Bruce didn’t go home during his break. He knew that even with the success he had had, his parents would ask questions about filling out college applications for the following fall. He didn’t want to deal with that. Not only that, he now had some money, real money. He decided to go to Hawaii for the holidays. He was nineteen years old, he was single, he had some cash, and he had no problem meeting people and making new friends.
His life was pretty close to perfect.
Rocket Man
LOOKING BACK NOW
, Jay and Natalie Edwards agree that they were probably living on Fantasy Island for ever thinking that Bruce was going to go to college. Jay, who fought the good fight for years and years, now shakes his head when the subject comes up and says simply: “Bruce knew what he was doing. It just took
us
a long time to figure that out.”
Once he hooked up with Watson, there was little chance that Bruce was going to give any serious thought to quitting the tour and going to school. He was making good money. He was traveling with people he liked. He was young and single and meeting people—male and female—everywhere he went. He liked his boss. He was living his boyhood dream. And he was proving to his parents that he could succeed doing it his way, not theirs.
“I’ve always thought that at least part of the reason Bruce never gave serious thought to college was that doing so would mean giving in to his father,” Bill Leahey said. “Bruce has a stubborn streak, and there isn’t much doubt where it comes from—Jay. But it was more than that. Listen, we were leading a great life on tour. It was a simpler time, guys driving from stop to stop; there was much more camaraderie among the caddies than there is now, because it wasn’t as competitive. Now you hear stories about guys trying to steal bags from one another because there’s so much money at stake if you get the right player. That just never happened back then. Never. Bruce was the life of the party wherever we went. And we went to a lot of parties.”
When 1974 started, Bruce hadn’t yet ruled out college. He was still telling people that the plan was to stay out for a year and then make a decision about what to do next. But he certainly wasn’t filling out college admissions forms in Pebble Beach, Tucson, or Phoenix, as the tour made its way through the annual West Coast swing that starts the golf season. His parents weren’t around to bug him about applications, and they were smart enough not to bring it up on the phone—at least not very often. But now, Bruce had someone else pushing him toward college: his boss.
“I’m probably no different than Bruce’s parents in that I believe in a college education,” Watson said, years later. “I know I benefitted from it, I think most people do. Bruce is a bright guy and I thought college would be good for him. I loved having him work for me as my caddy, but there were times when I would say to him, ‘You know, Bruce, this isn’t what you want to be doing for the rest of your life.’” Watson smiled as he said this. “Turns out I was wrong.”
He clearly had the heart of a gypsy during the 1970s. Leahey had gone back to college at the end of the summer of 1973 and so had Oxman. But Gary Crandall had finally given in to Bruce’s badgering and come out at the end of the summer. “I had balked at going to college because my father kept telling me it was the right thing to do and we were in all sorts of conflict because he and my mother were divorcing,” Crandall said. “I was in a dead-end job”—working in a local drugstore in Wethersfield—“going noplace and trying to figure out what to do next with my life. Bruce kept writing me and calling me to tell me how great it was out there. One week I get a postcard from Philadelphia: ‘Hey, we were paired with Nicklaus yesterday. It was amazing. When you coming out?’ Eventually he wore me down with stuff like that and I decided to try it.”
One of Crandall’s first tournaments that summer was a homecoming for him and for Bruce and for Leahey: the Greater Hartford Open. Steve Hulka, a friend of Bruce and Crandall, had been caddying that summer for Bruce’s old friend David Graham. Since Graham wasn’t planning on playing Hartford, Hulka had arranged to work for a tour rookie named Andy North. At the last minute, Graham entered Hartford and Hulka had two bags. Since Crandall didn’t have a bag yet, Hulka offered him North. That turned out to be the beginning of a six-year relationship that climaxed in 1978 when North won the U.S. Open.
“We missed the first two cuts and then finished fifth the third week,” Crandall said. “I had never seen a guy putt like that in my life. Plus we got along right away, even if he did talk obsessively about his [Wisconsin] Badgers.”
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, but 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.