Caddy for Life (30 page)

There were others who had to be told. Greg Rita and Mike Rich were coming to the house that afternoon to watch the football game. Greg already knew and had promised not to tell Mike. Before the game began, Marsha took him into a bedroom and told him. Each new set of tears, whether from his family or his friends, reminded Bruce that the pain involved in this disease wouldn’t be his alone. They watched the game quietly, in large part because the Eagles, heavily favored, were beaten soundly. Bruce had desperately hoped that the game would give him a release, give him something to feel joyful about. Instead it was just another reminder of how awful he felt.

In Boston, Len Dieterle was also watching the game. Gwyn, who didn’t care that much if the Eagles won, went into the kitchen to make her weekly phone call to her parents. “It’s not anything written in stone,” she said. “But most Sunday nights I give them a call.”

The moment she heard her father’s voice on the phone—“I mean on the word ‘hello,’” she said—she knew something was very wrong. Her first thought was about her mother.

“Dad,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

Jay Edwards was stunned. He had thought Brian would have called already to give Gwyn the news. “Brian didn’t call?” he asked.

No, Brian hadn’t called. What was it? As with Marsha and Bruce, Jay Edwards had no way to deliver the news that wasn’t going to be stunning.

“Bruce has ALS,” he said.

Gwyn isn’t exactly certain what happened next. She knows she dropped the phone, cutting her father off. The room began to spin and she thought she might faint. She heard the phone ringing and picked it up. It was Jay. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“I think so,” she said, not really sure.

After he had given her the details, Gwyn half walked, half stumbled into the room where Lenny was watching the end of the game. “My first thought was that something had happened to Jay,” he said. “We’ve worried all these years about Natalie [who was diagnosed more than fifteen years ago with a very mild form of Parkinson’s disease], and I thought Jay had had a heart attack. When she told me it was Bruce and ALS, I had no idea what to say.”

John Cutcher, Chris’s husband, was put in an even worse position. Concerned that Chris would somehow hear in the kind of unplanned, sudden way that Gwyn had, Jay called John’s cell phone in New Orleans. John and Chris were having dinner in a small restaurant, celebrating her birthday, when John saw Jay’s phone number pop up on his cell. Thinking Jay and Natalie were calling to say happy birthday to their daughter, he answered the phone.

“John, I have to tell you something and you have to promise me not to gasp and that you won’t tell Chris tonight,” Jay said. John was baffled, but agreed. Chris, expecting to be handed the phone for birthday greetings, sat looking at him, confused. Jay gave John the news. In spite of the warning, John couldn’t help himself. “Oh my God,” he said. “That’s awful.” Jay talked for a few more seconds while John recovered, looking at Chris and nodding. Then he hung up.

“What was that about?” Chris demanded. “What’s awful? Why didn’t you let me talk to him?”

“Oh, the Eagles are losing,” John said. “Jay was upset about it. He said he wanted to go back and watch the end and to wish you a happy birthday and they’d try to call you later.”

“I never should have bought the story,” Chris said later. “For one thing, John could care less about sports, and the ‘Oh my God’ was clearly genuine. But we were drinking wine and having a good time and I had no reason to be suspicious, so I bought it. Looking back, I shouldn’t have, but I’m glad I did.”

The next day, when they got back to their home in Annapolis, John quietly sat down with Chris and told her the news. “When he said Bruce was very sick, my first thought, to be honest, was AIDS,” she said. “All those years on the road, being single most of that time. Gwyn and I had worried about it at times. When he said ALS, I found myself wishing it was AIDS, because these days at least there’s some hope there.”

Telling his family and closest friends was a step Bruce knew had to be taken. He had prepared himself for it almost from the night of the diagnosis. He knew that the inevitable next step was the word getting out on the tour and then to the media and the public. He dreaded dealing with all of that, but he knew it was unavoidable. The regular tour had been in Hawaii the week he was diagnosed and would be in Phoenix the next week. The Senior Tour—newly renamed the Champions Tour in a marketing ploy by the PGA Tour—would begin the week after that in Hawaii with the MasterCard Championship, the seniors version of the Tournament of Champions. Watson had qualified for the event with his victory in Oklahoma City. Bruce was planning to caddy in Hawaii and take Marsha with him. He knew that by then the word would be out.

