Caddy for Life (8 page)

Suddenly Oxman was on his feet. “Hey Bruce,” he said. “Look over there.”

Bruce saw a young pro with reddish-brown hair walking toward the clubhouse. He had a green McGregor golf bag slung over his shoulder and there was no caddy in sight. Bruce had no idea who the pro was. He had never seen him before. Oxman knew exactly who it was.

“That’s Tom Watson,” he said to Bruce. “He’s going to be a real good player someday. Go ask him.”

Bruce recognized the name immediately. He remembered watching the Hawaiian Open on TV on a Saturday afternoon that winter. Watson was in the lead, and he remembered seeing him make a bunch of putts from everywhere. “Three bombs in a row that I remember,” Bruce said. “I remember thinking, ‘Who in the world is this guy? He can really putt.’”

The guy who could really putt was twenty-four years old and had just returned to the tour after a two-week break. He had married Linda Rubin, his childhood sweetheart, in June and had been on his honeymoon at Lake Tahoe. Watson had graduated from Stanford in 1971 with a degree in psychology, and even though he wasn’t certain he was good enough, he had decided to give the PGA Tour a try. In all likelihood, if the tour hadn’t panned out, he would have followed in his father’s footsteps and gone into the insurance business.

He had made it through Qualifying School in December of 1971, one of twenty-three pros awarded their playing cards after six rounds of golf at PGA National, in Palm Beach. The winner of the Q-School that year was Bob Zender. Watson finished fifth. Among those who also finished behind Zender were Lanny Wadkins, David Graham, John Mahaffey, Bruce Fleisher, and Steve Melnyk.

Watson’s rookie year on tour had been respectable. He had finished 78th on the money list, making $30,413 for the year. His goal had been to make the top 60 and become fully exempt, but he fell short of that. He had started 1973 well, finishing fourth at Hawaii, and appeared to be in good position to make the top 60 halfway through the year when he took the break to get married.

He had never employed any caddy for very long during his eighteen months on tour, mostly because that was just the way caddying worked. Even now he can’t remember the names of any of the men who worked for him prior to that day. As Watson walked in the direction of the clubhouse, Bruce froze for an instant. He had never yet had to approach a complete stranger about working for him. Seeing Bruce hesitate, Oxman grabbed him by the shoulders.

“Go ask him,” he repeated. “Come on. Go do it. Now.”

Bruce walked over to Watson and introduced himself. As he remembers it, he was talking fast, trying to give Watson a quick verbal résumé.

“My name’s Bruce Edwards,” he said. “I just finished high school in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and I’m going to spend a year on the tour caddying. If you don’t have a caddy right now, I’d like to work for you.”

Watson didn’t hear that much of what Bruce said beyond his first name and the plan to spend a year on the tour. He had the impression that Bruce was asking if he could work for him for that year. Bruce isn’t sure what he was asking. “If he’d have offered it to me, I’d have probably taken it,” he says now.

Watson wasn’t prepared to offer that. To him, Bruce looked like most caddies: long brown hair, an easy loping stride. “I saw a long-haired kid in jeans asking me to caddy,” he said. “He was polite, I remember that. So I said, ‘Okay, we’ll try it for a week and see what happens.’”

He handed the bag over to Bruce and told him he was going to go inside to change his shoes. Then they were going to the range to hit balls. Bruce figured Watson would warm up and then go play a few holes. Walking to the range, Watson was relaxed and friendly. He asked Bruce where he’d grown up and how long he had been out on tour. Bruce liked him instantly. He had an outgoing manner and a ready smile that revealed a slight gap in his front teeth. With the reddish hair and freckles, he could easily have passed for Huck Finn.

When they arrived at the range, Watson gave Bruce some money and told him to buy a couple of buckets of balls. Nowadays when a pro walks onto the range at a tour event, someone asks him what brand of ball he plays. Whatever the answer, he is handed a free supply of as many of those balls—brand-new of course—as he wants. In the 1970s, pros were only just beginning to be able to buy range balls, the beat-up kind most people are familiar with, on-site. Most carried a shag bag with them in their trunk, and when they hit balls, their caddies were expected to stand on the range and shag the balls.

