Caddy for Life (40 page)
Bruce was all over the map on what he expected and wanted from 2004 as the 2003 season wound down. There were good days and bad days, up days and down days. Marsha, a devout Christian, talked to him often about not fearing death, and in many ways he was at peace with what he was facing, except, as had been the case that day in Boston, when he thought about what those who loved him would go through in his final days and in the aftermath of his death.
“There are times,” he wrote in an e-mail, which had become his main form of communication by late fall, “when I think it would be better if I went sooner rather than later. I know it will be very tough on Marsha, and I worry about the children [Brice and Avery] when that time comes. I don’t want anyone else to suffer through this any more than is necessary. What I worry about is those last days.”
On the days when he thought about what was to come, Bruce would get down and depressed. Only on rare occasions did the unfairness of it all make him angry. Even then, he kept almost all of that to himself. When reality would hit him hard on a given day, he shared some of those thoughts with Marsha. But he always managed to snap back and find things that would make him happy. He was still working; he had a great family around him, not to mention all his friends, who he knew would do anything for him. In October he was inducted into the Caddie Hall of Fame—a long-overdue honor that had been held back only because most inductees are already retired—and managed to find humor in the notion. “The best caddies aren’t famous,” he said. “We’re the guys behind the players who are famous. They’re the ones who belong in the Hall of Fame.”
Watson had three more events to play to finish the year—a Champions Tour stop in San Antonio; the Champions Tour Championship the following week in Sonoma, California; and, finally, the UBS Cup in Sea Island, Georgia, the week before Thanksgiving. The UBS Cup was a team event, a sort of mini-Ryder Cup with twelve-man teams—six in their forties and six over fifty—representing the United States and the “rest of the world,” competing with one another. Bruce was looking forward to working those first two weeks, especially after having had time off. He was hoping he would feel refreshed and rested, and that he and Watson could finish the season by winning again.
What he didn’t count on was the fact that his speech made traveling more difficult than it had ever been and that, even rested, even working in a cart, he tired far more easily than he had in the past. Watson played reasonably well in San Antonio, considering the fact that he was coming off a long layoff. He finished in a tie for fourth place—seven shots behind winner Craig Stadler—and earned $64,500, which put him comfortably in the lead on the Champions Tour money list with one week left in the official season.
One of the things that had been lost in all the emotion surrounding the year was Watson’s remarkable play. In his first three years on the Senior Tour, he had never been able to find the fire or inspiration that had made him the dominant player he had been at the peak of his PGA Tour career. Part of it, as he pointed out, was physical: He simply couldn’t practice as long or as hard as he had been able to do when he was younger. But it was more than that. Playing in 54-hole tournaments, with no cut most weeks, on golf courses set up to give up birdies the way a hose gives up water, didn’t exactly get Watson’s competitive juices flowing on a regular basis. During his first three full years on the Senior Tour, he had finished 13th, 17th, and 8th on the money list, bolstered the first and third years by big-money victories in the Tour Championship—not coincidentally a four-round event with an elite field (top 31 on the money list) usually played on a reasonably difficult golf course. Watson wanted to play well, worked hard when he was out on tour, and always gave 100 percent of himself on the golf course. But he wasn’t driven to play well, certainly not the way he had been driven as the young player Bruce had hooked up with way back in 1973.
In 2003 Watson was clearly driven again. He was driven by the understanding that the better he played, the more opportunities he had, as he had said in Chicago, to use the bully pulpit handed him when he was in contention, but even more so when he was in the lead. “Fame is fleeting—for everyone,” he said one summer morning while leading the Senior Open. “Even now, I can feel the momentum from Chicago slipping. You have to grab it while you can, because it doesn’t last long.”
But his drive was more than practical. He understood, as everyone did, that the time he and Bruce had together on the golf course was now extremely finite. Prior to Bruce’s diagnosis, both men had assumed that Watson would play into his sixties and that Bruce, who was in excellent shape when it came to walking golf courses, would continue to work for him until they both got around to retiring. That was no longer the case. Watson very clearly wanted to win for Bruce, wanted that hug they had at the Tradition, an old-time victory hug; not the kind of hug they had in Chicago, because that was entirely different. When they had their victory hug, made perhaps even more special because they were alone in the scorer’s trailer, not on a green in front of thousands of spectators, Watson and Bruce didn’t want even to think that it was the last one. But of course it crossed both their minds.
