The Caddie

by J. Michael Veron

  Morse must have been something of a tinkerer, because he hired a succession of professional and amateur architects over the next few years, in an effort to raise his course to the status he felt it deserved. As a result, the course was “tweaked” in succession by prominent English golfer Herbert Fowler, renowned architect Alistair Mackenzie (who designed nearby Cypress Point as well as Augusta National), and U.S. Amateur champion H. Chandler Egan. While too many cooks usually spoil the broth, Pebble Beach must have been improved quite a bit in the process, because it was selected to host the U.S. Amateur in 1929.

  By any measure, it was a successful debut for national championships at Pebble Beach. The overwhelming favorite, of course, was Bobby Jones, who had a few weeks earlier won his third U.S. Open, beating Al Espinosa in a thirty-six–hole playoff at Winged Foot by an unbelievable twenty-three strokes. Having beaten the world’s greatest professionals in the Open for the third time in seven years (with three runner-up finishes in that span to boot), it was easy to see that the world’s greatest player was the man to beat. But, to everyone’s surprise, Jones lost in the very first round of match play to Johnny Goodman, who four years later would become the last amateur to win the U.S. Open. Left with time on his hands (and a paid-for hotel room), Jones arranged a game at the newly opened Cypress Point Club and was so impressed with the layout that he eventually retained its architect, Alistair Mackenzie, to design Augusta National.

  At any rate, other championships soon followed. In all, the USGA brought three more Amateur Championships to Pebble Beach (in 1947, 1961, and 1999), as well as two Women’s Amateurs (in 1940 and 1948). But it didn’t award its most prestigious event, the U.S. Open, until 1972, when Jack Nicklaus won. Since then, Pebble Beach has hosted three more Opens (1982, 1992, and the 100th Open in 2000) as well as the 1977 PGA Championship.

  This was good stuff, I thought. The book also had an account of how Nicklaus added the 1972 Open trophy to the one he won at Pebble Beach in the 1961 Amateur. I then read a story about Lanny Wadkins edging out Gene Littler to win the 1977 PGA and, of course, how Watson chipped in at the seventeenth hole to win the Open in 1982. The next story described how Tom Kite claimed his only major by matching par in the final round of the 1992 Open on a day when the wind was so severe that many players in the field were unable to break 80. And, of course, I already knew how Tiger Woods had lapped the field in the 2000 Open on his way to a fifteen-stroke victory. That margin of victory was second in U.S. Open history only to Jones’s twenty-three—stroke margin in the ’29 Open.

  Instead of relaxing me, my late-night reading had the opposite effect. After learning about all the grand championships that had been staged just outside our door, I was more keyed up than ever. It was several hours before I was able to fall asleep, and I didn’t wake up until the smell of Stewart’s cooking overtook me around eight the next morning.

  My friend barely looked up when I stumbled into the kitchen. As I flopped down on a stool at the breakfast counter, he poured me a cup of coffee. I mumbled my thanks and waited for the combination of heat and caffeine to take effect.

  Stewart knew that I was not a morning person, and so he made no attempt at conversation. Instead, he pushed a copy of the morning’s Monterey County Herald across the table at me. It had a special section on the Open, including an article about which players would be favored.

  It was no surprise, of course, that Tiger Woods was the odds-on pick to win another Open. He had already won the AT&T Pebble Beach Invitational as well as the last Open at Pebble Beach. Picking Tiger to win again in his home state was something of a no-brainer. Behind him, the paper listed a second tier of players that included Davis Love III, Phil Mickelson, Vijay Singh, and Ernie Els. Next to each player’s name was a short comment describing his potential for success. I scanned across a few more names, including Sergio Garcia, Kenny Perry, Hal Sutton, David Toms, and Lee Janzen.

  As I neared the bottom of the list, a name caught my eye. It was mine. Next to it was the cryptic comment: “Early season success brought high hopes but may have been a fluke.”

