Now, though, Bruce was in a completely different arena. He had become the story. That would not have made him happy under any circumstances. Under these circumstances, they made him miserable. Even when dealing with media members he knew and liked and trusted, the act of talking was becoming more and more difficult. It frustrated him that he was hard to understand, although he joked about it. “Sorry I sound like the town drunk,” became his standard line. The toughest part was suddenly finding himself the focus of attention from media people he didn’t know, some of whom asked sensitive questions like, “So about how long do you think you have to live?”
Bruce first began to understand how different his life was going to be when he arrived for Watson’s first full-field Champions Tour event of the year in Naples, Florida. After an entire lifetime of answering questions about his player, Bruce realized that his player was now answering questions about him. No one asked him anymore about how Watson was playing or what his club selection had been at a particular hole. After years of finishing a round or a postround practice session, taking the bag back to the bag room, and heading for the parking lot, Bruce found he couldn’t do that anymore. Always there were reporters or camera crews who just wanted a minute. People wanted autographs. He had gone from being recognized by some in golf as Watson’s caddy to being recognized by almost everyone as “Bruce Edwards—the guy with ALS.”
Bill Leahey saw that difference almost instantly. Several years earlier, he and Bruce had been playing golf one afternoon at Leahey’s club in New Jersey. Leahey was standing in the rough on one hole midway through the round when a wayward drive from an adjoining hole smacked him on the forehead, just above his right eye. Stunned and hurt—though not seriously, as it turned out—he grabbed a towel, yelled over at Bruce that he had been hit by a ball, and proceeded to lie down with the towel underneath his head to try to recover from the wooziness he was feeling. “Bruce came running over,” Leahey said. “So did the guys from the group that had hit me. I was lying there with my eyes closed when I hear one of these guys say to Bruce as he’s getting there, ‘Hey, you’re Tom Watson’s caddy.’”
Now when Leahey mentioned Bruce’s name to people, they knew exactly who he was long before Bill added those three words that had identified him to the public for so many years: Tom Watson’s caddy.
Intellectually Bruce understood that virtually everyone who stopped him, whatever the reason, meant well. Strangers would want to talk to him about their relative who had ALS; about a friend who had lived five years with it; about a doctor who had a new drug or a new theory. He and Watson were both bombarded with e-mails and phone calls with advice, remedies, doctors, new drug protocol suggestions, and, in many cases, simply good wishes from people who wanted them both to know they were thinking of Bruce and praying for him.
Emotionally it was tough to take. As Watson would say later in the year, “I love the outpouring of affection people have directed at Bruce. I
hate
the reason for it.”
That summed up well the way Bruce felt. He knew why people wanted to tell him their stories, give him a hug, or pat him on the back. He knew why one reporter after another wanted to talk to him. He and Marsha both went through a period early on where they were resentful of the press, feeling that what they were going through was private, that they were entitled to not talk about what was going on everywhere they went. But after a while they realized that life doesn’t work that way when you are a public figure, and Bruce had gone from being a semipublic figure—Tom Watson’s caddy—to being a very public one.
Bruce’s private life had also undergone a radical change. Soon after they returned from Hawaii, Marsha went back to Dallas to get the children and move them to Ponte Vedra. There was now no need for an apartment, so Marsha, Brice, and Avery all moved in together. Bruce had vowed to Watson on the night of his diagnosis that he was going to marry Marsha, enjoy every minute he had with her,
and
buy a dog—something he had never done in the past even though he loved dogs, because there had never been anyone at home to care for the dog when he was on the road. Now he had an instant family, so he decided not to waste any more time before getting a dog. The dog, a Labrador, was quickly named Nabby, after Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, in spite of their miserable failure in the conference championship game.
After living most of his adult life alone—and certainly never with kids or a dog—Bruce found the suddenly full house an adjustment. But he was, overall, very happy to have Marsha, the kids, and Nabby with him, even when the latter three ran amok on occasion. “At this time in my life, having people around, especially people who love me, can only be a good thing,” he said.
