Caddy for Life

by John Feinstein

  “That really got me going,” Bruce remembered. “It was Tom being Tom under pressure. When we walked off the green, I said to him, ‘Let’s go, he’s made his big run. This is ours.’ The look in his eyes told me he was really into it. Which was what I wanted to see.”

  Naturally Bruce didn’t have to specify who “he” was. Everyone on the property at that moment knew this was another two-man duel: Watson vs. Nicklaus. Pumped by the save at 10, Watson made another bomb at 11—this one from 22 feet for birdie. Nicklaus had bogeyed the hole a few minutes earlier, so Watson suddenly had a two-shot lead. Maybe Bruce was right, maybe Nicklaus had made his run.

  Not quite. Nicklaus was forty-two, but still just about as good at responding to a challenge as anyone. He birdied the 12th to cut the lead to one and then birdied 15 while Watson was walking off 12 to tie the game up again. Watson’s turn. At 14, he was on the fringe, 35 feet from the flag, and holed yet another over-hill-and-dale putt. “From the eighth hole on,” he remembered, “I putted just about as well the rest of the way as I possibly could.”

  Again he led by one. Bruce’s major concern at that moment was that the thousands of fans following Watson and Rogers could hear his heart pounding.

  “I get tight sometimes out there, that’s part of it when you’re inside the ropes,” he said. “But that day, coming down the stretch, my mouth was dry and I could feel my heart about to come through my chest. I knew how bad Tom wanted this one. And I wanted it just as bad.”

  At 16 Watson made his only real mistake off the tee of the day, landing his drive in a fairway bunker. In January, during the Crosby, he probably would have had a shot from there. But the USGA had lowered the level of the sand and had built a new, higher lip on the bunker for the Open. Bob Rosburg, ABC’s longtime “on the ground” reporter, was the first person to get to the ball. “Jim,” he said to Jim McKay on the tower at 18, “that one is absolutely dead.”

  “That one is dead” has been Rosburg’s trademark for most of thirty years. He’s right a lot more often than he’s wrong, although there are instances in which players have pulled off miracles to come back from the dead.

  Not this time.

  Watson took one look at the ball, the lie, and the lip and knew his only option was to play out sideways. “Rossi was never more accurate than he was with that comment,” he said. “At that point, I was happy to get off the hole with a bogey.”

  He had to two-putt from 50 feet with a 10-foot right-to-left break to get that bogey, but he did so and walked onto the 17th tee tied for the lead with Nicklaus at four under par. Nicklaus was already in the scorer’s tent, watching on a monitor, feeling pretty good about the situation. “Seventeen is always a hard hole,” he said. “And birdieing the 18th hole to win a U.S. Open is a pretty tall order for anyone. I was thinking there was a good chance we would be playing [in an 18-hole playoff] on Monday.”

  In fact at that moment, no one in history had ever birdied the 18th hole on Sunday to break a tie and win the U.S. Open. And the 17th at Pebble Beach is one of the most daunting holes in golf.

  It is a long par-three—playing 209 yards on that day—to a double green with weeds and water on the left, weeds on the right, and more water (and the tiny 18th tee) behind it. Since it sits on a corner of land with water on two sides, the wind is almost always blowing hard there, especially later in the day. Ten years earlier, the first time the Open had been played at Pebble Beach, Nicklaus had wrapped up the title by hitting the flag with a magnificent one-iron shot.

  “What you have to do at that hole is fairly simple,” Watson said. “You take a long iron and try to hit into about a twenty-foot by twenty-foot area of green with the wind almost always blowing. There’s really no margin for error.”

  Watson and Bruce were between two-iron and three-iron as they stood on the tee. Looking back, Bruce now says if he had it to do over again, he would have pushed harder for a three-iron, because Watson tends to be more accurate with a hard swing as opposed to an easy one. They agreed, however, on the two, wanting to take the front bunker out of play.

  “The wind was blowing right to left,” Watson said. “I wanted to aim for the middle of the green and let the wind blow it left toward the pin. But I overcooked the shot [hooked it], and then the wind started to take it.”

  The ball started out more left than Watson wanted it and, as he said, the wind kept carrying it left. It took one hop and disappeared into the weeds to the left of the green. Both men’s hearts sank. “There just isn’t a good spot over there,” Watson said. “Not one.”

