An hour later Watson joined Tatum for lunch at the nearby Cypress
Point Club. “I think any other man, having been what Tom Watson had
been, wouldn’t have been much fun,” Tatum says. “Not Tom. He was a joy.
We had a delightful lunch.” As they left the club, Watson looked at his
watch. “It’s 4:30,” he said. “We’ve got time to play nine holes.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Tatum said.
“I’m not kidding. We can play nine.”
Tatum looked around. “You don’t have any clubs.”
“We can borrow some.”
“How about shoes?”
“Can’t you get me a pair of shoes? And a sweater?”
A quick search of the clubhouse turned up some shoes, a sweater, and
Cypress Point member Hank Ketchum, a golf nut and creator of the “Dennis the Menace” cartoon strip. Within minutes the three men were out in
the gloaming, hitting golf shots past deer grazing on turf grass. “We played
with Hank’s clubs, and I can’t remember having more fun,” says Tatum.
“There was a dimension to Tom that I found almost unique, a deep, abiding love for the game. He still played for the sheer joy of playing.”
There was, of course, another side to Tom Watson. He could be
overearnest, obsessed with decorum, judgmental, even preachy. (Envious
tour rivals used to call him “Carnac” because he had all the answers.) When
he denounced comedian Bill Murray for his slapstick antics at the 1993
Pebble Beach Pro-Am, Watson looked stuffy. When he wrote a letter to
Masters chairman Hord Hardin asking that wisecracking commentator
Gary McCord be taken off that tournament’s telecast, Watson appeared
meddlesome. When he declined to autograph a program for Scotland’s Sam
Torrance at a 1993 Ryder Cup dinner, Watson—long admired for his
impeccable manners—came off as rude.
But none of those missteps occurred when Watson had a golf club in his
hand. The game brought out the best in him—the inspired competitor, the
affable midwesterner, the supportive friend. Golf was his enduring link to
innocence and wonder, and he fought to maintain that link, knowing its
value. “When you mature, when you lose the dreams you had as a kid,
you’re no longer capable of playing a sport to its best,” he once said.
“Money has a lot to do with that. Abundance dilutes the desire.”
It was a typical Watson remark—intelligent, on point, and tinged with
self-reproach. His was always the examined life. Watson was born on September 4,
1949, the second of three brothers, and driven home to a prosperous, leafy
neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri. His father, Ray Watson, was an
insurance broker, a prominent amateur golfer, and a man for whom games
represented moral instruction. “All the people who played golf with my dad
were serious golfers,” Tom says. “Serious meaning they loved the game, and
every time they hit a golf shot they were there for one purpose only, and
that was to hit it the best that they could.”
By his midteens Tom played regularly with these grown-ups at the exclusive Kansas City Country Club. In the summers he entered the city and
state amateur championships, drawing smiles with his short pants and
droopy white socks—until suddenly he was wearing long pants and taking
home the trophies. He had a boyish, gap-toothed grin, but he was an old
soul, eagerly absorbing the tall tales and instruction of men three times his
age. At Stanford University, where he played well but not brilliantly for the
golf team, he would be remembered as an independent thinker who flirted
with the antiestablishment views of the day, only to return in the end to
the bourgeois sensibilities of his parents. “I was somewhat of a fish out of
water at Stanford,” he admits.
It was not until he graduated in 1971 that Watson decided to try professional golf, and the game he took out on tour was ragged. He didn’t trust
his swing—how could he, playing as often as he did from trees and anklehigh grass?—but his scrambling skills were extraordinary, and he chipped
and putted as if he’d had a nerve bypass. The tour’s Andy Bean said, “When
you drive into the left rough, hack your second out into a greenside bunker,
come out within six feet of the hole, and sink the slippery putt—when you
do that, you’ve made a Watson par.”
Watson was not, however, a winner. Tournaments slipped away from
him on Sundays, and halfway into his third tour season players and
reporters were beginning to whisper the C-word. Yes, Watson admitted—
to himself, if not to others—he choked (although, as he would point out
a few years later, “A lot of guys who have never choked have never been in
the position to do so”). His most painful failure came in the 1974 U.S.
