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 Americans 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.
If Palmer hadn’t lost a playoff to a chubby twenty-two-year-old tour rookie named Jack Nicklaus at Oakmont Country Club in the U.S. Open a month earlier, he would have been three-fourths of the way to a Grand Slam at that point. Nicklaus, fresh off his U.S. Open victory, followed Palmer to Troon and finished twenty-third. That was the first of thirty-six straight British Opens he played in.
When Watson first came on tour, the top Americans were regularly going to the British Open. Lee Trevino had won it back-to-back in 1971 and 1972, and Tom Weiskopf had beaten Johnny Miller in 1973 for what proved to be his only major title. But those players were stars. They could afford to take a week off from the tour, spend the money for the trip, and know that they were almost certainly going to miss out on playing the following week too. For the journeyman player trying to keep his playing card or a rising young player trying to prove himself, the British Open just wasn’t worth the hassle.
By 1975, though, Watson was a star. He was making a lot of money, he had won tournaments in consecutive years, and he wanted to follow the other top Americans who had gone over and played. So he decided to play at Carnoustie, arguably the toughest golf course on the British Open rota, if not in the world. He told Bruce he was planning to make the trip to Scotland and Bruce was welcome to come along and caddy if he liked.
In those days, a caddy who traveled overseas with a player had to pay his own way. Nowadays, players pay for their caddies and often take them along on their private jets. Watson was flying coach himself, and if Bruce wanted to come, he would have to come up with the money. Bruce had the money and he wanted to go, but he didn’t want to make the trip alone. So he talked Bill Leahey into going with him. Leahey had just graduated from college and was taking a year off to work on the tour before deciding what he wanted to do next with his life. He didn’t have a player going over to play, but he figured he would certainly be able to get a bag once he and Bruce reached Scotland. So he agreed to go.
Then problems cropped up. Neither one of them had given any thought to the fact that they needed passports. A few days before they were scheduled to fly over, they didn’t have passports and getting them in time was becoming a major hassle. They had no idea where they were going to stay. Neither of them had been overseas before.
“We finally decided it was too much of a hassle,” Bruce said. “We agreed we’d pass on it this year but try to go the next year.”
That turned out to be a crucial decision in Bruce’s life. Watson went without him, hired a local caddy for the week named Alfie Fyles, and, in his first British Open, won. This time there were no late collapses. Watson finished the final round tied for first place with Australian Jack Newton. This was still the era of 18-hole playoffs at all the majors (only the U.S. Open retains that outmoded format today), so Watson and Newton had to come back and deal with the howling winds of Carnoustie the following day. Watson shot 71; Newton 72. In his first attempt, Watson had become the British Open champion.
It was a remarkable breakthrough for a golfer still only twenty-five years old. It put the choke talk to bed and it put Watson into a different category of player. Every player is viewed differently when he wins his first major, but when a young player who has flashed big-time potential does it, golf people pay serious attention. Watson was thrilled with the win but still viewed himself as a work in progress.
“It was big because it was the British Open,” he said. “It showed me that I had potential. But I never thought for a second that there wasn’t a lot of work still to do. I honestly believed I still wasn’t nearly as good a player as I could be or wanted to be.”
The British Open wasn’t on live TV in those days, so Bruce had to keep checking radio reports to see how Watson was progressing. He was thrilled when Watson won but angry with himself for not having figured out a way to get over there and work.
“Next year,” he told Leahey. “Next year, we’re definitely going.”
With that, he went out and got himself a passport.
Joy Ride
NOW THAT HE WAS WORKING
for the winner of a major championship, Bruce wasn’t even thinking about giving up caddying to go to college. The winner of the major championship, however, was thinking about it more and more often.
“I wasn’t trying to tell him you have to go right now,” Watson said. “I knew he was having fun. So was I. And I liked having him around—a lot. Our relationship was evolving at that point to something that went beyond caddy and player. We were becoming friends.”
It wasn’t as if the two men socialized very often away from the golf course. Watson was married, and Linda traveled with him most of the time. Bruce was single and spent most of his time away from the golf course hanging out with other single caddies. But when you are with someone all day, every day, six days a week for twenty-five to thirty weeks a year, you either make each other crazy or you become close. There’s no in between.
From the beginning, Watson and Bruce got along. They argued frequently. Watson was an ardent fan of the Kansas City Royals, Bruce a fan of the Philadelphia Phillies. Bruce loved the Eagles, Watson the Chiefs. They made an annual $100 bet on the NCAA basketball tournament, each of them picking teams once the field was chosen, then adding up who had the most wins when it was all over. They also argued about politics: Watson, the midwesterner who had grown up hunting with his dad, was very anti-gun control. Bruce, the easterner who had never touched a gun in his life, argued for gun control.