“You haven’t given up at all. You’re still out there doing what you’ve always done. What you did today was inspiring, believe me, for all of us, but I’ll bet especially for people with ALS. I think it would be great if you came out and talked just for a few minutes about how you’ve been able to do this. It’s an amazing story.”
Bruce thought about it for a minute, then lit a cigarette. “I’ll be there the whole time,” Malchow promised. “If you get tired, or it’s too tough, you tell me and I’ll stop it.”
Bruce agreed. He walked back outside the locker room and found a phalanx of reporters waiting for him—notebooks, tape recorders, and cameras were everywhere. Bruce had talked to reporters for thirty years; he had done a good deal of media at the Masters. But nothing like this.
He spoke slowly, trying to make his words clear, about what the day meant to him. He talked emotionally about all Watson had done for him. “To have a friend like Tom Watson,” he said at one point, “is an incredible thing. I can’t tell you how lucky I feel.”
The tears were coming again, and he paused and looked down to gather himself. When he looked up, he glanced at some of the faces around him and noticed something: Many of those listening—cynical, jaded reporters—were crying too.
“All my years in the business,” Malchow said, “I’ve never seen reporters crying. They did it that day, and I don’t think any of them was ashamed to do it.”
It was that kind of day.
The last thing Bruce did before he left the golf course was an interview with ESPN. Once he understood that this was an opportunity, that people wanted to hear his story, tired as he was, he agreed to do as many interviews as he could.
Before he left for the evening, Watson had made the comment to people that “if I were to go out and shoot ninety tomorrow, it really wouldn’t matter.” He didn’t want to shoot 90, he wanted to win the golf tournament. The competitor in him was saying it was Thursday and he had played 18 good holes with 54 still to go. But the friend in him, the brother in him, or as Neil Oxman would put it, the closer-than-brother in him, knew that nothing could take away from what had happened that day. It had been magical, and as he said, shooting 90 wouldn’t change that.
He went back to his hotel room and was getting ready to go to bed when he flipped on the television set. There was Bruce, doing the ESPN interview, struggling to talk because he was so tired and so full of emotion. The interview wasn’t long, but Watson clearly heard the last thing Bruce said: “I know,” he said, the tears coming one more time, “that he did this for me.”
This time, alone in his room, Tom Watson made no attempt to hold back his tears. As Bruce’s image faded from the screen, he sat for several minutes crying quietly out of both joy and sorrow. “I only wish,” he said later, “it could have been more about the joy and less about the sorrow.”
Needle in a Haystack
ANY GOLFER WILL TELL YOU
that there is nothing more difficult than coming back and playing well the day after a great round. It is not the least bit uncommon for a player who has gone low one day to shoot 8 to 10 strokes higher the next day. The feel is different, the pressures are different, and when the magic that was evident the day before isn’t there, a player can get frustrated easily and quickly.
In Tom Watson’s case all that was in play on Friday at the Open—and more. He had slept well—“I had trouble sleeping at times early in my career,” he said, “but not anymore”—and came back to the golf course the next day to find the place still abuzz about what had happened on Thursday afternoon. One after another, players came up to congratulate him on his round and on the day. Watson took the compliments as nothing more than the respect players show one another after a good round, but many of those who paid him the compliments felt as if it had been far more than that.
“If all it had been was a great player turning back the clock for a day, it would have been a wonderful story,” said Jeff Sluman, the 1988 PGA champion. “But this was so much more than that. I think we all believed that he did play that round for Bruce, and I think we all felt proud of both of them that day.”
Watson played early on Friday, which according to Bruce was normally an advantage for him. “I prefer to go late-early when he’s playing well, because you get up and get right back at it,” he said. “You don’t want to sit around and wait to play if you don’t have to.”
Watson didn’t play poorly on Friday, but it wasn’t the same as Thursday. Realistically, how could it be? He wasn’t likely to hole out another six-iron or have too many thirty-five-footers hang on the lip of the cup and drop in. He shot 72, two over par for the day. That left him at three under par for the championship, four strokes behind the leaders, Jim Furyk and Vijay Singh. Like most people, Furyk, after playing early on Thursday, had watched much of Watson’s round. “The good thing was, after a while, it was all Tom Watson,” he said. “Normally, as a player, if you’re watching on TV you get upset if they just focus on one guy. But this time it was the right thing to do. Some stories are feel-good stories for the viewers. This was different. It was a feel-good story, at least for that day, for everyone.”
