Caddy for Life

by John Feinstein

  Thorpe was extremely aware of the emotions his two friends were feeling that day. “At one point I asked Tom how Bruce was doing,” he told reporters after receiving his trophy. “I could see the happy smile on his face fade. His mood changed.”

  Watson had gone into the week knowing that a solid finish would almost certainly wrap up the title as leading money winner for the year. He had told PGA Tour officials early in the week that if he did win, he was planning to announce that he would contribute the prize, a $1 million tax-deferred annuity paid by Charles Schwab & Company, to ALS-related charities. Commissioner Tim Finchem had asked if Watson would like to make the announcement during the awards ceremony on the 18th green and Watson said, yes, he would like to do that.

  “I was really inspired by what Allen Doyle did a couple years ago,” Watson said (Doyle had contributed the $1 million he had won as leading money winner in 2001 to six different charities). “Obviously after all that had happened this year and knowing how far ALS still needs to go in terms of research dollars, it just seemed to be the right thing to do.”

  By finishing second and making $254,000 for the week, Watson finished the year with $1,863,401 in earnings, the most money he had ever made in one year as a professional golfer. When Finchem presented him with the annuity during the awards ceremony, Watson, with Hilary and Bruce standing next to him, announced what he planned to do with the money. When Watson had told Bruce what he was going to do and asked him to be there for the ceremony, Bruce had thought he would be in the crowd, not out on the green. “Another adjustment,” he said. “I forgot that at this point I was part of what Tom was doing.”

  Bruce was thrilled by Watson’s gesture and yet, standing on the green in the fading sunlight of a late fall afternoon, he caught himself looking around, wondering if he had just caddied in the last stroke-play event of his career. It had been a long, difficult two weeks on the road, and he was looking forward to getting home. But he didn’t want to think that this had been his last afternoon trying to help Watson win a golf tournament.

  “If we had won, I wouldn’t have felt any differently,” he said. “I wish we had won, but Jim’s a great guy and he played wonderfully. Either way, I was thinking I didn’t want this to be an ending, but I knew, deep down, that it very well might be.”

  For the moment, he focused on going home to see Marsha and Brice and Avery and Nabby and the puppy they had gone out and bought a few weeks ago as a companion for Nabby.

  Bruce had suggested naming the new dog Deuce, after Eagles running back Deuce Staley. Marsha had put her foot down on that one. One dog named after an Eagle was enough. They talked it over for a while and finally came up with a name that made everyone happy.

  They named the new dog Hope.

  18

  “See You in Hawaii”

  ON NOVEMBER 16, 2003, a warm Sunday in Ponte Vedra, Bruce celebrated his forty-ninth birthday. In all, it was a happy day, with a few friends, including Greg Rita and Mike Rich, over for a cookout and to watch the Eagles play the New York Giants. Not only did the Eagles win, but—for once—they won easily, 28-10.

  “Pretty close to a perfect day,” Bruce concluded.

  Naturally there were certain thoughts he couldn’t escape: Was he celebrating his last birthday? Would this be his last holiday season? And, more imminently, was he about to caddy for the last time?

  The UBS Cup would be held only 90 miles from Ponte Vedra, on St. Simons Island, a lovely resort near the south Georgia coast. Bruce’s parents were driving up from Vero Beach for the weekend, along with his aunt Joan. Chris, his older sister, was flying down from Annapolis. Marsha had made plans to have her son Taylor, who lived in Orlando, drive up to babysit for Brice and Avery on Saturday and Sunday so she could be there too.

  The event itself was one that the players and caddies enjoyed greatly. It had only been in existence for three years, started by IMG, the giant international management firm, to capitalize on the popularity of the Ryder Cup. The PGA Tour had beaten IMG to the punch in 1994 when it launched the Presidents Cup, matching the United States against all the non-European players in the Rest of the World (thus the team name), and IMG had finally responded with the UBS Cup, which was named, rather crudely, after the corporate sponsor, the United Bank of Switzerland.

  That aside, the site was stunning, the golf course scenic and challenging, and the accommodations, a place called the Lodge, right on the grounds of the Sea Island Golf Club, elegant. “It’s rather embarrassing when they tell you not to hesitate to call on your butler,” Hilary Watson said.

