He was now, at the age of twenty-four, a married man, an established young star on the PGA Tour, and a player with a regular caddy. He and Bruce had clicked as a team from the start. “We just seemed to fit together,” Bruce said. “Our personalities worked well. We’re both very opinionated, but Tom’s always been someone you could argue with and disagree with and it never became a big deal. I noticed that about him right away, he seemed to me to have an open mind about things—whether it was politics or sports or anything else. I think we enjoyed working together as a result of those things.”
Just as Watson was the kind of player Bruce was comfortable with, Bruce was the kind of caddy Watson had been hoping to find. In addition to being a fast walker, Watson said, “he had a good sense of humor, a quick wit. He knew when to say things that could loosen me up, he knew when to encourage me, and he knew when to yell at me. That’s important too.”
Of course not all players want to be yelled at. Encouraged, yes. Told that they’re right, told that a bad shot wasn’t their fault, probably. But yelled at? Not usually. Watson had no problem with the idea that there were times when Bruce would disagree with him or, as Bruce put it, “kick him in the butt.” Caddies on the PGA Tour grow used to the notion that poor play by their player is likely to lead to their getting fired. The old caddy saying is, “They have to fire someone and most would rather fire their caddy than their wife.” So caddies are routinely blamed when things go wrong. Fred Couples, who is a lot like Watson in that he rarely blames Joe LaCava, his longtime caddy, for mistakes, does look at LaCava at times when he’s in a bunker or a bad lie and say, “Jeez Joey, look what you’ve done to me now.” He’s kidding . . . sort of. Other players actually believe it’s the caddy’s fault. The best recent example of that phenomenon came at Augusta in 2003 when Tiger Woods pointedly mentioned that Steve Williams, who has caddied for him in seven of his eight major victories, had suggested he hit driver on the third hole Sunday, a decision—ultimately made by Woods—that led to a disastrous double-bogey six.
Watson has never taken that approach. “Look, a caddy is important, and a good caddy can be a big help to a player,” he says. “Bruce has certainly helped me throughout the years, without a doubt. We’ve been a very good team in the best sense of the word. But Lee Trevino”—a close Watson friend—“always likes to say that if the caddy was that good, he’d be out there playing against you. In the end, you listen to your caddy, consider his opinion, and you make the decision on what club to hit. Then you hit the shot. The only time I’ve ever given Bruce a hard time out there is if he gives me the wrong yardage, and in twenty-seven years that hasn’t happened very often. If he suggests five iron and I think it’s six and I end up hitting five and the ball goes in the bunker, it was my decision to hit the five.
“As a player, you have to understand that neither you nor the caddy is always going to be right. If I go against what Bruce is saying and make the wrong decision, it was my decision. If I go along with what he’s saying and it’s wrong, it was still my decision. If we agree and we’re right, I’m still the one who has to hit the shot. Same thing if we disagree. Caddies don’t get credit for winning golf tournaments, so they shouldn’t get blame for losing them.”
Bruce realized early on that Watson felt that way, which allowed him to be bold with opinions and with his thoughts on how a round was going or on Watson’s attitude. “Tom always let me make mistakes,” he says. “That made me a better caddy. A lot of guys out here become ‘yes-caddies’ because they know if they disagree and it doesn’t work out, they’re going to get blamed. I never got blamed, and that allowed me to tell him what I thought with confidence, which made me a better caddy and helped make him a better player.”
The classic Bruce-Tom story along those lines took place years later, during the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, which is played on three courses along the Monterey Peninsula, most notably Pebble Beach. Because the tournament is played on three different golf courses the first three days—everyone plays Pebble the last day—the cut comes at 54 holes. On the third day, Watson wasn’t playing very well and was lingering around the cut line coming down the stretch. He was playing at Spyglass Hill, and having teed off on the back nine that day, came to the seventh hole—a par-five with a risky second shot over water if a player wants to go for the green—feeling generally lousy about his game and his shotmaking. He finally hit a decent drive, getting into the fairway in position where he could try to carry the water, get the ball on the green, and give himself a chance to make a birdie that might ensure that he made the cut.