Which could occasionally be dangerous. Oxman remembers standing on the range one day shagging balls when he saw Homero Blancas, a longtime pro, completely mishit a driver. “He absolutely thinned it,” Oxman said, and it screamed on a low line drive toward where he was standing, no more than 150 yards away, since his player, Mike Reasor, was hitting mid- to short-range irons. “I saw it come off the club and just ducked instinctively,” Oxman said. “I heard this scream of pain next to me. The ball had nailed the guy standing there right in the chest. He pitched forward like he’d been shot and didn’t move for a few seconds. It was scary.”

As it turned out, the victim only had the wind knocked out of him—and a nice-sized bruise.

Bruce didn’t have to shag balls that day. But he did spend the next four hours on the range as Watson hit bucket after bucket of balls. “All he would say is, ‘I need more balls and some water,’” Bruce said. “I can’t begin to tell you how many balls he hit that day. Could have been four hundred, five hundred, more. I don’t know. But we spent four hours out there, and the temperature was a million degrees.”

“Nine million,” Oxman repeats.

“I’m pretty sure I hadn’t touched a golf club in two weeks,” Watson said. “I needed to practice. I’ve never been bothered by weather. I grew up practicing and playing most of the winter in Kansas City, and I played there in the heat of the summer all my life. So a hot day or a cold day or a windy day or a rainy day isn’t going to stop me from whatever it is I need to do.”

In fact Watson would go on to become one of the great “weather” players of all time. One of the reasons for his remarkable success in the British Open—five titles—is that the wind and the rain and the cold never bothered him. He enjoyed seeing that kind of weather, because he knew other players would be bothered by it far more than he would.

Neither Watson nor Bruce knew any of this on that steamy afternoon. But by the end of the day, Bruce had a sense that he was with a different breed of player than those he had worked for in the past. “I thought to myself, ‘This guy will do anything to get better.’ To me, that was half the battle right there.”

They played a practice round the next day and became better acquainted walking the golf course. Watson was impressed when he learned that Bruce was the son of a dentist, that he had an older sister at Bucknell, and that his parents were counting on him to come home in a year and go to college. “You could tell he had been raised the right way,” he remembered. “He was polite, he had manners, and he was well spoken. The more we talked, the more it became clear to me that this was a bright young man.”

Which would become an issue between the two of them later on.

But not in St. Louis. It didn’t hurt that Watson had an excellent week. Bruce finally made his first cut since his days with Dick Lotz at the GHO, and Watson played well on the weekend, especially Sunday, when he shot 67 to move up the leader board into a tie for sixth place. That was worth $6,500 to Watson. This was before caddies were paid more for a top-ten finish than for a non-top-ten (most caddies get 7 percent these days for a top-ten), but 3 percent of $6,500 was $195. Add in $15 a day for the six days he had worked and Bruce found himself being handed a $300 check for the week by Linda Watson. She had rounded up from the $285 he was actually owed.

Almost as good as the check was what Watson handed him soon after that: the keys to his Buick Cutlass. “I’ll see you in Montreal Tuesday morning at nine a.m.,” he said.

He had the job. He also had 1,200 miles to drive in a little more than thirty-six hours. He wasn’t about to complain or point out how far he would have to drive in such a short period of time. He felt certain his life had just changed, and he felt richer than he had ever felt in his life.

“That three hundred dollars might just as well have been three thousand or thirty thousand,” he said. “I mean, I was rich.”

Leahey and Oxman had also had good weeks—in different ways. Lou Graham had made the cut and finished twenty-fifth, providing Leahey with his first weekend check. Labron Harris had missed the cut but had provided one of the funnier scenes Oxman had ever seen. Harris had been paired at the start of the week with Jim Colbert and Bob Dickson. By the time he reached the 10th tee Friday, both men had dropped out of the tournament. Colbert had withdrawn after the round Thursday, feeling sick. Dickson managed nine holes Friday before the heat got to him.

“It wasn’t one of those deals where he was playing bad and quit,” Oxman said. “He was really sick.”

Rather than play nine holes in a single, Harris decided to catch up to the threesome in front of him and play in as a foursome. He hit his tee shot on number 10 down the right side of the fairway. As he walked to the ball, several marshals asked him where his playing partners were. “Way left,” Harris said. “They hit their balls way, way left. They need help.”