Even when Watson dropped back on Friday, most of the buzz around Olympia Fields was still about what had happened on Thursday. In fact a truly remarkable thing had happened: Tiger Woods, still struggling, had become almost an afterthought. Story one was Watson and Bruce; story two the leaders.
Then
people got around to Tiger. It was almost unnoticed, since Watson finished the second round in a tie for 10th place, but he had already accomplished his unspoken goal: making the cut. Of course that goal had become a given after Thursday. Watson was still focused at the end of the day Friday on trying to win. Four shots behind the leader with 36 holes to play was far from an impossible task.
By Saturday evening, though, the dream had faded. Each day at the Open, the USGA makes the golf course a little bit more difficult. Furyk and Singh’s score—133—had broken the Open record for 36 holes, and there were all sorts of red (under par) numbers on the board. In fact twenty-six players were under par through two rounds. A year earlier, at Bethpage Black, the number had been four. That did not make the USGA happy. So the hole locations on Saturday were considerably more difficult. “The weather and wind conditions never really changed all week,” Watson said. “The course did get drier and faster. But what really changed were the pin placements. By Sunday they had them tucked pretty well.”
Saturday was no picnic either. Furyk was steadily playing himself into control of the tournament. He shot 67, three under par, which gave him a commanding three-shot lead over unknown Australian Stephen Leaney with 18 holes to play. Watson had a tough day right from the start, shooting 75. By the time he finished, he knew he had no chance to win. He was now tied for 32nd place and trailed Furyk by 12 shots. So he and Bruce changed their goal. Since he wasn’t going to win, the next best thing Watson could do was guarantee himself a spot in the 2004 Open at Shinnecock. The way to do that was to finish in the top 15. Watson figured if he could shoot 68 on Sunday and finish at even par for the week, he would be a lock for the top 15.
His calculations were right. In fact they were conservative. The combination of Sunday Open pressure, a golf course that was now playing fast and hard, and those always tricky Sunday hole locations sent scores soaring. From twenty-six players under par on Friday, the number had trickled down to nineteen on Saturday. By the time everyone holed out on Sunday, there were only four players under par, led by Furyk, who shot a cozy, conservative 72 to ease his way to a three-shot victory over Leaney, his first major championship after being a very solid player on tour for almost ten years. Mike Weir and Kenny Perry finished tied for third place, seven shots back. It was the least suspenseful Sunday at an Open since Woods’s 15-shot victory in 2000, but that had been different since it was Woods in the lead, smashing records left and right en route to his first win in the Open.
A 68 would have tied Watson for fifth place. Unfortunately, he shot 72, which left him tied for 28th. That was a very solid finish for a Champions Tour player, but it wasn’t what Watson had hoped for, especially after Thursday. “I never backed up the great round on Thursday with another good one,” he said. “I needed one more round in the sixties to confirm the first round and didn’t get it. That part was disappointing.”
As it turned out, an even-par 70 on Sunday would have put Watson in the top 15, with virtually everyone in the field going in reverse on the last 18 holes. Even though he never made a move on Sunday, the afternoon was still full of emotion for both Watson and Bruce. When they arrived at the first tee, Ron Read, the USGA’s longtime Open starter, told Bruce he had something for him. It was, he said, the original flag that had been in the hole at Pebble Beach on the 17th green that day in 1982 when Watson had chipped in to win the Open. Bruce knew that Watson had a framed flag from the 17th hole in his house, so he was a tad skeptical. “We always have two,” Read explained. “We keep an extra one for every hole in case something happens to the flag we’re using during the round—wind gust, whatever it might be. We sent Tom the copy because it was less beat-up.”
Bruce looked at the flag. Sure enough, there were small tears and stains, indicating it had spent time on the green on that windy day. “Of all the things I lost in the fire, losing the flag [from the 18th] at Pebble was the worst,” he said. “To get the one from seventeen that way was just unbelievable.”
