Caddy for Life

by John Feinstein

For his part, Bruce had told all his friends that Watson had won because he hadn’t gone to Scotland and that if Watson won at the PGA he was going to demand 10 percent of the purse and then retire.

  The week in Portland began on a high note when John Solheim, the chairman of the Ping corporation, presented Tom and Bruce with gold-plated putters. Each bore an identical inscription: “Tom Watson and Bruce Edwards: Friends, Companions, and Brothers Forever.”

  “Brought tears to my eyes,” Watson said. The same was true of Bruce. For both men, the gesture and the words meant far more than the putter itself.

  For a long time on the weekend, it looked as if the Tradition was going to be a repeat of the Senior Open and the Senior Players. Watson played well the first two days, shooting a stunning 62 in the second round to take a four-shot lead over Jim Ahern going into the third round. But as had been the case throughout the summer, he struggled on Saturday, shooting 73 to let the rest of the field get back into contention. He entered the final round tied with Tom Kite and Morris Hatalsky for second place, one shot behind Ahern.

  There was one good moment on Saturday. At the par-five 16th hole, Watson missed the green to the left with his second shot and caught a hanging lie with the pin no more than 25 feet from where he was standing. It was a shot very similar to the one at the 17th hole at Pebble Beach in 1982. As he pulled his wedge out of the bag, Watson shot a look at Bruce and said, “Aren’t you going to tell me to knock it close?”

  “I only do that,” Bruce answered, “during majors.”

  They both cracked up, then Watson chipped to three feet and made birdie.

  “I’m not sure what’s more amazing, that he was thinking the exact same thing I was thinking about the shot and the lie, or that he came up with an answer like that so quickly,” Watson said. “Actually, when you think about it, neither is really that amazing at all. They’re both just Bruce.”

  Sunday was an up-and-down day from start to finish. Watson played well on the front nine, then found water on the 10th hole. Peter Jacobsen, the longtime PGA Tour player whose company was managing the event (he is Portland-based), had come out to watch after Watson made the turn, hoping to help push him to the win. “As soon as he knocked the ball in the water,” Jacobsen said later, “I said, ‘I’m out of here.’ I felt like I was a jinx.”

  Watson made a good up-and-down there to save bogey, righted himself, and got to the 16th—the easiest hole on the golf course—tied for the lead with Kite and Gil Morgan and one shot ahead of Ahern. Kite and Ahern were playing one group behind him. “I was thinking I had to birdie sixteen and then see what I could do on the last two holes,” he said.

  He didn’t birdie 16. Instead he hit his second shot in the water and had to work to save bogey. He walked off the 16th green convinced he had blown the tournament. “I figured Jim and Tom both had sixteen and eighteen”—another par-five—“to play and it was going to be really hard for both of them to not make at least one birdie, if not two, on those holes. I thought I had lost, that I’d given it away right there.”

  As always, Bruce was in his ear, reminding him a lot could still happen—remember Turnberry?—and that he needed to focus on playing the last two holes well. As always, Watson put the mistake behind him. He parred 17 and was in the bunker at 18 in two, looking at what he thought was a fairly easy bunker shot. “I knew I had, at worst, a good chance to get up and down,” he said. “It was the kind of shot you should be able to get to no more than six feet from the flag.”

  As he walked up to the bunker, Watson checked the scoreboard. Ahern had birdied the 16th. But Kite had not. That left Watson, Kite, Ahern, and Morgan—who was already in the clubhouse—tied for the lead. If he got up and down for birdie, he would have a one-shot lead. “I had been thinking I had to make birdie to have a chance to play off,” he said. “When I saw the board, I realized if I made birdie, chances were that I would do no worse than play off.”

  He knocked the bunker shot to about four feet and, with the wind whipping, managed to nudge the birdie putt into the hole. Now he had the lead. Kite and Ahern had both parred 17. If either or both birdied 18, there would be a playoff. Watson and Bruce went into the scorer’s tent and went over the card, and Watson signed for a two-under-par 70. Then they sat together and watched Kite and Ahern play 18.

