Solitude and a Solitary Master

By Tom Calahan

With no more Open wounds, Tom Watson sets the course

For one who inspires so little romance, Tom Watson has a predilection for the romantic, a trait once associated with golf. "It's a slow game," says the finest golfer in the world, "and it's difficult to get the full meaning of it without taking time. You play along a while against the course, until, eventually, it comes down to the last nine holes, and you go after the other guy, usually just one other guy." Watson almost wishes there were no television then. "Isn't the book always better than the movie?" he wonders. "It's always better to read about it, read somebody like [The New Yorker's] Herbert Warren Wind, if you have any imagination."

Watson has the imagination of a dreamer. "Sure, you play-act on the golf course growing up," he says, "play out your fantasies." In that delightful aside after his U.S. Open victory at Pebble Beach last summer, Watson told how, while a student at nearby Stanford, he had often practiced just the closing holes there, thinking: "All right, you need to play these last two holes one-under to beat Nicklaus in the Open." Watson's dramatic chip-in at 17 last June, which the world thought was miraculously struck, he considered only amazingly timed. "To do it then, "he says. On the record, he had been the best golfer for five years, but crashing at the U.S. Open was also a part of his identity. "Winning it has put my career on a different level." And, of course, Jack Nicklaus was the man he beat.

The golfers' awe of Nicklaus--this prehistoric bear--is so gigantic that on meeting him, many people are surprised that he is under 6 ft. Is this the man who bashes the ball so hard and so high and leaves "bear tracks" in the green to chill Johnny Miller? "Don't disturb the bear," Lee Trevino shuddered, even when Trevino was disturbing him greatly. Watson was the first to come along who really thought he was the equal of Nicklaus, and he is the only one Nicklaus truly came to regard as a peer. Over the past six years, Watson has won twice as many major championships (6 to 3), twice as much money and five P.G.A. Player-of-the-Year awards. But the public is no more disposed to throw over Nicklaus for Watson than it once was to drop Arnold Palmer for Nicklaus. Symmetrically enough, Palmer is 53, Nicklaus 43, Watson 33.

On the four great occasions when Nicklaus and Watson have looked each other in the eye--the 1977 Masters; the British Open that year at Turnberry, Scotland; the 1981 Masters; and last year at Pebble Beach--it has always been Jack who blinked. At Turnberry, their epic confrontation, Nicklaus finished 65-66 with a stouthearted 40-ft. putt spoiled by Watson's 65-65 and a stately seven-iron shot that settled lightly by the last hole. Squeezing Tom's arm--Watson is rather diminutive, 5 ft. 9 in., but the arms are parts off a larger man--Nicklaus told him as they strode away together, "I threw my best at you, and it wasn't good enough."

Of the 1982 U.S. Open, Nicklaus says just as forthrightly, "My year was finished 15 minutes after Tom's shot went in at 17. But I'm over that now." It is a new year. For everyone who plays for something beyond money (maybe only two of them), the year begins this week in Augusta, Ga., at the Masters, resumes at the U.S. Open in June, winds down at the British Open in July, and concludes at the P.G.A. in August.

And though he holds the championships of both the U.S. and Britain, and Nicklaus has no current title, Watson knows, "As long as Nicklaus is still active, I'm going to play second fiddle." Far from minding too much, Watson would take more solitude if he could get it.

Partly because there is no gallery, he is a man who enjoys hunting birds; eating them too. He likes being outside by himself. "There are more drawbacks than pluses to fame," he says. "I think so. They say fame is fleeting. I hope so." One drawback is never being allowed to be alone on a golf course. In Ireland once, he called for a dew sweeper's teetime at Ballybunion Golf Club and asked the pro to keep it quiet. When Watson arrived, 3,000 Irishmen were waiting. "I just miss the beauty of an empty golf course," says Watson, who can rhapsodize about the fragrance of Augusta when the sun goes down, or the sound at Cypress Point when the wind comes up. "I hear people wishing golfers would be more flamboyant, but I don't intend to be," he says, almost flamboyantly. "I don't want people to know a certain private side of myself. They have no business." It is not an appreciation for aesthetics that makes Watson the finest of so many excellent golfers today, maybe a few too many of them towheads. "As Nicklaus says, 'There are better scorers today than ever before.' Not players, scorers," Watson notes. He leaves it to you to mull the distinction. "Nobody on tour today can play like Hogan or Snead," he says, "not even Nicklaus." There is nothing obvious to choose between any two of today's top 100 pros when you line them up at the practice tee, so it must be something inside that distinguishes a man "Something that allows you to deal with the task," Watson agrees, "to live with it. Golf is a negative sport, telling yourself over and over all that can go wrong, then not letting it. Four days is a long while without a release, and at times the pressure is immense. I started learning about pressure competing with my older and younger brother and my father."