The round itself wasn’t terribly gratifying in a golf sense, but it had to be in a personal sense. At every single hole the two men heard cheers that were as loud as Thursday’s, only different. These were valedictory cheers. Most fans knew it might be Watson’s last Open and that it might also be Bruce’s last. “There was a sense,” Billy Andrade said, “that Thursday had been a farewell of some kind. It was great that it happened, but it made you very sad to think of why it had been as dramatic a day as it was.”
Watson felt that sense keenly. He was trying very hard to focus on playing well, but he couldn’t help but hear the cheers, hear the fans chanting, “Bruuuuce,” on almost every green. “As wonderful as the cheers were,” he said, “the closer we got to eighteen, the more heartbreaking they became.”
NBC was now clinging to Tom and Bruce as if they were a ratings life raft. With Furyk in command and no one other than Leaney even remotely having a chance to make a run at him (Woods had faded to 75 on Saturday and was a complete nonfactor, finishing tied for 20th), Tom and Bruce were NBC’s story. Every time they walked on a green, the camera showed close-ups of both of them. Whenever Watson made a putt or hit a good shot, there was a close-up of Bruce reacting. It went on that way all day.
Bruce felt as if he had spent all his emotions on Thursday. He heard the cheers and, like Watson, was grateful. Marsha had flown out Saturday to be there for the final round, and he was glad she was getting the chance to feel all the emotions in person. But he was cried out and worn out. As he and Watson walked up the 18th fairway together, the noise was as loud as it had been on Thursday, growing as they got closer to the green. Watson put his arm around Bruce as they approached the green and Bruce whispered to him, “We’ve still got another shot to get into Shinnecock, you know—if we win at Inverness.”
“Absolutely,” Watson said. “Let’s just do that.”
They both had to go through one more go-round with the media when it was over. Watson did an interview with Jimmy Roberts in which he talked about the four days and what Thursday had meant and the importance of raising money for ALS research. At the end Roberts asked him what he would remember most about the week. Watson paused a moment. “Bruce’s tears,” he said finally. “That’s what I’ll remember.” He was choking up again. “I just want to find something for him.” Roberts, pretty close to tears himself by then, managed a “thank you, Tom” and threw it back to Dan Hicks in the 18th tower.
The
Today
show wanted Tom and Bruce to appear the next morning. Since the two of them were flying back to Kansas City that night, that would mean waking up at about 4 a.m. to do the segment. But it was too good an opportunity to turn down. Marsha and Kim Julian had been working on setting up a website called Driving4Life, and this was a chance to talk about it on one of the most-watched programs in the country, and about the work being done on ALS research at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where Bruce was now being treated.
“What this comes down to is simple,” Marsha said the next day. “We’re looking for a needle in a haystack. It won’t be easy. But we’ve got to find it.”
The publicity generated by the Open was overwhelming, dwarfing the post-Masters response. Money came in, good wishes came in, requests for more interviews came in.
And people claiming to know where the needle was came in.
Watson and Marsha were both bombarded with calls and e-mails from people who claimed they knew how to help Bruce. They knew about a drug or a doctor or had a friend who had found a way to slow the progress of the disease. There were also a handful of people who insisted that Bruce didn’t need to find a cure for ALS. That’s because they didn’t think he had ALS. They thought he had chronic Lyme disease. One of the reasons the Mayo Clinic had tested Bruce for Lyme disease in January was because there are times when the symptoms of ALS mimic the symptoms of chronic Lyme. Both are neurological diseases, the difference being that one is treatable if caught in time and one is not. The key, in the case of Lyme, is diagnosing it as early as possible.
Both Watson and Marsha were extremely skeptical when people first began to bring up the issue of Lyme. Bruce had been tested for it. The test had been negative. Doesn’t matter, some people insisted; the spinal tap done at the Mayo Clinic wasn’t foolproof. Sometimes people have Lyme and it doesn’t show up in that test. Further testing should be done. The more Bruce and Marsha heard about this, the more curious they became. Watson remained the skeptic. There were several doctors—notably one in Philadelphia—who kept insisting that Bruce needed to come see them and undergo
their
tests for Lyme. Finally Bruce told Watson he wanted to go see the doctor in Philadelphia.