  There were twelve players on each team. Arnold Palmer was the playing captain of the American team, which included, in addition to Watson, players like Hale Irwin, Raymond Floyd, Curtis Strange, and Mark O’Meara—all winners of more than one major title. The Rest of the World, captained by Tony Jacklin, included veteran Ryder Cuppers (in this case Rest of the World meant everyone) Nick Faldo, Colin Montgomerie, and Bernhard Langer. Each player received $100,000 for the week just for showing up (not to mention the butler), and the players on the winning team would receive an extra $50,000 apiece. Unlike the Ryder Cup, which involved two grueling days in which many players have to play 36 holes, starting near dawn and finishing at dusk, no one played more than 18 holes a day. There were six alternate-shot matches the first day, six best-ball matches the second day, and then the traditional twelve singles matches the last day. Everyone played each day, no one got their feelings hurt by not playing (as often happened at the Ryder Cup), and the atmosphere was far more fraternal than hostile. Even the fans understood that this was a competitive but friendly event. Not a single cry of “USA!” was heard all weekend.

  Bruce was looking forward to the five days he would be spending on St. Simons. The only travel was a ninety-minute drive in his car, and he would be with friends and family all week. He had even figured out that if Watson got an early enough tee time on Sunday, he could make it home in time to see the second half of the Eagles-Saints game.

  “As soon as it’s over,” he said, “I’m down the road.”

  The Eagles were part of the reason for that. The other part wasn’t nearly as cheery: He didn’t want any teary scenes, any lingering moments at the finish. If this was the end, okay, this was the end. He didn’t want a pity party. Not now. Or ever.

  Everyone had thought about the implications of the weekend. Watson would not play again until the last week in January, when he would fly to Hawaii for two weeks, first to play in the season-opening MasterCard Championship and then in the Senior Skins Game (a four-man, made-for-TV event). It was at the MasterCard in 2003 that Bruce and Marsha had been married. Given Bruce’s condition, the notion of flying from Ponte Vedra to Hawaii in two months to work was a daunting one. He and Watson both knew that. Watson’s approach was simple: “Tell me what you want to do,” he said to Bruce. “You don’t have to tell me until the last possible minute. If you want to work, come and work. If you can’t, I understand.”

  Bruce knew Hawaii was a long way off. For the moment, he wanted to focus on getting through what he knew would be an emotional few days, enjoy every minute of it, and then deal with whatever came next whenever it came. He arrived on St. Simons on Wednesday morning, in time for the first of two pro-ams (remember, this was a corporate event), and met Watson, who had just gotten home after a vacation in Argentina.

  “My golf game is a long way from being in any kind of shape,” Watson said.

  “Me too,” Bruce answered.

  So, as always, they were the perfect couple.

  Bruce missed walking. “Half the fun is being able to walk down the fairways and talk to Tom and the other guys,” he said. “I miss all that, the back-and-forth. Of course, as it is, I can’t give that much back.”

  The good news was that he and Watson had worked out a system whereby Bruce could tell Tom what he needed to tell him, either with a few words, with hand signals, or by writing down what he needed to say. As Watson had predicted in Son
oma, they had both adapted. There were still times, especially early in the day, when Bruce wasn’t that hard to understand. But trying to talk too much wore him out, as did raising his voice. At dinner each night, when he wanted to talk, he would usually address the person sitting closest to him and have them repeat what he had said to the rest of the table.

  Bruce felt funny walking off each tee, getting in his cart, and working his way through the spectators until he could reach a point on the fairway where he would take the cart under the rope, ride over to Watson’s ball, and wait for Watson to arrive. On the greens, it was usually the other way around, Bruce finding a spot to park the cart, then hurrying under the rope to get to Watson in time to clean his ball and help him read his putt.

  For his part, Watson was determined to treat the situation as if everything was normal. He didn’t hesitate to ask Bruce what he thought about club selection or about which way he thought a putt was going to roll, just as he had done in the past. When spectators heard Bruce’s answers, the uninitiated would look at one another, because it sounded as if Bruce was answering in gibberish. More often than not, especially if he pointed to a spot on the green or nodded or shook his head in reply to a question about club selection, Watson had no trouble understanding him.

