Caddy for Life

by John Feinstein

  “We need a good start,” Bruce said Sunday morning. “He’s never been in this position before, and he’ll definitely be looking at this as a chance to win a major—senior or not. We put some pressure on him early and he might come back to us.”

  The chance to do that was there early. Just as Bruce had predicted, Lietzke looked tight at the start. He found the bunker off the first tee, missed the green, and made bogey. Watson had a 20-foot putt for birdie that could have sliced the lead in half on one hole, but it just slid by. Both Watson and Bruce looked chagrined, because they knew how important a two-shot swing on the first hole might have been. Lietzke then had to get up and down from a greenside bunker at the second while Watson had another birdie chance. Lietzke saved his par; Watson missed his birdie.

  That set a pattern for the day. Lietzke was no different than anyone else coming off a great round: The day was a struggle for him. The fact that he was trying to hold off Tom Watson in a Senior major made it that much tougher. But Watson couldn’t make enough putts to really turn the pressure up. Lietzke made a great par save at the sixth, then drilled a 10-foot eagle putt on the par-five eighth hole after his best shot of the day got him that close.

  At that moment Watson trailed by six strokes, having missed his own birdie putt. Bruce could see a little sag in his shoulders as they walked off the ninth tee.

  “Hey,” he said, “how far behind were we last year at Caves? Six wasn’t it?”

  “Five,” Watson said.

  Bruce knew that, and he knew Watson would know it too. “Yeah,” he answered, “but you made a bogey on sixteen and we still caught up.”

  The message got through. Watson birdied the ninth while Lietzke bogeyed to slice the margin quickly back to four. Watson got within three and had a 12-foot birdie putt at 13 that would have cut the margin to two. But as had been the pattern since Friday, he couldn’t make the putt. A Lietzke birdie from the rough at 16—when his ball bounced over a bunker and stopped two feet from the flag—sealed the deal. The final margin was two. As Lietzke lined up his final putt, Bruce, knowing the tournament was over, said to him, “Knock it in, Bruce.”

  Lietzke gave him a big smile and did just that. The handshakes were warm and so was the applause for everyone. But Watson and Bruce both felt let down. Each had believed that Watson would win and, in doing so, clinch that spot in the 2004 Open. It just wasn’t meant to be.

  “We still have a lot of golf left,” Bruce told Watson as they walked off the green.

  “Damn right we do,” Watson answered.

  One week later Bruce made his debut in a cart at the Ford Senior Players Championship. Technically this was a major, just as the Senior Open and the Senior PGA Championship were. But most of the players, especially those who had won real majors during their career, looked at it as a good tournament but a clear notch below the first two majors on the Champions schedule.

  The event in Dearborn wasn’t all that different from the Senior Open, except that Watson’s brilliant round came on the second day—a 64—and the player who made a big move on the weekend to catch him wasn’t Lietzke but newly minted senior Craig Stadler, the 1982 Masters champion who had turned fifty a month earlier. Once again Watson’s inability to play defense on the golf course was his downfall, as Stadler shot 65-66 on the weekend to beat him by three shots. Watson had played remarkably well in three straight tournaments but had come up short of his goal in each one of them, especially the last two, where he very much wanted to share a victory with Bruce.

  Midway through the week in Dearborn, Watson got a phone call from Neil Oxman. “Bruce should go with you to Europe,” he told Watson. “I’ve been following the weather over there. It’s been hot and dry all summer, and they’re expecting it to stay hot and dry. He should go.”

  Watson understood and appreciated Oxman’s feelings. He knew why Oxman wanted Bruce to go, but he also knew Bruce was exhausted, and he would have to walk at both British Opens if he went overseas. Hot weather, even Scottish hot weather, would be just as tough on him at this stage as cold, wet weather, just in a different way. Oxman understood. Reluctantly he finally made a room reservation and told Watson he would meet him at Royal St. George’s the following Monday.

