Caddy for Life

by John Feinstein

  Something had gone out of Watson on the eighth hole. As he walked up the hill from the tee to the fairway, his head was down. For the first time, he didn’t respond to the encouraging shouts from the Scots. His tee shot had actually gone too far right into the deep rough. He missed the green from there, tried to do too much with a chip, then chipped (again) to four feet. There wasn’t much question about what would happen next. He missed.

  Back-to-back double bogeys. It was over.

  Two hours later, after signing for another Sunday 74, Watson stood next to the 18th green and patiently answered all the questions . . . again. Someone asked him what he would take away from the week. For once Watson couldn’t think of the birdie that might follow the double bogey. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

  Did he still think he could win again?

  “You bet,” he said.

  Why.

  “Because,” he said, his eyes flashing some anger, “I believe it.”

  A few yards away, Bruce stood waiting, still shouldering the bag. “It’s so damn close,” he said. “I know you can if and but forever, but if the drive at eight is two feet more to the right, the way he’s rolling at that point, it all might have been so different.”

  He forced a smile. “At least he’s still got those five. They can’t take them away.”

  What Bruce didn’t say—and wouldn’t say—was that he would have loved to have had just one.

  Years later, talking about high and low moments in his career, Watson brought up Oakmont in ’78—especially since he never did win the PGA—and Oakmont again in ’83. He still remembered Winged Foot in ’74 and Olympic in ’87. But number one on the list, he said, was Turnberry in ’94.

  “I thought I was going to win,” he said. “In fact I was convinced all week I was going to win. It would have been the perfect way, the absolute best way, to end the [seven-year] drought.” He paused. “And I really wanted to win one over there with Bruce. That would have been really special.”

  Even with all the putting problems, Watson had his best year in a long time in ’94. The T-11 at the British was certainly disappointing, but he finished the majors season with a T-9 at the PGA, meaning he had finished in the top 15 in all four majors—even with 74 on three of the Sundays. It was the first time in five years he had made the cut in all four majors and the first time in seven years that he had been in the top 15 in all four. Even spending a lot of money with his Sunday putting problems, he finished 43rd on the money list, the highest he had been since finishing 39th in 1988 and fifth in 1987.

  Bruce was just happy to be back where he belonged. The two men were very much partners and, in many ways, peers now. Watson was the boss and always would be, but he almost never had to give Bruce any kind of order, because Bruce knew exactly what needed to be done before Watson asked. And Watson knew that when his caddy spoke sharply to him at times, it wasn’t out of disrespect. It was, to put it bluntly, out of love.

  Bruce’s love life away from the golf course was a different story. With all the traveling he had done through the years he had met many women, dated many women, and enjoyed relationships with many women. But he had never really fallen in love. The lifestyle was certainly a factor, but so was Bruce’s personality. As Watson always says, “a gypsy at heart.”

  Bruce turned forty in November of 1994. It may or may not have been coincidence that he met Suzie Marciano a couple of months later in a bar near Pebble Beach. Watson was to play a Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf match against Jack Nicklaus the next day, after the conclusion of the ’95 AT&T Pro-Am. “All the other guys had left, since the tournament was over, and I just went into the bar at Mission Ranch to have a drink and she was in there,” Bruce said. They started talking. “She told me she had come up from San Francisco to take a tennis lesson.” He laughed. “I guess that should have told me something right there—coming over a hundred miles to take a tennis lesson.”

  Suzie Marciano was short, well-built, and friendly from the start. Bruce had never had trouble meeting women and Suzie was no exception. She had recently divorced (“quite well,” Jay Edwards likes to say, since her ex-husband was an executive for the Coach clothing line), and even though she knew very little about golf, she certainly knew who Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus were. Almost casually, Bruce invited her to the match the next day.

  “She showed up for the last four holes,” Bruce said. “That started it.”

