seeing how much the kids of other friends of mine meant to them, did make me think about it every once in a while.”

Still, there was no concrete plan, no notion that there was something else he might do as an alternative. A few years earlier, Bill Leahey had forced him to sit down and start to get his finances in something resembling order. By then Leahey was working for the investment firm Smith Barney, a job he had landed in 1981 because of his willingness to step in and help Bruce in the midst of a tragedy.

Leahey and his wife, Karen, had just rented a house in the town of Shrewsbury in the Jersey Shore area. Karen was from there and Bill liked the idea of living there. He was ready to move on from the job he had held for five years at the Norton Company, a Boston-based industrial manufacturer, and had decided this was the time to take a gamble and see what was out there. He was planning to work at the U.S. Open in June for John Mahaffey, his old tour boss, and then see if he could find work near the Jersey Shore.

The night after signing the paperwork for the house, Leahey was in Philadelphia, where he was based at the time, when he got a frantic call from Bruce. The father of the woman he was dating at the time had committed suicide. She was very close to him and desperately wanted Bruce to fly to Chicago for the funeral. Bruce was in Washington, where Watson was about to play in the Kemper Open, which was being played at Congressional Country Club, in Bethesda, Maryland. He needed someone he could trust to caddy for Watson while he flew to Chicago.

“It was about ten-thirty on Tuesday night when he called,” Leahey remembered. “I took a shower, packed, and drove to Washington. I picked Bruce up and drove him to some early-morning flight and then went straight to the golf course, because Tom had a morning tee time in the pro-am. I had no idea what I was doing. I had never seen the golf course, had no yardages, nothing. Tom understood, though, and was very patient.”

Most pro-ams are the same. Local businessmen ante up large amounts of money—these days the going rate is anywhere from $3,500 to $6,000 per player—for the right to play 18 holes, usually in a fivesome, with one of the pros in that week’s field. In 1981 Watson was as big a name as there was in any field, so the four players he was paired with came from big companies who had paid a good deal in sponsorship money for the week.

One of those companies was Smith Barney. Among the players in the group was a man named Jeffrey Kahn, who was Smith Barney’s senior vice president for sales on the East Coast. “That was the week they had launched those John Houseman ‘We make money the old-fashioned way, we earn it’ commercials,” Leahey said. “We started talking about the commercials and ended up becoming quite friendly by the end of the round. At one point Kahn asked Leahey why he—and not Bruce—was caddying for Watson. Leahey explained the story. Perhaps it struck a chord with Kahn, or maybe he just liked Leahey. In any event, he told him to give him a call, he might be able to help him find a new job sometime in the near future.

“I followed up,” Leahey said. “I didn’t know if he was being polite or not, but I had fooled around with stocks and bonds a little and the market interested me. So I called him. He told me to come see him at his office in New York. I did. He said they were looking for someone to work in one of their New Jersey offices, specifically the one in Tinton Falls. The office where he sent me was literally an eighth of a mile from the house we had just rented. Talk about karma.”

Leahey spent the next twenty-one years working there, eventually ran the office, moved it to a large building in Red Bank, and then decided at the age of forty-nine that he’d had enough and retired. Long before that, though, he had sat Bruce down to talk about taking better care of his money. Bruce, being Bruce, simply turned his portfolio over to Leahey. “Which was probably one of the few smart things I ever did in my life,” he said. “Who knows where my money would be today if Billy hadn’t handled it for me.”

Bruce didn’t know it when they started dating again in 1984, but Marsha probably would have jumped at the proposition of marriage at the time if he had been ready. But he wasn’t. Even though the thought of changing his lifestyle crossed his mind, he never really acted on it. He was sharing an apartment in Dallas with a nongolf friend and still enjoying life on the road. It had changed considerably by then. More often than not, he now flew to tournaments and, more often than not, he had his own room. Occasionally, for old times’ sake, he might bunk in with Rita or one of his pals, but usually he had a single. His parents would occasionally wonder if he thought the end of his caddying days might be near, but there wasn’t any stridency to it.

