Caddy for Life (9 page)

Raymond Watson was a member of Kansas City Country Club and was an outstanding amateur player. He won a number of important junior tournaments, including the Western Junior Open when he was seventeen, and once had Frank Stranahan, one of the great amateur players of the 1940s and ’50s, three down in a quarterfinal at the U.S. Amateur before losing to him one down. “He was still upset about that years later,” Watson said. Everyone who ever met him, including his middle son, described Ray Watson as an intense competitor. As a boy Tom first competed against his brother Ridge, three years his senior, working constantly to be better than Ridge in anything, but especially in golf. “For years he beat me at everything,” he said. “I was, I guess, the typical little brother, always scrambling to keep up with my big brother. When I was thirteen, I started beating him in golf. But I still couldn’t beat my father.”

When Tom was fourteen, he and his father faced each other in the finals of the club championship at Walloon Lake Country Club (which was near their summer home in northern Michigan). Tom had Ray two down with three to play, but his father rallied to even the match on the 18th hole and then won it on the second hole of sudden death. Undeterred, Tom came back a year later, when both again reached the final, and won two-and-one. “That was a big deal, to beat my dad,” he said. “The funny thing is, I think he was more upset when I beat him than I had been when he beat me. I think the only thing that might have upset him more was when his sister beat him one day. He shot eighty or something like that and she shot seventy-seven. He didn’t take that well at all. He was that kind of competitor. Very tough. Never gave an inch, never asked for one.”

Ray Watson wasn’t just competitive when it came to golf. He genuinely loved the game. Years after he had become the world’s best player, Tom told people that the most fun he had playing was still when he went out at Kansas City Country Club with his father and Stan Thirsk, his longtime teacher. Tom was a very good junior player but not a spectacular one. The same could be said for his career at Stanford. He was a good college player, good enough to qualify for the Masters in 1970 by finishing fifth at the U.S. Amateur (in those days it was stroke play and the top eight qualified for Augusta), but he wasn’t a dominant college player. And the same could be said of him as a student. He drifted through majors, from communications to economics, before finally settling on psychology.

It was a class experiment in a psych class that convinced him to settle there. The professor gave each student in the class a sealed packet which, he said, contained an analysis of each of them done by the school based on their records and class work. The students were supposed to read the analysis and then write a paper on why they agreed or disagreed with what their report said. “Almost ninety percent of us agreed,” Watson said. “It was only then that the professor told us that the analysis given to each one of us was exactly the same.”

Stanford changed Watson in many ways. Being his father’s son, he arrived with what would best be described as typical midwestern Republican values. Like his father, he favored the Vietnam War and thought those who protested it were wrong. He wrote a paper for a freshman English class criticizing those who had protested the war on campus, which led to a spirited discussion with the professor about the war and the antiwar protests. “I had come from a very closed and structured environment growing up in Kansas City,” he said. “Stanford opened my eyes up to a lot of things.”

By the time he graduated, Watson had taken part in antiwar protests himself. A year after graduating he voted for George McGovern for president. When he told his father that he had voted for McGovern, Ray Watson said simply, “You are an idiot.” Watson laughs now when he retells the story and says, “Of course he was right.” A voracious reader, Watson often quotes from the books and writings of famous men. One that he mentions often is Winston Churchill’s oft-quoted line on liberals and conservatives. There are many different versions of the quote. Watson’s is: “If you are not a liberal at eighteen, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at thirty-five, you have no brain.”

At eighteen, Tom Watson clearly had a heart.

But he had very little idea of what he wanted to do with his brain when he graduated from Stanford. Insurance was there, he knew, but Watson didn’t have any great passion for it, nor did he have great grades—about a 2.5 GPA. “I also knew,” he said, “that clinical psychology was not in my future.” He knew that he liked golf, liked it a lot. Frequently he would wake up before dawn, get in his car, and make the two-hour drive down the coast from Stanford to the Monterey Peninsula and be the first player to tee off at Pebble Beach. “I’d stop at a little place right near the golf course and pick up a dozen miniature glazed donuts,” he said. “That was my breakfast. The starter, Ray Parga, would get me out first, I’d play eighteen holes, get in the car, and be back at school by lunchtime. But I wasn’t all that good, certainly not good enough to think that a successful pro career was a sure thing.”

