Caddy for Life (26 page)

“The Senior Tour,” the late, great Dave Marr once said, “is life’s ultimate mulligan.”

The dominant players on the tour were men like Jim Colbert and Gil Morgan and Bruce Fleisher, all of whom had solid careers but were hardly stars in their prime. Hale Irwin, the all-time leader in victories on the Senior Tour (thirty-eight through 2003), was a superb player who won three U.S. Open titles, but he wasn’t the kind of charismatic figure who was going to bring fans to the golf course or to their TV sets. Trevino was, but once injuries and age began to slow him in the late 1990s, there was really no one to fill the void he left. That was where Watson, Wadkins, and Kite were supposed to step in. They had all been born in 1949 and had been rivals throughout their careers on the PGA Tour. Watson had won eight majors, Wadkins and Kite only one apiece. But Wadkins had won a total of twenty-one times on tour and was a popular, charismatic figure. Kite had won nineteen tournaments and for a long period had been the tour’s all-time leading money winner.

They would be the Senior Tour’s new triumvirate. Their continuing rivalry would bring people back to the over-fifty set. Only it didn’t happen that way. Kite played remarkably well in the Senior “majors” his first year out—a first, a second, a third, and a tie for fifth—but had trouble getting excited about the nonmajors. Wadkins never seemed to get excited about playing against his peers. His first three years out, he won once and had only six top-ten finishes in sixty-one starts. Watson played only forty-two times those first three years. After his victory in September 1999, he managed a total of three wins in three years: two of them in the season-ending Tour Championship, one in the 2001 Senior PGA. That victory, by one stroke over his friend Jim Thorpe, had great meaning, since he had never won the PGA Championship. It was hardly a coincidence that all three of those victories took place in 72-hole events played on relatively tough golf courses. Watson likes tough golf courses. The Senior Tour was not the best place in the world for someone looking for challenging venues.

“Look, the Senior Tour is fine,” Watson said in 2003. “I do prefer tougher golf courses, but I’ve enjoyed myself out here. I enjoy being around the guys and I enjoy still having a chance to compete. Is it the same as when I was on the regular tour? Of course not. It’s different because it has to be different. Once you understand that, it’s just fine.”

That’s exactly what it was to Bruce, just fine, nothing more. He missed the tension of the PGA Tour, the golf courses, and his friends, who were for the most part still working over there. He also missed the crowds. Most Senior Tour events draw small, quiet crowds. Only the real Senior majors—the PGA and the U.S. Open—are apt to draw crowds that make players and caddies feel as if they are back playing with, as Trevino likes to call them, “the flat-bellies.”

Bruce’s feelings about the junior tour vs. the Senior Tour may have been best summed up when, as he walked toward the first tee for Watson’s first practice round at the Masters in 2000, he stopped under the famous tree outside the clubhouse, looked at the sky, held out his hands, and said, “Real tour
air
. I feel like I can breathe again!”

During Watson’s first years on the Senior Tour, Bruce had offers from several top players on the junior tour—notably David Duval and Ernie Els—to go work for them. As he had with Greg Norman, Watson would have understood if Bruce had chosen to make the jump. This time, though, it was never an issue for Bruce. No doubt he could have made far more money working for Duval or Els, who played worldwide schedules as Norman had, probably played twice as much in a year as Watson, and were winning consistently and often. “I learned once that money can’t buy happiness,” Bruce said. “I knew I belonged with Tom. If he had told me, ‘Go do it,’ I would have told him no way. But it never came up because I never thought about it seriously.”

He did keep his hand in on the regular tour by working several times a year for Lee Janzen and a couple of times a year for John Cook. Watson was only playing about eighteen times a year—thirteen or fourteen Senior events and about four regular tour events—so Bruce had free time to work for Janzen and Cook. Cook didn’t have a regular caddy, and Janzen’s caddy at the time, Dave Musgrove, lived in Great Britain. Several weeks a year, rather than ask Musgrove to fly over just to work one tournament and then fly back, Janzen would hire Bruce. That worked perfectly for the player and both caddies.

