Leahey floated the idea to his old boss at Smith Barney, Tom Matthews, who although he is now a higher-up at the firm, is best known to his friends as someone who once played in Bruce Springsteen’s band. “If you can put it together, I can get you a golf course,” Matthews said. “I’ll get you on Caves.”
Caves Valley is a relatively new golf course but it is already considered one of the better courses in the country. Watson and Bruce were certainly familiar with it. It had been the site of the 2002 U.S. Senior Open, in which Watson had lost a dramatic five-hole playoff to Don Pooley. Leahey began contacting friends from Smith Barney and old clients and people he knew were golf fans. He called Watson to see if he might be willing to come in for the day and participate in the outing. “Bill, if you can guarantee $100,000 net to Bruce, I’ll definitely come,” Watson said.
“Tom, if I have to put the money up myself, we’ll raise that much,” Leahey answered.
Watson promised to be there. He also called the president of Caves Valley, Leslie Disharoon, a friend of his, to seek his help convincing people to Play-and-Pay. A date—May 20—was set. The goal was to get a dozen foursomes at $10,000 a foursome and net the $100,000. With Disharoon’s help the total ended up being eighteen foursomes. When Leahey called Gary Crandall to tell him about the day, Crandall mentioned that Andy North was doing an outing not far away the day before and might be willing to come over. When North heard what was going on, he was more than willing to take part.
There was one other thing Leahey wanted to do the day of the fund-raiser. He wanted to play one more Hebert Cup.
The Hebert Cup was a four-man competition that had first been played in 1987, not long after Crandall had suffered a mild heart attack. “It reminded all of us that you never know what’s going to happen in life,” Leahey said. “There had been four of us who really hung out together in the early years on tour: Bruce, Gary, Drew Micelli (who had caddied for Mark Hayes), and myself. Three of us had left the tour, but we had all stayed in pretty close touch. There was no regular get-together, though, nothing we put on our calendars. So we decided we needed to change that.” The Hebert Cup was born.
They named the event after Lionel Hebert, who had won the 1957 PGA Championship in what was by far the highlight of an otherwise ordinary professional career. “We decided that the PGA was so humiliated having Hebert win that they changed the format from match play to stroke play the next year. So four mediocre golfers getting together, why not call it the Hebert Cup?”
The PGA’s switch to stroke play undoubtedly had nothing to do with Hebert, but that was the foursome’s story and they were sticking to it. The initial Hebert was played in Dallas—Crandall getting to host first—and was played with a Ryder Cup format: three days, match play, with best-ball matches, alternate-shot matches, and singles matches. Crandall and Micelli played Leahey and Bruce and won a tense match that went down to the final holes on the final day. Bruce and Leahey had an “Hebert Cup” made and presented it to their two buddies.
Like the Ryder Cup, the Hebert was played every two years at different venues. Leahey hosted one year in New Jersey; Bruce one year in Florida; Micelli one year in California. But after the fourth match, the Hebert had faded away. “It probably didn’t help that we just couldn’t win,” Leahey said. “We’d always be close, but they were just a little bit better than us. After the fourth time, the cup kind of got retired. Or lost.”
Or both. Now Leahey wanted to revive the Hebert, at least for one day: 18 holes of best ball on the day of the fund-raiser at Caves Valley. All four Hebertians were game and the match was set up.
Needless to say, Bruce had played almost no golf since his diagnosis. Between work and travel and seeing different doctors and saving his energy, there hadn’t been any chance to play. He had never played very much, although he’d become a reasonably good player as an adult, someone capable of breaking 80 when he was playing regularly. “I was always a good putter,” he said. “The irony is, I was never a good bunker player, and I took lessons from arguably the best bunker player ever to play the game.”
They all arrived in Baltimore on a beautiful spring day. Most of Bruce’s family came—only Brian and Laurie couldn’t make the trip—even though they all had doubts about what the day would be like. “I think we were afraid it would just be too sad for all of us,” Chris said. “But it didn’t turn out that way. It was a celebration, and I know it was a great day for Bruce, which made it a great day for all of us.”
Many of Bruce’s caddying buddies—some retired, some still working—flew in for the day. Leahey had been able to sell enough foursomes to put the net for the day at over $150,000.