  Looking up, I saw Stewart watching me intently. I then realized that he had put the paper in front of me because he wanted me to read that very word. And now he was waiting to measure my reaction.

  I took a sip of coffee, if only to give me another few seconds to collect my thoughts. Pointing to the column, I pretended nonchalance and said, “They say I’m a fluke. Doesn’t show much confidence in me, does it?”

  Stewart arched his left eyebrow. “I would think that’s irrelevant.”

  I was quick to rise to the bait. “What do you mean?”

  He turned over the bacon he was cooking before answering. “Can a sportswriter’s opinion make any difference in how you play?”

  “You know the answer to that,” I said sarcastically.

  “Yeah, I do. The question is whether you do.”

  I tossed the paper aside. “You know I don’t take these people seriously. According to them, missing the cut on our Tour is a terrific achievement if you’re a woman but makes you a ‘fluke’ if you’re a man. What’s up with that? A 75 is a 75, no matter who shot it.” I shook my head. “Maybe I should wear a dress next time I play.”

  I noticed that he was now giving me a hard look. Political jokes aside, this was more than idle breakfast conversation. Stewart apparently had something on his mind.

  He laid the now-cooked bacon on a paper towel to dry. “Bobby, it’s time you showed some faith in yourself. That’s the whole point in what we’ve been doing for—what’s it been?—the better part of a year now.”

  He cracked a couple of eggs and dropped them into the pan. “Still like ’em over easy?” After I nodded, he continued. “Letting go means believing that you’ll get it done when the time comes. It means letting your game take over.”

  His voice was rising, and he began sounding uncharacteristically agitated. “Dammit, you’ve stopped trusting me. More important, you’ve stopped trusting yourself. Don’t you understand? You’re here because you belong here. You earned your way at Scioto.”

  He stared at me, as if he were searching for some reassurance that I understood what he was saying.

  I didn’t say anything for a long time. After filling my cup again, I spoke as softly as I could, hoping to remain unemotional. “Stewart, this isn’t easy, you know. I can’t change a lifetime of bad habits overnight.” Try as I might, I couldn’t contain the surge of emotions rising inside of me. “You have been the best friend I’ve ever had. How can you say that I don’t believe in you? I have taken everything you’ve said to heart. For God’s sake, you saved my life.”

  I stopped and bit my lip. I usually swept aside my emotions with sarcastic humor. I was pleased, but embarrassed, that for once I was honestly sharing what I really felt with Stewart.

  He walked over and put an arm around me. I started to apologize for losing it, but he said, “That’s the first real emotion you’ve shown in a long time. You’ve got to stay in touch with your feelings, Bobby. It’s what makes you what you are.” He paused before adding, “It’s part of trusting yourself. Or have you forgotten?” He then winked at me. “The last time you allowed yourself to have feelings was before we took our break. For whatever reason, I think going home set you back a bit.”

  At that point, Stewart apparently sensed that I was too drained to talk any more. Besides, he had made his point. Putting a plate in front of me, he said cheerfully, “Eat your breakfast. We’ve got to get going.”

  It was an emotional start to my first Open week.

  xxviii

  MY FIRST ACTUAL view of the course on Monday morning at 10:46 more than met my expectations. Stewart allowed me to gawk for a few minutes as we stood on the first tee before giving me his overall view of the way to play the course. “We’d best make our birdies on the first six holes. After that, par will be a good score.”

  It didn’t take long for me to understand what he meant. Pebble Beach is one of t
hose courses that becomes progressively more difficult as you move through a round, especially under Open conditions. When the USGA sets up a course for its national championship, it grows what I call Footjoy rough, meaning you can lose your shoes standing in it. On top of that, the greens are so fast they appear to be lacquered rather than mowed. The idea behind these severe conditions is to find out who hits it straightest in the air and rolls it best on the ground, the two most essential skills required to play the game.

