Watson’s first real chance to break his seven-year victory drought came early in 1994 at one of his favorite venues, Pebble Beach. In addition to his victory there in the 1982 Open, he had won what had then been the Bing Crosby Pro-Am in 1977 and 1978, and in his college years had often beaten the dew-sweepers onto the golf course at sunup. The corporate takeover of the PGA Tour had reached the Monterey Peninsula in 1986, when the tournament had been renamed the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. Those who have been around golf long enough still insist on calling the tournament the Crosby, in part to make the PGA Tour corporate people cringe.
The “Pro-Am” part was a reference to the fact that, unlike at most tour stops, where amateurs play only on Wednesdays, at Pebble Beach the amateurs play in the actual tournament. Each pro has an amateur partner, and many of the amateurs are celebrities from the acting and entertainment worlds, the sports world, even a stray TV newsperson sprinkled here and there, in addition to the corporate moneymen who ante up the big bucks to participate. Watson’s amateur partner is usually Sandy Tatum, the former USGA president, who has been a friend and mentor since his days at Stanford.
Watson’s swing that week was about as close to perfect as it had been since the glory days. He was confident, his tee shots were finding the fairways consistently, and he went into the final round at Pebble Beach (the first three rounds are played on three golf courses) two shots behind young Dudley Hart and one behind old Johnny Miller, with Tom Kite two shots further back. This was a 1970s leader board: Miller was forty-six and had been retired to the TV booth for five years. He only played in the AT&T because he was a two-time champion and had grown up playing the golf course with his dad. Watson was forty-four and had already been a Ryder Cup captain. Kite was forty-two—and had won
his
U.S. Open at Pebble Beach two years earlier. Hart must have figured he had taken a wrong turn and ended up in a grainy old highlight film.
Naturally the Sunday weather was cold, windy, and rainy—classic Crosby weather. After nine holes, Watson, Miller, and Hart were tied for the lead. Bruce couldn’t help but think it was all right there: Watson in bad weather on a golf course he loved, trying to beat a kid and a TV announcer. He was right. Or should have been right. With Hart fading, Watson led Miller by two shots with five holes to play. He still led by one as he lined up a 12-foot birdie putt on the 16th green. But that putt just missed and rolled four feet beyond the cup—right in what players call the throw-up range, the kind of putt that had haunted Watson in his recent past. His par putt didn’t even touch the hole.
He went to 17 still tied for the lead, back to the scene of his most glorious moment in golf. This time, in a howling wind, he found the green safely with a four-iron, landing 35 feet right of the flag. Hoping to give Watson some positive thoughts, Bruce whispered to him, “Let’s do something special from
this
side,” as he lined the putt up. Watson tried, but the putt slid three feet past the hole. Once upon a time, three feet for Watson was like three inches for most people. Not anymore. He missed that putt too and gave Miller the lead. When he missed an eight-footer for birdie at 18, all Miller had to do was par in to win. Which he did.
The depth of Watson’s putting woes was never more evident than that day. As he stepped into the bunker at 18 to hit his third shot, CBS commentator Ken Venturi, who almost never said anything demeaning about any player, much less one of Watson’s stature, said quietly and sadly, “The only way he can make birdie right now is to hit this ball about an inch from the cup.” Watson came out to eight feet—once almost a gimme for him, now virtually unmakeable.
Bruce knew how devastated Watson was. As Watson said later, “If I had been even mediocre with the flat stick out there today, I think I would have won pretty easily.”
He was right. And yet he was still Watson, waiting by the scorer’s tent for Miller to finish, offering congratulations and then forcing a smile and saying, “Now get your butt back up in the booth.”
Miller was as stunned by what had happened as Watson and Bruce were. “Down the stretch I kept thinking, I never beat Tom Watson, he always makes a putt somewhere to beat me,” Miller said.
Not this time. “Early in my career I lived by the putter,” Watson said. “Right now, I’m dying by it.”