But the highlight of the day was the Hebert.
The underdog team of Bruce and Leahey grabbed an early lead and was two up after nine holes. As they relaxed on the 10th tee before starting the back nine, Bruce said to his friends, “You know, this might be the last nine holes of golf I ever play.”
He tried to say it half-joking, but the comment stuck with everyone. It became even more poignant when Bruce, normally the least serious golfer in the group, began to play as well as anyone had ever seen him play. After Micelli and Crandall had rallied to tie the match on 15, Bruce rolled in a birdie putt at 16 to put his team one up again. Sixteen had been the one hole Watson had bogeyed coming down the stretch eleven months earlier at the Senior Open, a bogey that probably cost him the championship.
Micelli and Crandall tied the match again on 17, and after Bruce had just missed a long birdie putt on 18 that would have been the winner, they had finished even. By then Andy North, having finished his round, had driven up in a cart. He asked how the match stood and was told even. “Sudden death!” he screamed and they marched back to the 18th tee. No one won 18. Newly appointed commissioner North decreed that they play 16. Another halve. They went to 17. This time it was Leahey who came through, trickling in a short par putt. Micelli and Crandall could do no better than bogeys.
Bruce and Leahey had won.
“I’m not sure who was happier, us or them,” Leahey said. “I mean, they weren’t going to give an inch, but when we won fair and square, I think they were thrilled.”
In fact Crandall and Micelli went out and had new plaques made up and sent them to the winners, immortalizing their victory at the 2003 Hebert Cup. Leahey has an office in his house that is filled with plaques and photos and memorabilia. The Hebert plaque is right over his desk, in a place where he can see it anytime he looks up from his computer.
The rest of the evening was almost as much fun as the Hebert. By the time it was over, the $150,000 was only part of the story. When it was Bruce’s turn to get up and thank everyone, he simply couldn’t do it. Finally he whispered something in Marsha’s ear. “If you judge a man’s life by the friends he has,” he said, “then I’ve certainly had a great life.”
That was the moment when everyone was too filled with emotion to do anything but cry.
A Great Five Hours
THE OUTING AT CAVES VALLEY
came during the last break that Bruce and Watson would have for a good long while. Beginning the first week in June, Watson was going to play three weeks out of four, take one week off, and then play three more weeks consecutively. Each of those six tournaments was, technically at least, a major championship. He would start at the Senior PGA Championship at Aronimink Golf Club outside Philadelphia and then go from there to the U.S. Open, which would be played at Olympia Fields in Chicago’s south suburbs. After a week off, he would play the U.S. Senior Open at Inverness in Toledo. All three of those events were majors in Watson’s mind, the Senior PGA being by far the longest running of the senior major championships (dating to 1937), and the Senior Open being a national championship always held on difficult golf courses.
After that would come another week off, followed by the Ford Senior Players Championship, an event the Champions Tour insisted was a major; the British Open; and then the Senior British Open, which had just been declared a major by the tour, meaning that there were now five Champions Tour “majors.” Bruce had a simple method for deciding if a tournament was a major: “If there’s a pro-am, it’s not a major.” He might have added, if there was a corporate name in the official tournament title it also wasn’t a major. That would eliminate the Ford Senior Players and the JELD-WEN Tradition, the final Champions major, which would be held at the end of August. JELD-WEN, for those of you keeping score at home, makes doors and windows.
It could be argued that the three June events were the most important on Watson’s schedule for the year: the two Champions events he cared about the most and the event he had grown up dreaming about winning. What’s more, he hadn’t played in the U.S. Open since the 2000 event at Pebble Beach and was delighted when he got a call from his old friend Sandy Tatum in January asking him if he would accept an exemption at Olympia Fields if it was offered to him.
“You’re darn right I would,” was Watson’s succinct answer.
In its winter meetings, the USGA executive board had decided to offer three exemptions to past Open champions: one would go to Tom Kite, who had won the Open in 1992 and had exhausted his ten-year champion’s exemption the previous year at Bethpage Black. It had become an unofficial USGA tradition to invite Open champions of note to play in the first year they were no longer exempt. Hale Irwin, who was offered the third exemption, had benefited more than anyone from this, winning his third Open at Medinah in 1990 on an eleventh-year exemption. He was invited as a three-time champion whose last win had come in the Chicago area. Watson had also been given an eleventh-year exemption, at Baltusrol in 1993, and had used it to finish in a tie for fifth.