  Of course, not everyone likes this. Some say it destroys the creativity of players like Seve Ballesteros, who can no longer manufacture dramatic recoveries from trouble spots because the tall rough permits only a chopped wedge back into the fairway. In a famous response to a player who groused that the Open setup was humiliating the competitors, then-USGA President Sandy Tatum commented drily that the USGA wasn’t trying to embarrass the world’s greatest players, just identify them.

  I had often heard the same kind of grumbling from players on Tour whenever the subject of the Open came up. I never saw much point in joining in, though, because no matter what the conditions were, they were going to be the same for everyone. Besides, the guys who set up the course were thinking of the game, not the players. I knew enough about golf to know that was important. (If you knew some of these pros like I do, you wouldn’t want them running a lemonade stand, much less the game of golf.)

  Anyway, I didn’t do as well as Andy Dillard once did on the opening holes (he started the ’92 Open with six straight birdies to vault to the top of the leaderboard), but I did make two birdies in that stretch. When we reached the 106-yard par-three seventh hole, which is the most famous short hole in the world, I got my first taste of the famous Pebble Beach weather. A small, dark cloud came out of nowhere and rolled across from our right as we stood on the tee. Immediately, the wind changed direction and intensity, and we were suddenly showered with surprisingly hard-driving rain. We played the hole in the storm, and I was lucky to make bogey.

  It was over by the time we got to the eighth tee, which is barely more than twenty yards from the seventh green. The sun came back out, and we toweled off. I had been in and out of my rain suit in a span of ten minutes. And now it seemed as if nothing had happened. As we put up the rain gear, I said, “That was quick.”

  Stewart shrugged. “That’s the way it is around here. There’s nowhere else quite like it. You’d best be prepared for a little bit of everything: wind, rain, fog, heat, cold, whatever. And you may get ’em all in one day.”

  I also learned quickly that Stewart’s first-tee assessment of the course was dead on. The degree of difficulty definitely picked up after the first third of the round was behind us. In particular, the eighth, ninth, and tenth holes are without a doubt the toughest stretch of beautiful golf terrain in the world. All three holes are par fours that run alongside the ocean, stretch more than 400 yards apiece, and feature small greens. To make things worse, their fairways slope toward the cliffs above the sea and further reduce the effective landing areas from the tee. No one seriously expects birdies on these holes. In fact, the talk among the players was that anyone who escaped that stretch with only one bogey each day had a leg up on the field.

  The course turns inland beginning at the eleventh hole. While the scenery is no longer quite so dramatic, the golf is still plenty hard. You don’t see the ocean again until the seventeenth hole, which is a long par three that plays straight out to the sea lions and gulls. It’s about 200 yards through unpredictable winds to a figure-eight green that is heavily bunkered. When the pin is on the right front portion of the putting surface, it’s got a landing area in front of the green that may be the only place on a par three where I’ve ever been tempted to lay up.

  Of course, just about everyone is familiar with the great finishing hole at Pebble Beach, the par five that curves around the ocean. It starts with a teeing ground that juts out over the ocean and would have been reclaimed by the forces of erosion long ago but for dramatic bulkheading that only a civil engineer could have designed. To compound the golfer’s challenge off the tee at the eighteenth, there’s out of bounds on the right. And that’s only the beginning. Although the hole is reachable in two for big hitters, it’s such a low-percentage play that few attempt it. For one thing, the green is too small to offer much of a target, and it won’t receive a long second shot well, anyway. It’s a far better play to lay back with your second shot, wedge it on, and try to make your birdie that way. That’s how I played it, and my birdie four there gave me a 70. A score like that would be plenty good once we started playing for real.

  Of course, practice-round scores are meaningless for precisely that reason: We weren’t playing for real. As Bobby Jones once declared, there are two games: golf and championship golf. And, he further explained, the two have little in common with one another.

  Nonetheless, Stewart seemed very pleased with my play. As we made our way back to the bungalow, he remarked that I seemed ready.

  I wasn’t quite so confident. “Well, let’s hope I continue to hit the ball as well the rest of the week. We don’t start for another three days.”

