Caddy for Life

by John Feinstein

  To Bruce the biggest difference was attitude. “I was spoiled,” he said. “I had worked sixteen years for a player who never complained about bad luck, never whined, never blamed anyone. There are very few players like that. Only a handful at most. But I got used to that being the way it was. Then, with Greg, it wasn’t. It was, I realized later, far more normal.” Norman was a long way from being the worst whiner on tour, but he wasn’t Tom Watson. Bruce was used to being outspoken with his player, to telling him when he thought he had screwed up. He learned—the hard way—that Norman wasn’t always comfortable with that kind of caddy.

  “There’s no question that Tom and I are very different on the golf course,” Norman said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Tom get angry, really angry, at least outwardly, when things go wrong. I’ve never seen him yell or curse or get on himself or his caddy for bad play. I’m just not that way. I’m too intense. I do get upset when things go wrong. I get mad at myself and sometimes I get mad at my caddy. I say things in the heat of the moment I don’t really mean. When I did that to Bruce at times, I would try to tell him later that it wasn’t personal, it was a heat of the moment thing. But I think it was hard for him to take it that way, because we were friends and because he was so used to Tom, who just never took it out on him at all.”

  Bruce agrees that he did take things personally. He also believes that his outspokenness, which never bothered Watson, simply wasn’t the right thing for Norman. With Watson, he said, “when I called him a chicken-blank mother-blank, he knew I was doing it for a reason,” Bruce said. “If I told him not to hang his head or that there was something he needed to be doing, he always understood why. Sometimes when I tried to do that with Greg it worked, other times it didn’t.

  “It really started to go bad at the British the next year,” he said, speaking of 1990. “We were tied for the lead with [Nick] Faldo after thirty-six holes and paired with him on Saturday. Well, it was one of those days. Faldo was great, shot sixty-seven. Greg wasn’t, shot seventy-six. Ballgame over.”

  Bruce remembers standing in the fairway of St. Andrews’ famous 17th hole, the Road Hole, the place where Watson’s last chance for a sixth British title had disappeared six years earlier. “Well, Bruce,” Norman said to him. “I guess some days it’s better to be lucky than good.”

  Bruce was stunned. Faldo hadn’t been lucky, he had been brilliant. Later he realized that Norman was doing what many if not most golfers will do in that situation: finding a way to avoid the truth, because the truth can really hurt.

  “Maybe I was too tough on him,” Bruce said. “But right then and there, it kind of pissed me off that he said it. I guess I should have been the supportive caddy, but I just couldn’t do it at that moment. So I said, ‘Greg, I just want to work for someone who plays with guts and heart, no matter the outcome.’ The look he gave me told me he understood exactly what I was saying.”

  Things began to slide soon after that. It certainly didn’t help that Norman followed 1990 with the worst year of his career, failing to win, finishing in the top ten only six times (down from eleven times the previous year), and dropping to 53rd on the money list with $320,196. The overseas income kept Bruce’s pay in six figures, but Norman’s struggles became a source of constant strain in the relationship. Whether Norman needed a swing adjustment—as many players do at midcareer—or was just worn out from all the years of globe-trotting and never taking a break is hard to say. But his game suffered. He also hurt his wrist at the U.S. Open at Hazeltine Golf Club that June. His game improved in 1992 after he starting working with swing guru Butch Harmon, but his relationship with his caddy did not. In fact by then Bruce was miserable.

  “I had become a ‘yes-caddy,’” he said. “All I was really concerned about was not getting blamed when things went wrong. If I did speak up, I was afraid of being wrong, so I wasn’t as authoritative as I should have been. Greg had lost confidence in me, and I had lost confidence in myself. Things were really tense between us. I had reached the point where I dreaded going to the golf course. For sixteen years I never caddied for the money. Making money was nice, but I caddied because I loved it, and I enjoyed the competition and the feeling inside the ropes and being with Tom when the pressure was greatest. The last year, maybe eighteen months, with Greg, I was doing it strictly for the money. That wasn’t the way I wanted to work or live.”