  Kite had to lay his second shot up but, always a superb wedge player, knocked his third shot to about five feet. Ahern was much closer to the green in two, but his chip pulled up eight feet short. Both had makeable birdie putts. But Ahern missed. “At that moment it occurred to me that Tom’s just not a good putter inside six feet anymore,” Watson said. “I didn’t say anything to Bruce, but I was thinking there was a pretty good chance he’d miss. I didn’t want to think about it too much, because I had to be mentally prepared to go out there and play off if he made it. But the thought crossed my mind that he could miss.”

  He did. Watson had won. As soon as the putt slid by the hole, Watson and Bruce hugged—their first victory hug since that cold October weekend in Oklahoma City ten months earlier when Bruce had first noticed the problem with his hand. That seemed like a long time ago at that moment.

  “I thought he might miss and he did,” Watson said to Bruce.

  Bruce’s answer was direct: “Hey,” he said. “We aren’t done yet.”

  “You’re right,” Watson said. “We’re not close to being done.”

  Later, talking about that moment, Watson’s voice was very soft. “I think we both wanted to take the approach that this was just another win and that there were more to come,” he said. “We’ve always been that way. Celebrate, yes, but then move on to whatever is next. In a sense, we did take it that way, but in another sense, we both knew this was very special.”

  They weren’t the only ones. When they came out of the trailer, the first person to greet them was Jacobsen. “You know I love Tom Kite,” he said. “But I have to admit, I was thrilled when he missed that putt.”

  The following week, the cover of Golf World, the magazine that chronicles all the tours on a weekly basis, did not feature Adam Scott, who had won the new $5 million Deutsche Bank Championship on the PGA Tour. It didn’t feature Tom Watson either. The cover boy was Bruce Edwards, and the subhead said, “Caddie Bruce Edwards carries Tom Watson to another major championship.”

  Bruce, of course, disagreed. “It wasn’t a major,” he said.

  Watson always takes September off, so Bruce had time to rest, enjoy the victory at the Tradition, and travel to Boston for the family reunion. By then he and Marsha both understood that none of the medications he was taking were having any effect. His speech was getting worse, he was continuing to lose weight, and his legs were getting sore and tired far more quickly than they had at the beginning of the summer. Sleep had become difficult because he often had trouble breathing when he was lying down.

  Predictably his emotions swung more frequently than they had in the initial stages after his diagnosis. In the spring, when his legs still felt strong, he had talked confidently about caddying throughout 2004, saying he knew he would work the Masters again and that he was still holding out hope that Watson would get into the Open again so they could go to Shinnecock together. By the fall, the constant aching in his legs, the continued deterioriation of his speech, and the fatigue he often felt all made it apparent to him that caddying in 2004 would be difficult, if not impossible.

  “If I go to Augusta, it would have to be in a cart,” he said quietly one night during the family reunion weekend at Gwyn’s house. “I know that my legs couldn’t take those hills for four days anymore.”

  There was sadness in his voice as he spoke, as if saying the words were some form of surrender. From the very first day, he had vowed not to give in to the disease, almost convinced that his mind could command his body not to weaken to the point where he couldn’t caddy anymore. As strong as his mind and his heart were, each day brought him closer to realizing that they could not stop ALS from wreaking havoc on
his body. The idea of giving up the Masters brought home the realization that the day was coming when he wouldn’t be able to caddy anymore.

  “If he wants me to, I’ll call Hootie”—Augusta National chairman Hootie Johnson—“myself and ask him to let Bruce work out of a cart,” Watson said. “I would be very surprised if Hootie were to say no under the circumstances. That’s all up to Bruce. I’ll do whatever he wants.” He paused and took a deep breath, knowing, like Bruce, that what he would say next was another step closer to the end of their working relationship. “Knowing Bruce, my guess is he wouldn’t want me to do that,” he said. “I know he wants to work at Augusta again. But I also know if he works in a cart, it will be a media circus, and he knows that too. It wouldn’t bother me a bit. I’ll make the call tomorrow if he asks me to. But my guess is, in the end, he won’t want me to do it.”