  Walking off the tee, a little bit disgusted with himself, Watson flipped the two-iron to Bruce and became Bob Rosburg: “That one’s dead,” he said.

  At that moment, something Ben Hogan once said flashed through Bruce’s mind. “Golf is a game of missed shots,” the great man said. “It’s what you do afterward that matters.”

  “Hey,” he said in response to Watson, “let’s see what kind of lie we have. We can still get it up and down.”

  He wasn’t feeling terribly optimistic himself at that moment, but he knew Watson needed bolstering. He had just bogeyed 16 to give up the lead and was now looking at another bogey. The last thing he wanted to do was go to 18 needing a birdie to tie Nicklaus. Sitting in the scorer’s tent, Nicklaus went from thinking playoff to thinking he might be accepting the trophy for a fifth time within the next half hour.

  Walking ahead of Watson, Bruce thought he saw a glimmer of hope as he approached the ball. “I could see it,” he said. “That meant it wasn’t buried completely. Which gave us at least a fighting chance.”

  Watson saw the same thing Bruce did and, like Bruce, went from thinking “dead” to “life support.”

  “It was still far from an ideal shot,” he said. “It was a hanging lie, the ball was below my feet, and the lie was still pretty gnarly. But at least I could get my club on the ball. There were places over there where I might not have been able to do that.”

  The other problem was that he was only 18 feet from the flagstick. He had, as the players say, “short-sided” himself, meaning he had almost no green to work with. The ball would come out of the high grass hot (moving fast), and getting it to stop quickly once it hit the green would be almost impossible. “The one thing I had going for me was that I’d practiced shots like that all week in the practice rounds,” he said. “You know you’re going to have shots like that at Pebble Beach, that’s the way the golf course sets up. So I’d practiced quite a few shots from spots like that.”

  The other thing he had going for him was genius. It may well be that there has never been a player in golf history with a better short game than Watson at his peak. His ability to get the ball up and down from seemingly impossible spots is something other players still discuss in awed tones. “What always amazed me,” Ben Crenshaw said, “was his unbelievable confidence. The thought that he couldn’t do something around the green almost never crossed his mind.”

  That may have been the key to what happened next. As Watson looked the shot over and took a couple of practice swings, opening the face of his wedge as far as he possibly could, Bruce, ever upbeat at critical moments, said, “Come on, Tom, get it close.”

  Close would be near miraculous. And yet Watson’s answer was direct and firm: “Close?” he said. “Hell, I’m gonna knock it in.”

  It was part bravado, part self-pep talk, and, remarkably, part logic. “I knew that my only real chance to get the ball anyplace close to the hole was to hit the flagstick,” Watson said. “No matter how soft I landed it, if it didn’t hit the stick, it was going to pick up speed and go at least ten or fifteen feet, maybe more, past the hole. I had to aim for the stick, try to hit it, and hope that if it didn’t go in, it would stop close enough to the hole that I could make the putt. But when I stood over the ball, I was absolutely trying to make it. It was my best chance.”

  Always a fast player, Watson wasted little time once he was over the ball. He gently dropped the club
underneath the ball, hitting it about as softly as was humanly possible while still actually moving it. The ball popped up into the air, landed just on the green, and began rolling—picking up speed as Watson had predicted—right at the flagstick. Halfway there, Watson thought it had a chance. Three-quarters of the way there, he was convinced he had holed the shot. He began running in the direction of the ball while Bruce, frozen to the spot with fear, anticipation, and hope, stood staring at the ball, afraid that if he thought it had a chance it would roll past.

  The ball hit the flagstick, paused for a split second, and then dropped into the hole. Watson was in full flight by now, sprinting in a circle around the hole. When he turned back in Bruce’s direction, he pointed his finger at him and yelled, “I told you! I told you I was gonna make it!”

  In the scorer’s tent, Nicklaus stared at the TV monitor in disbelief. The late John Morris, then the USGA’s director of communications, was sitting there with Nicklaus, preparing to guide Nicklaus and Watson through their postround media paces, when the ball went into the hole. “You could tell everyone in the tent wanted to throw their arms in the air because it was such an amazing shot,” he said years later. “It wasn’t a matter of rooting for Jack or for Tom, it was just such a stunning shot. I think a few people may have said, ‘Oh my God!’ in disbelief. But then we all looked at Jack and got ahold of ourselves.”