Actually it was out sooner than that. Once it was on the caddy grapevine, the news spread through Phoenix like wildfire. Bruce’s phone began ringing off the hook. Most of the time he screened the calls and simply listened to the messages. They were all heartfelt. Caddying buddies, players, equipment reps. Someone in the media was bound to hear the news quickly. Someone did, Melanie Hauser, a longtime golf writer who had written for years for the
Houston Post
and as a freelancer after that paper folded. When she initially heard about the diagnosis, she called Watson to ask him if it was true.

Watson knew Hauser well and knew she would handle the story sensitively. So he confirmed it for her, not realizing that she would write the story almost immediately and post it on PGATour.com, the tour’s website. As luck would have it, Bruce wanted to check something on his upcoming schedule on the website later that day. “I think I was double-checking the dates of the tournament in Naples,” he said. “I clicked onto PGATour.com and there was this huge headline,
WATSON’S CADDY EDWARDS DIAGNOSED WITH ALS
. It rocked me, just seeing it that way in a headline. I saw Tom quoted in the story, so I knew what had happened. He was trying to help me by being my spokesman, I understood that, and he knew it wasn’t going to stay secret anyway. He felt badly that he hadn’t been able to reach me before I saw it, but again, there’s no easy way to do something like that. He made it easier for me, because he did all the talking and explaining.”

Hauser’s story made it official that he would have to deal with the issue when he got to Hawaii. It also engendered another week of phone calls—many now coming from the media.

Sometimes, when he heard the voice of a close friend, Bruce picked up the phone. Even those conversations were difficult, because whoever the caller was could find little to say. “They all wanted to help,” Bruce said. “They all wanted me to know they were thinking about me. They all said, ‘Anything I can do.’ I knew they were all sincere, but it was hard—for them and for me.”

One of the early calls came from Greg Norman. He was in Australia, playing in a tournament. Tony Navarro, who had replaced Bruce on his bag in 1993, had gotten a call from Phoenix from one of the caddies there telling him the news. As soon as he heard, Norman put in a call to his brother-in-law, a surgeon, because he wanted to understand the disease thoroughly. “I knew what it was and I knew about Lou Gehrig,” he said. “And I knew about Jeff Julian”—a tour player who was stricken with the disease late in 2001—“but I wanted to hear from a doctor exactly what was involved. The more he talked, the more despondent I got. I finally just told him, ‘Enough. I can’t listen anymore.’”

Bruce was touched that Norman took the time to call from Melbourne. The conversation was similar to the others: Anything he needed or wanted, call. He was thinking of him, praying for him. By now Bruce was almost becoming immune to these talks. He understood, though, that each person who was calling needed to talk to him, to tell him that he was in their thoughts. He did remember one thing Norman said: “I can’t think of anyone who will have more people pulling for him than you.”

Norman wasn’t the only one who wanted to learn more about ALS. Most people knew as soon as they heard “Lou Gehrig’s disease” that the disease is incurable and fatal. Few knew how quickly most people die once diagnosed, or how they die. Many, searching the Internet for details, had the same reaction as Norman. “I got to a point where I simply couldn’t read any more,” Greg Rita said. “I kept looking for something that would give me some hope, anything, but the further I went, the bleaker the picture got.”

Ten days after the diagnosis, Bruce and Marsha flew to the Hawaiian island of Kona for the MasterCard Championship. In a sense, this was the perfect event for Bruce to return to the tour. There were only thirty-six players in the field and the media coverage would be tiny, even by Champions Tour standards, because of the location of the event. He would have to deal with being the subject of TV coverage, but even that wouldn’t be full blown, since the tournament was on the Golf Channel as opposed to being on one of the networks. Still, being out on tour meant Bruce could no longer screen whom he talked to. Everyone was going to want to say something to him, and he spent most of the long flight to Hawaii preparing himself.