“I already knew he was good from watching him with Tom through the years,” Janzen said. “But I found out
how
good one of the first times he worked for me. I asked him for the yardage to a hole, and he said it was something like one fifty-six but I needed to play the shot as if it were one forty-six because there was a little ridge short of the pin that would make the ball hop forward. I pulled out my yardage book and there was no notation about a ridge on that part of the green. I said, ‘Are you sure, Bruce? There’s nothing here about a ridge.’ He said it was there, he had seen it yesterday when he checked the dot.” (Caddies nowadays check every green the first three days of a tournament to see where the rules officials have marked a small white dot. That tells them the next day’s pin placement and allows them to check around the area for any ridges or plateaus, things that won’t always show up in a yardage book or on a pin sheet.)

Janzen was convinced by Bruce’s certainty and played the shot as if it were 146 instead of 156. Pros are that exact in their yardage. As Watson says, “When we’re on, we can hit any club to within plus or minus two yards of our target.” Janzen watched his shot land, take a big hop forward, and settle hole high. “If Bruce doesn’t see the ridge, I hit the shot ten yards farther and I’m probably over the green,” he said. “Instead I’ve got a makeable birdie putt. After that I never doubted him again.”

Bruce enjoyed working for both Janzen and Cook. He liked both men, he liked the extra income, and he liked getting back to the regular tour whenever he could. He was one of the few caddies who could handle Cook’s mercurial temperament. One of the tour’s nicest men off the golf course, Cook could become a dervish on the golf course, often beating himself to a pulp when he played badly. “Bruce, as much or more than any caddy who ever worked for me, could handle me,” Cook said. “What’s more, he was never afraid to tell me to just stop it—which is exactly what I need to hear sometimes.”

But his best weeks were still with Watson, especially at the two Senior majors Watson really focused on and those rare weeks when Watson went back to play the regular tour. As a two-time champion, he played Augusta every year; he played the British Open every year; and he played the two tournaments he had won late in his career—the Memorial and the Colonial—every year.

It was at the Colonial in May of 2002 that Marsha Cummins came back into Bruce’s life once again.

She was actually Marsha Moore by then, mother of four, two grown, two from a marriage that wasn’t working. She and her husband, Jeff, had recently agreed to file for divorce.

It was Marsha’s first marriage, but her third serious relationship. Since last dating Bruce in 1984, Marsha had gotten a job as a flight attendant for American Airlines, so for a while she was traveling almost as much as Bruce. Her parents would take her kids, Brittany and Taylor, when she was on the road, and she finally had a job that she truly enjoyed. In 1987, she met Jeff Moore, who was then a senior at SMU.

“I was looking for a car,” she said. “I read an ad in the paper and went to see the guy about the car. He was very nice, and I bought the car. Then I get a call from him saying he had left his CDs in the glove compartment. Could he come over and pick them up? He did, we got into a long conversation and, well . . .”

Jeff was twenty-one at the time, Marsha was thirty-one. They dated for six years before Marsha finally got over her phobia about being married and married him. “I had to wait for him to grow up,” she jokes.

They had two children: a son, Brice, who was born in 1993, and a daughter, Avery, born eleven months after that. It was not long after Avery’s birth that Kay Barton called Marsha with some news about an old friend of theirs: Bruce Edwards had at long last gotten married.

“I probably hadn’t seen Bruce a half-dozen times since 1984,” Marsha said. “But when Kay called and told me he had gotten married, I was devastated. I mean, completely devastated. It made no sense. Here I was, married, with young children, and I was carrying the torch for a man I had hardly seen at all for years. But I was crushed. Completely crushed. I remember saying to myself, ‘Marsha, it just wasn’t meant to be. Now move on.’ But it was a lot easier said than done. I guess there was a part of me that just always figured somehow, some way, we’d end up together,” she said. “And then there was Kay on the phone, in essence telling me no way it was ever going to happen. I tried to put him out of my mind at that point.” She smiled.

“But I guess I never really did. I guess my first clue should have been when my son was born and I wanted to name him for Bruce, so I named him Brice,” she said.

She and Jeff had gone from Texas to Florida to Texas, hoping to find happiness in their marriage. He had changed jobs twice. She had gone back to work, as a ticket agent for Southwest Airlines. Then she decided to go back to school, enrolling in the nursing program at the University of Texas at Arlington. “I was searching,” she said. “I didn’t know what for, but for something.”

And then Bruce showed up again.