Open at Winged Foot Golf Club. Leading by a stroke after three rounds,
Watson wandered home with a final-round 79 and finished tied for fifth,
five strokes behind his playing partner, Hale Irwin. In the locker room
afterward, golf legend Byron Nelson approached a disconsolate Watson and
Scotland’s Favorite Son • Tom Watson 5
said, “I know how you feel, son. I’ve thrown away tournaments, too.” Nelson added: “If you ever want to talk about your game, call me.”
Thus began one of the most significant friendships in golf history. Watson seized the opportunity to work with Nelson, and the old champion
soon became another of those seasoned guides that he trusted. On the lesson tee in Texas, Nelson watched Watson hit balls, making an occasional
suggestion and bolstering his confidence. Watson then watched Nelson hit
balls, looking for elements he could incorporate into his own swing. “I
always marveled at how Byron’s club went through the impact area,” Watson said. “If you drew a perfect arc, he was on it time after time. He never
hit a wild shot. I was just sitting there, a boy with a man. He could play
rings around me.”
With Nelson and Kansas City Country Club pro Stan Thirsk monitoring his swing, Watson quickly dispelled the notion that he lacked heart.
He got his first tour win, the Western Open, in the summer of ’74. A year
later, at Carnoustie, Scotland, he won the British Open, beating Australian
Jack Newton in a play-off. During the next decade Watson exceeded his
childhood dreams. Between 1977 and 1984 he won twenty-nine more
PGA Tour events, including two Masters titles and the ’82 U.S. Open, and
won the British Open four more times, endearing himself to British golf
fans. He also won three Vardon Trophies (for low scoring average), five
PGA Tour money titles, and six PGA of America Player of the Year awards.
The most memorable Watson victories came at the expense of Jack Nicklaus, the greatest player of all time. The Missourian first baited the Golden
Bear in the spring of 1977, firing a final-round 67 at the Masters to beat
Nicklaus by two. A few months later the two Americans staged their famous
“Duel in the Sun” at Turnberry, Scotland, in what was arguably the most
dramatic final round in major championship history. Far ahead of the rest
of the field, Watson and Nicklaus locked horns in a titanic test of wills,
each topping the other with inventive shot making and pressure putting.
“I don’t believe I have ever before seen two golfers hole so many long putts
. . . on fast, breaking, glossy greens,” wrote Herbert Warren Wind. “They
were also doing such extraordinary things from tee to green that it was hard
to believe what you were seeing.”
On the final hole, Nicklaus, trailing by a stroke, hit a miracle eight-iron
from an almost unplayable lie at the foot of a gorse bush. He then rammed
in a thirty-five-foot putt for birdie. Watson, having hit his seven-iron
6 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
approach to within two feet of the cup, calmly rolled his putt in for the
win. With his final-round 65, Watson finished at 268, smashing the British
Open tournament record by eight strokes. Nicklaus walked off the green
with his arm around Watson’s shoulder, and both men smiled like winners.
Five years later, when the U.S. Open returned to Pebble Be
fifteen or sixteen tournaments a year, and he contended in several majors,
playing with a kind of grim fatalism that struck some as heroic and others
as masochistic. Few understood that Watson had always been steeled to
failure; it went with his pursuit of perfection. Bruce Edwards, his caddie
for close to three decades, told how his boss, striving for victory at Pebble
Beach during a Bing Crosby Pro-Am, hooked his approach shot on the
eighteenth hole into the Pacific. Another golfer might have hurled his club
or turned away in disgust, but Watson watched the flight of his ball from
impact to splashdown, his lips pressed together. “Why didn’t you react?”
Edwards asked afterward. Watson’s reply: “Because that’s my punishment.”
To Watson, the ball in the drink was as instructive as the ball in the hole.
He won five British Opens, but there was a poignant luminosity to the ones
that got away, like the 1984 Open at St. Andrews, where he came to grief
against the old stone wall behind the Road Hole. He won two green jackets,
but he would forever be haunted by his final tee shot at the 1991 Masters,
which darted into the trees on the right and left him without hope. “I don’t
make excuses,” he said. “You make excuses, you’re not fooling anybody.”