Watson had thought about that often as he watched his friend grow thinner and weaker. One day in San Antonio, when they had a moment alone during a practice round, he said to Bruce: “Is there anything, I mean
anything,
in the world that you haven’t done that you want to do?”
Bruce looked at him, smiled, and said in words perhaps only Watson and Marsha could have understood at that point: “Tom, I’ve done it all.”
Watson wasn’t sure at that moment if he wanted to laugh or cry or do both. He was happy that Bruce felt that way. “If there’s anything you think of,” he said, “just ask.”
He didn’t have to say, “And I’ll make sure it happens.”
Bruce already knew that.
It was in Sonoma that Bruce finally crashed emotionally.
The week in San Antonio had been difficult. He was fully aware of the fact that even his close friends were having trouble understanding him when he talked, and the fatigue he felt at the end of each day reminded him that the disease was progressing rapidly. “People kept telling me that I looked good,” he said. “Which is exactly what you say when you’re worried about the way someone looks.”
Friends who had not seen him for a while were stunned by how thin he had become. The crowds were as supportive as ever, but walking through the gallery ropes from the cart to the tees or greens, Bruce could hear people whispering about how he looked, wondering how much longer he would be caddying. On the first practice day at Sonoma, he and Watson were out alone. The day was beautiful and the golf course was too. It was the kind of afternoon they had both enjoyed through the years, a chance to get some work done but also spend some time talking, with no one to interrupt them. There was virtually no gallery, so it felt as if they had the golf course to themselves.
On the 13th hole, a par-five, Watson asked Bruce a question about yardage and what kind of contour the green had. Bruce gave him the yardage and said something about the way the green was tilted. Watson leaned forward, trying to understand what he was saying. Bruce tried again. Watson still couldn’t understand him. That was when it all crashed on Bruce. Talking to Watson was an essential part of his job; not just giving yardages, but telling him what he thought about putts, encouraging him when he needed encouragement, kicking him in the butt verbally when he needed to be kicked in the butt.
“And now I couldn’t do any of that anymore,” he said later. “Tom and Marsha were the two people who always found a way to understand what I was saying no matter what. Now Tom couldn’t understand me on something simple like yardage, and I knew he was trying as hard as he could to understand me. But he just couldn’t. It all got to me and I lost it completely.”
Watson understood exactly what was going on. He put his arm around Bruce and told him they would get through this too. “Listen to me, Bruce,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get done what we need to get done. If you have to write something down, write it down. If you need more time, take more time. This is
not
a problem. Get your head up, you’re going to be fine, we’re going to be fine. I’m not concerned about it, you shouldn’t be concerned about it.”
Bruce knew that Watson would never complain about his speech problems, that if he needed to take five minutes to write something down, Watson would stand and wait for five minutes. Writing wasn’t very easy for him at that stage either, because the condition of his hands had deteriorated too. But he got the message that mattered: I don’t care if you can talk. I want you here with me. This is where you belong. That was what mattered.
“Thank goodness it was just Tom and me out there,” he said. “It gave me a chance to get myself together.”
He did get himself together. In fact on other days Watson could understand a good deal of what he was saying. As had been the case from the beginning, his speech was better early in the day, when he wasn’t tired. Watson played well once more that week but was again victimized by a brilliant performance. This time it was Jim Thorpe, long one of Watson’s and Bruce’s favorite people on the tour, who played superbly. He began the week with a nine-under-par 63 and ended up leading wire to wire. Watson did his best to chase him down on Sunday afternoon, getting to within one shot with three holes to play before Thorpe eagled the par-five 16th hole to wrap up the title.