  On Friday, Watson was paired with Curtis Strange in an alternate-shot match against Eduardo Romero, the Argentine he had played with during the first two rounds at Olympia Fields, and Vicente Fernandez, another Argentine, who had contended until the last nine holes in the U.S. Senior Open. Alternate shot means exactly that: The players on each team alternate shots from each tee to each green, taking turns hitting the tee shot to begin a hole. The match was never really close. Watson and Strange were two down early, rallied to get even, then fell behind when Romero nailed a 35-foot birdie putt on the seventh hole. They never got even again, and only a twisting 12-foot par-saving putt by Watson on the 14th green kept the match alive until the 15th hole.

  “I told Tom the key was my great chip,” Strange joked on the next tee, having left Watson the 12-footer with a (to be kind) mediocre chip shot.

  “Maybe you can rally,” said his wife, Sarah, who, like Hilary Watson, had turned her cap backwards to create a rally cap.

  “Don’t bet on it.” Strange laughed.

  He knew what he was talking about. The Argentines birdied the 15th to close out the match, and at the end of the day, the Rest of the World led by 31/2 to 21/2. Later that afternoon, when the captains announced the next day’s pairings, Watson had a new partner—Rocco Mediate. Unfortunately he had the same opponents: Romero and Fernandez.

  “They’re both great guys,” Bruce said at dinner that night. “Unfortunately they’re also really good players. And Tom’s game isn’t that sharp yet.”

  Jay Edwards, being the belt-and-suspenders guy that he is, had made dinner reservations ahead of time at three different restaurants. By Friday night, Chris had arrived and so had Marsha—along with Taylor and Brice and Avery. At the last minute, Marsha had scrapped her plan to have Taylor babysit for the weekend and had brought all three of them along.

  “I just decided this may very well be the last time Bruce is going to caddy and we should all be here for it and for him,” she said. “I told the kids we were going to make it a camping trip, all five of us sharing a room together.”

  That was fine with Brice and Avery. The only one suffering was twenty-one-year-old Taylor, who, at 6-3 and 235 pounds, found himself scrunched into a corner of a double bed while his half-brother and half-sister, younger by a dozen years, flopped around happily looking for a comfortable spot to sleep.

  Saturday was a lot like Friday. The weather was perfect—temperatures in the 70s, enough breeze to keep everyone comfortable but not enough wind to really affect the golfers. That was the good news. The bad news was that the results weren’t any better. Romero and Fernandez were every bit as good the second day as they had been the first, and the team of Watson and Mediate wasn’t any better than the team of Watson and Strange. In a familiar scene, the Americans conceded a birdie putt to Romero on the 15th green and everyone shook hands.

  “The only good thing is, I know for sure we won’t have to play both those guys again on Sunday,” Bruce joked.

  The two teams had split Saturday’s six matches, meaning the Rest of the World led 61/2 to 51/2 going into the twelve singles matches Sunday. The United States would need to win 61/2 points to retain the cup (it had won the event the first two years), since a 12-12 tie meant the defenders kept the cup. The ROWs (as they were called) needed 6 points to get to 121/2 points and win the cup.

  Palmer, who would play the first singles match against fellow captain Jacklin, decided to send Watson out in the third match on Sunday, against Colin Montgomerie. Bruce liked the matchup for two reasons: He knew that playing Montgomerie, the youngest man in the event (he had just turned forty), would ensure that Watson was fired up to play, especially after enduring one-sided losses the first two days. Second, with a nine-twenty tee time, the match would be over no later than one o’clock, meaning that Bruce would be able to get home in plenty of time for the second half of Eagles-Saints.

  “I told Tom we need to win seven-and-six,” he said. “That way I might be able to see almost the whole game.”

