Caddy for Life

by John Feinstein

  Now it was Bruce’s turn to get angry. He knew Watson was worried about his father and unhappy with his game, but he just didn’t think he could allow him to continue with that kind of attitude, regardless of the circumstances. “Plus that wasn’t him,” he said. “Tom almost never talked that way on the golf course, even when he was really playing poorly.”

  Bruce decided it was time for a lecture. He was about to say something when Watson took out a four-wood, dropped a ball next to the hazard, and proceeded to hit the flag with what was his third shot. That gave Bruce the opening he needed.

  “I said, ‘Yeah, this game really sucks, doesn’t it? Don’t you just hate this damn game?’ He kind of smirked at me at that point, but I wasn’t done with him yet. I said, ‘You know, Tom, your father taught you this goddamn game, and considering that he just had a stroke, I would think you might want to dedicate the week to him.’ He didn’t say much after that, which told me I had gotten through to him. So I didn’t say anything else, just handed him his putter and walked to the back of the green.

  “He had an eight-foot putt for par and he rolled it in. When he handed me the putter I said very softly, ‘Your father would have really liked that four.’”

  Getting Watson to straighten out his attitude was one thing—and not usually that difficult. Getting him to make short putts, especially under pressure, was another. Bruce decided to play another mind game with him that week. “I’ve always been a good putter,” he said. “Tom gave me lessons back in the ’70s and that really helped, but one thing I’ve always done when I’m playing is every time I’ve got a putt under ten feet, I pretend it’s for birdie—whether it’s for birdie or par or bogey or double bogey. Doesn’t matter. I just say to myself, ‘Knock this one in for birdie.’ Maybe it’s pure coincidence, but I’ve always been good at making those putts.

  “So that week, I played the same game with Tom. Every time he had a putt under ten feet I was in his ear, regardless of what the putt was for. ‘Knock this in for birdie,’ or, ‘This will be a good birdie when you make it.’ I remember a few years ago when someone asked Tom once what my role was, he said, ‘Bruce is always the voice in my ear.’ That made me feel good, because it meant he was listening.”

  Trying to make putts for birdie all week, Watson took a one-shot lead into the final day and was paired with Ernie Els. On the first hole, he missed a three-foot “birdie” putt—and bogeyed. Walking off the green, Bruce said quietly, ‘Okay, that’s out of your system now. It will be the last one you’re going to miss all day.’”

  From that point on, Watson was almost perfect. With David Duval, then a rising star, closing in on him in the final holes, he kept making shots when he had to. He missed one very makeable putt—about a six-footer at 16—but still held a one-shot lead playing the 17th hole, with Duval already in the clubhouse. Watson’s second shot ran just through the green. He had about two feet of short rough to putt through and took out his putter, since he was only about 15 feet from the flagstick. At that moment, for the first time in twenty-three years as a caddy, twenty of them with Watson, Bruce broke his code of never telling a player what to do around the green.

  “I just thought he was going to have to hit it too hard with the putter to get it through the rough, and then it would be hard to get it to stop near the flag,” he said. “I said, ‘Let’s chip this, you’re a great chipper.’ Tom agreed, took out a nine-iron and left the chip three feet short. For a moment my heart sank, but then he stepped up and knocked the putt right in—another ‘birdie’—and I breathed a sigh of relief. Because he made that putt, I’m a great caddy at that moment. If he misses . . .”

  Still leading by one, Watson hit a perfect drive on 18. As he pulled out a six-iron, Bruce said, “Remember the shot you hit last year?” Watson had nearly holed a six-iron shot on 18. “Just do the same thing.”

  Watson smiled and hit his shot right at the flag, landing it 12 feet past the pin. “That what you had in mind?” he asked as they walked up to the green, hearing the roars from a crowd that was thrilled to see Tom Watson about to win again. Just as he had done at Pebble Beach in 1982, Watson used one putt when he had two to work with, knocking the birdie putt dead center for a two-shot victory.

  “It was like winning for the first time all over again,” Bruce said. “That hug was almost as special as the one at Pebble . . . and a long time coming.”

