Caddy for Life

by John Feinstein

  So Crandall was on tour making good money with a regular bag and so was Bruce. As it turned out, Watson and North ended up becoming close friends, so the two caddies often found themselves together during practice rounds. They traveled together and in 1976 they were joined by Greg Rita, who had grown up one town over from Wethersfield in Glastonbury. Like Bruce, Greg Rita had been sent away to prep school by his parents because he struggled academically. Like Bruce, Rita was the only person in his high school class who did not go to college. And, like Bruce, Rita is now convinced that he had ADD and was never diagnosed. Bruce was a veteran caddy—three years—by the time Rita arrived on tour and he quickly took him under his wing. For a while, until Crandall decided to give up the tour and go back to school and eventually into the business world, Bruce, Crandall, and Rita were the three musketeers. Leahey took a year off after college to join the group, and Oxman kept popping up throughout his three years at Duquesne law school.

  “I probably spent more time on tour than I actually spent at law school,” he said. “I did just enough to get through, and I mean just enough. I remember being at a tournament in the spring of ’76 after my first year. My mother called to say my grades had come in. I knew I needed a 2.0 to move on. I told her to open the envelope. She said I had three C-pluses and a C. I remember running out to the range to tell everyone I had somehow made it. They all looked at me like I was nuts.”

  There were other caddies Bruce became close to: Hulka was one. Another was Dennis Tunning, also a Wethersfield caddy. Mike Boyce, the caddy who beat Bruce to Dale Douglass that fateful day in St. Louis and who, like Bruce, has stayed on the tour for most of the last thirty years (he now works on the Champions Tour for Gil Morgan) was another close friend. So was Drew Micelli.

  “We were a traveling circus,” Leahey said, remembering his year as a full-time caddy. “I think we basically looked at ourselves as the luckiest guys alive to be leading the lives we were leading. I never looked at it as a forever thing, though. Obviously neither did Ox or, eventually, Gary. But Bruce did. And since he was with Watson, why would he think any differently? He was attached to a rocket ship and he would have to have been crazy to want to get off.”

  Bruce now says that if he had any doubt at all about the direction his life was headed in, it was dispelled when Watson won his first PGA Tour event, the Western Open, in the summer of 1974. Two weeks earlier, Watson had led the U.S. Open for three rounds only to collapse during the final round at Winged Foot Golf Club, in Mamaroneck, New York, and shoot 79. Bruce was walking outside the ropes that day—tour caddies were not allowed to work the Open at the time—and he remembers feeling completely helpless because there was nothing he could do. “It was an awful feeling,” he said. “I’m not saying he would have done any better had I been there, but I would have at least felt as if I had the chance to try and help him.”

  That day at the Open, painful as it was, proved to be a turning point in Watson’s life. It was on that day that he first talked about golf with Byron Nelson. A month earlier, when Watson had played in the tournament named for Nelson, Bruce’s life had also come to a crossroads. There was one difference: When Nelson and Watson had their post-Open talk, Watson had a feeling that something important had just happened to him, because one of the sport’s icons had shown an interest in him. Bruce had no idea what had happened to him. In fact he really didn’t understand it until almost thirty years later.

  The PGA Tour first came to Dallas in 1944 for what was then called the Texas Victory Open—soon to become known as the Dallas Open. The winner that year was Byron Nelson, hardly a surprise, since Nelson won eight tournaments that year and eighteen the next year, including his untouchable streak of eleven straight tournament victories. Nelson, a gentle, soft-spoken man who had grown up—along with Ben Hogan—in Fort Worth, would go on to win fifty-two PGA Tour events in all, including five majors. He almost certainly would have won more majors if not for the fact that World War II shut down the British Open for six years, the U.S. Open for four years, the Masters for three years, and the PGA Championship for one year. That meant Nelson missed out on fourteen opportunities during the years when he was golf’s dominant player.

  If that mattered to Byron Nelson, he didn’t show much evidence of it. He retired from golf at a young age and went back to his cattle ranch in Texas. He came back to golf in 1966, when ABC hired him to be the network’s lead commentator soon after it had acquired the rights to the U.S. Open.

