Men in Green (13 page)

“Yes, you were,” Tatum said. “But the fifties were better.”

I asked why.

“Hogan, Nelson, Snead.” The American triumvirate.

“What was it about them?” I asked.

Without pausing Sandy said, “They came out of the caddie yard.”

Viewed through that light, it's interesting that Sandy had such an affinity for Tom Watson, who grew up at the Kansas City Country Club and not in its caddie yard. But Watson also has a toughness and a directness about him that made you forget about his privileged background. His attitude has always been
Tell me the bad news now
. There is a lot about him to admire, but Sandy loved him, which is something, because I wouldn't describe Watson as obviously lovable. When he was yipping late in his tour career, Watson once asked Davis Love how he gripped the putter. Davis told him what he did. Watson said, “That's wrong.” There are a thousand other examples. But Sandy never saw that side of him. Or if he did, he ignored it.

Tatum and Watson met in 1968, when Watson was in his brief hippie phase and a member of the Stanford golf team. There was a match against an alumni team, and Tatum played for the old guys. Later, and for twenty consecutive years, Tatum and Watson played together in the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, either as partners or in the same foursome. They played together all over the United States and in Ireland and Scotland, often wearing rain suits.

Part of the appeal for Tatum was Watson's Scottish approach to golf, including his walking speed and his decisiveness over the ball. In Watson's decade or more of superior golf, starting in 1975, he was golf's one obvious stoic, the closest thing the seventies and eighties had to a Hogan. He was almost painfully forthright. Watson's attitude, as Sandy and Herb Wind and many others saw it, was that the game owed him nothing, and whatever the golf course gave him, good or bad, he took it without complaint.

Consider Watson's response to the second shot he hit on seventeen in the fourth round of the '84 British Open. He was a shot off the lead. He was trying to win his sixth Open and third straight. He was trying to do it at St. Andrews. The stakes were high. Watson hit too much club, approaching that seventeenth green, and he hit it too hard and too far right. His ball finished about a yard from a rock wall where there is no free relief. All realistic hope for victory ended with that shoved 2-iron. I have long suspected that his caddie, Alfie Fyles, urged that club on Watson, though Watson has told me that was not the case. With his ball in the air, Watson showed his disgust by taking two steps to his left. You could see nothing on his face. He always hid hurt well.

For years, it was an open secret on tour that Watson had a drinking problem. Stories would go around depicting Watson at dinner, drinking too much and becoming belligerent and even more of a political and golfing know-it-all. One of his tour nicknames was Carnac II, a play off a Johnny Carson character who had an answer for everything.

Any addiction, of course, is a personal and tender matter, even when the disease falls to the famous. Tatum would not have discussed Watson's drinking with me, with my notebook out, and I would not be writing about it here, if Watson had not been public about it first. Some months before Mike and I went to see Sandy, Watson did a Golf Channel interview with David Feherty in which he spoke about his drinking problem. Feherty has talked about how Watson helped him get sober.

Feherty and Watson were at a golf event one year in Canada when Watson said, “You're not well, are you?”

“How do you know?” Feherty said.

“I can see it in your eyes,” Watson said.

“What do you see?”

“My reflection.”

Alcohol runs through golf like spit tobacco runs through baseball. Watson's father, Ray, a good amateur golfer himself, quit drinking late in life. Tatum knew Ray Watson long before he knew Tom. “I had been asked to come to Watson's home in Kansas City,” Tatum said. “It was a gathering of friends and family members who were concerned about Tom's well-being. The goal was to get Tom to deal with his drinking, which was pervasive, to put it mildly.

“This intervention was orchestrated by a professional who had been to jail twenty-one times because of his drinking. And this man was remarkably effective. As he began a dialogue, Watson broke down in tears. He acknowledged then the magnitude of his problem. He saw that there were people who could help him find a way out of it. He saw the love for him from the people in that room.

“There was a vehicle waiting for him. That was part of the program. You didn't pack or have long good-byes. It called for the participant to get into an automobile and go to a treatment facility, where you do the real work. And that is what Watson did. When I think about it, it is the most remarkable thing I have ever seen him do.”

•  •  •

When I was falling under the spell of the game, Watson seemed always to be on TV. He was the leader through three rounds in that '74 U.S. Open at Winged Foot, the first I can recall following. He won the '75 British Open by a shot in an eighteen-hole playoff, wearing a plaid woolen British racing hat. Two years later he was the star of the Duel in the Sun, the pen name for his one-shot win over Big Jack at the '77 British Open at Turnberry. That's the most fun I ever had watching TV, and I'm including all those Saturday nights in the seventies when Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart and Carol Burnett batted first, second, and third. In '79 Watson lost at Augusta in a three-man playoff.

Watson wasn't like other golfers. I imagine that was part of the attraction for Sandy, and I know it was for me. In 1990 Watson resigned his membership at the Kansas City Country Club because a prominent businessman, Henry Bloch, a founder of H&R Block, had been rejected for membership, and Watson felt there was only one biographical fact that had kept Bloch out: He was Jewish, as was Watson's wife, Linda Watson, née Rubin. Watson's son and daughter were Jewish, too. So was Watson's manager, Chuck Rubin, Linda's brother. In a pinch, you could count Watson for your minyan.

You could also count on him to take principled stances. In the 1983 Skins Game, Watson accused Gary Player of violating a rule by removing a small part of a live weed that was behind his ball. Player maintained that Watson could not see what he was doing from thirty feet away. Player also said that he was just trying to determine whether the plant matter was attached or unattached. (The issue became public only because Dave Anderson of the
New York Times
heard them arguing about it.) Watson could be difficult, impatient, and abrupt. Once, when I was caddying in Watson's group in the Masters, he asked Dow Finsterwald, an honorary marshal, if there was a backup on the first tee. When Dow couldn't immediately tell him, Watson said, “You should know.” (To which Finsterwald said, “Okay,
Tommy
.”) But on matters related to the rule book, on anything related to the spirit of the game and how it should be played, Watson was beyond reproach. Sandy Tatum had been sending out that message from a high place for years.