  Needless to say, the win and the hug had just as much meaning for Watson, who did dedicate the victory to his father. It was his thirty-eighth PGA Tour victory and came after he had gone 139 starts in a row without a win. It was the catalyst to what was then the most lucrative year of his career—he made more than $761,000 to finish 25th on the money list—and even though he continued at times to struggle with the putter, he had at least proved that he was right on that disappointing day at Turnberry when he said he would win again.

  And he won again, in 1998 at the Colonial, making him one of the oldest players (he was four months shy of forty-nine at the time) to win on the PGA Tour. That victory and another top-30 finish on the money list—29th—had Couples and others telling him there was no reason for him to move over to the Senior Tour when he turned fifty. He could still hit it long enough and straight enough to compete with the kids, so why not keep competing with them?

  Part of Watson wanted to do just that. Most of the best players are dragged kicking and screaming to the Senior (now Champions) Tour when they turn fifty. Nicklaus never fully embraced it, never playing more than seven events there in any single year. Tom Kite, Watson’s contemporary, told people he would only go over when he knew he couldn’t compete on, as most players call it, “the real tour” anymore. Watson liked being around the younger players, liked competing against the best. But even though he could still hit it long and straight, his body kept reminding him that he was fifty, not twenty-two or even thirty-two or forty-two.

  “I can’t practice the way I used to practice,” he said. “Sometimes my hip bothers me, sometimes I just get sore, period, if I’m out there for long stretches. I used to love to practice for hours. I can’t practice that way anymore. I like the fact that I can go back and play on the regular tour a few times a year, I enjoy that. But the fact is at this stage of my life, the Senior Tour is the right place for me.”

  Both Watson and Bruce found the adjustment to their new life difficult at times. Watson and Linda had divorced in 1998 and Watson had remarried just before joining the Senior Tour. His new wife, Hilary (who had previously been married to South African pro Denis Watson), had three children, who were thirteen, ten, and eight when their mother remarried, so Watson had a new family in addition to a new tour. At the same time, Bruce’s marriage was in its final throes, climaxing with the loss of his house eight months after Watson began playing the Senior Tour.

  Both men knew that the Senior Tour would be different from the regular tour. On the one hand, it was a homecoming of sorts, Watson reunited with players he had known for years: Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Jim Thorpe, Andy North, Bob Murphy, Lanny Wadkins, Hale Irwin, and others. The same was true for Bruce. His old buddy Mike Boyce was working for Gil Morgan; Lynn Strickler, a longtime pal, was with Crenshaw. “Sometimes it was as if we were back in the ’70s again,” he said.

  But they weren’t back in the ’70s. When Watson arrived on the Senior Tour, with Wadkins and Kite arriving a couple months afterward, the hope was that their arrival would pump new life into the tour at a time when interest in it was fading. The Senior Tour had sprung up in the late 1970s, following on the success of an annual event called the Legends of Golf, which had been held as a team event in 1978 and 1979. Noticing that Arnold Palmer, the most popular player in golf history, had turned fifty in September of 1979, the PGA Tour decided to experiment with a couple of Senior events in 1980. At the same time, the USGA decided to hold a U.S. Open for Seniors, although in that first year, players had to be fifty-five to compete. The following year, the age limit was dropped to fifty, and much
to the joy of the USGA, the winner was the fifty-one-year-old Palmer.

  Palmer’s popularity, and the country’s fascination with nostalgia in the 1980s, built the Senior Tour. Older golf fans loved to watch Sam Snead still tee it up every now and then, in addition to Palmer and Gary Player and Julius Boros and Chi Chi Rodriguez—and, ten years in, Lee Trevino and Nicklaus, even if Nicklaus didn’t play that often. Corporate America loved the Senior Tour because the core audience was, generally speaking, middle-aged and older people who fell into the upper income brackets—the perfect audience for Cadillac, Mercedes, high-end banks, and credit cards.

  But as the tour grew, it wasn’t dominated by the great players but by players who had been journeymen on the PGA Tour or in some cases hadn’t played the PGA Tour at all. Among the legendary players, only Trevino (twenty-nine victories) and Player (nineteen wins) truly embraced it. It was difficult for those who had been the very best in the world to get excited week in and week out about playing in 54-hole no-cut events on golf courses that were set up short and easy in order to encourage low scoring. The money got bigger and bigger, but dominant players weren’t motivated by the money. They had plenty. The players who were motivated by the big purses were the midlevel players who had played in an era when one had to be a consistent top-ten player to get rich. This was their chance.