  The first three winners of the Dallas Open were Nelson, Sam Snead, and Ben Hogan. That’s a little bit like saying when you decided to start up a baseball team, your outfielders were Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, and Henry Aaron. Nevertheless the tournament wasn’t played for nine years, from 1947 to 1955. It returned in 1956 but still couldn’t seem to find firm ground on the tour’s schedule. In both 1963 and 1965, there was no Dallas Open. After Bert Yancey won the event in 1967, the tournament organizers came up with an idea that they thought would give it an extra level of prestige: Name it for Byron Nelson. They moved it from Oak Cliff Country Club to Preston Trail, a highly regarded old men’s club in Dallas, and renamed it the Byron Nelson Golf Classic.

  The new golf course and the new name helped attract better fields and higher TV ratings. In 1970 and 1971 Jack Nicklaus won, and the following year Chi Chi Rodriguez beat Billy Casper by a stroke to win. In 1973 the champion was twenty-three-year-old rising star Lanny Wadkins. Watson and Bruce arrived at the ’74 Byron Nelson feeling good about the way their year was going. Watson was in the top 20 on the money list, rapidly closing in on earnings of $100,000 with the year less than half over. By now he and Bruce had been together for almost a year and each could almost read the other’s thoughts on the golf course.

  Even though he doesn’t remember it, there’s little doubt that Watson knew what Bruce was thinking early in the week when he spotted sixteen-year-old Ruthann Cox standing by the putting green. Ruthann Cox was a Nelsonette, one of a group of teenage girls and young women who volunteered at the tournament during the week. The Nelsonettes all wore the same outfit: white cowboy hat, blue denim blouse, very short blue denim skirt, and white boots. All of them wore a sash across their chest à la Miss America which said NELSONETTES. They were not selected based on SAT scores or the quality of their golf swings. Ruthann Cox was a Nelsonette that year because her older sister, Kay Barton, a flight attendant for Braniff at the time and a Nelsonette, had recommended both Ruthann and her best friend, seventeen-year-old Marsha Cummins, to the committee that selected the Nelsonettes.

  Bruce took one look at Ruthann Cox and decided she was someone he needed to know better. He began chatting her up, and soon after, he was introduced to Kay, who was ten years older than he was. “Kay took one look at me and decided she better do a background check,” Bruce said, laughing. “I think she talked to Linda Watson and maybe a couple of the other wives. But I must have passed.”

  Having passed the Kay background check, Bruce was invited to her house. It was there—he thinks—that he first met Marsha. “All I remember is that I thought he was really cute,” Marsha says now. “But he was with my best friend. I had to behave, even though I didn’t want to.”

  Neither Bruce nor Ruthann took their new “relationship” all that seriously. Ruthann was, after all, a high school junior. Bruce was a nineteen-year-old gypsy who wasn’t likely to spend a lot of time in one place anytime in the future. The closest friend Bruce made that week turned out to be his background checker, Kay Barton. She told him that whenever he needed a place to stay in Dallas, he was welcome to stay in the extra room she and her husband had in their house. Bruce took her up on it on several occasions and still saw Ruthann from time to time. In 1975 he came back for a full week during the Nelson. Marsha had retired as a Nelsonette by then, but she was around for the tournament.

  “I was still nervous because of Ruthann,” Marsha said. “But then one night he kissed me and all sorts of bells went off. Maybe I should have felt guilty, b
ut at that point I was way beyond worrying about guilt.”

  She was eighteen, he was twenty. She went off to college—at Houston Baptist University—and, after Watson won the tournament that year, Bruce went back to the road. Even though he ended up setting up headquarters in Dallas for several years, first at Kay’s, then on his own, their paths rarely crossed during the next nine years. “It was a wonderful memory,” Marsha said. “But that’s what it was. I had enough on my hands dealing with my own life by then.”

  Bruce was blissfully unaware at the time that the pretty blonde Nelsonette he had met in 1974 and had a brief fling with in 1975 would eventually hold the central place in his heart. He was far too busy in the mid-’70s riding the Tom Watson rocket. The collapse at Winged Foot on the final day of the 1974 Open was devastating for Watson. Every kid who grows up playing golf in the United States is either an Open guy or a Masters guy. In other words, when he is alone on the putting green trying to make his last putt of the day he will say to himself either, “This is to win the U.S. Open,” or, “This is to win the Masters.” Depending on where he grows up, or how he grows up, it’s one or the other.

