Caddy for Life (21 page)

Here again, Bruce resolved to say nothing. “I never said anything to Tom around the greens,” he said. “That kind of shot is so much about feel it has to be whatever the player is feeling at that moment.” He smiled. “Of course it also helped that Tom was maybe the greatest short-game player in history.”

Norman’s very good, but the wedge was a mistake. As Bruce had thought, the ball simply couldn’t stop. It rolled 15 feet past the hole and Norman missed the par putt. Calcavecchia made par, so now he and Norman were tied with one hole to play. Grady bogeyed and was two back and out of contention.

“I really believe to this day that I cost Greg the golf tournament on the 17th tee,” Bruce said. “I should have spoken up. That’s where my experience should have taken over. If I said something and he ignored me, then it would be on him. But I didn’t, so it’s on me.”

Not so, says Norman. “I pulled the club, I hit the shot,” he said. “If Bruce had suggested five, I might not have listened. Who knows? That’s typical of Bruce, though. I don’t agree with him, but I’m not surprised he said it.”

Back to the 18th tee. Calcavecchia’s tee shot flared way right, so far right that he was outside the ropes in the trampled-down area where the gallery walked, meaning he would have a decent lie. Norman again took driver. Up in the ABC tower, Nicklaus immediately questioned the play. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “He’s all pumped up, a three-wood is plenty to get into good position. All he does with driver is bring that bunker down the right side into play.”

Bruce didn’t think so. Neither did Norman. The bunker was 330 yards away. Even on a dry golf course it would take a huge shot and a bad bounce for the ball to end up there. Which, of course, is exactly what happened. Norman crushed the shot down the middle, it took one long bounce to the right—and caught the corner of the bunker. “The results say I was wrong,” Bruce said. “But I don’t second-guess that one.”

Norman does . . . a little. “Bruce is right, the result says we got it wrong,” he said. “But I’d driven the ball great all week, and I’m sure that was our mindset. Why mess with success at that point?”

While Norman and Bruce watched from the bunker, Calcavecchia hit a superb second shot from the rough to about 12 feet from the hole.

“How close is he?” Norman asked, because from the fairway it was impossible to tell exactly how close the ball was, and the crowd’s going nuts didn’t really mean anything at that point.

“I think it’s close,” Bruce said. “Can’t tell exactly how close.”

It was close enough that Norman felt he had to try to get the ball on the green. If Calcavecchia made birdie, laying up and making par would be worthless. Nicklaus, who had the advantage of knowing exactly how far from the hole Calcavecchia was, again first-guessed the play. “With the lip on that bunker, there’s almost no way to get the ball up fast enough to hit it far enough to get it to the green,” he said.

Right again. The ball caught the lip, flew high in the air, and landed in the bunker in front of the green. Now Norman and Bruce could see where Calcavecchia’s ball was in relation to the flag. Norman had to get his bunker shot close, hope to make par, and hope Calcavecchia missed. Forced to try the spectacular shot, Norman didn’t take enough sand and the ball flew over the green, over the out-of-bounds marker, and stopped on a little path next to the clubhouse.

That was the end of the dream. As if to twist the knife, a Royal and Ancient official standing near the bunker said to Norman as he came out, “You’re still away.”

Norman and Bruce looked at each other in disbelief. Norman remained remarkably calm. “I’m hitting five,” he said. “Let Mark putt, and if there’s any need, I’ll play my next shot when that time comes.”

Calcavecchia quickly put Norman out of his misery by making his birdie putt. Twenty brilliant holes had gone for naught, undone by two adrenaline-pumped shots that brought disaster. “It was an awful feeling,” Bruce remembered. “Because I think we were both convinced until eighteen that he was going to win.”

“Never should have been a playoff,” Norman said. “If I don’t make that mistake with the three-putt at sixteen in regulation, we win it without playing off. But golf is all about ifs and buts.”

Norman did recover from Troon to win twice on tour that summer and won another tournament overseas. None, of course, were majors, but Bruce was making more money than he had ever made in his life. The most money he had made in any full year working for Watson had been $60,000. He made more than that in his first
half
year with Norman and continued to make more money than he had ever dreamed of in 1990, when Norman won twice, finished first on the money list with more than $1,165,000 in earnings, and continued his globe-trotting, taking Bruce along, and of course paying him for his time when he did.

