Caddy for Life (38 page)

Kerr and the other caddies had noticed that Bruce, who had always been one of the fastest walkers on tour, just couldn’t keep a fast pace for 18 holes anymore. “He needs it slower,” Kerr said. “He won’t ever say a word about it, but we notice. The guy has so much guts, but you can see the exhaustion in his face. We got lucky today because it’s cooled off, but he’s still hurting. I can feel it.”

Caddies will often help one another during a round—raking for one another, for example, if a caddy needs to get right to his player after he comes out of a bunker. On 18 that afternoon, Watson found the back bunker. After he played out, Kerr grabbed the rake just to save Bruce a little work. “All the guys are doing that when they can,” Watson said. “I notice it when they do it, and I’m grateful. But I know they aren’t doing it for me. They’re doing it for Bruce.”

Watson didn’t play badly on Saturday, shooting a one-under-par 70, but Bruce Lietzke, who had started the day two shots behind Watson, in third place, played what he later called the round of his life, shooting 64. That put him at nine under for the week, giving him a four-shot lead on Watson and Fernandez. Sometimes the most frustrating thing about golf is not being able to play defense. Lietzke was a talented player who had won thirteen times and made a lot of money on the regular tour but had never won a major. He had made a conscious decision early in his career to play enough golf to make a good living but took off long stretches during the year to spend time with his two children. If that meant missing majors, he simply missed them. He had never played in the British Open and had last played in the U.S. Open in 1985. Now his kids were almost grown, and like a lot of players, he was finding playing with the over-fifty set quite enjoyable.

“We need a good start,” Bruce said Sunday morning. “He’s never been in this position before, and he’ll definitely be looking at this as a chance to win a major—senior or not. We put some pressure on him early and he might come back to us.”

The chance to do that was there early. Just as Bruce had predicted, Lietzke looked tight at the start. He found the bunker off the first tee, missed the green, and made bogey. Watson had a 20-foot putt for birdie that could have sliced the lead in half on one hole, but it just slid by. Both Watson and Bruce looked chagrined, because they knew how important a two-shot swing on the first hole might have been. Lietzke then had to get up and down from a greenside bunker at the second while Watson had another birdie chance. Lietzke saved his par; Watson missed his birdie.

That set a pattern for the day. Lietzke was no different than anyone else coming off a great round: The day was a struggle for him. The fact that he was trying to hold off Tom Watson in a Senior major made it that much tougher. But Watson couldn’t make enough putts to really turn the pressure up. Lietzke made a great par save at the sixth, then drilled a 10-foot eagle putt on the par-five eighth hole after his best shot of the day got him that close.

At that moment Watson trailed by six strokes, having missed his own birdie putt. Bruce could see a little sag in his shoulders as they walked off the ninth tee.

“Hey,” he said, “how far behind were we last year at Caves? Six wasn’t it?”

“Five,” Watson said.

Bruce knew that, and he knew Watson would know it too. “Yeah,” he answered, “but you made a bogey on sixteen and we still caught up.”

The message got through. Watson birdied the ninth while Lietzke bogeyed to slice the margin quickly back to four. Watson got within three and had a 12-foot birdie putt at 13 that would have cut the margin to two. But as had been the pattern since Friday, he couldn’t make the putt. A Lietzke birdie from the rough at 16—when his ball bounced over a bunker and stopped two feet from the flag—sealed the deal. The final margin was two. As Lietzke lined up his final putt, Bruce, knowing the tournament was over, said to him, “Knock it in, Bruce.”

Lietzke gave him a big smile and did just that. The handshakes were warm and so was the applause for everyone. But Watson and Bruce both felt let down. Each had believed that Watson would win and, in doing so, clinch that spot in the 2004 Open. It just wasn’t meant to be.

“We still have a lot of golf left,” Bruce told Watson as they walked off the green.

“Damn right we do,” Watson answered.

One week later Bruce made his debut in a cart at the Ford Senior Players Championship. Technically this was a major, just as the Senior Open and the Senior PGA Championship were. But most of the players, especially those who had won real majors during their career, looked at it as a good tournament but a clear notch below the first two majors on the Champions schedule.