  Watson’s two weeks overseas were an almost unqualified success. He finished tied for 18th place in the British Open, his highest finish since a tie for 10th in 1997 at Royal Troon. He did so, according to Oxman, in spite of a series of gaffes by his caddy on the first day, which he comically described to Bruce in a lengthy letter he wrote him after returning home. “By the fifth hole on the first day,” he wrote, “I had dropped a towel, had a bag fall over, the umbrella had fallen out of its bottom brace, and Tom threw me a ball that I dropped and it ended up rolling halfway across the green. At that point, Tom tried to calm me down. I actually thought I wasn’t that nervous!”

  The following week, returning to Turnberry for the British Senior Open (he and Hilary shared a cottage for the week with Jack and Barbara Nicklaus), Watson appeared on his way to yet another second-place finish until Englishman Carl Mason, leading by two shots with one hole to play, double-bogeyed the 18th hole, forcing a playoff. Both men parred the first playoff hole—the 18th—then they played the 18th again. Watson had hit two-iron the first time he played the hole that day, leaving himself 195 yards to the front of the green. On the first playoff hole, he hit driver and had 124 to the front. The third time, he hit driver and “turned it over” (hit a draw that cut the corner), and had 95 yards to the front. “A hundred yards closer to the green than he was in regulation,” Oxman wrote. “I just don’t think you can give Watson two ‘take-overs’ (as we would say in Philly) and not have him come out on top.”

  He did, winning on the second playoff hole. Even though he had needed Mason’s help at the finish to win, the victory was gratifying after the near misses earlier in the summer. “I know for a fact that he was tired of finishing second,” Bruce said. “Of course I told both him and Ox before they went over that Tom was a lock to win since I wasn’t going.”

  Bruce wasn’t there in body, but his spirit was very much present. After Watson had been presented with the trophy and had done his postround media interviews, he returned to the cottage to pack. Oxman was already there, getting things organized, since the Watsons and the Nicklauses were leaving that night to fly home. They sat down for a moment to talk about the week and joked about how Bruce had correctly predicted Watson’s victory. “We both started to get emotional, just talking about him, even making jokes about what he was going to say when we got back,” Oxman said. “We didn’t start out to have a good cry, but that’s what we ended up doing.”

  In his letter to Bruce, after telling him all the funny stories and expressing amazement that Watson had been able to win with him on the bag (it was Oxman’s first win as a caddy ever), Oxman wrote:

  Without exaggerating, fifty or sixty times over the two weeks someone came up to me and began a conversation with the same two words, “How’s Bruce.” A guy at Turnberry who you gave a signed glove to; someone who first met you at Wethersfield when you were fifteen; spectators in front of the clubhouse at St. George’s and Turnberry seeing me standing next to the golf bag; reporters; marshals—all of whom asked in the most genuine and sincere way.

  When we were on the practice tee one day, a European Tour caddy gingerly stepped up to Tom and said, “How’s Bruce? Please tell him all the caddies over here are thinking of him and wish him well.”

  It happened every day—lots of times every day.

  One more. We were standing in front of the locker room at St. George’s and one of the members asked Tom how you were. Coincidentally, the guy was a doctor. Tom got into a very animated discussion about you with him. (I saw this happen a lot as well.) And when this conversation was over there was one overriding conclusion that you could draw from listening to it. Tom Watson loves you Bruce. That is for sure.

  And so do a lot of other people—many of whom have never met y
ou. But you know that.

  Thanks for letting me see a little bit of the world as you’ve been able to see it for the past thirty years.

  Feel better.

  Best.

  Ox

  P.S.—I packed the flag from the 18th at Turnberry and the bib in Tom’s bag for you.

  Bruce couldn’t help but smile at the P.S. Finally, twenty-eight years after Watson’s first win in Scotland, he had gotten a British Open flag.

  17

  “We’re Not Done Yet”

  WHILE WATSON AND OXMAN were in Great Britain, Bruce and Marsha made a trip of their own: to Hartford.

  The Jaycees who run the Greater Hartford Open had asked Bruce to come home to the GHO to be honored. They had decided to name a scholarship after him. “Imagine that,” Bruce said. “Someone naming a scholarship after me, the antistudent.”