  Bruce was all over the map on what he expected and wanted from 2004 as the 2003 season wound down. There were good days and bad days, up days and down days. Marsha, a devout Christian, talked to him often about not fearing death, and in many ways he was at peace with what he was facing, except, as had been the case that day in Boston, when he thought about what those who loved him would go through in his final days and in the aftermath of his death.

  “There are times,” he wrote in an e-mail, which had become his main form of communication by late fall, “when I think it would be better if I went sooner rather than later. I know it will be very tough on Marsha, and I worry about the children [Brice and Avery] when that time comes. I don’t want anyone else to suffer through this any more than is necessary. What I worry about is those last days.”

  On the days when he thought about what was to come, Bruce would get down and depressed. Only on rare occasions did the unfairness of it all make him angry. Even then, he kept almost all of that to himself. When reality would hit him hard on a given day, he shared some of those thoughts with Marsha. But he always managed to snap back and find things that would make him happy. He was still working; he had a great family around him, not to mention all his friends, who he knew would do anything for him. In October he was inducted into the Caddie Hall of Fame—a long-overdue honor that had been held back only because most inductees are already retired—and managed to find humor in the notion. “The best caddies aren’t famous,” he said. “We’re the guys behind the players who are famous. They’re the ones who belong in the Hall of Fame.”

  Watson had three more events to play to finish the year—a Champions Tour stop in San Antonio; the Champions Tour Championship the following week in Sonoma, California; and, finally, the UBS Cup in Sea Island, Georgia, the week before Thanksgiving. The UBS Cup was a team event, a sort of mini-Ryder Cup with twelve-man teams—six in their forties and six over fifty—representing the United States and the “rest of the world,” competing with one another. Bruce was looking forward to working those first two weeks, especially after having had time off. He was hoping he would feel refreshed and rested, and that he and Watson could finish the season by winning again.

  What he didn’t count on was the fact that his speech made traveling more difficult than it had ever been and that, even rested, even working in a cart, he tired far more easily than he had in the past. Watson played reasonably well in San Antonio, considering the fact that he was coming off a long layoff. He finished in a tie for fourth place—seven shots behind winner Craig Stadler—and earned $64,500, which put him comfortably in the lead on the Champions Tour money list with one week left in the official season.

  One of the things that had been lost in all the emotion surrounding the year was Watson’s remarkable play. In his first three years on the Senior Tour, he had never been able to find the fire or inspiration that had made him the dominant player he had been at the peak of his PGA Tour career. Part of it, as he pointed out, was physical: He simply couldn’t practice as long or as hard as he had been able to do when he was younger. But it was more than that. Playing in 54-hole tournaments, with no cut most weeks, on golf courses set up to give up birdies the way a hose gives up water, didn’t exactly get Watson’s competitive juices flowing on a regular basis. During his first three full years on the Senior Tour, he had finished 13th, 17th, and 8th on the money list, bolstered the first and third years by big-money victories in the Tour Championship—not coincidentally a four-round event with an elite field (top 31 on the money list) usually played on a reasonably difficult golf course. Watson wanted to play well, worked hard when he was out on tour, and always gave 100 percent of himself on the golf course. But he wasn’t driven to play well, certainly not the way he had been driven as the young player Bruce had hooked up with way back in 1973.

  In 2003 Watson was clearly driven again. He was driven by the understanding that the better he played, the more opportunities he had, as he had said in Chicago, to use the bully pulpit handed him when he was in contention, but even more so when he was in the lead. “Fame is fleeting—for everyone,” he said one summer morning while leading the Senior Open. “Even now, I can feel the momentum from Chicago slipping. You have to grab it while you can, because it doesn’t last long.”