  As Morris remembered it, Nicklaus looked around at the other people in the tent, somehow produced a smile, and said, “Just another tap-in for Tom.”

  Watson had never in his life celebrated a shot like that when there was still golf to play. Always in control of his emotions on the golf course, he never let loose before the 18th green. This time, though, he did. “It was just instinct,” he said. “It was a miraculous shot and it gave me a one-shot lead with one hole to play in the Open. So I celebrated more than I normally do.”

  Bruce was already thinking about the 18th hole, the long par-five with Carmel Bay all the way down the left side. Back then, before equipment changed the game, no one tried to reach the green in two. All Bruce wanted was for Watson to get his tee shot in the fairway, hit a safe layup, and leave himself an easy third shot to the green. “It wasn’t over, because that’s a tough driving hole,” he said. “But he’d hit the ball well off the tee all day, except for the one at sixteen. So I knew he would stand up there and feel confident.”

  He did. His three-wood split the middle. Then the layup. Wanting to be absolutely certain he didn’t chunk a wedge into the front bunker, Watson played an easy nine-iron to the green. He caught it a little bit thin and it landed about 20 feet behind the hole. Which was fine with Watson. As he handed the club to Bruce, he thought about something Byron Nelson always said to him.

  “Byron always says, ‘Hit it thin to win,’” he said. In other words, if you hit a shot a bit thin it is far less likely to get into trouble than catching a shot fat.

  Just shy of nine years after they first met, Watson and Bruce did what they had always dreamed of doing: They walked onto the 18th green together at a major championship with victory close at hand.

  “This is exactly where I want to be,” Watson said to Bruce as the crowd engulfed them in cheers.

  “Above the hole?”

  “No, walking onto the eighteenth green with two putts to win the U.S. Open.”

  As it turned out, Watson only needed one of those two putts. After Bruce pulled the pin, his birdie putt curled down the hill, picking up speed as it broke left to right. For a brief moment, both Watson and Bruce had a panicked thought.

  “That ball’s really moving,” Bruce thought as he stood holding the flag.

  Watson went a step further. “It’s moving,” he thought, “too fast.”

  At that stage of his career, Watson didn’t know how to lag a putt. He charged every putt he looked at, believing he was going to make them all, but just as convinced that if he did miss, he would make the putt coming back, regardless of the distance. Pumped up by the moment, he put too much speed on the putt. “If it had missed the hole,” he said, “I would have had some serious concerns about the one coming back. It could have been tricky.”

  As it turned out, there was no need for concern. Watson’s read of the putt and his aim were perfect. It was moving fast when it hit the hole, but that’s what it did, dropping dead center.

  Bruce’s arms were in the air and he was sprinting at Watson for the hug he had fantasized about while watching from the sidelines during those other major victories. When Bruce got to Watson, they wrapped their arms around each other and Watson said simply: “We did it.”

  Bruce was shouting and crying all at once. “Damn right,” he said. “We did do it.”

  It was one of the most extraordinary finishes in the history of the U.S. Open. Watson had finished birdie-birdie on two of the most difficult closing holes in championship golf to beat the greatest player of all time.

  Nicklaus was one of the first people to greet Watson after he and Bruce untangled and shook hands with Bill Rogers and his caddy, John Griffin.

  “You did it to me again, you little son of a bitch,” Nicklaus said, a huge smile on his face, an arm around Watson’s shoulder, his voice filled with admiration. “I’m really proud of you.”

  Watson remembered Nicklaus adding one more sentence. “If it takes me the rest of my life, I’m gonna get you one of these times.”

  At that point neither Watson nor Bruce really cared if Nicklaus did get them one of those times. Both men felt completely fulfilled by this victory.

  “I missed the others,” Bruce said years later. “But the one I got made up for the rest. Because it was so hard and it meant so much to both of us. I mean, come on, Pebble Beach, the Open, Nicklaus, the chip-in, what more could you possibly ask for?”

  Not a thing.