A few weeks after our visit with Sandy in his office, Tom Watson was introduced, at a stagy press conference in the Empire State Building, as the new Ryder Cup captain. Watson was asked about his relationship with Tiger Woods. He said, “My relationship with Tiger is fine. Whatever has been said before is water under the bridge. No issues.” It was such a political answer. That wasn't the Watson I knew and admired. The real Watson—Sandy's Watson—was the one who came into the press tent after losing that four-hole playoff for the 2009 British Open at the astonishing age of fifty-nine. Watson saw the bummed-out reporters assembled before him and said, “This ain't a funeral, you know.”

Watson at that Ryder Cup announcement was saying what he needed to say in order to live another day. Watson in defeat at Turnberry was exposed and real. The sun and the wind had left his voice dry and scratchy, and he dropped in that casual
ain't
like he knew what real pain was all about. He was saying the events at Turnberry did not qualify. What a sense of balance. Watson had lost, and he was handling it better than we were.

I asked Sandy once if he ever discussed that Open with Watson.

“No,” Sandy said. “The subject's too painful. For me.”

Drawn by warm year-round weather and the absence of a state income tax, scores and scores of touring pros, TV golf executives, tour caddies, and per-diem PGA Tour officials choose to set up housekeeping in the Sunshine State. Tom Watson, it so happens, is not among them. He thinks people who leave their hometowns—distancing themselves from family members and old friends and familiar ways—are fools. But many other golf people have relocated to Florida, some quite happily. Frank Chirkinian of CBS lived in West Palm Beach for years. His deputy, Chuck Will, lives in South Palm Beach. Tommy Roy, the longtime NBC golf producer, lives outside Jacksonville. Jacksonville Beach has been a magnet for tour caddies. As for players in Florida, the list is endless and includes Woods, Nicklaus, and Palmer. The center of Arnold's universe may be Latrobe, but his official residence is a modest townhouse in Bay Hill, an Orlando golf community (no gate!) that he helped create. His office is above the pro shop.

If you know the name Chuck Will at all, it's likely from seeing it scroll by in the production credits at the end of hundreds of CBS golf telecasts over the course of twenty years, beginning in 1968. Chuck knew all about Venturi, Palmer, Tatum, the Harmon brothers and their father. But none of those people would have known Chuck, not in a meaningful way. Of all my Secret Legends, Chuck Will was the most secret. His work, as Frank Chirkinian's right-hand man at CBS Sports, had kept him in trailers and broadcast trucks. He wasn't often in the sunlight. Still, he seemed to know everybody.

Mike seemed to be having a good time, working the legends beat with me, and he was on board to go see Chuck. The appointed day for our rendezvous was spectacular, nothing but blue skies in every direction, but Mike was willing to take the day off from work. (That is, checking on his investment portfolio and playing Eagle Trace and hitting balls on its range.) We drove to Chuck's condo together, southbound on A1A through South Palm Beach and along a collection of oceanfront high-rises where you could stop in the lobby and readily get a golf game, a gin game, or the name of a good osteopath.

I met Chuck at the '85 Players Championship in the manner that many unemployed caddies met him. I was looking for work, and Chuck hired caddies as casual laborers for weeklong stints at CBS tournaments. When I moved to Philadelphia in 1986 to work for the
Inquirer
, we would talk regularly and play occasionally, always at Bala Golf Club, a cozy old club for the city's pols and fixers. The Bala course, in the city limits and near the intersection of City Avenue and Golf Road, is a tiny little thing. But it's old, and the golf vibe there is deep. Chuck and Frank, who met in Philadelphia in '48, contributed significantly to the club's culture. Chuck once told me that Frank's game was driver in the rough, Ginty 7-wood recovery shot. In other words, not very good. But he did have a fabulous selection of golf sweaters. Chuck was a former club champ at Bala and he played competitive golf. One time he shot 65 in a local tournament when he was supposed to be working at his job as a cardboard-box salesman. Joe Greenday of the
Philadelphia Daily News
wanted to write him up. Chuck said, “Talk to somebody else.” A golf bum with a conscience.

Chuck and I were once partners in a money match at Bala, and I found myself apologizing to him for my play. Chuck said, “Are you trying your hardest?” He knew I was. Too hard, if anything. “Then you have nothing to apologize for.”

We had a good friendship. Then I wrote a story for
SI
in 1995 that Chuck thought I should not have written, and our friendship went into a deep freeze. The story resulted in the firing of Ben Wright, an English newspaperman whom Chirkinian had turned into a CBS golf commentator. Wright had made a series of inane, sexist, and homophobic comments about the LPGA to a reporter named Valerie Helmbreck from the
Wilmington News-Journal
. Wright said women's breasts interfere with their swing. Another of his pearls: “They're going to a butch game, and that furthers the bad image of the game.” When Helmbreck's story came out—which she wrote absolutely straight—the
New York Post
had a field day and a perfect front-page head:
THE BOOB ON THE TUBE
.

It was a passing storm until Wright went on TV and trashed Helmbreck's reputation in an effort to save his own job. Our story in
SI
was able to show that Wright had made the comments he'd claimed on national TV he did not make. That's why he got fired. My friendship with Chuck was another casualty of the bombastic interview Wright gave Helmbreck. On that Monday in early March my barren years with Chuck were about to come to an end.