There was hope. Watson had hit the ball plenty well enough to win against a good field. He and Bruce both remained convinced that there was an answer to the putting problems. Of course golf fans had answers. Watson was bombarded with letters from fans suggesting everything from putting cross-handed (he tried it once on a putt at number 13 at Doral and then gave up the idea) to the long putter, to putting lefty, to hypnotism. Other players offered tips. One morning on the putting green at the Tournament Players Club in Jacksonville prior to the Players Championship, PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman, an excellent putter in his day, gave Watson a lesson. Everyone wanted to help. But the yips have nothing to do with mechanics. Watson knew how to putt, he had been a great putter for years. He was simply at a stage where his mind wasn’t allowing his body to do what it was perfectly capable of doing.
What made ’94 such a tough year was that Watson was playing better golf than he had played in quite a while. Having both his golf swing and Bruce back made the game more fun for him than it had been in years. He played well at Augusta, finishing 13th, and then headed to Oakmont in June for the U.S. Open.
Watson and Bruce both insist to this day that they love Oakmont. It is without question a classic old golf course, located just outside Pittsburgh. It has been the site of many memorable major championships. It was also the site of two of Watson’s greatest disappointments: the 1978 PGA, when he lost a five-shot lead on the back nine on Sunday and lost in a playoff to John Mahaffey, and the 1983 U.S. Open, when he had again led on the back nine Sunday before Larry Nelson’s 83-foot birdie putt at the 16th hole on Monday morning (after a rain delay) had beaten him by one shot.
“What I remember the most is the tenth hole at the ’78 PGA,” Bruce said. “He hit a perfect drive and it landed in a sandy divot on the fairway. He had no shot from there, and he had to purposely hit it fat to try to keep it short of the bunkers, because there was no way he was going to get it on the green. But he ended up with an almost impossible third shot and the ball ran clear across the green. He ended up making double bogey, and that changed everything. He actually had to
rally
to get into the playoff.”
The ’94 Open may have been the hottest in the history of the tournament. The East Coast was in the midst of a record heat wave and the temperatures each day were in the mid-90s with brutal humidity. Watson weather. Any weather that is uncomfortable is Watson weather on tour. For three rounds, he was right there on the leader board, trailing leader Ernie Els by three shots, in a tie for third place with Hale Irwin and Loren Roberts going into Sunday. On Saturday, after his round, someone asked Watson about his two less-than-happy Oakmont memories. Watson shook his head as if to say they didn’t matter.
“This is a great golf course,” he said. “I love playing here. Oakmont has been a friend.”
Oakmont wasn’t anyone’s friend that Sunday. The USGA hadn’t been happy that heavy rains on Thursday night had slowed the greens to the point where there had been a couple of 65s and 66s and a number of other rounds in the 60s. Els would be starting the final round at seven under par. The Oakmont members were
still
grumbling about the 63 Johnny Miller had shot twenty-one years earlier on Sunday on a rain-saturated course. That just wouldn’t do. So the greens weren’t watered on Saturday night, as is standard procedure at the end of a round if there is no rain, or if they were, the hoses were turned on for about three seconds per green. The next day, in the searing heat, they were so hot and fast that players who went out early said they were starting to turn white.
Greens that fast made putting tough for everyone; virtually impossible for Watson. He struggled to a 74 and finished tied for sixth. The condition of the golf course produced a rare outburst from Watson, one of the few times in his career when anyone among the public saw him truly upset. When he walked into the scoring trailer to sign his card, Watson asked Jeff Hall, taking scores for the USGA, a direct question: “Whose decision was it to change the condition of the golf course today?” Hall, who is accustomed to players complaining about course setup and conditions, didn’t answer the question because he honestly didn’t know. “You just don’t do that to a golf course on the last day of a U.S. Open,” Watson continued, clearly angry. “Let mother nature decide the condition of the golf course. That was a man-made change and it wasn’t right.”
At that moment, Bruce, standing behind him as always, gave Watson a gentle tap on the back. Looking up, Watson saw the ABC-TV camera installed in the scoring trailer not so much to capture moments like that as just to show the players going through the routine of handing in their cards. Watson was chagrined. He hadn’t realized he was on camera.
Years later, though—not surprisingly—his opinion hadn’t changed. “That was just wrong,” he said. “They changed the golf course overnight and then didn’t tell anyone they had done it. At the very least they should have had someone on the first tee to say, ‘Fellas, we only watered for two minutes instead of seven last night, you can take that for what it’s worth.’ Let us know what we’re dealing with.”
