Caddy for Life (25 page)

Bruce was staying that week at the home of Kevin Dennis, another old caddying buddy, who had worked years earlier for Tom Weiskopf and had settled in Palm Beach after getting off the tour. Dennis was working with NBC that week as a spotter. Bruce asked him to go straight to the golf course, meet Watson, tell him what had happened, and caddy for him that day. Dennis agreed. Another old caddying friend, Tim Thalmueller, had driven down from his home in Ponte Vedra to spot for NBC that week and was also staying at Dennis’s house. He insisted on driving Bruce back to Ponte Vedra. “I’m not letting you get behind the wheel right now,” he said. “You’ll drive a hundred and that won’t do anybody any good.”

Bruce, knowing Thalmueller was right, agreed. By the time the two men had made the drive up I-95 and gotten to the house, the fire was out. Suzie was under what the police call Baker Watch, because she had told the police she might commit suicide. That meant she was in protective custody for seventy-two hours. Bruce was allowed to go inside the house. Almost everything inside had been destroyed. Suzie hadn’t started the fire in the memorabilia room, but she had made absolutely certain that his most cherished souvenir—the flag from the 18th hole at the ’82 Open—had been destroyed. “She had smashed the frame, pulled it out, and set it on fire in the kitchen sink,” Bruce said. “All that was left was the three ringholders that held the flag in place. When I saw that, I lost it completely.”

His marriage was clearly long gone, he had lost his home, and he had lost many of the artifacts he cherished most from twenty-seven years on the tour.

The police asked him if he wanted to press charges against his wife. No, he told them, he didn’t. Clearly she was disturbed and needed help. The state of Florida had no choice but to charge her with felony arson since she had confessed to the crime. Suzie pleaded guilty, and since Bruce was the victim, the prosecutors asked Bruce what kind of sentence he would like them to recommend to the judge.

“I didn’t want to see her thrown in jail,” Bruce said. “I still don’t think she was evil or malicious. I didn’t think her daughter or her parents, who I really liked, should go through having to see her in jail. So I asked them to put her on probation for fifteen years
and
place a restraining order on her for that time to keep her away from me. I don’t think the judge was thrilled. He wanted to give her jail time. But he went along with it.”

Suzie moved back to San Francisco and Bruce started dealing with rebuilding his home and rebuilding his life.

Insurance rebuilt the house. Friends and family helped him begin to rebuild his life. One other person, someone he hadn’t heard from in years, provided the finishing touches on the second job.

11

Winning . . . and Moving

THE YEARS DURING WHICH
Bruce’s marriage deteriorated and moved toward its unhappy finish were also the closing years of Watson’s career on the regular tour. Watson turned fifty on September 4, 1999, and started playing the Senior Tour the following week. In fact he won in his second start on that tour, a quick indication that he was going to have a good deal more success playing against the older guys than against the younger ones.

“They shouldn’t even let him out there. It isn’t fair,” Fred Couples, a good friend of Watson’s, had said a couple of years earlier. “He hits it better than most of the guys out
here
[on the PGA Tour]. It won’t be a contest if he’s really into it playing against the Seniors.”

Watson had indeed enjoyed a genuine renaissance as he approached fifty. After enduring the near misses of 1994 and a similar year in 1995, he finally won again in ’96. Given that Jack Nicklaus had been in the middle of the most dramatic moments of Watson’s golf career, it was somehow appropriate that when Watson broke his nine-year nonwinning streak, it was at the Memorial, the tournament created by and for Nicklaus on a golf course he had designed and built. Watson had won the Memorial before, in 1979, shooting a 69 during the second round on a frigid, windy day when the field’s stroke average was almost 10 strokes higher. That had been during his heyday. This was different. This was Watson at forty-six, finding the old magic again to beat an elite field.

“It didn’t start out to be that kind of week, that’s for sure,” Bruce remembered. “His dad had just had a stroke and he wasn’t even sure he wanted to play. I think he came because he knew his dad would want him to and because by then he and Jack had become very close. But he was really uptight in the practice rounds.”

On Wednesday, Watson came to the 18th hole during the last practice round in what would best be described as a lousy mood. He tried to hit his tee shot from left to right to keep it away from the creek that runs down the left side of the fairway. Instead he hooked the ball and it took one hop and landed in the creek. Furious and frustrated, Watson flipped his driver to Bruce and said, “You know, I hate this damn game.”