  Even so, he was delighted with the honor and the gesture. The Jaycees were planning to give $12,000 in Bruce’s name to a deserving high school senior which would be put toward his or her college education at the rate of $3,000 a year. The Jaycees had asked Bruce and Marsha to fly in to be part of the GHO’s opening ceremony on Monday morning, July 21, at which all of their scholarships and grants were presented.

  Bruce and Marsha flew in on Sunday, which gave Bruce a chance to give Marsha a tour of his old neighborhood: the house where he had grown up, the schools he had gone to, the places where he had played, and, of course, Wethersfield Country Club. “I guess I was like a lot of people going home to the place where they grew up,” he said. “As a kid I couldn’t wait to get out. Now, as a grownup, it was great to be back.”

  It had been a hectic month for Bruce and Marsha. After arriving home from the Senior Open, Bruce had received a call from the doctor who had examined him in Philadelphia. His tests for chronic Lyme disease had come back positive. He was convinced, the doctor said, that the Mayo Clinic had misdiagnosed him in January and that he did not have ALS. This was stunning news, though not necessarily surprising. Marsha had by then done enough research to know that many Lyme experts believed that what appeared to be ALS was chronic Lyme. At times, they believed, ALS was an outgrowth of chronic Lyme. When Bruce told Watson the news, he was skeptical but encouraged Bruce and Marsha to follow up. He had done the same research as Marsha and had come across some cases where people diagnosed with ALS had been treated for Lyme and gotten better.

  “There weren’t many of them, but they were out there,” Watson said. “My attitude was pretty much the same as Bruce’s. As long as the testing and the medicines they were proposing weren’t going to hurt him, why not pursue it? At the very least, it gave us all some hope.”

  Watson and Bruce and Marsha agreed then that the best thing to do was go to the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville and have them test for Lyme again.

  “We showed the test results from Minnesota to the doctor there and the Lyme test results from Philadelphia,” Marsha said. “I could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t believe the Lyme test. I knew when they retested it was going to come back negative.”

  She was right. The test for Lyme was negative again. The test results said, “Unconventional testing was done with a positive result and through our testing the Lyme diagnosis remains negative.”

  Who was right? Naturally Bruce and Marsha wanted to believe the Lyme doctor was right. Lyme was treatable. Marsha found a second Lyme doctor, one who was thought of as one of the best in the country. After he finished caddying in Dearborn, Bruce went to Springfield, Missouri, for still more testing. Again he was told he had chronic Lyme disease, not ALS. The doctor prescribed Flagyl, a potent drug which he said would make Bruce feel worse at first, even taken in small doses. But, he said, as Bruce built up the dosage, he would start to see results and would begin to feel better. Bruce and Marsha were certainly willing to try.

  “There are two options,” Bruce said, sitting in a Hartford restaurant the night before the scholarship ceremony. “One is to try this and hope for a miracle. The other is to go home and wait to die.”

  Bruce had decided by this point not to caddy in the PGA at Oak Hill in August. Watson had been invited to play by the PGA of America. Bruce wanted to go, but he knew that walking the golf course, especially in August heat, would be difficult. He didn’t want to ride. What’s more, Marsha and Kim Julian had found someone in the Bahamas who had come up with a “cobra venom” that he insisted halted the progression of ALS. “I guess we were at the point of trying just about anything then,” Marsha said. “If it was Lyme, this stuff wouldn’t hurt Bruce. If it was ALS, maybe, long shot, it might help.”

  Jeff Julian’s ALS was far more advanced, and he had already been involved in just about every experimental treatment there was, so this was close to being a last-ditch effort. The trip was planned for the week of the PGA.

  “One of the things that happens when you are diagnosed with ALS is that you don’t want to just accept it,” Marsha said. “Looking back, the first two doctors we spoke to—Dr. Sorenson in Rochester and a local neurologist we saw soon after that—were probably the most honest with us. They said, ‘This is what it is. Right now, there is no medicine and no cure. Don’t waste your time, your money, or your hope on treatment. Live your life to the fullest as long as you can.’ They probably gave us the best advice of anyone. But at the time, it wasn’t the advice we wanted to hear.” In July there was still hope. Or so it seemed. Bruce had heard about the cobra venom soon after his diagnosis and had told Watson about it.