  A one-sided victory against Montgomerie wasn’t likely. He was one of the sport’s more enigmatic figures, a great talent who was as accurate off the tee as anyone in the game. He had almost won the U.S. Open twice, had lost the 1995 PGA in a playoff, and had been the dominant player in Europe for close to a decade. And yet he had never gotten around to actually winning a major and had never won at all in the United States, a sharp contrast to Europe, where he had won twenty-seven times. His greatest achievements had come in the Ryder Cup, where he had a 4-0-2 record in singles matches and had very much been the leader of the European team that had upset the United States in 2002.

  His personality was as mercurial as his golf. One-on-one in the right setting, he was bright, charming, and funny, someone who was very popular with most of his fellow players. But he had the worst case of rabbit ears ever seen in golf, something fans knew and played on—especially in the United States during Ryder Cups—hounding him with often mean-spirited hooting and hollering, knowing he would not only hear it but was likely to respond to it. In dealing with the media, Montgomerie was also a Jekyll-Hyde. When he wanted to be, he was thoughtful and insightful. On other occasions he was known to simply storm off or to snap off one-word answers and then storm off.

  Watson was going to be ready to play, regardless of his opponent. Whether it was the Ryder Cup, the UBS Cup, or the Member-Guest at Kansas City Country Club, the notion of being shut out for three straight days rankled. He and Bruce spent a solid hour on the putting green Saturday, searching for a clue to the greens, which had mostly baffled Watson (and almost everyone else) for two days. The greens on the Tom Fazio-designed Seaside Course at the Sea Island Golf Club were just about as enigmatic as Watson’s Sunday opponent.

  Dinner on Saturday night was alternately cheerful and quiet. Sitting across the table from Bruce, Jay Edwards watched his son entertain Avery, who had walked 18 holes that day and was looking like a very tired nine-year-old girl as she waited patiently for her food. Her older brother Brice had summed up the way a ten-year-old views an upscale restaurant a few minutes earlier: “You sit down and you wait. Then you order food and you wait. Then you get a little bit of food, you pay a lot of money, and when you leave you’re still hungry.”

  Watching Bruce with Avery made the normally stoic father melancholy. “He’s always been great with kids,” he said softly. “He was a great big brother when he was a kid. Of course he’s always been a people person, regardless of age. But he goes an extra step with kids.”

  Bruce had a huge smile on his face as he quietly entertained Avery, who had her eyes closed and a happy grin on her face. Watching that scene, Jay Edwards made a decision. He had planned to drive home the next morning, s
kipping the last day to avoid a long trip that might stretch until after dark on Sunday. “We’re going to stay tomorrow,” he said, turning to Natalie. “We should be here. I think Bruce would want us to be here.”

  When he leaned across the table to tell Bruce that he and Natalie and Joan were staying, the look Bruce gave him as he nodded his head told him he had been right. There was no need for anyone to discuss the reason why Jay had made the decision to stay.

  It was warmer the next morning than it had been earlier in the week. Bruce was at the club by seven forty-five to have breakfast, keeping intact his streak of never having been late to work in more than thirty years as a caddy. Warming up on the range, Watson quickly worked up a decent sweat, noting that it was more humid than it had previously been. The ritual this day was no different than it had ever been: Watson working through his bag until he hit several drivers, with Bruce standing behind him to check his swing and positioning. He finished with a few wedges and then they went to the putting green. This was a little different. Watson walked; Bruce went to get the cart. Watson hit a few bunker shots, then putted for five minutes before they headed to the first tee.

  Montgomerie was the first to arrive, and because this event was a lot more low-key than the Ryder Cup, he received warm applause. Watson arrived a moment later to another ovation. Seconds later, when Bruce carried his driver onto the tee, the fans applauded again. Bruce had grown accustomed to this sort of reception, but it still left him feeling gratitude, awkwardness, and sadness all at once.

  Bruce and Jay had been able to round up a cart that morning for Natalie, Joan, and Jay (who could walk 18 holes if necessary but, having had hip replacement surgery two years earlier, thought that three straight days might be a bit much). That meant all three of them would be able to see the entire match. It also meant that Bruce wouldn’t have to worry that his parents and aunt were pushing themselves too much to get around in the heat. Taylor and Brice were there, and so was Mike Rich. Avery had slept in, so Marsha would bring her to the golf course as soon as she woke up and had breakfast.