The event in Dearborn wasn’t all that different from the Senior Open, except that Watson’s brilliant round came on the second day—a 64—and the player who made a big move on the weekend to catch him wasn’t Lietzke but newly minted senior Craig Stadler, the 1982 Masters champion who had turned fifty a month earlier. Once again Watson’s inability to play defense on the golf course was his downfall, as Stadler shot 65-66 on the weekend to beat him by three shots. Watson had played remarkably well in three straight tournaments but had come up short of his goal in each one of them, especially the last two, where he very much wanted to share a victory with Bruce.

Midway through the week in Dearborn, Watson got a phone call from Neil Oxman. “Bruce should go with you to Europe,” he told Watson. “I’ve been following the weather over there. It’s been hot and dry all summer, and they’re expecting it to stay hot and dry. He should go.”

Watson understood and appreciated Oxman’s feelings. He knew why Oxman wanted Bruce to go, but he also knew Bruce was exhausted, and he would have to walk at both British Opens if he went overseas. Hot weather, even Scottish hot weather, would be just as tough on him at this stage as cold, wet weather, just in a different way. Oxman understood. Reluctantly he finally made a room reservation and told Watson he would meet him at Royal St. George’s the following Monday.

Watson’s two weeks overseas were an almost unqualified success. He finished tied for 18th place in the British Open, his highest finish since a tie for 10th in 1997 at Royal Troon. He did so, according to Oxman, in spite of a series of gaffes by his caddy on the first day, which he comically described to Bruce in a lengthy letter he wrote him after returning home. “By the fifth hole on the first day,” he wrote, “I had dropped a towel, had a bag fall over, the umbrella had fallen out of its bottom brace, and Tom threw me a ball that I dropped and it ended up rolling halfway across the green. At that point, Tom tried to calm me down. I actually thought I wasn’t that nervous!”

The following week, returning to Turnberry for the British Senior Open (he and Hilary shared a cottage for the week with Jack and Barbara Nicklaus), Watson appeared on his way to yet another second-place finish until Englishman Carl Mason, leading by two shots with one hole to play, double-bogeyed the 18th hole, forcing a playoff. Both men parred the first playoff hole—the 18th—then they played the 18th again. Watson had hit two-iron the first time he played the hole that day, leaving himself 195 yards to the front of the green. On the first playoff hole, he hit driver and had 124 to the front. The third time, he hit driver and “turned it over” (hit a draw that cut the corner), and had 95 yards to the front. “A hundred yards closer to the green than he was in regulation,” Oxman wrote. “I just don’t think you can give Watson two ‘take-overs’ (as we would say in Philly) and not have him come out on top.”

He did, winning on the second playoff hole. Even though he had needed Mason’s help at the finish to win, the victory was gratifying after the near misses earlier in the summer. “I know for a fact that he was tired of finishing second,” Bruce said. “Of course I told both him and Ox before they went over that Tom was a lock to win since I wasn’t going.”

Bruce wasn’t there in body, but his spirit was very much present. After Watson had been presented with the trophy and had done his postround media interviews, he returned to the cottage to pack. Oxman was already there, getting things organized, since the Watsons and the Nicklauses were leaving that night to fly home. They sat down for a moment to talk about the week and joked about how Bruce had correctly predicted Watson’s victory. “We both started to get emotional, just talking about him, even making jokes about what he was going to say when we got back,” Oxman said. “We didn’t start out to have a good cry, but that’s what we ended up doing.”

In his letter to Bruce, after telling him all the funny stories and expressing amazement that Watson had been able to win with him on the bag (it was Oxman’s first win as a caddy
ever
), Oxman wrote:

Without exaggerating, fifty or sixty times over the two weeks someone came up to me and began a conversation with the same two words, “How’s Bruce.” A guy at Turnberry who you gave a signed glove to; someone who first met you at Wethersfield when you were fifteen; spectators in front of the clubhouse at St. George’s and Turnberry seeing me standing next to the golf bag; reporters; marshals—all of whom asked in the most genuine and sincere way.

When we were on the practice tee one day, a European Tour caddy gingerly stepped up to Tom and said, “How’s Bruce? Please tell him all the caddies over here are thinking of him and wish him well.”

It happened every day—lots of times every day.

One more. We were standing in front of the locker room at St. George’s and one of the members asked Tom how you were. Coincidentally, the guy was a doctor. Tom got into a very animated discussion about you with him. (I saw this happen a lot as well.) And when this conversation was over there was one overriding conclusion that you could draw from listening to it. Tom Watson loves you Bruce. That is for sure.