Watson would have said yes to an exemption to any U.S. Open on any course but was especially happy to be invited to Olympia Fields, since he had played his first professional tournament there in 1968. He was an eighteen-year-old Stanford freshman then, playing as an amateur, when Olympia Fields had been the site of the Western Open. Watson didn’t receive his official invitation to the 2003 Open until May, but he had told Bruce to put it on his schedule before then. It occurred to Bruce, as it occurred to Watson, then fifty-three, that this might be Watson’s last Open. There were ways he could qualify again—win the Senior Open or finish in the top 15 at the Open or at a Masters—but at this stage of his career those were accomplishments that, while not impossible, certainly could not be counted on.
Watson arrived at Aronimink with a fairly cranky golf swing. He had hoped to spend a good deal of time on the practice tee during the week, but the weather was awful, limiting practice time and forcing play to be called off completely on Saturday. That made for a very long day on Sunday, slogging 36 holes on another muddy golf course. The only good news was that since this was a senior event, there wasn’t much media around, which was a relief to Bruce. Watson finished in a tie for 17th and never really felt comfortable with his swing all week.
“It wasn’t all that hard to hit fairways there,” he said. “And I was having trouble hitting fairways. You aren’t likely to win when that’s the case.”
The best news of the week came when Watson got a phone call from Andy North, who was in Chicago doing advance work on the Open for ESPN, which has employed him as a commentator for many years. North is one of Watson’s closer friends on tour, a fellow midwesterner who loved to tell Watson that his beloved University of Wisconsin was every bit the center of learning that Stanford was and had a better football team to boot.
North had walked the golf course at Olympia Fields while doing his TV prep work. “Tom,” he said on the phone, “you can play this golf course. The rough’s not that high and the greens aren’t all that fast either.”
Watson was happy to hear that but was convinced that by the time play began the following Thursday the rough would be higher and the greens considerably faster. “I remembered the greens from ’68 as being rock hard,” he said. “I figured the USGA would get them there eventually. I was hoping that Andy was right about the rough. Those young guys can slash it out of the high stuff, but I’m not strong enough to do it anymore, especially when I’m hitting a long iron.”
What Watson didn’t know was that the USGA wasn’t going to get the greens as fast and hard as it may have wanted, because Chicago had been saturated by rain all spring and the greens were far softer than the USGA had planned. Obviously the rain would make it easier to grow the rough high, but the USGA has been more forgiving in recent years when it comes to Open rough. “We want to penalize players when they hit it in the rough,” said Tom Meeks, who is in charge of course setup at the Open. “But we don’t want them pitching out. We want them to have the opportunity to play for the green if they’re willing to gamble.”
So the rough would be difficult but not impossible.
It wasn’t going to matter, though, if Watson couldn’t find a swing key to get him hitting the ball more consistently. He and Bruce flew back to Kansas City for a rest day after Aronimink and then arrived in Chicago on Tuesday afternoon. Since he hadn’t seen the golf course in thirty-five years, Watson wanted to get in two full practice rounds before the Open began on Thursday. The advantage of arriving relatively late was that most of the media was already busy writing stories for Wednesday about Tiger Woods—who had done his pre-Open press conference that morning—and many of the fans had already left for the day. Watson hit a few balls on the range and then he and Bruce headed onto the golf course alone.
“It was actually kind of nice,” Bruce remembered. “There weren’t that many people, and without any other players or caddies with us, it was just Tom and me preparing for an important tournament. It was kind of like old times. I really enjoyed it.”
Of course both men were working too. Bruce had never seen the golf course, and although he had Gorgeous George’s yardage book, he made his usual checks around the greens and the hazards and stepped off some of the more likely yardages that Watson might be facing when the championship began. Watson was, in his words, “trying to remember the golf course.” That day he was having trouble remembering the layout of the holes. There had been a number of changes since he’d played it, and as good as Watson’s memory for golf courses is, a lot of it wasn’t coming back.