The marshals, ever polite, scrambled to the left to help look for the golf balls. Harris hit his second shot and walked to the green. As he did, he turned and waved the marshals even further left. “When we last saw them,” Oxman said, “they were disappearing over the hill.”

Bruce had a job. Leahey did too, and he had made a cut. Oxman hadn’t made a cut yet that summer, but he had helped Bruce get a job and he’d had some laughs.

The carnival moved on. Next stop, Montreal.

As it turned out, Bruce’s trip to Montreal was a lot easier than Tom and Linda’s. They flew through a nasty thunderstorm en route. Bruce and Leahey simply kept driving, one sleeping while the other drove. They made great time and pulled into the parking lot at the Richelieu Valley Golf and Country Club, the site of that year’s Canadian Open, shortly before dusk on Monday. Watson was on the range—of course—finishing up a relatively brief session. Bruce proudly handed him the keys and told him he had parked the car in the players’ lot.

“Go home and get some sleep,” Watson said, knowing how long the drive had been. “I’ll see you here in the morning.”

Bruce did just that. Watson hit a few more balls, went back to the locker room, and then walked out to the parking lot. There was the car, looking none the worse for wear after the long trip. Watson got in, turned the key, and . . . nothing. The car was completely dead. Watson had to call a tow truck. When the rig arrived, the driver looked under the hood and told Watson the problem was simple—the car was bone dry, not an ounce of water in it. He put water in it, and an hour later than planned, Watson drove back to the hotel to meet Linda.

There were a lot of pros on the tour back then who would have fired a caddy one week into a relationship for leaving them with a dead, waterless car. Watson never flinched. “It was my fault for not checking the water before a long trip like that,” he said. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

When Watson mentioned it to Bruce the next morning, he was momentarily terrified. When he saw Watson smiling as he described turning the key and finding the car dead, he breathed a sigh of relief. “For a split second I thought I’d blown it, lost the job,” he said. “But he was great about it, took the blame himself. That was one of the things I noticed about him right away during that first week, he wasn’t a whiner. A lot of players never hit a bad shot. It’s always someone else’s fault, and a lot of time it’s the caddy’s fault. It could be a wind gust, a bad golf course, a terrible lie. On the green a guy misses a putt, there was a spike mark. Tom never does that, I mean
never
does it, even sometimes when there is a legitimate excuse. He hits it and finds it and hits it again. And in those days, a lot of the time finding it wasn’t all that easy.”

During that first week Bruce had been struck by how hard Watson hit the ball every single time he swung. “You never knew which direction it was going,” he said. “It could go straight, dead left, dead right. But it was always solid, right on the club face. And he could really putt. I remember thinking, ‘This guy is going to make a lot of money, because he makes putts from everywhere.’”

Watson had noticed several things about his new caddy too. “He walked fast,” he said. “That’s important to me, because I’ve always been a fast walker and I need a caddy who can keep up with me without huffing and puffing. He did that from the start. Still does it today. He was clearly smart, had a quick wit, which I enjoyed right away. And he wasn’t a whiner at all. He never complained about how long we were on the range or how long the day might be. When I handed him the keys and said get the car to Montreal by Tuesday morning, he didn’t roll his eyes, didn’t talk about how far it was. He just said, ‘I’ll see you there.’”

Watson smiled at the retelling. “He got there in plenty of time. Of course, he never did promise the car would actually start when he got it there.”

4

The Boss

IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE
might imagine, the backgrounds that landed Tom Watson and Bruce Edwards together were similar.

Bruce had grown up in an upper-middle-class family, the second of four children, all of whom were expected to go to college. He had lived in a comfortable suburb and had spent a good deal of time during his teenage years around a country club. Watson’s background was more upper class. He was the son of a very successful Kansas City insurance broker named Raymond Watson, the second of three sons born to Raymond and Sarah Watson. He is five years older than Bruce, born on September 4, 1949. The Watson brothers were also expected to go to college. Specifically, they were expected to go to Stanford. That was where Raymond Watson had gone, and eventually all three Watson brothers went there too.