There was still life in Watson’s game. In 1996, after nine seasons without a victory, he shot a final-round 70 to edge David Duval at the Memorial Tournament. “I was looking for keys, secrets to perfection, the Holy
Grail,” Watson said, uncertain how to explain his return to form. “Then
finally the lightbulb went on. I ironed out a few basics, and golf became
fun again.” Two years later, at forty-eight, he replaced Ben Hogan as the
oldest player to win the MasterCard Colonial. The span between his first
tournament victory and his last was the third longest in Tour history—
twenty-three years, eleven months, and twenty-four days.
Watson accepted these late triumphs graciously and without hubris. “I
don’t put myself in the class of Nicklaus and Hogan,” he said. “I’m not the
golfer that they were.” Perhaps not, but Watson’s course management skills
rivaled those of Nicklaus, and he was Hoganesque in his practice regimen
and his insistence that a golfer’s private life was not a matter of public interest. For a fair appraisal of Watson, the man, one had to go to his father, to
Nelson, to Thirsk, or to Tatum, the men who had shaped his views on golf
and life.
Tatum was the most voluble, employing his lawyer’s mastery of language
to describe a Watson more nurturing and playful than the one the public
saw. (“Sandy uses words with which I’m not familiar,” Watson said, rework8 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
ing the old Bobby Jones line about Nicklaus. “He loves the game with a
passion, and I love being around people who are like that.”)
We go back to Tatum, then, for the last word on Watson. “I took Tom
on a trip to Ireland one year,” his old friend begins, “because I’d been kidding him about the fact that he had won three British Opens by that time,
but he didn’t have the slightest idea what playing golf in that part of the
world was like.” Tatum wrote ahead, advising the secretary of the Ballybunion Golf Club that Watson would be traveling incognito and didn’t
expect any hoopla. Ballybunion’s members, respecting Watson’s wishes,
shared the secret with only a couple of close friends each. When he and
Tatum arrived, Watson was greeted at the fabled links by two thousand
spectators, some of whom had come from as far away as Belfast: “It was an
absolute madhouse,” Tatum recalls, “and a simply wonderful day.”
At the fourteenth green someone had set up a table with Irish linen,
Waterford crystal, and two large bottles of Irish whiskey. Watson and Tatum
each downed a slug or two before moving to the fifteenth tee, where Watson drank in the view of towering dunes before sizing up his shot to the
emerald green.
“How far is this hole, Tatum?”
“It’s 227 yards, Watson.”
Watson reached into his bag. “Watch me rip a one-iron.”
“And rip a one-iron he did,” Tatum says with an appreciative chuckle.
“Finished about two feet from the hole, an absolutely glorious stroke.”
After Ballybunion the two tourists drove to Dublin to play Portmarnock.
From there they flew to Scotland for a round at quirky little Prestwick and
another round just up the road at Royal Troon, where Watson would soon
win his fourth Open Championship. The trip ended at Royal Dornoch
Golf Club, in the far north of Scotland, where another crowd came to pay
homage to the latest in a distinguished line of Open champions named
Tom. “It was raining, the wind was blowing, huge crowd,” says Tatum.
“Coming up to the eighteenth green, at about a quarter to six, Tom said,
‘Hey, why don’t we send the caddies home and then come back when all
these people are gone and play again?’”
The caddies, delighted to be part of the ruse, made a show of leaving
but returned in an hour. “Now it was just the two of us with our caddies.
We were walking along the third hole, and the wind was really whipping
our rain pants, the rain was sliding off our faces.”
Scotland’s Favorite Son • Tom Watson 9
The champion suddenly stopped. Tatum, looking back, said, “What is
it, Watson?”
And Watson said, “I just want you to know this is more fun than I’ve
ever had in my whole life in golf.”
They played on in the North Sea gale, enjoying that blissful state that
golfers know, where punishment is indistinguishable from reward.