“I think by then we did it out of force of habit,” Jay Edwards said. “It was pretty clear that Bruce had put together a very good life for himself by then.”

Bruce’s sister Chris was married by that time, having met John Cutcher while both were stationed in Italy. When Chris announced that she was marrying John, that had sent Jay and Natalie spinning just a bit, because John was divorced and had children from his previous marriage who were thirteen and eleven. “Instant family,” Chris said. “I knew there would be challenges with it, but to me it was clearly the right thing to do. I know Mom and Dad weren’t real happy at first, but I had to do what was right for me, and I figured once they got to know John they’d get over it.”

They did. Jay and Natalie now readily admit that the one time they thought their perfect daughter was making an imperfect move, it turned out to be just as correct as all the other things she had done with her life. And ironically it was John, perhaps the least athletically inclined member of the family, who was at Pebble Beach on the day of Watson’s chip-in. “I was out there for a meeting,” he said. “Bruce got me a ticket. I wasn’t even sure I understood exactly what I was seeing, but my God it was thrilling.”

The rest of the family had watched on TV that day. “By that time our hearts were in our throats whenever Tom was in contention,” Gwyn said. “But that one was the worst—and then the best. We all knew how much it meant to Bruce to finally be there for a major. And to do it that way . . . wow.”

Gwyn had graduated from Lafayette in 1983 and had gone into public relations work. Brian, after deciding the caddying life wasn’t for him, had gone back to school to take the courses he needed to go to dental school. He went to dental school, then decided to become an endodontist. “I think he spent eleven years in college, counting graduate school,” Bruce likes to say. “Then he worked for eight years and retired.”

Brian insists Bruce is exaggerating—slightly. He did go to school for nine years and, after starting his own business in Charlotte, sold it and decided to take some time off before figuring out what to do next. By then he had met Laurie during a charity run and they had gotten married. A year after selling the business, Brian and Laurie moved to Colorado and Brian opened an office—where he and Laurie both work three days a week.

“The funny thing is, when Chris retired from the Navy in 1997 and Brian retired and then Gwyn quit her job to have kids, I was the only kid in the family with a steady job,” Bruce jokes. “None of us could get over how ironic and funny that was, me being the only gainfully employed member of the family.”

That came later. In ’84 Bruce was still happily riding the Watson Express. But the train began to slow in 1985. For the first time since 1976, Watson failed to win a tournament. He dropped to 18th on the money list, the lowest he had been since 1973, Bruce’s first year on the bag. Even though he top-tenned twice, he didn’t seriously contend in any of the majors. He wasn’t happy with his golf swing or his game, and that made life less fun for him and for Bruce. The one relief for Bruce was that Watson never blamed him for his troubles.

That was not Watson’s way, and even if it had been on any level, he and Bruce were too close by then for the thought of blaming Bruce to cross his mind. Nineteen eighty-six wasn’t much different. This time there was only one top ten at a major (sixth at the Masters while Nicklaus was winning his sixth Masters at the age of forty-six), and there were no wins and no seconds. Watson was 20th on the money list. For most players, a solid year. For him, a genuine slump.

“I just couldn’t find a swing I was comfortable with for a long time,” he said. “I tried different things and they didn’t work. I was still trying as hard as I ever did on the golf course, but I was getting frustrated. The game’s not as much fun when you can’t play it the way you think you should, and I wasn’t enjoying it as much.”

What’s more, his children were now school age, which meant they couldn’t travel on tour as often as they had as infants. Any week at a tournament was a week away from the children, and as with any parent, that too became a distraction and a frustration. Watson began talking about cutting back on his schedule. He wasn’t enjoying playing as much, he certainly wasn’t enjoying the travel. He told Bruce that if there were weeks when he wanted to work for other players, that was fine with him. Watson had played thirty-one times on tour in 1973 and twenty-nine times the next year. After the kids were born, he started going home for most of the fall events. By 1986 he had cut his schedule back to no more than nineteen or twenty events a year. Bruce was still making good money working for Watson—his pay was up to $1,000 a week and 5 percent for a made cut, 7 percent for a top ten, and 10 percent for a win—but he didn’t want to sit home for half the tour season. He began putting out the word that on weeks Watson didn’t play, there would be times when he would be willing to work. He was careful about how he went about doing this, because he didn’t want players with regular caddies giving them weeks off in order to pick him up. By then he was so highly thought of among the players that there were players who might have been willing to do that. Bruce wasn’t.