  He smiled. “I’m not just talking about the Open, Bobby.”

  xxix

  I BECAME MORE and more comfortable with the golf course over the next two practice rounds. I guess I was becoming more and more comfortable with Bobby Reeves, too, because I seemed to have rediscovered my rhythm and tempo. And, of course, as my confidence grew, I found it easier to trust my ability and let the game come to me.

  The results were evident: I had a 68 and 67 on Tuesday and Wednesday, which was pretty salty golf by anyone’s standards, even for a practice round. After all, I told myself, this wasn’t some two-dollar Nassau back home; we were at Pebble Beach playing for the national championship of American golf.

  I didn’t think much of it at the time, but Stewart had become very quiet. Other than offering yardage and reading putts, he had little to say on the course. Not that I minded; it seemed like we didn’t need to talk much in order to communicate. Besides, I just assumed that he, like me, was losing himself in the experience. I certainly had no inkling of what really was on his mind.

  My playing companions for the first two rounds would be Notah Begay III and Billy Mayfair, two established Tour players. I wasn’t sure I understood how the USGA determined which players to put together for the first two rounds. For one thing, they called it “pairings,” but we played in threesomes, not pairs, on Thursday and Friday. Leaving aside that grammatical error, it was clear there was some kind of pecking order. Tour players tended to be grouped together, and those who had won major championships generally played together as well. Again, this was something over which I had no control, so I paid little attention to it other than to double-check my starting time. As it turned out, the schedule called for us to play in the morning on Thursday and the afternoon on Friday.

  We stuck with our usual preround routine on Thursday morning and finished up on the putting green with ten minutes to spare. As we made our way to the first tee, I felt surprisingly calm. Even hearing Ron Read, the USGA starter, announce my name and hometown to the gallery didn’t seem to faze me. I guess I finally did feel, as Stewart said, that I belonged where I was. I certainly didn’t have the fear of failure that the U.S. Open usually inspires among even the best players. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t mean to sound arrogant. I suppose I just felt that my game was as good as it had ever been and that whatever happened at that point would be for the best.

  And that’s pretty much the way the first round went. We finished the day with a 71, even par. It was nothing spectacular but better than most of the field. The best round of the day was a 66 by Sergio Garcia. There were no more than twenty scores better than mine. By any measure, it had been a good day.

  That night at dinner, Stewart pointedly refused to take any credit for our successful start. Whenever I brought up a good read he had made on a putt or his club selection on a particular hole, he w
as quick to remind me that I had already read the line or that my hand was already on the club he recommended.

  Finally, he looked squarely at me and said, “Bobby, it’s you, not me. Don’t you get it? You don’t need me like you used to. I know you’re grateful and give me a lot of credit for what you’ve achieved, but the truth is, I’ve never been the reason for your success. The only thing I’ve done is try and show you how to reach your potential.”

  I started to protest. After all, this was the guy who pulled me out of jail when I was at rock bottom and reconstructed my game. He chose to become my best friend after I had run off every friend I ever had, including my wife. I wanted to tell him that I would never forget those things no matter where we went from here.

  But Stewart held up his hand to hush me before I spoke. “I appreciate your feelings for me. But you’ve got to give yourself credit, too. Don’t ever, ever give up on yourself again. You must promise me that.”

  I nodded, a little uncertainly. My friend was being entirely too solemn for my taste. He must have sensed it as well, because he suddenly stood up and began to clear the table.

  After we were done, we talked awhile about the next day’s round. Stewart reminded me that playing in the afternoon presented different challenges at Pebble Beach, especially in an Open. Even though most players wore so-called spikeless shoes, there would be a large number of spike marks on the greens from the morning traffic. Under the Rules of Golf, we could repair any pitch marks made by balls landing on the green, but we were not allowed to repair spike marks. As usual, Stewart reminded me to check with another player before fixing any irregularity in the green to avoid controversy. Beyond that, he also counseled me to accept that we might miss a putt or two because of the spike marks. As he put it, “It’s just part of the game, so don’t let it upset you.”