It was on Monday that Hilary Watson proposed marriage to Marsha—as in Bruce marrying Marsha there, in Hawaii, that week. “I was thinking it’s such a beautiful spot to do it,” she said. “And I knew Bruce was concerned that if they waited until the summer he might have trouble saying his vows. So I asked Marsha if she wanted to do it.”

Marsha and Bruce talked it over and decided to go ahead with the Hilary Plan. “Being realistic, there was no way to know how much time we were going to have,” Bruce said. “I knew my family would want to be there, but I also knew they would understand.”

Hilary did most of the work, finding a minister, arranging for a spot on the beach right near the hotel where all the players were staying, putting together invitations that could be slipped into lockers on Friday. The wedding was at sunset on Saturday after everyone had completed the second round of the tournament. It was, to say the least, an illustrious guest list: Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player—the famed Big Three of the 1960s, winners of thirty-four majors among them—were all there. So were Hale Irwin and Fuzzy Zoeller and Bruce Fleisher and Gil Morgan, recent stars of the Champions Tour. Wives came, and so did all the caddies. The best man, as at Bruce’s first wedding, was Tom Watson. This time, though, Watson was beaming, full of enthusiasm for this union.

“It was so beautiful,” Marsha said. “It was like something straight out of a movie. I can’t imagine having a more beautiful wedding than that one.”

After joking about the Eagles and Cowboys, Watson talked about his friend of almost thirty years. “The one thing I can tell you about Bruce,” he said quietly, “is that there’s not a mean bone in his entire body.”

That was a theme Watson would return to often throughout the year when he was asked—over and over again—to talk about his friendship with Bruce. Like Bruce, he understood that he was going to be asked the same questions over and over on a subject that was painful to discuss at all. But both of them—along with Marsha—came to understand that it was critical that they deal with those questions; with the media attention; with the public outpouring. Watson’s “mission,” as Hilary described it, could only have a chance for fulfillment if millions of dollars could be raised for research.

“The toughest part of this disease is that so few people live for very long with it,” Watson said. “I don’t blame the drug companies for focusing research on diseases that afflict more people, but the statistics are, in a way, deceiving. Nowadays there are people who live very long, productive lives after being diagnosed with cancer. It isn’t that way with ALS. That’s why we’ve got to raise the money
now,
while the awareness level is up, because it is so difficult to get people to understand just how powerful and destructive the disease is.”

Watson’s goal wasn’t just to find a cure for ALS; it was to find a cure for ALS in time to save Bruce. Right from the beginning, he was very conscious of a ticking clock, more conscious every time he saw Bruce looking thinner, tiring more easily, having more difficulty speaking.

But that night on the beach, even though everyone was aware of the clock, there was a strong sense that a wonderful thing was happening. Watson, who isn’t a believer in destiny or getting over-philosophical about things, looks back on that night and says, “I don’t know why Bruce had to get this disease. But when he did get it, the fact that Marsha had come back into his life and has been willing to take on everything that she’s taken on is something approaching a miracle.”

No one who knows Bruce or Marsha would argue with that.

14

Media Darling

DEALING WITH THE MEDIA
had never been a problem for Bruce during his thirty years on the PGA Tour. Because he was friendly and outgoing by nature, he was always approachable when reporters wanted to talk to him and never felt uncomfortable talking to anyone.

“Most of the time, though, the attention I got was because of who I was working for, whether it was Tom or Greg,” he said. “More often than not, I would get questions about what club we had hit or what I might have said or he might have said at a given moment. I never had any trouble with that. It was easy.”

Occasionally it would go beyond that. Because he had been on tour for so long and knew so many people, there were occasions when someone would do a feature on the guy who had been Tom Watson’s partner for all those years. “Even then it would always be someone I knew,” he said. “It wasn’t as if some newspaper or magazine was going to send some guy who had never written about golf to do a story about a caddy.”

The only time he had ever been the least bit uncomfortable with the spotlight had been when he left Watson for Norman and then when he left Norman for Watson. In both cases there were questions about whether any sort of rift existed, but even then it was eased by the player. First Watson made it clear that he had supported Bruce’s decision to leave. And then, even though most people in golf knew that Edwards and Norman were clearly at odds by the time they split, neither man ever said a bad word about the other publicly.