That was the year when Bruce decided it was time to build a house. He had lived in apartments and small houses shared with others throughout his adult life. Now he was 36 years old, with an income well into six figures, and he was ready to spend some of his money on a place he could truly call home. He decided to build in Ponte Vedra, Florida. It was right near PGA Tour headquarters; he liked the northern Florida climate most of the year, especially in late fall, when he was home the most; and he had a number of friends living in the area. Plus Jacksonville Airport was an easy place to get into and out of, with lots of flights to Atlanta, where he could connect to just about anyplace he needed to go.

As soon as Bruce began telling his caddying buddies what he was doing and showing them the plans, the home-to-be was given a name: The House That Norman Built. Years later, when Watson talked about Bruce’s decision to go work for Norman, he used the house as proof that it was the correct thing for Bruce to do. “Greg made Bruce enough money so he could build that house,” he said. “The way I was playing back then, there’s no way that would have happened.”

Watson and Bruce missed each other. Watson continued to struggle with his game after Bruce’s departure, and, he admitted, playing golf wasn’t the same without Bruce walking down the fairway with him. “Every player has his own quirky habits,” he said. “Bruce knew mine so well. I remember one of the first tournaments after he left, I bent down to mark a ball and, without looking, flipped the ball back over my shoulder. That’s the way I always did it, and Bruce was always there to catch the ball, because he knew that. This time the ball just went flying, because the guy working for me had no idea. Not his fault. He just wasn’t Bruce. He didn’t know me like Bruce did.

“Plus I enjoyed his company. We had fun together. We gave each other a hard time, we got each other’s humor. None of the guys who worked for me were bad guys or bad caddies. They just weren’t Bruce.”

And Norman wasn’t Watson. When the Eagles played the Chiefs, Norman didn’t care who won. Watson wanted the Chiefs to win, if only so he could taunt Bruce. The same was true of the Phillies and Royals. When the two teams had met in the 1980 World Series and the Phillies won, Bruce completely wore Watson out reminding him about the outcome. Bruce had felt as if he were part of the Watson family. With Norman he was well treated and felt that Greg was a friend, but he also understood that the relationship was different—had to be—from the way it had been with Watson.

He liked Laura Norman, Greg’s wife. In fact to this day, Jay and Natalie Edwards talk about how much they enjoyed walking golf courses with Laura Norman. Gwyn still remembers walking into a New York restaurant with the Normans one night and seeing heads turn because so many people immediately recognized the white-blonde hair of the Great White Shark.

To Bruce the biggest difference was attitude. “I was spoiled,” he said. “I had worked sixteen years for a player who never complained about bad luck, never whined, never blamed anyone. There are very few players like that. Only a handful at most. But I got used to that being the way it was. Then, with Greg, it wasn’t. It was, I realized later, far more normal.” Norman was a long way from being the worst whiner on tour, but he wasn’t Tom Watson. Bruce was used to being outspoken with his player, to telling him when he thought he had screwed up. He learned—the hard way—that Norman wasn’t always comfortable with that kind of caddy.

“There’s no question that Tom and I are very different on the golf course,” Norman said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Tom get angry, really angry, at least outwardly, when things go wrong. I’ve never seen him yell or curse or get on himself or his caddy for bad play. I’m just not that way. I’m too intense. I do get upset when things go wrong. I get mad at myself and sometimes I get mad at my caddy. I say things in the heat of the moment I don’t really mean. When I did that to Bruce at times, I would try to tell him later that it wasn’t personal, it was a heat of the moment thing. But I think it was hard for him to take it that way, because we
were
friends and because he was so used to Tom, who just never took it out on him at all.”

Bruce agrees that he did take things personally. He also believes that his outspokenness, which never bothered Watson, simply wasn’t the right thing for Norman. With Watson, he said, “when I called him a chicken-blank mother-blank, he knew I was doing it for a reason,” Bruce said. “If I told him not to hang his head or that there was something he needed to be doing, he always understood why. Sometimes when I tried to do that with Greg it worked, other times it didn’t.