Now it was Bruce’s turn to get angry. He knew Watson was worried about his father and unhappy with his game, but he just didn’t think he could allow him to continue with that kind of attitude, regardless of the circumstances. “Plus that wasn’t him,” he said. “Tom almost never talked that way on the golf course, even when he was really playing poorly.”

Bruce decided it was time for a lecture. He was about to say something when Watson took out a four-wood, dropped a ball next to the hazard, and proceeded to hit the flag with what was his third shot. That gave Bruce the opening he needed.

“I said, ‘Yeah, this game really sucks, doesn’t it? Don’t you just hate this damn game?’ He kind of smirked at me at that point, but I wasn’t done with him yet. I said, ‘You know, Tom, your father taught you this goddamn game, and considering that he just had a stroke, I would think you might want to dedicate the week to him.’ He didn’t say much after that, which told me I had gotten through to him. So I didn’t say anything else, just handed him his putter and walked to the back of the green.

“He had an eight-foot putt for par and he rolled it in. When he handed me the putter I said very softly, ‘Your father would have really liked that four.’”

Getting Watson to straighten out his attitude was one thing—and not usually that difficult. Getting him to make short putts, especially under pressure, was another. Bruce decided to play another mind game with him that week. “I’ve always been a good putter,” he said. “Tom gave me lessons back in the ’70s and that really helped, but one thing I’ve always done when I’m playing is every time I’ve got a putt under ten feet, I pretend it’s for birdie—whether it’s for birdie or par or bogey or double bogey. Doesn’t matter. I just say to myself, ‘Knock this one in for birdie.’ Maybe it’s pure coincidence, but I’ve always been good at making those putts.

“So that week, I played the same game with Tom. Every time he had a putt under ten feet I was in his ear, regardless of what the putt was for. ‘Knock this in for birdie,’ or, ‘This will be a good birdie when you make it.’ I remember a few years ago when someone asked Tom once what my role was, he said, ‘Bruce is always the voice in my ear.’ That made me feel good, because it meant he was listening.”

Trying to make putts for birdie all week, Watson took a one-shot lead into the final day and was paired with Ernie Els. On the first hole, he missed a three-foot “birdie” putt—and bogeyed. Walking off the green, Bruce said quietly, ‘Okay, that’s out of your system now. It will be the last one you’re going to miss all day.’”

From that point on, Watson was almost perfect. With David Duval, then a rising star, closing in on him in the final holes, he kept making shots when he had to. He missed one very makeable putt—about a six-footer at 16—but still held a one-shot lead playing the 17th hole, with Duval already in the clubhouse. Watson’s second shot ran just through the green. He had about two feet of short rough to putt through and took out his putter, since he was only about 15 feet from the flagstick. At that moment, for the first time in twenty-three years as a caddy, twenty of them with Watson, Bruce broke his code of never telling a player what to do around the green.

“I just thought he was going to have to hit it too hard with the putter to get it through the rough, and then it would be hard to get it to stop near the flag,” he said. “I said, ‘Let’s chip this, you’re a great chipper.’ Tom agreed, took out a nine-iron and left the chip three feet short. For a moment my heart sank, but then he stepped up and knocked the putt right in—another ‘birdie’—and I breathed a sigh of relief. Because he made that putt, I’m a great caddy at that moment. If he misses . . .”

Still leading by one, Watson hit a perfect drive on 18. As he pulled out a six-iron, Bruce said, “Remember the shot you hit last year?” Watson had nearly holed a six-iron shot on 18. “Just do the same thing.”

Watson smiled and hit his shot right at the flag, landing it 12 feet past the pin. “That what you had in mind?” he asked as they walked up to the green, hearing the roars from a crowd that was thrilled to see Tom Watson about to win again. Just as he had done at Pebble Beach in 1982, Watson used one putt when he had two to work with, knocking the birdie putt dead center for a two-shot victory.

“It was like winning for the first time all over again,” Bruce said. “That hug was almost as special as the one at Pebble . . . and a long time coming.”