  “Neither one of us was happy, that’s for sure,” Norman said. “I was unhappy with my game, baffled by it. No question Bruce sometimes bore the brunt of that on the golf course. I know he was trying to help me, and it frustrated him feeling as if he couldn’t. I don’t think either one of us was a bad guy, we were just in what added up to a bad situation.”

  While Norman’s game had taken a turn for the worse, Watson was beginning to see some light after more than four years of groping in the dark, looking for his golf swing. It happened, as Watson’s swing revelations often do, very quickly and very simply. “I was on the practice tee one Tuesday at Hilton Head,” he said. “I started trying a move where my shoulders were more level than they had been. It occurred to me that I had consistently been too steep with my right shoulder on my downswing for a long, long time. It was as if a light switch had finally turned on.

  “I took the thought with me to the golf course the next day and started hitting shots focusing on keeping my shoulders level. There it was. The ball started flying for me again like it hadn’t flown in years.”

  The only move missing was the pleasure of turning around at impact and saying to Bruce, “I’ve got it.”

  But he did have it, and he began striking the ball far more consistently. His scoring didn’t improve much at first, because he was still learning the swing and because he was beginning to struggle with a different facet of his game—putting; specifically short putts. But at least he didn’t dread every tee box, every iron shot. “I felt,” he said, “like I could play again.”

  By late summer 1992, Bruce could see the end coming with Norman. Playing at the International, outside Denver, they reached the 11th hole, a straight downhill par-three. Norman wanted to hit a nine-iron. Bruce, who at that stage would normally have said nothing, couldn’t resist telling him he thought wedge was a better choice. Norman agreed, hit the wedge, and uppercut it just enough that it came up short in a dry creek bed. Norman slammed the club back into the bag and said, “My son [then age six] could have pulled a better club than that one.”

  Bruce was embarrassed and angry. “What I wanted to say was, ‘Your son probably could have hit a better shot too,’ but I would either have been fired or had to quit right there, so I kept my mouth shut.”

  Norman doesn’t remember the incident but doesn’t doubt that he made the comment. “By then we were both very frustrated with the way things were going,” he said. “It was almost as if we both sensed at the same time that each of us needed a change.”

  Bruce was convinced that Norman was going to fire him, and the more he thought about it, the more he realized that getting fired would be a relief. He had never felt as unhappy on a golf course in his life as he had during the months when Norman’s game had gone awry. The next stop was Milwaukee on Labor Day weekend. After two near silent days between player and caddy on the golf course, Bruce decided to tell Norman he was going to quit. He had already made arrangements with another caddy to take over for him on the weekend if Norman didn’t want him to finish the tournament.

  He waited in the parking lot for Norman after the round was over and said to him, “Greg, I’m not doing you any good right now, and working for you isn’t doing me any good. I’ve decided to quit.”

  Norman was stunned by the way the news came out, but not by the news. “He had it exactly right,” Norman said. “We weren’t doing each other any good at that point, and he was right that it was better for both of us this way. I think I had reached that conclusion too, but pulling that trigger was going to be hard for me, because as bad as things were, I still considered Bruce a f
riend.”

  In fact when Bruce told Norman that he had lined up another caddy for the weekend if he wanted to make the separation immediate, Norman said no, that he would really like Bruce to finish the tournament. Bruce agreed.

  “The funny thing is, the weekend was the best time we’d had together in a long time,” Bruce said. “It was as if the pressure was off both of us. At one point he said to me, ‘Why do you think I lose it at times during rounds?’ I told him I thought he should think about seeing a sports psychologist.” Norman listened to that advice—almost. “I should have seen a sports psychologist when I was younger,” he said. “I think it could have made a difference then. When I was older I was probably too stubborn and set in my ways to listen to someone else who hadn’t been in the situations I’d been in. But I did start studying some Zen soon after that, and I do think that did help me.”