And so do a lot of other people—many of whom have never met you. But you know that.

Thanks for letting me see a little bit of the world as you’ve been able to see it for the past thirty years.

Feel better.

Best.
Ox

P.S.—I packed the flag from the 18th at Turnberry and the bib in Tom’s bag for you.

Bruce couldn’t help but smile at the P.S. Finally, twenty-eight years after Watson’s first win in Scotland, he had gotten a British Open flag.

17

“We’re Not Done Yet”

WHILE WATSON AND OXMAN
were in Great Britain, Bruce and Marsha made a trip of their own: to Hartford.

The Jaycees who run the Greater Hartford Open had asked Bruce to come home to the GHO to be honored. They had decided to name a scholarship after him. “Imagine that,” Bruce said. “Someone naming a scholarship after me, the antistudent.”

Even so, he was delighted with the honor and the gesture. The Jaycees were planning to give $12,000 in Bruce’s name to a deserving high school senior which would be put toward his or her college education at the rate of $3,000 a year. The Jaycees had asked Bruce and Marsha to fly in to be part of the GHO’s opening ceremony on Monday morning, July 21, at which all of their scholarships and grants were presented.

Bruce and Marsha flew in on Sunday, which gave Bruce a chance to give Marsha a tour of his old neighborhood: the house where he had grown up, the schools he had gone to, the places where he had played, and, of course, Wethersfield Country Club. “I guess I was like a lot of people going home to the place where they grew up,” he said. “As a kid I couldn’t wait to get out. Now, as a grownup, it was great to be back.”

It had been a hectic month for Bruce and Marsha. After arriving home from the Senior Open, Bruce had received a call from the doctor who had examined him in Philadelphia. His tests for chronic Lyme disease had come back positive. He was convinced, the doctor said, that the Mayo Clinic had misdiagnosed him in January and that he did not have ALS. This was stunning news, though not necessarily surprising. Marsha had by then done enough research to know that many Lyme experts believed that what appeared to be ALS was chronic Lyme. At times, they believed, ALS was an outgrowth of chronic Lyme. When Bruce told Watson the news, he was skeptical but encouraged Bruce and Marsha to follow up. He had done the same research as Marsha and had come across some cases where people diagnosed with ALS had been treated for Lyme and gotten better.

“There weren’t many of them, but they were out there,” Watson said. “My attitude was pretty much the same as Bruce’s. As long as the testing and the medicines they were proposing weren’t going to hurt him, why not pursue it? At the very least, it gave us all some hope.”

Watson and Bruce and Marsha agreed then that the best thing to do was go to the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville and have them test for Lyme again.

“We showed the test results from Minnesota to the doctor there and the Lyme test results from Philadelphia,” Marsha said. “I could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t believe the Lyme test. I knew when they retested it was going to come back negative.”

She was right. The test for Lyme was negative again. The test results said, “Unconventional testing was done with a positive result and through our testing the Lyme diagnosis remains negative.”

Who was right? Naturally Bruce and Marsha wanted to believe the Lyme doctor was right. Lyme was treatable. Marsha found a second Lyme doctor, one who was thought of as one of the best in the country. After he finished caddying in Dearborn, Bruce went to Springfield, Missouri, for still more testing. Again he was told he had chronic Lyme disease, not ALS. The doctor prescribed Flagyl, a potent drug which he said would make Bruce feel worse at first, even taken in small doses. But, he said, as Bruce built up the dosage, he would start to see results and would begin to feel better. Bruce and Marsha were certainly willing to try.

“There are two options,” Bruce said, sitting in a Hartford restaurant the night before the scholarship ceremony. “One is to try this and hope for a miracle. The other is to go home and wait to die.”

Bruce had decided by this point not to caddy in the PGA at Oak Hill in August. Watson had been invited to play by the PGA of America. Bruce wanted to go, but he knew that walking the golf course, especially in August heat, would be difficult. He didn’t want to ride. What’s more, Marsha and Kim Julian had found someone in the Bahamas who had come up with a “cobra venom” that he insisted halted the progression of ALS. “I guess we were at the point of trying just about anything then,” Marsha said. “If it was Lyme, this stuff wouldn’t hurt Bruce. If it was ALS, maybe, long shot, it might help.”