Thorpe was extremely aware of the emotions his two friends were feeling that day. “At one point I asked Tom how Bruce was doing,” he told reporters after receiving his trophy. “I could see the happy smile on his face fade. His mood changed.”
Watson had gone into the week knowing that a solid finish would almost certainly wrap up the title as leading money winner for the year. He had told PGA Tour officials early in the week that if he did win, he was planning to announce that he would contribute the prize, a $1 million tax-deferred annuity paid by Charles Schwab & Company, to ALS-related charities. Commissioner Tim Finchem had asked if Watson would like to make the announcement during the awards ceremony on the 18th green and Watson said, yes, he would like to do that.
“I was really inspired by what Allen Doyle did a couple years ago,” Watson said (Doyle had contributed the $1 million he had won as leading money winner in 2001 to six different charities). “Obviously after all that had happened this year and knowing how far ALS still needs to go in terms of research dollars, it just seemed to be the right thing to do.”
By finishing second and making $254,000 for the week, Watson finished the year with $1,863,401 in earnings, the most money he had ever made in one year as a professional golfer. When Finchem presented him with the annuity during the awards ceremony, Watson, with Hilary and Bruce standing next to him, announced what he planned to do with the money. When Watson had told Bruce what he was going to do and asked him to be there for the ceremony, Bruce had thought he would be in the crowd, not out on the green. “Another adjustment,” he said. “I forgot that at this point I was part of what Tom was doing.”
Bruce was thrilled by Watson’s gesture and yet, standing on the green in the fading sunlight of a late fall afternoon, he caught himself looking around, wondering if he had just caddied in the last stroke-play event of his career. It had been a long, difficult two weeks on the road, and he was looking forward to getting home. But he didn’t want to think that this had been his last afternoon trying to help Watson win a golf tournament.
“If we had won, I wouldn’t have felt any differently,” he said. “I wish we had won, but Jim’s a great guy and he played wonderfully. Either way, I was thinking I didn’t want this to be an ending, but I knew, deep down, that it very well might be.”
For the moment, he focused on going home to see Marsha and Brice and Avery and Nabby and the puppy they had gone out and bought a few weeks ago as a companion for Nabby.
Bruce had suggested naming the new dog Deuce, after Eagles running back Deuce Staley. Marsha had put her foot down on that one. One dog named after an Eagle was enough. They talked it over for a while and finally came up with a name that made everyone happy.
They named the new dog Hope.
“See You in Hawaii”
ON NOVEMBER 16
, 2003, a warm Sunday in Ponte Vedra, Bruce celebrated his forty-ninth birthday. In all, it was a happy day, with a few friends, including Greg Rita and Mike Rich, over for a cookout and to watch the Eagles play the New York Giants. Not only did the Eagles win, but—for once—they won easily, 28-10.
“Pretty close to a perfect day,” Bruce concluded.
Naturally there were certain thoughts he couldn’t escape: Was he celebrating his last birthday? Would this be his last holiday season? And, more imminently, was he about to caddy for the last time?
The UBS Cup would be held only 90 miles from Ponte Vedra, on St. Simons Island, a lovely resort near the south Georgia coast. Bruce’s parents were driving up from Vero Beach for the weekend, along with his aunt Joan. Chris, his older sister, was flying down from Annapolis. Marsha had made plans to have her son Taylor, who lived in Orlando, drive up to babysit for Brice and Avery on Saturday and Sunday so she could be there too.
The event itself was one that the players and caddies enjoyed greatly. It had only been in existence for three years, started by IMG, the giant international management firm, to capitalize on the popularity of the Ryder Cup. The PGA Tour had beaten IMG to the punch in 1994 when it launched the Presidents Cup, matching the United States against all the non-European players in the Rest of the World (thus the team name), and IMG had finally responded with the UBS Cup, which was named, rather crudely, after the corporate sponsor, the United Bank of Switzerland.
That aside, the site was stunning, the golf course scenic and challenging, and the accommodations, a place called the Lodge, right on the grounds of the Sea Island Golf Club, elegant. “It’s rather embarrassing when they tell you not to hesitate to call on your butler,” Hilary Watson said.