After a while, both Bruce and Marsha began to understand that the fight they were now in, the one Watson was leading every chance he got, was a very public one. The only way to raise awareness about ALS, about the funds that were needed and about the horrors of the disease, was to talk about it every chance they got. By coincidence, Lou Gehrig had been born in 1903, and ALS fund-raisers were already using the 100th anniversary of his birth as a jumping-off point to try to raise more money for research. Watson and Bruce became new voices and symbols for that campaign.
“I think it was hard for all of us to see how public the whole thing had become,” Bruce’s sister Gwyn said. “To us, at least in the beginning, this was a very private family thing. Reading about it, hearing about it all the time in the media, was hard for all of us. It wasn’t as if we weren’t used to hearing or reading Bruce’s name or seeing him on TV, that had been going on for years. But this was an entirely different context. Because I worked in public relations, I understood why it was happening. But that didn’t make it any easier.”
Each time he arrived at a tournament, Bruce felt as if he had to deal with a new wave of questioners and well-wishers. In Hawaii there had been just a trickle of attention, and he had been distracted for much of that week with plans for the wedding when he wasn’t on the golf course. Naples meant more attention, more media, and a whole new round of players and caddies and officials coming up to tell him how they felt. No doubt if he could have, Bruce would have worn a sign that said, “I know how sorry you are that I’m sick. I’m doing okay right now and I appreciate your support and your concern. Now, can we talk about something else?”
Since he couldn’t do that, Bruce often made the effort to change the subject as quickly as possible. He would ask about a player’s or caddy’s family, or comment on how they were playing. This came naturally to him because it was what he had been doing all his career. He readily admitted that he was in denial about what his future held. Both Marsha and Watson had been studying the Internet constantly, talking to doctors and ALS experts to learn everything they could about the disease. Both remained convinced there was time to find a cure; both were encouraged when they heard about doctors working with new drugs and progress that was being made in research. Several ALS fund-raising organizations explained to them how Bruce’s illness could benefit fund-raising for research, a role Bruce was more than willing to take on, even if it meant talking about his condition far more often than he wanted to talk about it.
“It almost became part of my job,” he said. “In one sense, the speech impediment helped me there, because I could beg off things, say it was just too hard. Most of the time I was telling the truth, but every once in a while with a reporter, I’d say I was too tired to talk just because I really didn’t feel like doing any more talking on that particular day.”
Once he had made the rounds on the Champions Tour and heard all the words of concern and sorrow, Bruce had to go through it again on the regular tour. As he had done in the years since Watson moved to the Senior Tour, he caddied for John Cook at the Players Championship at the end of March. This was an event Bruce always enjoyed because he got to sleep in his own bed during the week, the Tournament Players Club at Sawgrass being only a few miles from his front door. This time, though, it was different. One player after another whom he had not yet seen came up to him. In some cases words escaped them and they would literally collapse in his arms, speechless, leaving Bruce in the awkward position of having to say something like, “It’s okay. Thanks. I know what you’re thinking.”
“All I could think when I heard it was that it was so unfair,” said Billy Andrade, who never forgot how Bruce went out of his way to help him when he first arrived on tour in 1988. “Here’s a guy who the main sound in his life has always been laughter—his and everyone around him. I was on the range in Phoenix when one of the caddies came up and said, ‘Did you hear about Bruce?’ You know it’s something bad when they start the sentence that way, but when he said ALS, my knees buckled. I called him that night.”
Andrade was one of the few people Bruce picked up the phone to talk to. “When I heard his voice, all I could think to say was, ‘I know you’ll fight this and I love you,’” Andrade said, his voice choking with emotion as he remembered the conversation. “We all deal with tragedy in our lives. Some just hit you harder, especially when they’re so unexpected, than others.”
Many players hadn’t seen Bruce before the Players. Some were shocked by how thin he looked, even though he said his legs felt fine and joked about his speech problems.