When player and caddy arrived at the ball, Watson turned to Bruce and asked him what the yardage was from there to the water. The reason for the question was obvious: He wanted to hit a safe layup shot, then play a wedge with his third shot and hope he could get the ball close enough with his wedge to make birdie.
Bruce heard the question but acted as if he hadn’t. “You’ve got two thirty-five to the front of the green, plus twelve to the flag,” he said. “The total’s two forty-seven.”
“I didn’t ask you that,” Watson said. “I asked you the distance from here to the water.”
Now Bruce turned to his boss and faced him. “I heard you,” he said. “You don’t need to lay up. You can take a three-wood and hit this ball on the green from here.”
Watson didn’t think so. He didn’t think he was hitting the ball well enough to try that shot on a windy day. Plus he was unhappy with his game and didn’t want to gamble—very out of character. He just wanted to hit a safe layup and if he could make birdie, fine. If not, well, that was probably fine too.
So he again asked Bruce what the distance was to the water, his tone making it clear that was the shot he intended to play. Bruce told him the yardage—neither man can remember exactly what it was—but then got angry.
“He called me a chicken-blank mother-blank,” Watson says, laughing in the retelling.
“I did,” Bruce says. “Then I took out a three-wood and a six-iron, threw them on the ground, and said, ‘You do what you want to do, but it’s two forty-seven to the flag, and you’ve got that shot unless you want to prove that you’re a chicken-blank mother-blank.’”
With that he stalked up the fairway as if he didn’t even want to be seen with Watson at that moment. Sandy Tatum, the ex-U.S. Golf Association president, who is always Watson’s amateur partner in the AT&T event, was standing off to the side up the fairway from Watson when Bruce walked up to him. “You’ve got a lot of guts,” Tatum told him, having seen Bruce toss the two clubs onto the ground.
Bruce didn’t see it that way. He knew, regardless of what happened, that Watson wasn’t going to fire him. He was trying to get his player pumped up, breathe some confidence and fire back into him at a time when he was lagging. He knew perfectly well that whichever club Watson picked up, it would be Watson’s decision and he would take responsibility for the outcome. He wasn’t 100 percent correct in this case.
“He embarrassed me into it,” Watson said. “That hasn’t happened very often in my career, but that time it did. I figured if he was angry enough with me to call me those names, maybe I should think about what he was saying.”
Watson picked up the three-wood—“I did hold my breath a little bit while the ball was in the air,” Bruce now says, laughing—and cleared the water and hit the ball just to the right of the green.
“I still didn’t make birdie,” Watson said. “I took three to get down and made par.”
It is not surprising that Watson would remember that. But he knows, just as Bruce knows, that isn’t the point of the story.
Of course that incident occurred after the two had been partners for years. During that first year, the two men were still feeling each other out, growing to know each other as their comfort level increased.
“You have to remember that back then, caddying was different,” Bruce said. “I would go out and check yardages, but Tom, like all the players, had his own yardages.
I never read putts back then. He was so good at it, there was no reason for him to ask me to do it anyway. But most caddies didn’t read putts in those days. Most players just wanted someone who would show up on time, keep the clubs clean, and carry the bag.”
In fact, Bruce and his contemporaries are seen now as the group that changed caddying, not only in the way they did their job, but in the way they were viewed by players and by the public. There were other very good caddies who came along at about the same time as Bruce did, but because he was caddying for Tom Watson, he became the public face of those changes. Once Watson exploded and became the world’s number one player, Bruce’s face and walk and smile were as familiar to the golfing public as most players not named Watson or Nicklaus or Palmer. Because he did walk fast and never lingered behind, it often seemed as if he and Watson were walking down the fairways in lockstep, Watson with the gap-tooth smile, Bruce with the red-and-white Ram bag appearing to sit lightly on his shoulder. He had a way of carrying the forty-pound bag that made it look as if it wasn’t the least bit heavy.