  It became something of a whirlwind romance, Bruce flying in to San Francisco when he could, Suzie eventually coming out on tour to spend time with him. Everyone was impressed—initially. “On the face of it, she was everything you would look for,” Bill Leahey said. “She was good-looking, very striking, and smart. She had a lot of flair and a good sense of humor. It was only later that we all started to wonder.”

  Jay and Natalie Edwards were impressed too. Suzie’s father had been an operatic singer, her mother a pianist. She played the piano and spoke three languages. She seemed to be the real deal.

  They were engaged in the fall. The wedding was set for the Monday after Pebble Beach—a year and a day later on the golf calendar than the day they had first met—and it would be held in the place where they had met, Mission Ranch. Bruce’s friends were happy to see him finally settle down. Then they started to learn more about who he was settling down with. She had a daughter from her previous marriage who lived with her father. That was certainly unusual. She traveled in prominent circles—San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, for instance, was to be one of the guests at the wedding. Bruce’s sister Gwyn still remembers Suzie’s maid of honor getting up at the rehearsal dinner and tearfully talking about how much Suzie meant to her; after all it was Suzie who had given her her first pair of Chanel earrings.

  “What in the world,” Gwyn whispered to the rest of the family, “is this all about?”

  “We had the sense,” Jay Edwards said, “that she thought she was marrying a golfer and would be living the life of a golf wife, not the life of a caddy’s wife—albeit a well-paid caddy.”

  Watson was also concerned. He wasn’t about to tell Bruce what to do—Bruce admits that at that stage no one could have changed his mind anyway—but at the rehearsal dinner he pulled Suzie aside for a minute and said quietly, “Don’t ever hurt him.”

  “I won’t,” Suzie said. “I promise.”

  Watson, like everyone else, was skeptical. “We did everything but set up an over-under for how long it would last during the wedding,” Gwyn said. “Bruce was certainly enamored of her. But it didn’t feel right to any of us.”

  It didn’t feel right to Bruce for much longer. After the wedding Suzie moved into The House That Norman Built and was miserable. Ponte Vedra, Florida, is a long way from San Francisco in more ways than one. She missed her friends and the social life. The tour, when she was out with Bruce, wasn’t nearly as glamorous as she had envisioned—especially since she was a caddy’s wife. She began talking about moving back to San Francisco. For Bruce that wouldn’t have been practical in any way, financially or logistically. Suzie got very involved in gardening and that distracted her for a time. Then she went back to San Francisco for a while to take a cooking course and train to be a caterer. But when she returned to Ponte Vedra, she found that the law in Florida wouldn’t let her run a catering service from her home.

  Gwyn, who was working in Atlanta at the time for Turner Sports, remembers going to lunch with a client one day at an expensive restaurant. The golf tour was in town, the tournament being played at a course about an hour north of Atlanta. “There was Suzie, sitting there all by herself eating lunch,” Gwyn said. “It just struck me as strange. When she saw me, she sent over a ridiculously expensive dessert. It was nice of her, but all I could think was, ‘What is she doing sitting in this place all alone?’”

  By the time Watson transitioned from the regular tour to the Senior Tour at the end of 1999, the marriage was clearly floundering. Bruce wasn’t happy, neither was Suzie. “There was just
no way she was going to be happy in Ponte Vedra, especially with a husband who was away twenty-five weeks a year,” he said. “I should have known that right off the bat, but I didn’t.”

  Bruce may be one of the most nonconfrontational people on earth, but it seemed he and Suzie were fighting all the time now. In March of 2000, he was in Arizona with Watson, who was playing his first Senior major at the Tradition, one of those faux majors cooked up by the PGA Tour. Suzie called to say she had decided to move back to San Francisco. The marriage obviously wasn’t working for either one of them.

  “I was so relieved,” Bruce said. “She was right, and now I was off the hook. I didn’t have to pull the trigger.”

  Except that Suzie called back the next day. She wanted to try again. Bruce thought that was a bad idea and told her so. Suzie hung up on him.