  Watson was an Open kid because Ray Watson was an Open guy. In fact Ray Watson could name every single U.S. Open champion dating back to 1895 and, in most cases, give you details on how he won and why he won. Ray and Tom often played a game they called “Name the Open Champion.” When they first played the game, it was extremely one-sided. The father knew every answer; the son only a few. By the time Tom was a teenager, he could just about match his father. If there was one thing he wanted to do above all things in golf, it was win the national championship of his country. To lead the Open on a golf course like Winged Foot at the age of twenty-four was pretty close to a dream come true. But the dream was shattered on Sunday, when he shot that 79 and ended up tied for fifth place, five shots behind winner Hale Irwin.

  Bitter as it was at the time, the day turned out to be an important one for Watson. “You learn from things like that,” he said. “It isn’t pleasant, but you learn. You learn what it feels like to lead, to be in the last group, to feel that kind of pressure, which is different from the pressure you feel on the last day of a nonmajor.” The significance of the day went well beyond that of a hard lesson learned. After he had finished talking to the media, Watson returned to the locker room and found a familiar figure waiting near his locker: Byron Nelson.

  Nelson had just finished working on the ABC tower behind the 18th green and had come straight to the locker room to look for Watson as soon as ABC was off the air.

  In a scene straight out of a commercial, Nelson offered Watson a Coke and sat down with him. He spent the next several minutes telling him how much he thought of his game and his approach to the game. He knew Tom was disappointed, but he was convinced there would be other days and other chances. He volunteered to help Watson out any way he could. Anytime Watson wanted to fly down to Texas and talk about golf or the golf swing, he would be delighted to have him visit.

  Watson was flattered and delighted that one of the game’s greatest names would say such things about him, especially at the end of a day when he felt as if his game had fallen apart under pressure. He and Nelson spent several minutes talking before Watson remembered that Linda was waiting outside and it had been raining when the round ended. The two men promised to talk again soon.

  A friendship was born.

  Two weeks later Watson won for the first time on the PGA Tour, at the Western Open, then played at Butler National Golf Club, proving his ability to recover quickly from a setback, even a devastating one.

  The victory put him over $100,000 in earnings for the year. It also came very close to marking the one-year anniversary of Bruce’s arrival on tour. His parents had naturally been asking if he was planning to come home when that year was over. If Bruce had any lingering doubts about what he was going to do, they were completely dispelled by Watson’s victory at the Western. “I had been pretty convinced that he was destined to be a great player,” he said. “But until then he hadn’t won, so you couldn’t be sure. When he came back right after that loss at the Open and won his first tournament, I pretty much said to myself, ‘That’s it, this guy is going places very few players have gone.’ I really believed that. And there was no way I was giving up the bag at that point.”

  His parents were disappointed, but they also understood. “We knew by then that he had a good thing going,” Jay Edwards said. “We knew Watson was doing well and Bruce was happy working for him. Plus Tom was so clearly a class guy, how could you not feel good about your son working for him.” He smiled. “We figured he’d stay out another year or two, see how it played out, and then go to college. There was plenty of time.”

  Watson finished the year with $131,537 in earnings, placing him 10th on the money list. In three years he had gone from 74th to 35th to 10th. He had now won a tournament. And he had just turned twenty-five. He and Ben Crenshaw and Lanny Wadkins were viewed by most people as the coming stars on the PGA Tour. Bruce’s pay had continued to go up, although not always as fast as he would have liked.

  “In the early years, Tom never made it easy,” he said, smiling. “I think he was like my dad, thinking I needed to go to college, and if he made it too easy for me I wouldn’t ever think about going. Whenever I’d ask, he’d say, ‘I have to talk to Linda.’ Eventually, though, I’d get the raise.”