  “The Senior Tour,” the late, great Dave Marr once said, “is life’s ultimate mulligan.”

  The dominant players on the tour were men like Jim Colbert and Gil Morgan and Bruce Fleisher, all of whom had solid careers but were hardly stars in their prime. Hale Irwin, the all-time leader in victories on the Senior Tour (thirty-eight through 2003), was a superb player who won three U.S. Open titles, but he wasn’t the kind of charismatic figure who was going to bring fans to the golf course or to their TV sets. Trevino was, but once injuries and age began to slow him in the late 1990s, there was really no one to fill the void he left. That was where Watson, Wadkins, and Kite were supposed to step in. They had all been born in 1949 and had been rivals throughout their careers on the PGA Tour. Watson had won eight majors, Wadkins and Kite only one apiece. But Wadkins had won a total of twenty-one times on tour and was a popular, charismatic figure. Kite had won nineteen tournaments and for a long period had been the tour’s all-time leading money winner.

  They would be the Senior Tour’s new triumvirate. Their continuing rivalry would bring people back to the over-fifty set. Only it didn’t happen that way. Kite played remarkably well in the Senior “majors” his first year out—a first, a second, a third, and a tie for fifth—but had trouble getting excited about the nonmajors. Wadkins never seemed to get excited about playing against his peers. His first three years out, he won once and had only six top-ten finishes in sixty-one starts. Watson played only forty-two times those first three years. After his victory in September 1999, he managed a total of three wins in three years: two of them in the season-ending Tour Championship, one in the 2001 Senior PGA. That victory, by one stroke over his friend Jim Thorpe, had great meaning, since he had never won the PGA Championship. It was hardly a coincidence that all three of those victories took place in 72-hole events played on relatively tough golf courses. Watson likes tough golf courses. The Senior Tour was not the best place in the world for someone looking for challenging venues.

  “Look, the Senior Tour is fine,” Watson said in 2003. “I do prefer tougher golf courses, but I’ve enjoyed myself out here. I enjoy being around the guys and I enjoy still having a chance to compete. Is it the same as when I was on the regular tour? Of course not. It’s different because it has to be different. Once you understand that, it’s just fine.”

  That’s exactly what it was to Bruce, just fine, nothing more. He missed the tension of the PGA Tour, the golf courses, and his friends, who were for the most part still working over there. He also missed the crowds. Most Senior Tour events draw small, quiet crowds. Only the real Senior majors—the PGA and the U.S. Open—are apt to draw crowds that make players and caddies feel as if they are back playing with, as Trevino likes to call them, “the flat-bellies.”

  Bruce’s feelings about the junior tour vs. the Senior Tour may have been best summed up when, as he walked toward the first tee for Watson’s first practice round at the Masters in 2000, he stopped under the famous tree outside the clubhouse, looked at the sky, held out his hands, and said, “Real tour air. I feel like I can breathe again!”

  During Watson’s first years on the Senior Tour, Bruce had offers from several top players on the junior tour—notably David Duval and Ernie Els—to go work for them. As he had with Greg Norman, Watson would have understood if Bruce had chosen to make the jump. This time, though, it was never an issue for Bruce. No doubt he could have made far more money working for Duval or Els, who played worldwide schedules as Norman had, probably played twice as much in a year as Watson, and were winning consistently and often. “I learned once that money can’t buy happiness,” Bruce said. “I knew I belonged with Tom. If he had told me, ‘Go do it,’ I would have told him no way. But it never came up because I never thought about it seriously.”

  He did keep his hand in on the regular tour by working several times a year for Lee Janzen and a couple of times a year for John Cook. Watson was only playing about eighteen times a year—thirteen or fourteen Senior events and about four regular tour events—so Bruce had free time to work for Janzen and Cook. Cook didn’t have a regular caddy, and Janzen’s caddy at the time, Dave Musgrove, lived in Great Britain. Several weeks a year, rather than ask Musgrove to fly over just to work one tournament and then fly back, Janzen would hire Bruce. That worked perfectly for the player and both caddies.