Marsha had read in the papers about the house burning down and the divorce. She felt awful for Bruce and had asked Kay Barton, who still kept in close touch with Bruce—he is godfather to her two daughters—how Bruce was doing. “Kay kept me updated on Bruce,” she said. “But that was as far as it went.”

Until Colonial week. Kay and her sister, Ruthann, both knew that Marsha and Jeff had split. They also knew that Bruce was coming to town. They invited Marsha to a party at Kay’s house, not ever mentioning that Bruce was coming to the party too.

“I walked up to the porch and there he was, sitting in a chair, drinking a White Russian,” Marsha said. “My heart just about stopped when I saw him. All of a sudden it was 1974 and I was a seventeen-year-old Nelsonette again.”

They started talking, and all the memories flooded back. By the time the night was over, they were sitting on the couch together watching an NBA playoff game while everyone else was off in another room watching some reality show. “So it started up again just the way it had the first two times,” Marsha said. “We had a great week together. He took me to a great Mexican restaurant for my birthday, and when it was over we went to a bar and sat and watched a hockey game.”

Clearly any woman who actually
wanted
to watch a playoff hockey game on her birthday was a woman after Bruce’s own heart.

Which, in fact, was exactly what Marsha had decided she was—after his heart. “When the week was over, he left town and I went to see Kay,” she said. “I said to her, ‘This time he’s not just walking out of my life again. I’m not going to make it that easy for him.’”

Kay was all for the notion of Bruce and Marsha together, but she knew that Marsha’s saying she wanted them to be a couple didn’t mean it would happen. She explained to Marsha how awful the end of Bruce’s marriage had been, how much he had gone through in the aftermath of the fire, the trial, and the divorce. “She said, ‘If you’ll forgive the expression, he’s been burned,’” Marsha remembered. “I said, ‘I know, but Kay, I’m a woman on a mission.’”

Bruce and Marsha began talking—occasionally on the phone, but more often by e-mail. Their instant messages went back and forth so often that when Brice and Avery were on their mother’s computer and spotted Bruce’s e-mail address popping up in the instant messaging corner of the computer, they started screaming, “Mom, Mom, he’s back!” For a while they only knew Bruce by his computer sign-on. Bruce was very intrigued by Marsha and greatly enjoyed her company. But as Kay had pointed out, he was in no rush to get serious with anybody.

“I was a long par-four over water,” he said. “To a narrow green.”

That was okay with Marsha. To carry on with the golf metaphor, she was through laying up where Bruce was concerned.

He invited her to come visit in Ponte Vedra. She scrambled around for a babysitter and went. Then he invited her to a tournament. She went again. She began planning ahead. Bruce’s birthday was in November. She wanted to do something truly special, something that would tell him how much he meant to her without her having to say the words. “I’ve always been a planner,” she said. “I wanted to do something unique. I knew he’d lost a lot of stuff that meant a lot to him in the fire, so I came up with an idea to try to get him some of those memories back.”

She told Kay her idea: track down every clipping she could possibly find—every photo, every newspaper or magazine story, anything—on Bruce’s career with Tom. “That’s going to be an awful lot of work, especially to get original clips, not just stuff out of the computer,” Kay said.

“I know,” Marsha answered, then repeated her mantra: “I’m a woman on a mission.”

The mission to find anything and everything about Bruce Edwards took her to libraries and newspapers and magazines around the state of Texas. She spent hours going through microfiche, making copies, then taking them to Kinko’s and convincing the people there that she wasn’t infringing on any copyright laws, just trying to complete a mission. She found special paper and finally a binding that she knew would get Bruce’s attention: It was Eagles green.

As she worked, things were getting better and better with Bruce. He was inviting her to more and more tournaments, e-mailing more and more often. It was all going according to plan—until San Antonio.

“He had invited me to come down for the week, which was great since it was an easy trip from Dallas,” she said. “We had a wonderful time. And then I made a horrible mistake. I said those three words.”

The three words that often send men, especially recently divorced men, running for cover: I Love You. Marsha knew the instant the words had escaped her mouth that she had made a mistake. She could tell by his response, “something along the lines of, ‘Yeah, okay,’” she said, but more by the look on his face. “Terror,” she said. “I had terrified him.”