It was during the fall of his senior year that he finally had the epiphany that told him what he wanted to do. He was playing by himself one evening on the Stanford golf course, not even playing all that well, when he walked onto the 11th green and noticed something.

It was dark. He could see stars, but that was about all he could see. The golf course was completely empty. It occurred to Watson that a college senior who found himself all alone on a golf course after the sun had gone down might want to seriously consider the notion of trying to play the game for a living. He went home for Thanksgiving break and, sitting in the car coming home from a hunting trip, told his father he was thinking about turning pro when he graduated in the spring.

“That’s the right thing to do,” Ray Watson said. “Because if you don’t try it, you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

By then there was a second person whose approval was important to Watson: Linda Rubin. The two had met in high school when both had worked on a production of
The Pirates of Penzance
and had dated steadily since then. Linda had transferred from an eastern school to Mills College near Palo Alto as a junior and, whatever Watson’s post-Stanford plans were, they clearly included her. Linda wasn’t thrilled with the idea of life on the road as opposed to being the wife of a nine-to-five jacket-and-tie executive. But Watson has never been someone easily swayed once he makes his mind up, and as he put it, “I wanted to find out if I could be any good.”

So psychology degree in hand, he went off to the PGA Tour’s Qualifying School in the fall of 1971. There were a record 357 entrants in the Q-School that year (in 2003 there were 1,508). He made it through regional qualifying and became one of 75 finalists. The top 20 (and ties) made it to the tour, and Watson, even with a nervous 75 on the last of the six days, finished a solid fifth, making him a member of the PGA Tour. He wasn’t shocked to get his card, but certainly he was relieved. “I thought I could get through it,” he said. “But I certainly wouldn’t have been shocked at that stage of my career if I hadn’t made it.”

Qualifying School is perhaps the most difficult and intimidating event in golf. Players half-jokingly refer to it as the fifth major, because the pressure is so intense and because there is at least as much lore connected to Q-School as to any of the four majors. Many players need four or five attempts before they get through. Others get through, then end up back there—often on more than one occasion. Watson made it on his first try and never went back. At the time, Q-School was held in October and survivors were eligible to play on tour for the rest of that year. Watson played in the final six events of 1971 and made five cuts. He finished in a tie for 17th at the Azalea Classic, earning $472. Today a 17th-place finish in your run-of-the-mill $4 million tour event is worth $64,000—more than double the money Watson earned playing in thirty-two tournaments during his first full year on tour. Seventeenth was his highest finish in ’71, but his biggest check came in his first event, the Kaiser Open. There he tied for 28th and earned $1,065.

His first full year was a success. He made twenty-two cuts, had a second-place finish—at the Quad Cities Open—and made $30,413. That enabled him to pay back his father and the group of sponsors he had put together. It also landed him in 78th place on the money list for the year. These days, 78th place would have put Watson in a very comfortable spot, completely exempt for the next year, able to pick and choose what tournaments he wanted to play.

But the rules that made 125 players totally exempt for the following year didn’t go into effect until ten years later. When Watson first arrived, only sixty players were fully exempt at the end of each year. The rest had to go through Monday qualifying each week—unless they had finished in the top 25 of that tournament the year before, had made the cut at the previous week’s event, or were invited on a sponsor’s exemption. Many young players who were out of the top 60 would write tournament directors asking for sponsor exemptions. Anything to avoid the dreaded Monday qualifiers. Watson never asked for a sponsor’s exemption. It just wasn’t his way.

“I think I got two without asking,” he remembered. “But I never saw any reason to ask for one. If you were playing well and making cuts, you didn’t have to worry about Mondays. That’s the way I approached it.”