  Norman eventually hired Tony Navarro, who was then Jeff Sluman’s caddy, to replace Bruce. Navarro has been with him ever since. Norman says he learned something about player-caddy relationships from his time with Bruce. “I learned that even if a caddy is your friend, maybe especially if he’s your friend, you have to be aware that what you say on the golf course, no matter how you meant it, can hurt,” he said. “There are times when I snap at Tony, but now when I do, I make sure he knows before the end of the day that it wasn’t personal, that it was just me getting upset with something I did wrong. I’ve even written him letters to make sure he understands that.”

  When Norman holed out on that Sunday in Milwaukee, Bruce walked over to him, hand extended, and said, “Thanks for the opportunity.”

  Norman remembers being very emotional at that moment. “I cried,” he said. “You don’t meet many people in life much better than Bruce Edwards, and I was sorry we had reached that point. But he was right. It was the best thing for both of us.” He paused and thought for a moment. “You know, I really believe things happen for a reason. The way things have turned out for Bruce, he was meant to be back with Tom. I really and truly believe that.”

  Before he headed for the golf course that morning, Bruce had called the Watsons. It was Tom’s forty-third birthday, and Bruce had always made a point of calling Watson on his birthday, even after he stopped working for him. Linda answered. Tom wasn’t home, she said, but she was really glad he had called to say happy birthday. “I was glad to hear her sound friendly again,” Bruce said. When Linda asked Bruce how things were going, Bruce told her he had quit Norman on Friday and that this would be his last day working for him. He paused and then, figuring he had nothing to lose, said, “Do you think Tom would be interested in having me back?”

  Linda’s response was immediate. “Bruce,” she said, “I can’t think of a better birthday present.”

  After he had said his goodbyes to Norman, Bruce called the Watsons back that night. This time Tom answered the phone. “So,” he said, “are you calling to wish me a happy birthday or to ask for your job back?”

  “Both,” Bruce answered.

  They both laughed, and Bruce felt all was right in his world again. They talked for a few more minutes about Tom’s schedule and about Bruce’s salary and deal. At one point when Tom was talking about money, Bruce heard Linda say in the background, “Give him whatever he wants!”

  “That,” he said, “made my day complete.”

  He was back with Watson. Back on the bag that looked right on him. Back, he thought, where he belonged.

  10

  Home Again

  SINCE WATSON DIDN’T PLAY much in the fall, Bruce actually had some downtime after Milwaukee, which worked out well, since The House That Norman Built was just about complete and he had some time to enjoy the fruits of those three years. His first tournament back on Watson’s bag came late in the fall of 1992, when he and Watson flew to Japan to play the Dunlop Phoenix Open, the one overseas event Watson always played in the fall because Dunlop was one of his longtime sponsors. Playing in Japan had become something Watson looked forward to each fall. It had been there, in 1976, that Watson had hit the nine-iron shot he felt led to his emergence as the world’s best player the following year. Now it also became a place for reuniting.

  Being back with Watson was a little bit like returning to his old bedroom at home for Bruce. He felt completely comfortable right away. Which made sense. There hadn’t been any hard feelings between player and caddy when they had split. They had remained friends. Any concerns Bruce had about Linda had been wiped away on Watson’s birthday. “It was like old times,” Bruce said. “Except that we were all twenty years older.”

  By then the Watsons’ children were thirteen and ten, which was a major reason Watson was picking and choosing where he would play. He now felt comfortable again on the golf course, confident with his swing and with the way he was striking the ball. There was a new problem, though: short putts. Once the greatest putter in the world at any distance, Watson was still dangerous from long range; but he had lost his confidence on the short ones. “You miss a couple that you think you’re going to make and you start to think more about them the next time around,” he said. “The next thing you know, it’s inside your head, and people start whispering that you have the yips.”

  Next to the shanks (hitting the ball dead sideways), the yips may be the worst malady that can afflict a golfer. Quite simply, having the yips means you get jumpy and nervous over putts, almost always short ones. Johnny Miller, winner of two major championships, is the most notable exception to that rule: “I never had the yips on short putts, just ten-to-fifteen-footers,” he has said. Most players experience the yips in some form as they get older and their nerves begin to lose their sharpness. The reason so many players on the Senior Tour use long putters nowadays is to combat the yips.