  When Bruce Lietzke told Watson that his brother Brian had a friend in Texas who had been diagnosed in 1975 and had taken cobra venom and was still living with the disease, Watson, Bruce, and Marsha were, if nothing else, intrigued. “Again, we knew the odds were long,” Watson said. “But we’re already dealing with long odds to begin with. Your life is on the line, you try things. I told Bruce if it was me, I’d try it. I didn’t expect much, neither did he or Marsha, but there was nothing lost by trying.”

  Time would tell on the Flagyl, and who knew what would happen with the cobra venom. In the meantime, Bruce was excited to be home, and pleased—if a little bit embarrassed—to be honored with the scholarship. He had decided to kick in $1,000 of his own money to Bonnie Fewel, the high school senior who had won the scholarship. “The money they’re giving her is for books and fees and things like that,” he said. “I want her to have some money she can use just to have a good time.”

  Bruce’s part of the ceremony was brief. Most of the time was taken up by politicians (including Governor John Rowland, who in spite of a police escort showed up ten minutes late) and local officials congratulating one another on keeping the tournament alive even though there was no title sponsor for 2003. When Bruce was introduced, he received a warm ovation and let Marsha—who was getting used to speaking on his behalf—tell everyone how he felt. “Bruce is thrilled to be back and to be a part of this, because this is where it all began for him,” she said. “He’s very proud to have this scholarship carry his name.” She then surprised Bonnie by handing her the check for $1,000 and telling her that Bruce wanted her to use it to have a good time. Shocked, Bonnie let out a shriek and hugged Bruce, who was both delighted and slightly embarrassed by the commotion being made on his behalf. During forty-five minutes of speeches, presentations, and announcements, there was nothing that touched the warmth clearly felt by everyone involved when Bruce and Marsha made their presentation to Bonnie.

  The trip home was fun and nostalgic and a little bit sad. Bruce saw people he hadn’t seen for years and couldn’t help but wonder if he would see them again. By the time the ceremony was over and Bruce had shaken every hand in the place and struggled through several interviews with local media members, he was ready to go home. “This has been fun,” he said. “But I’m a little worn out.”

  The trip to the Bahamas proved to be about as fruitless as they had expected, although it was still discouraging. “The day after Bruce took the cobra venom the guy said to him that
his speech sounded better,” Marsha said. “Well, I knew it didn’t sound better and he knew it didn’t sound better. We were pretty convinced at that point that we were actually dealing with a snake oil salesman. What was discouraging about the trip was that, for the first time, we felt like we were dealing with people who took advantage of desperate people. We didn’t want to feel like we were in that category, and yet that’s where we were headed.”

  Even though he doubted that the venom was going to do any good, Bruce came home with an inhaler that he was supposed to continue using, presumably forever once it began to work. Unfortunately it didn’t ever begin to work. During this same period it became evident that the Flagyl wasn’t having any effect either. The high hopes of July were rapidly becoming the fading hopes of August.

  Watson had his first poor tournament of the summer at the PGA. With Bill Leahey caddying for the first time since the 1981 Kemper Open, he shot 75-75 and missed the cut. As with the two British Opens, Watson enjoyed the company of his fill-in caddy but felt Bruce’s absence, not so much from a golf standpoint as from a companionship standpoint. “Bill and Neil are wonderful guys, and they worked hard and did everything I asked them,” Watson said. “But I missed Bruce. How could I not miss him? I think they both knew I missed Bruce, and there was an emotional tug for all of us.”

  Bruce was back on the bag two weeks later in Portland, Oregon, for the JELD-WEN Tradition—the fifth of the so-called Senior majors. By this time neither he nor Watson was concerned about whether an event was a major or a nonmajor; they both just wanted to win. They had been close twice and then Bruce had missed the victory in Scotland. “I wanted very much to win again with Bruce,” Watson said. “I don’t think I was pressing because of it, but I was aware of it and so was he. I told him when I got back from Scotland that the only reason I’d won was because he’d put a hex on poor Carl Mason on that eighteenth hole.”