“I didn’t really want to work for anyone who had someone,” he said. “But if a guy didn’t have someone or if he was in the process of changing guys, I might work for him a little. It was just to have something to do when Tom started playing less.”

The respect Bruce had gained through the years from the players came about for several reasons. Certainly working for Watson helped, but it went beyond that. Players paired with Watson couldn’t help but notice how much the world’s best player relied on him; they noticed his work ethic, how he never seemed caught without an answer when Watson asked a question about distance or wind or where a hidden hazard might be. Beyond that, they liked him.

“One of the fun things about being paired with Tom has always been being around Bruce,” said Jay Haas, who has been on the tour for twenty-five years. “A lot of caddies are so buried in what they’re doing with their player, they hardly notice the other guys. Bruce not only noticed you, he made a point of being friendly, of bringing something up that had to do with you. If Wake Forest”—Haas’s alma mater—“won a big ball game, his opening comment would be something like, ‘You must be fired up today about your Deacons.’ He made a day on the golf course more fun even if he wasn’t working for you.”

Mike Hulbert, another longtime tour player, remembers Bruce grabbing him one day after he had been paired with Watson. “I was kind of struggling, and he came over to me on the putting green after we’d played and said something like, ‘Hubby, I watched you today and I don’t think you’re that far away. Your swing looks good to me, you just have to trust it a little more.’ First, that meant a lot because I respected his knowledge of the game. Second, it meant a lot more that he would take the time to come over and try and encourage me, knowing I was kind of in a down period.”

Because Bruce was so well thought of, players essentially lined up to ask him to caddy when he was available. Among them were Fred Couples, Payne Stewart, Jeff Sluman, John Cook, Scott Hoch, David Frost, Peter Jacobsen, Denis Watson (no relation), Jack Renner (Brian’s old boss), Andy Bean, his old friend David Graham, and the tour’s resident iconoclast and gadlfy, Mac O’Grady. “I think I was one of the few caddies he actually liked,” Bruce remembered.

Bruce had a good deal of success on other bags. Denis Watson won in Las Vegas with Bruce working for him; Bean won at Kapalua; and Renner appeared to have won in Hawaii in 1983 until Isao Aoki holed a 128-yard wedge shot on the final hole for an eagle to beat him by a shot. Bruce enjoyed working for other players when Watson wasn’t playing, and the fact that so many good players sought him out was gratifying. Stewart, who won three major titles before his death in 1999, once said that having Bruce on the bag made a bad day not such a bad day. “He’s always had the best attitude and approach to golf and life I think I ever saw,” Stewart said during the 1999 Ryder Cup, which Bruce worked as an assistant captain to Ben Crenshaw. “If you’re with Bruce on a golf course and you don’t get pumped up, then you can’t get pumped up.”

It was during this period that Bruce first became friendly with Greg Norman. Like everyone else in golf, he was impressed with the young Australian player who was given the nickname the Great White Shark early in his career in the United States. When Watson was paired with Norman, Bruce enjoyed his presence, his charisma and humor, and the fact that Watson and Norman together always drew an excited crowd regardless of the tournament. Norman’s caddy early in his career was Steve Williams, the New Zealander who has become quite wealthy the past few years working for Tiger Woods. Norman is not one of those players who sheds caddies every fifteen minutes—he’s only had four full-time guys in his twenty-two years on the PGA Tour—but he is a demanding boss and, as happens sooner or later in most player-caddy relationships, he had split with Williams in 1987 and then, a year later, with his successor, Pete Bender, another highly respected veteran caddy.