Andrade’s closest friend on the tour, fellow Rhode Islander Brad Faxon, had the same weak-in-the-knees reaction when he heard the news while sitting at home watching the Golf Channel one night. “The first thing I thought about was coming on tour in 1984 and there was one caddy everyone in golf knew: Bruce. I mean, who didn’t remember him and Watson at Pebble in ’82. So as luck would have it, the first time I’m paired with Watson is the last round at Pebble that year. I was almost as excited about being paired with Bruce as Watson. The first nine holes, Watson shot even par and it looked more like ten over. I mean, he was all over the place. As we’re walking off the ninth green, I hear Bruce say, ‘Okay, we’ve got all that out of our system, let’s make our move
now
.’
“And Watson looks at him and says, ‘I’m going to shoot thirty on the back nine and win.’
“I’m thinking they’re
both
nuts. Watson was lucky not to shoot forty on the front and he’s talking about thirty, and there’s Bruce saying, ‘That’s what I want to hear, let’s get going.’
“So Watson birdies ten, the first time he’s even had a chance to make birdie all day. Next thing I know, we’re standing on the eighteenth green and he’s got a putt for thirty-one. And there’s Bruce with the flag in his hand whispering to him, ‘This could be for the win.’ As it turned out, he finished third, but the two of them were thinking win the whole time. I remember thinking to myself, ‘These guys are the essence of a team. I want something like that someday.’”
A year later, Faxon, still struggling to establish himself on tour, went over to play in qualifying for the British Open—something unheard of for American nonstars at the time, since money made in the British didn’t count toward making the top 125 on the money list. Watson told him he would play a practice round with him on Tuesday if he qualified. When Faxon ran into Bruce on Monday morning before playing his second 18 holes in the qualifier, Bruce said to him, categorically, “Hey, we’re playing a practice round tomorrow.”
“I said, ‘Yeah, if I get in,’” Faxon said. “And he looked at me and said, ‘Like I said, we’re playing a practice round tomorrow.’ When I made it, I walked onto the putting green the next day and the first person to come over and high-five me was Bruce. You don’t forget things like that.”
Almost everyone on tour has a Bruce story along those lines. Even Watson, who knew Bruce better than anyone, was amazed by the number of people who felt the need to tell him how Bruce had touched their lives and how much they were thinking of him and pulling for him. One who didn’t surprise him was Ben Crenshaw. As Ryder Cup captain in 1999, Crenshaw had asked Lynn Strickler, his longtime caddy, to join the team for the week as an assistant captain to work with the caddies. That’s not unusual. Watson had wanted Bruce at the Belfry in 1993 when he was captain. But Crenshaw asked Bruce to be an assistant captain too.
“I knew he would add something to the effort,” Crenshaw said simply. “All the players like and respect him. All the caddies like and respect him. He would work hard and do anything I asked him to do to help. And when he said something, whether it was about pairings or the matches or anything, people were going to listen. It’s easy to find people who are going to jump up and down and say, ‘Let’s go get them.’ It isn’t as easy to find people whose words are going to mean something to the people involved.”
Davis Love, who had won his ’99 Ryder Cup match early on Sunday during the singles, remembers standing by a green watching another match when Bruce drove up in a cart. “He just waved me over and said, ‘Get in.’ I didn’t even ask why, because I knew he wouldn’t be doing it just for fun. When I got in, he took off and while we were driving said, ‘Ben wants you to go over and watch Justin [Leonard]’s match. He’s behind and down on himself. Maybe you can talk to him.’”
It was Love’s ensuing pep talk that Leonard later cited as a key to his coming back to halve his match with José María Olazábal and clinch the cup. “I take full credit,” Bruce said later. “Someone had to give Davis a ride to get over to Justin.”
During the Players NBC’s Jimmy Roberts asked Bruce about doing a piece on him for the weekend telecast. Part of Bruce didn’t want to do it, didn’t want the entire world hearing his speech problems while he talked about what he was going through. But he remembered what Watson and others had said about the platform he had to talk about the need for funding ALS research. So he agreed. Roberts is a good interviewer and an eloquent essayist. Although everyone in the cult that is the PGA Tour knew about Bruce’s illness, there were still millions of Americans watching the telecast that day who did not. The piece brought another outpouring of sympathy, phone calls, e-mails, and good wishes.