If you spend enough time with professional golfers, you will hear about a million different reasons why they aren’t playing well. It can be bad luck, bad karma, a bad teacher, a bad caddy, a bad sports psychologist, bad golf courses, or bad press. No one who has ever talked to Tom Watson about his golf has ever heard him make an excuse. He is a clear-eyed realist on most topics, but especially on his game. Most people who followed the tour in the early 1970s saw him as a rising star. Watson saw glimmers of potential, but not much more.

“The one thing I knew was that I wanted to get better,” he said. “I knew my game wasn’t anywhere close to a point where I could beat the best players on a regular basis, and that’s what I wanted to do. I was willing to work as hard as was necessary to get there.” Tour players today talk in awestruck tones about the work ethic of Vijay Singh, his willingness to take up residence at the end of a range and pound balls until darkness. Watson was doing that twenty years before Singh set foot on the tour. Bruce’s caddying buddies grew accustomed to telling Bruce where to meet them for dinner, because they knew that more often than not, Bruce was going to be on the range with Watson until dark—at least.

“I wanted to get good,” Watson explains simply.

He continued in that direction in 1973. By the time he took his break in June to get married and go on his honeymoon, he was solidly inside the top 60. His sixth-place finish in St. Louis was his fifth top ten of the year. He had finished fourth in Hawaii during that week when Bruce noticed him making bombs from all over on Saturday—when he had the lead. That was the way he played in those days. If nothing else, watching Watson play was always exciting. As Bruce noticed right away, he had a hard, fast swing that propelled the golf ball long distances—in many different directions. Even as he worked to become more consistent with his ball-striking, Watson was rarely deterred by an off-line shot. He was an absolute genius at figuring his way out of trouble, especially around the greens. Years later, if a player hit a ball from woods to water to bunker to green and somehow made par, tour players came to call such an escape a “Watson par.” It almost seemed as if he had invented that kind of escape from disaster.

He was also a remarkable putter, especially from long distance. He was so confident that he could make any putt of any length that he never lagged the ball on long putts. He fired at the hole. “I always took the approach with any putt of any distance that I was trying to make it,” he said. “I think I can honestly say that I’ve broken a lot of hearts out here through the years with some of the long putts I’ve made.” His face lights up at the memory of those heartbreakers, and it is apparent he has enjoyed every one.

“You better believe I did,” he says in confirmation.

If Watson wasn’t convinced he was on his way to stardom in 1973, his new caddy was. There was nothing about his game Bruce didn’t like. Even the wildness didn’t bother him, because he saw it as part of the aggressive style that he quickly became convinced was going to make his player a star. “He played the game the way I liked to see it played,” Bruce said. “He played fast, he played aggressive, and he never complained when he hit a bad shot. If he made a mistake, he didn’t sulk about it.” Even Watson admits that has been one of his strengths. “I’ve always been good about coming back from a double bogey to make a birdie,” he said. “I mean that both in the sense of going from one hole to the next but also one tournament to the next. I don’t brood. I move on.”

If Bruce had any doubts about Watson’s ability, they were dispelled forever that fall at what was then known as the World Open Golf Classic. The tournament was played over eight rounds—four rounds, a two-day break, then four more rounds. “Actually, to show you how different the tour was then, we all decided we didn’t want a two-day break, we just wanted a one-day break,” Watson said. “It was mid-November, it was the end of the year, we all just wanted to get out of there. So we just took one day and then kept playing. Can you imagine trying to do something like that today, with the way everything is now controlled by TV? Back then it was no big deal. We all wanted to play, so we played.”

In the final round before the break, Watson shot 62. He and Bruce both talk about that round to this day as a key step forward in his career. “It wasn’t just the fact that he shot such a low number,” Bruce says. “It was the way he shot it. He was just firing at flags all the way. On eighteen, he hit a three-iron—after driving the ball into the left rough—that just bored right through the wind to about ten feet and he made the putt for birdie. A lot of guys, they get five, six under for the day, they start protecting. All they want to do is make pars and get in without messing up. Tom just wasn’t built that way. He felt good and he just kept on firing. I knew that day for certain I was working with someone really special.”