  Since that day, few people play Pebble Beach for the first time without pausing at the 17th green, dropping a ball or two to the left of the green, and chipping it in the direction of the spot where the flagstick was that day. Most who follow golf can point to almost the exact spot where the ball was and to the spot where the pin was too, especially since that moment has been replayed thousands and thousands of times through the years, always punctuated by Watson pointing at Bruce and saying, “I told you . . .”

  Very few people chip it anywhere close to the spot where the flag was that afternoon.

  Years later Watson and a group of friends were having dinner at Club 19, which is on the Pebble Beach property. They were celebrating the work they had just completed on a new golf course for The Inn at Spanish Bay, which adjoins Pebble Beach. A good deal of champagne had been passed around the table and the subject of The Chip came up.

  On that June day in 1982, Bill Rogers had declared the shot one in a hundred. Nicklaus had said it was more like one in a thousand. When reporters asked Watson about those odds, he smiled and suggested he wouldn’t mind going back out to 17 to see if he could make the shot more than one time in a thousand. “It was an impossible shot,” he said in a rare moment of immodesty, “for most mortals.”

  Now when his friends asked what the chances were of ever getting the ball close to that spot again, Watson shrugged and said, “Why don’t we go find out?”

  He went up to his room, pulled a wedge and some golf balls from his bag, and the group walked down the 18th fairway to the 17th green. There, with the moon providing the only light and waves crashing behind them off Carmel Bay, they all took a few swipes. No one—including Watson—came close.

  “It was the champagne,” Watson insisted, laughing as he told the story.

  Perhaps. Or maybe he simply made a once-in-a-lifetime shot.

  8

  Tough Times

  THE OPEN VICTORY in 1982 took Watson to yet another level of stardom. He had now won three of the four major championships, and three of his six major victories had come in head-to-head stretch duels with Jack Nicklaus. Two of them had produced endings that would go down in golf
history as among the most dramatic of all time. Buoyed by that victory—and aided by a late Sunday collapse by then twenty-five-year-old Nick Price—Watson won his fourth British Open a month after Pebble Beach. By this time ABC was televising the British Open live on Sunday (the last day had been moved to Sunday in 1980, when Watson won at Muirfield), and Bruce was parked in front of a TV set watching Watson watch Price as he stumbled through the final holes. This time, though, it wasn’t so hard to be at home, because when he got up from the couch and walked into his den, the flag from the 18th green at Pebble Beach was hanging on the wall.

  It is an old caddies’ tradition to take the flag home from the final hole after a victory, and Bruce had made certain to hang on to the flag at Pebble in the aftermath of the win there. “Looking at that, thinking back to everything that happened that day, it was impossible not to have a smile on my face,” he said. “I still hoped the day would come when I’d get to work the British again, but having that Open really made up for feeling as if I’d missed anything.”

  Watson also finished tied for ninth at the PGA, marking the second time in his career (he had tied for fifth at the Masters in April) that he had top-tenned in all four majors. After the disappointing way 1981 had ended, 1982 was quite a bounceback year: four wins, two in majors, and the knowledge that—finally—when a father and son played “Name the Open Champion” in the future, the correct answer for 1982 would be “Tom Watson.” And then the father could fill in the remarkable details if he so desired.

  Michael Barrett Watson was born on December 15 of that year, climaxing a near perfect year. Watson was still only thirty-three years old and, with seven majors in the bank, appeared almost certain to become only the third professional in history (Nicklaus and Walter Hagen were the other two) to reach double digits in professional major victories. The following year wasn’t all that different, except that this time Watson was the victim of a remarkable shot at the U.S. Open rather than the perpetrator. Playing at Oakmont, the site of his nearest PGA miss, in 1978, Watson had come from behind on Sunday to take the lead from Seve Ballesteros (the one and only time Ballesteros seriously challenged at the Open) and looked to be on his way to a second straight victory when Larry Nelson, playing several groups ahead, started making birdies. Rain came late and the players had to return Monday morning to finish. Soon after play resumed, Nelson faced an 83-foot birdie putt at the 16th hole. He would have been delighted, if offered, to accept two putts and a par and proceed to the 17th tee. Instead he holed the putt, took the lead, and went on to beat Watson by one shot.