Watson visited Byron Nelson in May to spend time working on his mind and his golf swing. Soon afterward, Nelson told a reporter: “The only thing on his mind right now is winning at Pebble. Every shot he hit when he was here was designed to work on some hole there. If I know Tom Watson, he will be hard to beat there.”
Watson would have laughed if that statement had been repeated to him on the night before the championship began. “I knew I had no chance to win,” he said, “because I was hitting the ball sideways. I don’t mean sideways, I mean
sideways
. The only thing I had going for me was that I was so far off-line on a lot of shots that the ball was landing outside the ropes where the gallery had walked and I was getting decent lies.”
In many ways Watson’s genius comes out on those days—and during those weeks—when he is struggling to find his swing. With Bruce murmuring in his ear constantly that it wasn’t as far away as he thought it was, Watson somehow sneaked around the first two days in 72-72—even par—and was only four shots out of the lead. “I’m really not sure how I did that,” he said. “But I managed to finish strong both days. I played the last four holes in a total of five under: two under the first day; three under the second. That got me to even par and left me still, somehow, in the golf tournament.”
Amazed to be in contention and still searching, Watson and Bruce headed for the range after Friday’s round. Watson tried one move, then another. Something in one swing told him that he was lifting his arms too quickly on his backswing. He tried cutting down on his shoulder movement in order to turn his shoulders more quickly as he took the club away. One shot flew straight and true. Then another. A few more. Watson turned to Bruce and said quietly, “I’ve got it.”
This has become a ritual between the two men. When Watson is searching for something in his swing, he and Bruce may spend hours on the range together. Watson rarely consults with a teacher, especially when he is at a tournament. He will keep trying different things until something clicks. He may go weeks without anything clicking, but when it does, he can usually tell with a few swings that he’s found something. Only then will he turn and deliver what may be Bruce’s three favorite words: “I’ve got it.”
“There is no question,” Watson will say with a laugh, “that he enjoys hearing those words.”
As soon as Bruce heard Watson deliver the three words on that Friday afternoon, he began thinking the tournament could be won. Four shots back with 36 holes to play? That was nothing. Especially when Watson “had it.” The two men walked onto the tee on Saturday afternoon brimming with confidence.
“And I went out that day and absolutely striped it,” Watson said. “Hit the ball about as well as I can hit it.”
The result was a four-under-par 68 and a tie for the lead with Bill Rogers. A number of players were close behind, notably Nicklaus, who was three shots back and would play three groups in front of the leaders on the final day.
Watson and Bruce went to bed that night excited but nervous. Watson had slept on the 54-hole lead at the U.S. Open before, but that had been eight years earlier, when he was a tour novice, someone who had never won a PGA Tour event. Now he was the winner of five majors and thirty tournaments overall. He was the world’s best player. And, he says, he was every bit as nervous as he had been in 1974.
“What you’ve done in the past doesn’t matter one bit on the last day of a major,” he said. “It’s all about how you’re playing that day. I felt good about my swing, but I didn’t have any cush [cushion] for any sort of mistakes. I knew Sunday would be a long, tough day.”
The best thing for the leaders about playing a major on the West Coast is that there’s a lot less waiting on Sunday. In those days, ABC wanted the last ball in the hole by 7 p.m. East Coast time. That meant that Watson and Rogers, playing in the final group, would tee off at 11:40 a.m. West Coast time. Even with the shorter wait, Watson was tight walking onto the first tee. So was Bruce.
“You have to remember,” he said, “Tom was going for his sixth major. I was going for my first.”
Watson hit his opening tee shot in the fairway, then turned to Bruce as they walked off the tee.
“You nervous?” he asked.
“Real nervous,” Bruce answered.
“Good,” Watson answered. “Because I’m real nervous too.”
It was almost as if acknowledging the nerves helped calm them both down. Watson birdied the par-five second hole but bogeyed the fourth, and he was still four under for the championship as he stood on the tee of the tiny, scenic par-three seventh. Even though he was playing steadily, Watson was hearing huge roars from up ahead, and he knew they could only be for one person: Nicklaus.
“It didn’t really surprise me,” he said. “The first seven holes at Pebble Beach aren’t that hard. You can make a move there.”
Nicklaus had done just that. After a poor start—bogey at the first, par at the second—he had reeled off five straight birdies from number three through number seven. That got him to five under for the tournament, meaning he had taken the lead. Watson had not been able to take advantage of the early holes at Pebble. He had birdied the two par-fives but also had two bogeys. When he reached the seventh tee, he trailed Nicklaus by one shot.
Being mano a mano with Nicklaus didn’t seem likely to spook Watson. After all, he had come out of their two head-to-head confrontations on the last day of majors in 1977 just fine. He floated a perfect pitching wedge to within two feet of the flag at number seven, giving him a tap-in birdie that would give him a share of the lead.
Except that he missed the putt.
His second shot at the difficult par-four eighth hole came up short of the green. From there he putted to eight feet but made the par-saving putt, beginning a string of tough putts he would make. Fortunately Nicklaus had bogeyed the hole, so the two men were now tied for the lead. Watson took the lead outright with a birdie at the ninth hole and then made a classic “Watson par” at the 10th. He hit his second shot over an embankment, halfway down a hill that led to the beach and Carmel Bay. After hacking out of the weeds there, Watson was 24 feet from the hole on the fringe a couple of steps from the green. He rolled the putt into the heart of the hole.
“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.”