  “I already knew he was good from watching him with Tom through the years,” Janzen said. “But I found out how good one of the first times he worked for me. I asked him for the yardage to a hole, and he said it was something like one fifty-six but I needed to play the shot as if it were one forty-six because there was a little ridge short of the pin that would make the ball hop forward. I pulled out my yardage book and there was no notation about a ridge on that part of the green. I said, ‘Are you sure, Bruce? There’s nothing here about a ridge.’ He said it was there, he had seen it yesterday when he checked the dot.” (Caddies nowadays check every green the first three days of a tournament to see where the rules officials have marked a small white dot. That tells them the next day’s pin placement and allows them to check around the area for any ridges or plateaus, things that won’t always show up in a yardage book or on a pin sheet.)

  Janzen was convinced by Bruce’s certainty and played the shot as if it were 146 instead of 156. Pros are that exact in their yardage. As Watson says, “When we’re on, we can hit any club to within plus or minus two yards of our target.” Janzen watched his shot land, take a big hop forward, and settle hole high. “If Bruce doesn’t see the ridge, I hit the shot ten yards farther and I’m probably over the green,” he said. “Instead I’ve got a makeable birdie putt. After that I never doubted him again.”

  Bruce enjoyed working for both Janzen and Cook. He liked both men, he liked the extra income, and he liked getting back to the regular tour whenever he could. He was one of the few caddies who could handle Cook’s mercurial temperament. One of the tour’s nicest men off the golf course, Cook could become a dervish on the golf course, often beating himself to a pulp when he played badly. “Bruce, as much or more than any caddy who ever worked for me, could handle me,” Cook said. “What’s more, he was never afraid to tell me to just stop it—which is exactly what I need to hear sometimes.”

  But his best weeks were still with Watson, especially at the two Senior majors Watson really focused on and those rare weeks when Watson went back to play the regular tour. As a two-time champion, he played Augusta every year; he played the British Open every year; and he played the two tournaments he had won late in his career—the Memorial and the Colonial—every year.

  It was at the Colonial in May of 2002 that Marsha Cum
mins came back into Bruce’s life once again.

  She was actually Marsha Moore by then, mother of four, two grown, two from a marriage that wasn’t working. She and her husband, Jeff, had recently agreed to file for divorce.

  It was Marsha’s first marriage, but her third serious relationship. Since last dating Bruce in 1984, Marsha had gotten a job as a flight attendant for American Airlines, so for a while she was traveling almost as much as Bruce. Her parents would take her kids, Brittany and Taylor, when she was on the road, and she finally had a job that she truly enjoyed. In 1987, she met Jeff Moore, who was then a senior at SMU.

  “I was looking for a car,” she said. “I read an ad in the paper and went to see the guy about the car. He was very nice, and I bought the car. Then I get a call from him saying he had left his CDs in the glove compartment. Could he come over and pick them up? He did, we got into a long conversation and, well . . .”

  Jeff was twenty-one at the time, Marsha was thirty-one. They dated for six years before Marsha finally got over her phobia about being married and married him. “I had to wait for him to grow up,” she jokes.

  They had two children: a son, Brice, who was born in 1993, and a daughter, Avery, born eleven months after that. It was not long after Avery’s birth that Kay Barton called Marsha with some news about an old friend of theirs: Bruce Edwards had at long last gotten married.

  “I probably hadn’t seen Bruce a half-dozen times since 1984,” Marsha said. “But when Kay called and told me he had gotten married, I was devastated. I mean, completely devastated. It made no sense. Here I was, married, with young children, and I was carrying the torch for a man I had hardly seen at all for years. But I was crushed. Completely crushed. I remember saying to myself, ‘Marsha, it just wasn’t meant to be. Now move on.’ But it was a lot easier said than done. I guess there was a part of me that just always figured somehow, some way, we’d end up together,” she said. “And then there was Kay on the phone, in essence telling me no way it was ever going to happen. I tried to put him out of my mind at that point.” She smiled.