  No one knows exactly what causes the yips to kick in. In Watson’s case it may just have been the shock to the system he found in being competitive again after several years of wandering among the modern-day rabbits. In the 1970s, rabbits were players who didn’t have fully exempt status and had to hop from Monday qualifier to Monday qualifier on tour. Today, on the all-exempt tour, rabbits are players who are up early on Saturday and Sunday morning to lead the field at tour events. The closer he came to a breakthrough, the more pressure he felt over short putts. Fortunately he was distracted throughout most of 1993 by the Ryder Cup captaincy. He had been named captain shortly after the 1991 Ryder Cup, the infamous War by the Shore at Kiawah Island, when the behavior of the American fans and of some members of the American team had gone way over the line of the sportsmanship considered so important to golf.

  Watson was absolutely determined to do two things: tone down the rhetoric going back and forth between the U.S. and European teams and, just as important, be the first American captain to win in Europe since 1981, which had been one of the four Ryder Cups Watson had played in. He met with key European players, with key American players, and with Bernard Gallacher, his European counterpart, to discuss what had gone wrong at Kiawah and leading up to Kiawah. There was no questioning the fact that American desperation had played a part in the bad blood in 1991; the Europeans had held the cup since 1985 and had won in the United States in 1987. Watson wanted his team hungry to win, but he wanted them to win the right way.

  “We should be able to play as hard as we can to try and beat our opponent,” he said often, “and then be able to hoist a toast to one another when it’s all over.”

  Watson took the job very seriously. He spent time with Kansas basketball coach Roy Williams to learn about leading a team—something golfers are almost never asked to do—and about tactics during competition. Williams gave him one piece of advice he had first learned from his mentor, legendary North Carolina coach Dean Smith. “Coach Smith always told us that there was no better feeling than to go on the road and quiet the crowd down,” he said. “He always told our players to ‘listen for the silence,’ because there was no better sound you could hear in the other guy’s building. And then to watch t
he crowd leave early.”

  Watson and the Americans were going into the other guy’s building—specifically, the Belfry, a fairly ordinary golf course in the British midlands that was owned by the European PGA. The Americans had lost the cup there in 1985 and had allowed the Europeans to retain it there in 1989 with a 14-14 tie that would have been a U.S. win if four Americans hadn’t found the water at the 18th hole on Sunday during the twelve singles matches.

  Ten of Watson’s twelve players were decided for him by a points system. When the PGA Championship ended at Inverness that year, Watson had to announce his two captain’s picks. Actually he made three: Lanny Wadkins and Raymond Floyd, both veterans of many Ryder Cups, would be the eleventh and twelfth players. Watson’s third captain’s pick was Wadkins’s caddy: Bruce Edwards. He and Wadkins had agreed that Bruce should be part of the Ryder Cup team, and with Watson not playing, this was the logical way to do it. Wadkins knew Bruce well because he and Watson had been playing practice rounds together—with some intense money matches going on throughout—on Tuesdays for most of twenty years.

  The 1993 Ryder Cup turned into one of the most dramatic in years. This time the Americans trailed by three points on Saturday morning, rallied to within a point that afternoon, and then came from behind late on Sunday to win. There were all sorts of twists and turns to the plot, including European veteran Sam Torrance’s coming up with an infected big toe on Saturday night, which meant that Torrance, who would later be a Ryder Cup captain himself, would not be able to play in the singles matches on Sunday.

  Under Ryder Cup rules, if a player on one team can’t play singles, one player from the other team sits out the singles matches and each team receives a half-point for the match not played. Before Watson could give any serious thought to who should sit out for his team, Wadkins insisted it should be him. It wasn’t fair, he reasoned, to make one of the ten players who had made the team on points sit out. It should be Floyd or it should be him, and Floyd was playing better golf than he was, even though Wadkins’s reputation as a Ryder Cup singles player was peerless. Watson decided he was right. Of course that meant that Bruce also sat out—as a caddy. Many of the American players remember him that Sunday bouncing from match to match, handing out encouragement, relaying instructions from Watson, or just cheerleading.