  The Tradition ended on the Sunday before the Masters, Watson losing in a playoff to Tom Kite. Bruce then flew on a private plane with Tom to Augusta, got to the house he shared during the week with Greg Rita, turned off his cell phone, and went to bed, exhausted. When he woke up the next morning he turned his phone on and checked for messages. “There were twenty-seven messages,” he said. “All from Suzie.”

  The calls had started out friendly and calm. “I saw you on TV today. You looked great. I was pulling for you guys.” But with each passing one they became a little angrier, a little more desperate. Finally one of them said, “If I don’t hear from you in five minutes, I’m going to start breaking things.”

  The next one was Suzie telling him to listen and then the sound of glass being broken in the background. Then another call. And another. “You aren’t going to have much memorabilia left,” she said at one point.

  Panicked, Bruce called his close friend Mike Rich and asked him to go over to the house, find Suzie, and see how much damage she had done. Rich called back a little later to say he had only found one broken item, a framed picture that actually belonged to Suzie. “She’d been bluffing,” Bruce said. “So I called her at that point and asked her why she was threatening to break all my stuff. And she said, ‘I wanted you to call me.’” Bruce explained that even if he hadn’t had his cell phone turned off so he could get some sleep, threatening him was not the best way to get his attention. She told him she was staying in Ponte Vedra till he got home.

  Bruce went straight to the house Watson always rented for the week, played the last several messages for Watson, and asked Watson what he thought he should do. “You need to talk to Chuck,” Watson said, referring to Chuck Rubin, Linda’s brother, who had been his agent since early in his pro career. Rubin, as always, was in Augusta for the Masters. His advice was blunt: “You need to get her out of the house,” he said. “She sounds like she’s close to some kind of breakdown. The next time might be worse.”

  Bruce didn’t want to believe that, although he knew it was certainly possible. But he was in the middle of a three-week trip: the Tradition, the Masters, and the Senior PGA Championship the next week in Palm Beach, a tournament that was important to Watson, because even though he didn’t really think of the Tradition as a major, he did think of the Senior PGA (and the U.S. Senior Open) as a major. “Maybe she’ll be okay until I get home,” he told Rubin.

  Watson missed the cut at Augusta, and he and Bruce flew to Palm Beach to get ready for the PGA. Suzie called to say that movers were coming to the house the next day, bringing back things of hers that she had taken with her to San Francisco during her cooking school sojurn. What, she asked Bruce, should she tell the movers? “I would tell them not to unpack, to turn around and take the stuff back to San Francisco,” Bruce said. “I really think that’s the best thing for you and for me.”

  Suzie sounded calmer, more reasonable. Maybe, Bruce thought, she would realize the marriage was over and leave peacefully.

  The third round of the PGA Seniors, on Saturday, wasn’t completed because of a midafternoon Florida thunderstorm. That meant the players still on the golf course, Watson among them, had to return early Sunday morning to finish the round before the start of the final round. Bruce’s 6 a.m. alarm had just gone off when his cell phone rang. He sighed, hoping it was Watson calling about something; hoping it wasn’t Suzie.

  It wasn’t either one of them. “Bruce Edwards?” a voice said.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Sergeant Smith from the St. John’s County Police Department. I think you should come home immediately. Your wife has burned your house down.”

  Bruce stared at the phone for a second in disbelief. He knew instantly this wasn’t a joke or a prank. “How much damage?” he asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.

  The police sergeant hesitated for a moment. “It’s basically destroyed,” he said finally.

  He went on to explain that Suzie had been found two doors down at a neighbor’s house after police and firefighters had been called to the scene. She had confessed to starting the fire and had told the police officers who questioned her, “I should have burned all his memorabilia by the pool, like I was originally going to.” The police thought initially that she had started the fire by burning Bruce’s memorabilia, but fire investigators later told him that the fire had been started in the attic with gasoline poured on the floor and a match thrown on the gasoline.

  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.”