“That was probably,” he said, “because I always enjoyed being out there carrying it.”
Bruce was the best-known of that first generation of—for lack of a better word—professional caddies, the ones who helped make it a true profession. He is seen by today’s caddies as a crucial figure in the evolution of caddying. “To me, he’s our Arnold Palmer,” said Jim Mackay, who has caddied for Phil Mickelson since Mickelson turned pro in 1992. In many ways, Mackay is symbolic of today’s PGA Tour caddy. He is a college graduate, a very bright, well-read man who clearly could have opted for graduate school or a career in business. But, like Bruce thirty years ago, he enjoys the travel, the competition, and the camaraderie of being part of the PGA Tour. And because purses have soared and the way caddies are paid has changed so much since the 1970s, Mackay, like any caddy who works for a successful player, makes an annual income well into six figures.
“Palmer changed the way people looked at golfers,” Mackay continued. “Bruce changed the way people looked at caddies. He was the person a lot of us looked at in the ’80s and said, ‘Now that would be a cool thing to do.’ I can remember when I was a kid and I had done some caddying, going out to the Bay Hill Invitational every bit as much to see Bruce caddy as to see Tom Watson play golf. And the best thing, I think, for a lot of us when we came on tour, was that the guy we had all looked at and thought was so cool was the first guy to make you feel welcome, the first guy to want to help you out and show you the ropes. Palmer was always that way with young players. Bruce has always been that way with young caddies.”
In 1973 Bruce had no thoughts about becoming an iconic figure in his profession. All he knew was that he had somehow hooked on with a very good young player. He was making good money, he was having a good time, and any thoughts he might have had early on about his time on tour not working out were long gone. Visions of returning home and going to college were starting to fade too, but he didn’t say anything to his parents along those lines. No reason to start that battle again.
Back home in Wethersfield, the Edwards family was extremely happy to see Bruce having success. Jay and Natalie were relieved that he was making enough money to survive and seemed to be working for someone who was not only a good player but, based on Bruce’s description of him, a good man. They became very big Tom Watson fans. “As in, whenever Watson was in contention, we would set up trays in the family room, eat our dinner in front of the TV set, and watch every single shot,” Gwyn remembered. “A lot of our Sundays were built around Tom Watson’s golf game.”
And every time they turned on the TV with Watson on the leader board, there was Bruce, stride for stride with Watson, looking healthy and happy. Brian was just amazed that he was seeing his older brother on TV. Gwyn, who had just turned eleven, thought it was thrilling and of course cool because Bruce had always been cool. Jay and Natalie were still waiting for Bruce to come home and go to college. But, perhaps grudgingly at first, they had to admit that they weren’t just relieved, they were . . . proud. “He knew exactly what he wanted to do,” Jay says now, the perspective of thirty years making his vision clearer. “And he went out and did it.”
Watson and Bruce finished 1973 at the modestly named Walt Disney World Open Invitational. It had been launched in 1971, soon after Disney World opened, and was played on the two golf courses that had been built inside the park. Jack Nicklaus had won the tournament in ’71 and again in ’72, and he would win it a third straight year in ’73. Perhaps to add some suspense to the proceedings, Disney turned the tournament into a team event for the next eight years. Watson ended up missing the cut, only his second missed cut in the twelve tournaments Bruce had worked for him since July. On Friday, November 29, Linda wrote Bruce one last check and Watson and Bruce agreed that he would get a raise at the start of 1974—to $25 a day and 4 percent of winnings. There was no discussion about what Bruce might get for a win because Watson hadn’t won yet.
They shook hands in the parking lot and Watson said, “I’ll see you at Pebble.”
That would be the first event of 1974. There was now no doubt that Bruce and the Watsons were a team.
“I had my dream job,” Bruce said. “I had gone on tour not even thinking about who I wanted to work for. I just wanted to work. But once I started working for Tom, I knew I was doing exactly what I wanted to do every single week. There was no thought in my mind of doing anything different.”