  But his drive was more than practical. He understood, as everyone did, that the time he and Bruce had together on the golf course was now extremely finite. Prior to Bruce’s diagnosis, both men had assumed that Watson would play into his sixties and that Bruce, who was in excellent shape when it came to walking golf courses, would continue to work for him until they both got around to retiring. That was no longer the case. Watson very clearly wanted to win for Bruce, wanted that hug they had at the Tradition, an old-time victory hug; not the kind of hug they had in Chicago, because that was entirely different. When they had their victory hug, made perhaps even more special because they were alone in the scorer’s trailer, not on a green in front of thousands of spectators, Watson and Bruce didn’t want even to think that it was the last one. But of course it crossed both their minds.

  Watson had thought about that often as he watched his friend grow thinner and weaker. One day in San Antonio, when they had a moment alone during a practice round, he said to Bruce: “Is there anything, I mean anything, in the world that you haven’t done that you want to do?”

  Bruce looked at him, smiled, and said in words perhaps only Watson and Marsha could have understood at that point: “Tom, I’ve done it all.”

  Watson wasn’t sure at that moment if he wanted to laugh or cry or do both. He was happy that Bruce felt that way. “If there’s anything you think of,” he said, “just ask.”

  He didn’t have to say, “And I’ll make sure it happens.”

  Bruce already knew that.

  It was in Sonoma that Bruce finally crashed emotionally.

  The week in San Antonio had been difficult. He was fully aware of the fact that even his close friends were having trouble understanding him when he talked, and the fatigue he felt at the end of each day reminded him that the disease was progressing rapidly. “People kept telling me that I looked good,” he said. “Which is exactly what you say when you’re worried about the way someone looks.”

  Friends who had not seen him for a while were stunned by how thin he had become. The crowds were as supportive as ever, but walking through the gallery ropes from the cart to the tees or greens, Bruce could hear people whispering about how he looked, wondering how much longer he would be caddying. On the first practice day at Sonoma, he and Watson were out alone. The day was beautiful and the golf course was too. It was the kind of afternoon they had both enjoyed through the years, a chance to get some work done but also spend some time talking, with no one to interrupt them. There was virtually no gallery, so it felt as if they had the golf course to themselves.

  On the 13th hole, a par-five, Watson asked Bruce a question about yardage and what kind of contour the green had. Bruce gave him the yardage and said something about the way the green was tilted. Watson leaned forward, trying to understand what he was saying. Bruce tried again. Watson still couldn’t
understand him. That was when it all crashed on Bruce. Talking to Watson was an essential part of his job; not just giving yardages, but telling him what he thought about putts, encouraging him when he needed encouragement, kicking him in the butt verbally when he needed to be kicked in the butt.

  “And now I couldn’t do any of that anymore,” he said later. “Tom and Marsha were the two people who always found a way to understand what I was saying no matter what. Now Tom couldn’t understand me on something simple like yardage, and I knew he was trying as hard as he could to understand me. But he just couldn’t. It all got to me and I lost it completely.”

  Watson understood exactly what was going on. He put his arm around Bruce and told him they would get through this too. “Listen to me, Bruce,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get done what we need to get done. If you have to write something down, write it down. If you need more time, take more time. This is not a problem. Get your head up, you’re going to be fine, we’re going to be fine. I’m not concerned about it, you shouldn’t be concerned about it.”

  Bruce knew that Watson would never complain about his speech problems, that if he needed to take five minutes to write something down, Watson would stand and wait for five minutes. Writing wasn’t very easy for him at that stage either, because the condition of his hands had deteriorated too. But he got the message that mattered: I don’t care if you can talk. I want you here with me. This is where you belong. That was what mattered.

  “Thank goodness it was just Tom and me out there,” he said. “It gave me a chance to get myself together.”

  He did get himself together. In fact on other days Watson could understand a good deal of what he was saying. As had been the case from the beginning, his speech was better early in the day, when he wasn’t tired. Watson played well once more that week but was again victimized by a brilliant performance. This time it was Jim Thorpe, long one of Watson’s and Bruce’s favorite people on the tour, who played superbly. He began the week with a nine-under-par 63 and ended up leading wire to wire. Watson did his best to chase him down on Sunday afternoon, getting to within one shot with three holes to play before Thorpe eagled the par-five 16th hole to wrap up the title.