  Watson was growing as a player in leaps and bounds now, and Bruce was right there along for the ride. Back home, Brian was getting ready to graduate from high school and was telling his parents that he wanted to caddy on tour too, just like Bruce. Of course it wasn’t likely that he was going to be able to do it just like Bruce, because he probably wasn’t going to hook up with one of the hot young players in the game after a month out. Still, he wanted to try it. Chris had graduated from Bucknell, spent a year in France, and had returned home not sure what to do with her life. She finally settled on the Navy—one of the first women commissioned as an officer—and went off to Newport, Rhode Island, for basic training. After wanting to quit the first few weeks—everyone wants to quit the first few weeks—she stayed with it and ended up becoming very successful during her twenty-two-year career as an officer. Gwyn was still just a kid, only thirteen, but as proud of her big brother as a little sister could be.

  “Hey, he was on television all the time,” she said. “And all my friends knew who Tom Watson was by then. It was great.”

  Even Jay and Natalie were coming around. Jay started taping all the tournaments Watson contended in, building a library of tapes that he would later turn over to Bruce.

  In May of 1975, Watson and Bruce won their first tournament together. The Western was still an event that didn’t allow tour caddies (in fact it was the last event on the PGA Tour to finally give in and allow them, doing so in the late 1980s), so Bruce had not worked there when Watson won. But he was on the bag—and dating Marsha for the first time—at the Byron Nelson when Watson won, beating Bob E. Smith by two shots. That victory was worth $40,000 to Watson and $2,400 to Bruce (Watson had upped his pay to 6 percent for a win), the biggest check either of them had ever cashed.

  There was another disappointment a few weeks later, when Watson led the U.S. Open at Medinah for thirty-six holes and again couldn’t close the deal, finishing in a tie for ninth. He had now won a couple of times on tour, was making good money for himself and for his caddy, and was a respected player. But after the Open, there were whispers that he couldn’t finish when the pressure was greatest. There were even some people who invoked the C-word—as in choke. Clearly those people didn’t know Watson very well.

  It wasn’t until 1960, when Arnold Palmer, having won both the Masters and the U.S. Open, decided to go to the British Open for the first time, that most American pros began to think seriously about making the trip across the Atlantic Ocean to play. Crossing the Atlantic by plane wasn’t exactly a picnic, but it had come a long way from the early days, when A
mericans made the trip by ship or, starting in the 1950s, occasionally by airplane.

  It wasn’t as if American golfers never went to the British Open, they just didn’t go very often or in great numbers. Bobby Jones had won it three times in five years, beginning in 1926. The last time was in 1930, en route to his Grand Slam, which back then consisted of the U.S. and British Opens and the U.S. and British Amateurs. Gene Sarazen had won it in 1932 and Sam Snead had won at St. Andrews in 1946. Ben Hogan had only played in one British Open—his famous victory at Carnoustie in 1953.

  Palmer’s decision to go and play at St. Andrews that year had a lot to do with the venue and a lot to do with the fact that he had won the Masters and the U.S. Open. No one had ever really talked about a modern slam before then, but Palmer figured if he won at St. Andrews and then won the PGA, he would have something that amounted to a Grand Slam. As much talk as there is nowadays about the Slam—especially in any year when Tiger Woods wins the Masters—it had hardly been discussed before then. In fact when Hogan won the Masters, the U.S. Open, and the British Open in 1953, he had no chance to win the PGA because it began before the British Open ended. By 1960 the PGA had gone from match play to stroke play. Still, to most Americans the two titles that really mattered were the Masters and the U.S. Open.

  Palmer changed all that. He didn’t win at St. Andrews, finishing a shot behind Kel Nagle, but he drew huge crowds and brought a lot of attention to the championship in the United States, a big difference from most years in the past. Most Americans on the tour didn’t play the event at the time, in part because of the travel, in part because the prize money was tiny, and in part because any money they did win didn’t count on the official money list. In fact a victory in the British Open didn’t even count as an official PGA Tour victory until 2001, when the tour got around to making all British Open wins (dating back to 1860) official victories. Palmer didn’t need official money or official victories. He loved playing the Old Course, loved the crowds and the links style of golf. A year later, he went back and won at Royal Birkdale. The following year, at Royal Troon, he beat Nagle by six shots for his second straight British Open win.