Bruce didn’t go home during his break. He knew that even with the success he had had, his parents would ask questions about filling out college applications for the following fall. He didn’t want to deal with that. Not only that, he now had some money, real money. He decided to go to Hawaii for the holidays. He was nineteen years old, he was single, he had some cash, and he had no problem meeting people and making new friends.
His life was pretty close to perfect.
5
Rocket Man
LOOKING BACK NOW, Jay and Natalie Edwards agree that they were probably living on Fantasy Island for ever thinking that Bruce was going to go to college. Jay, who fought the good fight for years and years, now shakes his head when the subject comes up and says simply: “Bruce knew what he was doing. It just took us a long time to figure that out.”
Once he hooked up with Watson, there was little chance that Bruce was going to give any serious thought to quitting the tour and going to school. He was making good money. He was traveling with people he liked. He was young and single and meeting people—male and female—everywhere he went. He liked his boss. He was living his boyhood dream. And he was proving to his parents that he could succeed doing it his way, not theirs.
“I’ve always thought that at least part of the reason Bruce never gave serious thought to college was that doing so would mean giving in to his father,” Bill Leahey said. “Bruce has a stubborn streak, and there isn’t much doubt where it comes from—Jay. But it was more than that. Listen, we were leading a great life on tour. It was a simpler time, guys driving from stop to stop; there was much more camaraderie among the caddies than there is now, because it wasn’t as competitive. Now you hear stories about guys trying to steal bags from one another because there’s so much money at stake if you get the right player. That just never happened back then. Never. Bruce was the life of the party wherever we went. And we went to a lot of parties.”
When 1974 started, Bruce hadn’t yet ruled out college. He was still telling people that the plan was to stay out for a year and then make a decision about what to do next. But he certainly wasn’t filling out college admissions forms in Pebble Beach, Tucson, or Phoenix, as the tour made its way through the annual West Coast swing that starts the golf season. His parents weren’t around to bug him about applications, and they were smart enough not to bring it up on the phone—at least not very often. But now, Bruce had someone else pushing him toward college: his boss.
“I’m probably no different than Bruce’s parents in
that I believe in a college education,” Watson said, years later. “I know I benefitted from it, I think most people do. Bruce is a bright guy and I thought college would be good for him. I loved having him work for me as my caddy, but there were times when I would say to him, ‘You know, Bruce, this isn’t what you want to be doing for the rest of your life.’” Watson smiled as he said this. “Turns out I was wrong.”
He clearly had the heart of a gypsy during the 1970s. Leahey had gone back to college at the end of the summer of 1973 and so had Oxman. But Gary Crandall had finally given in to Bruce’s badgering and come out at the end of the summer. “I had balked at going to college because my father kept telling me it was the right thing to do and we were in all sorts of conflict because he and my mother were divorcing,” Crandall said. “I was in a dead-end job”—working in a local drugstore in Wethersfield—“going noplace and trying to figure out what to do next with my life. Bruce kept writing me and calling me to tell me how great it was out there. One week I get a postcard from Philadelphia: ‘Hey, we were paired with Nicklaus yesterday. It was amazing. When you coming out?’ Eventually he wore me down with stuff like that and I decided to try it.”
One of Crandall’s first tournaments that summer was a homecoming for him and for Bruce and for Leahey: the Greater Hartford Open. Steve Hulka, a friend of Bruce and Crandall, had been caddying that summer for Bruce’s old friend David Graham. Since Graham wasn’t planning on playing Hartford, Hulka had arranged to work for a tour rookie named Andy North. At the last minute, Graham entered Hartford and Hulka had two bags. Since Crandall didn’t have a bag yet, Hulka offered him North. That turned out to be the beginning of a six-year relationship that climaxed in 1978 when North won the U.S. Open.
“We missed the first two cuts and then finished fifth the third week,” Crandall said. “I had never seen a guy putt like that in my life. Plus we got along right away, even if he did talk obsessively about his [Wisconsin] Badgers.”
Caddy for Life Page 8