Caddy for Life

by John Feinstein

  “The only problem was, I had to make all my notes on the scorecard so everything was in one place when we played,” he said. “Sometimes it was hard to read my own writing because I had so much stuff written down.”

  The other problem was the rather arcane rule which said that caddies could not actually walk on the greens. The rule existed in part to keep greens pristine for play, but also because walking on the greens was, in a sense, testing them—for firmness, for break around the flagstick—almost as if the caddy were out practicing on behalf of his player. “We would have one guy walk on the green to check around the pin for ridges or slopes you couldn’t see,” Bruce said. “Everyone else would fan out and keep an eye out for a rules official. If you saw a cart coming, you would scream, ‘Rules!’ and the guy would run off the green. We weren’t trying to cheat, we just wanted to know what was around the hole, and you couldn’t see it from the fringe.”

  Once, out walking by himself, Bruce got caught. The rules official put him in a cart, drove him from the seventh green back to the first tee, lectured him there on not walking on greens, and then made him walk back to where he had initially been found. “That was my punishment for being a bad boy,” Bruce said.

  His not always legible scorecard scribbling became a problem for the first time on Friday at the Robinson. Cerrudo was lingering around the cut line when he got to the 17th hole. This was before electronic scoreboards, so most players made educated guesses at what the cut would be. “You always knew it to within a stroke, two at most,” Bruce said. “We were right on it.”

  As Bruce remembers it, Cerrudo hit his tee shot in the fairway and had 140 yards to the front of the green, which was elevated just enough to make it impossible to actually see exactly where the pin was located. Looking at the scribblings on his scorecard, Bruce thought he had written down that the pin was in the back of the green, 22 paces (or yards) from the front. So he told Cerrudo the total yardage was 162 yards. Cerrudo nodded, took out a six-iron, and “he hit it exactly 162 yards,” Bruce said. “Perfect shot.”

  Perfect shot if the pin had been 22 paces from the front. As it turned out, the pin was 12 paces from the front—a difference of 30 feet. Instead of a short birdie putt, Cerrudo found himself putting from 35 feet—downhill. “I was sick to my stomach when I saw it,” Bruce said. “There was nothing I could say to him except that I had misread my notes.” It didn’t help that Cerrudo three-putted for bogey. It helped even less when he ended up missing the cut by one shot.

  “The amazing thing is he didn’t fire me,” Bruce said. “It was certainly a firing offense. But he didn’t. He just said, ‘I’ll see you Monday in St. Louis.’”

  Having missed the cut in Robinson and without an exemption the next week, Cerrudo would have to play in the Monday qualifier. Bruce told him he would be there. He and Leahey made it to St. Louis late Sunday night and Bruce went to the golf course where the qualifier was being held first thing the next morning, since he didn’t know what time Cerrudo would be teeing off. He went straight to the locker room to check the tee times and couldn’t find Cerrudo’s name. He double-checked the list, then went into the pro shop to see if there had been a mistake. No mistake, he was told, Cerrudo had called over the weekend and withdrawn. It was only later, when he saw Cerrudo again, that he found out that Cerrudo had called to ask how many golfers would make it from the qualifier into the St. Louis field. When he was told there were only six spots available, he decided to take the week off. But he didn’t have any kind of contact number for Bruce—imagine that happening today—so there was no way to let him know he was withdrawing.

  Disappointed, Bruce hunted around and found a bag that day with a local pro who failed to make it into the field. He went to bed that night a bit unnerved. For the first time in his five-week career as a caddy, he was starting a week without a bag. He decided to head for the tournament site, the Norwood Hills Country Club, next morning and hope he could find a job. “I wasn’t that nervous about it,” he said. “I figured I would find someone. But even though I hadn’t made a cut yet, the guys I had worked with had all been legitimate players, guys who were all on tour. I really didn’t want to spend the week working for someone who had no chance to make the cut. But I figured I would just show up and see what happened.”

  July in St. Louis is always hot—except when it is blazing hot. Everyone who was there that week says the temperature never once dipped into double digits during the daytime. “It was about a million degrees,” Bruce always says when retelling the story.

  “More like nine million,” Oxman insists.

  Tuesday morning, July 17, 1973, was as blazing as one might imagine, the temperature hovering between one million and nine million degrees. Oxman and Leahey arrived at Norwood Hills Country Club knowing they had work for the week. Leahey had survived his trial the week before with Graham and was pretty confident he had the bag for the rest of the summer. Oxman’s guy, Mike Reasor, had missed the cut in Robinson and, like Cerrudo, had been consigned to the Monday qualifier. He failed to qualify, leaving Oxman to search for a bag for the week. By nightfall he had run into Labron Harris, whom he had met the previous summer, and asked him if he had a caddy for the week. Harris said he didn’t, so Oxman got the job.

  There’s a big oak tree outside the clubhouse at Norwood Hills, and that was the lingering place for caddies during the week. In those days caddies were never allowed in the clubhouse—some pro shops would put up signs during tournament weeks which said PUBLIC WELCOME, NO CADDIES ALLOWED—so everyone looked for shade when they weren’t actually working.

  Late that morning Bruce thought he had caught a break. He spotted Dale Douglass, bag on his shoulder, walking into the clubhouse. Bruce knew Douglass because of his friendship with Dick Lotz. He ran over to Douglass and asked him if he could work for him that week. Douglass’s face fell. “I just told a guy a few minutes ago he could work for me,” he said. “I’d love to have you do it. If you can find him and convince him to get someone else, I’ll hire you in a second.”

  Bruce soon learned that the guy Douglass had hired was Mike Boyce, another young caddy whom Bruce had become friends with. “There was no way I was going to ask him to give up the bag,” he said. “He had talked to Dale first, he got the job. That was it.”

  Douglass would have seemed like the perfect guy for Bruce. It certainly helped that he knew him, but beyond that Douglass was established as a top-60 player and as one of the solid players on tour. He was thirty-seven, had won three times on tour, and had been a member of the Ryder Cup team in 1969. Plus he had a reputation as one of the truly nice people in golf.

  But Bruce had missed out by about fifteen minutes. He returned to the tree, sitting with Oxman and Leahey, who were waiting for their players to arrive for their practice rounds. Bruce was getting just a little bit nervous. He had missed his best chance, he thought, for a good bag for the week with Douglass. Morning became early afternoon, and Bruce was beginning to think he might not work at all that week.

  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 n
ine 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.”