Needless to say, the win and the hug had just as much meaning for Watson, who did dedicate the victory to his father. It was his thirty-eighth PGA Tour victory and came after he had gone 139 starts in a row without a win. It was the catalyst to what was then the most lucrative year of his career—he made more than $761,000 to finish 25th on the money list—and even though he continued at times to struggle with the putter, he had at least proved that he was right on that disappointing day at Turnberry when he said he would win again.

And he won again, in 1998 at the Colonial, making him one of the oldest players (he was four months shy of forty-nine at the time) to win on the PGA Tour. That victory and another top-30 finish on the money list—29th—had Couples and others telling him there was no reason for him to move over to the Senior Tour when he turned fifty. He could still hit it long enough and straight enough to compete with the kids, so why not keep competing with them?

Part of Watson wanted to do just that. Most of the best players are dragged kicking and screaming to the Senior (now Champions) Tour when they turn fifty. Nicklaus never fully embraced it, never playing more than seven events there in any single year. Tom Kite, Watson’s contemporary, told people he would only go over when he knew he couldn’t compete on, as most players call it, “the real tour” anymore. Watson liked being around the younger players, liked competing against the best. But even though he could still hit it long and straight, his body kept reminding him that he
was
fifty, not twenty-two or even thirty-two or forty-two.

“I can’t practice the way I used to practice,” he said. “Sometimes my hip bothers me, sometimes I just get sore, period, if I’m out there for long stretches. I used to love to practice for hours. I can’t practice that way anymore. I like the fact that I can go back and play on the regular tour a few times a year, I enjoy that. But the fact is at this stage of my life, the Senior Tour is the right place for me.”

Both Watson and Bruce found the adjustment to their new life difficult at times. Watson and Linda had divorced in 1998 and Watson had remarried just before joining the Senior Tour. His new wife, Hilary (who had previously been married to South African pro Denis Watson), had three children, who were thirteen, ten, and eight when their mother remarried, so Watson had a new family in addition to a new tour. At the same time, Bruce’s marriage was in its final throes, climaxing with the loss of his house eight months after Watson began playing the Senior Tour.

Both men knew that the Senior Tour would be different from the regular tour. On the one hand, it was a homecoming of sorts, Watson reunited with players he had known for years: Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Jim Thorpe, Andy North, Bob Murphy, Lanny Wadkins, Hale Irwin, and others. The same was true for Bruce. His old buddy Mike Boyce was working for Gil Morgan; Lynn Strickler, a longtime pal, was with Crenshaw. “Sometimes it was as if we were back in the ’70s again,” he said.

But they weren’t back in the ’70s. When Watson arrived on the Senior Tour, with Wadkins and Kite arriving a couple months afterward, the hope was that their arrival would pump new life into the tour at a time when interest in it was fading. The Senior Tour had sprung up in the late 1970s, following on the success of an annual event called the Legends of Golf, which had been held as a team event in 1978 and 1979. Noticing that Arnold Palmer, the most popular player in golf history, had turned fifty in September of 1979, the PGA Tour decided to experiment with a couple of Senior events in 1980. At the same time, the USGA decided to hold a U.S. Open for Seniors, although in that first year, players had to be fifty-five to compete. The following year, the age limit was dropped to fifty, and much to the joy of the USGA, the winner was the fifty-one-year-old Palmer.

Palmer’s popularity, and the country’s fascination with nostalgia in the 1980s, built the Senior Tour. Older golf fans loved to watch Sam Snead still tee it up every now and then, in addition to Palmer and Gary Player and Julius Boros and Chi Chi Rodriguez—and, ten years in, Lee Trevino and Nicklaus, even if Nicklaus didn’t play that often. Corporate America loved the Senior Tour because the core audience was, generally speaking, middle-aged and older people who fell into the upper income brackets—the perfect audience for Cadillac, Mercedes, high-end banks, and credit cards.

But as the tour grew, it wasn’t dominated by the great players but by players who had been journeymen on the PGA Tour or in some cases hadn’t played the PGA Tour at all. Among the legendary players, only Trevino (twenty-nine victories) and Player (nineteen wins) truly embraced it. It was difficult for those who had been the very best in the world to get excited week in and week out about playing in 54-hole no-cut events on golf courses that were set up short and easy in order to encourage low scoring. The money got bigger and bigger, but dominant players weren’t motivated by the money. They had plenty. The players who were motivated by the big purses were the midlevel players who had played in an era when one had to be a consistent top-ten player to get rich. This was their chance.