“It really started to go bad at the British the next year,” he said, speaking of 1990. “We were tied for the lead with [Nick] Faldo after thirty-six holes and paired with him on Saturday. Well, it was one of those days. Faldo was great, shot sixty-seven. Greg wasn’t, shot seventy-six. Ballgame over.”

Bruce remembers standing in the fairway of St. Andrews’ famous 17th hole, the Road Hole, the place where Watson’s last chance for a sixth British title had disappeared six years earlier. “Well, Bruce,” Norman said to him. “I guess some days it’s better to be lucky than good.”

Bruce was stunned. Faldo hadn’t been lucky, he had been brilliant. Later he realized that Norman was doing what many if not most golfers will do in that situation: finding a way to avoid the truth, because the truth can really hurt.

“Maybe I was too tough on him,” Bruce said. “But right then and there, it kind of pissed me off that he said it. I guess I should have been the supportive caddy, but I just couldn’t do it at that moment. So I said, ‘Greg, I just want to work for someone who plays with guts and heart, no matter the outcome.’ The look he gave me told me he understood exactly what I was saying.”

Things began to slide soon after that. It certainly didn’t help that Norman followed 1990 with the worst year of his career, failing to win, finishing in the top ten only six times (down from eleven times the previous year), and dropping to 53rd on the money list with $320,196. The overseas income kept Bruce’s pay in six figures, but Norman’s struggles became a source of constant strain in the relationship. Whether Norman needed a swing adjustment—as many players do at midcareer—or was just worn out from all the years of globe-trotting and never taking a break is hard to say. But his game suffered. He also hurt his wrist at the U.S. Open at Hazeltine Golf Club that June. His game improved in 1992 after he starting working with swing guru Butch Harmon, but his relationship with his caddy did not. In fact by then Bruce was miserable.

“I had become a ‘yes-caddy,’” he said. “All I was really concerned about was not getting blamed when things went wrong. If I did speak up, I was afraid of being wrong, so I wasn’t as authoritative as I should have been. Greg had lost confidence in me, and I had lost confidence in myself. Things were really tense between us. I had reached the point where I dreaded going to the golf course. For sixteen years I never caddied for the money. Making money was nice, but I caddied because I loved it, and I enjoyed the competition and the feeling inside the ropes and being with Tom when the pressure was greatest. The last year, maybe eighteen months, with Greg, I was doing it strictly for the money. That wasn’t the way I wanted to work or live.”

“Neither one of us was happy, that’s for sure,” Norman said. “I was unhappy with my game, baffled by it. No question Bruce sometimes bore the brunt of that on the golf course. I know he was trying to help me, and it frustrated him feeling as if he couldn’t. I don’t think either one of us was a bad guy, we were just in what added up to a bad situation.”

While Norman’s game had taken a turn for the worse, Watson was beginning to see some light after more than four years of groping in the dark, looking for his golf swing. It happened, as Watson’s swing revelations often do, very quickly and very simply. “I was on the practice tee one Tuesday at Hilton Head,” he said. “I started trying a move where my shoulders were more level than they had been. It occurred to me that I had consistently been too steep with my right shoulder on my downswing for a long, long time. It was as if a light switch had finally turned on.

“I took the thought with me to the golf course the next day and started hitting shots focusing on keeping my shoulders level. There it was. The ball started flying for me again like it hadn’t flown in years.”

The only move missing was the pleasure of turning around at impact and saying to Bruce, “I’ve got it.”

But he did have it, and he began striking the ball far more consistently. His scoring didn’t improve much at first, because he was still learning the swing and because he was beginning to struggle with a different facet of his game—putting; specifically short putts. But at least he didn’t dread every tee box, every iron shot. “I felt,” he said, “like I could play again.”

By late summer 1992, Bruce could see the end coming with Norman. Playing at the International, outside Denver, they reached the 11th hole, a straight downhill par-three. Norman wanted to hit a nine-iron. Bruce, who at that stage would normally have said nothing, couldn’t resist telling him he thought wedge was a better choice. Norman agreed, hit the wedge, and uppercut it just enough that it came up short in a dry creek bed. Norman slammed the club back into the bag and said, “My son [then age six] could have pulled a better club than that one.”