Again, a disappointment, but one laced with hope. Playing a tough golf course, Watson had been right there in contention until the finish. The British Open was coming up. It would be played at Turnberry, a golf course that might be described as Watson’s best friend.
It had been seventeen years since that glorious weekend when he had dueled with Nicklaus in the final two rounds. Returning to Turnberry and being back in Scotland was like going home for Watson. Having won the British Open five times and having made it clear how much he had come to love Scottish golf, Watson was an adopted son to the Scots. Everywhere he went they yelled his name—“Toom,” or “Toommy”—and it was clear that he loved being there among them. Illness had forced Alfie Fyles to retire from caddying by then, so Bruce was there, thrilled to be in Scotland with Watson, delighted to finally see Turnberry in person.
The week prior to the Open, the Watsons had taken a vacation in Ireland with Lee Trevino and his wife, Claudia—who, in the small world category, had grown up in a house no more than 100 yards from the 16th tee at Wethersfield Country Club and not far at all from the spot where Watson had almost been arrested while sticking up for Bruce during his only appearance at Wethersfield for a GHO.
Watson had come to play in the tournament in part because he knew it would mean a lot to Bruce to come back to Wethersfield on the bag of the world’s number one player. During a practice round, Watson and Bruce were crossing a public road that runs between the 15th green and the 16th tee when a car going way too fast came within inches of running Bruce over. Angry and a bit frightened, Watson yelled, “Hey, watch what you’re doing, you SOB!”
The car braked to a fast halt. Sure enough, it was an unmarked police car. The policeman got out, marched over to Watson, and said, “What did you just say to me?”
Watson never blinked. “I said, ‘Watch what you’re doing, you SOB.’ You just about ran my caddy over just now.”
In the mind of the policeman, that wasn’t the right answer. “He wanted to arrest him,” Bruce said, able to laugh at the memory years later. “I’m standing there thinking, ‘Great, I’m going to have to walk the bag back to the clubhouse and then go bail Tom out of jail.’ Fortunately, a bunch of people jumped in and pointed out to the cop that they saw him driving too fast and this was Tom Watson and he should just let it go. The guy finally let it go.”
Watson got to finish the round, but he never did make it back to Wethersfield, although he did play Hartford in later years when it moved to the TPC at River Highlands.
Watson loved spending time with Trevino because Trevino could make him laugh as few people could. “Just one of the great wits you’ll ever meet,” is the way Watson describes him. During the week Trevino, just as aware of Watson’s putting woes as everyone else in golf, gave Watson a putting lesson, moving his hands slightly forward on the putter. Watson felt comfortable with his stroke and when he began to make putts on the relatively slow Scottish greens during the practice rounds at Turnberry, his confidence soared.
On Wednesday he played his final practice round with Nicklaus, Nick Price, and Greg Norman. It was the old men vs. the young men; the past stars vs. the current stars—Price and Norman being ranked 1-2 in the world, Norman the defending champion. Watson and Nicklaus hammered them, winning 100 pounds each. The gallery appeared to be every bit as big and enthusiastic as it had been that last day back in 1977.
Watson had to play very early Thursday and struggled while trying to wake up the first nine holes, but he posted a solid 68. The next afternoon it was 1977 again—he shot 65 to take the lead. “Not bad for a has-been,” he said, laughing, when the round was over.
Watson would never say it, but he was convinced he was going to win. This was
his
championship,
his
golf course,
his
crowd, and he was hitting the ball as well as he had in years. Even a couple of missed short putts on the back nine on Saturday that dropped him a shot behind the coleaders, Fuzzy Zoeller and Brad Faxon, didn’t shake his confidence going into Sunday. Or Bruce’s. Mindful of the ugly pattern of Sunday that had developed during the year—74 at Pebble Beach, 74 at Augusta, 74 at Oakmont—his last comment to Tom as they left the golf course that night was direct: “I have a feeling,” he said, “that tomorrow is going to be the best Sunday we’ve had this year.”
He was right. For seven holes. Watson was near perfect for that long. When he birdied the seventh hole, he was leading the golf tournament and his smile was as wide as the nearby Firth of Clyde. The weather was mild—Watson would have loved to have seen the Giant roll in—but that was fine. He was going to win. He was convinced, so was Bruce.