Ray Watson, a Kansas City insurance broker and expert golfer, a man with a certain temper, started Tommy out with a sawed-off three wood at age six and had him defending the family honor with it by seven. The Watsons were vacationing in Colorado, and father and son were about to tee off when the starter objected that the child was too little. Pointing to a ditch in the distance, Ray Watson struck a bargain. If Tommy was able to carry the hazard, could he play? It was agreed. Seven is young to feel that kind of pressure, but Tommy played that day.

His father's golfing companions took to calling Tommy "Fly" for "Flytrap Finnegan," the mouthy caddie of the Toonerville Trolley, since young Tom scarcely uttered a word. Stan Thirsk, the Kansas City Country Club pro who would be to Watson what Jack Grout has been to Nicklaus, a lifelong tutor, noticed Tom in a drive, pitch and putt contest at seven. "Usually a kid that age will just haul off and try to slug the ball," Thirsk says, "but already he had a beautiful balance." It was not until five years later that Thirsk took over Watson's schooling, but he remembered. In 1972, after Tom graduated from Stanford with a degree in a field most helpful to a golfer, psychology, Ray Watson and several of his usual playing partners staked Flytrap Finnegan to $18,000 in expense money for a try at the tour. By the last event of the year, Watson had won just enough to repay them. The next season he paid them dividends. Beamed one of the investors, Bob Willits: "Fly is better than General Motors." In the years since, Watson has won as much as $360,000, $460,000, $530,000 a year, almost $3 million in all.

What his father could not show him and Thirsk could never teach him, Watson had to learn himself: how to win. "You learn how to win," he says, "by losing." Byron Nelson helped him survive the lessons. At 24, Watson led the U.S. Open (he prefers National Open, the old name) after three rounds at Winged Foot in Mamaroneck, N.Y., but on Sunday he bogeyed half of the holes and shot 79. His junior-high sweetheart Linda, his wife less than a year then, remembers that as the lowest point. "Wives weren't allowed in the clubhouse," she says. "I was out in the rain, the workmen were tearing down all the signs, and Tom was inside crying to Byron Nelson."

That was the moment when Nelson, 71, who won eleven consecutive tournaments in 1945, appeared at Watson's side almost like a fairy godfather to explain the pressures that visit a man on the verge of winning a major championship. Why did Nelson bother? He found something appealing about Watson. Nelson did not approve of Watson's flailing swing, but he admired his aggressive manner, and says, "I liked his freckle-faced grin."

Two weeks later, Watson won his first professional golf tournament, the Western Open, and publicly declared that he intended to be the greatest golfer in the world. It was at a small awards dinner, and the Kansas City Star's veteran sports editor, Joe McGuff, remembers dropping his fork. "In a game almost based on fear of failure," says McGuff, "he never thought how far he had given himself to fall. He was absolutely sure." Watson laughs at that now. "My father got mad at me that night. Even if you think it,' he said, do you have to say it?'" At the next U.S. Open, in Medinah, Ill., Watson followed record rounds of 67 and 68 with calamitous scores of 78 and 77, convincing everyone but himself that he was a choker.

"Even my friends started to believe it," he says, "but I just didn't believe in the swing I had that week. I think that's different from choking." A swing that repeats itself is a grail the best golfers keep searching for, finding and losing again. Last week he took time off to practice for the Masters; the week before at the Tournament Players Championship, Watson played what he sarcastically calls "skank" golf, searching for a key. When Nicklaus is doing the same, he says: "I'm diddy-bumping the ball around." The birth of Watson's second child in December kept him home in Mission Hills, Kans., a bit more than usual at the start of the year. He has often won a tournament or two by now, but says, "I have no excuses," nor many concerns. "I've hit a few decent shots," he adds with a smile. Another charm of golf is that only the player knows when the shot is as good as the result. "I have to answer only to me out there," he says, "and it's kind of nice that only you really know how you were that day."

Only slightly less than Nicklaus, Watson is moved by history. "I don't know what my place in golf history will be, but I hope to be remembered as a great player, to achieve something lasting." He will not get up at a dinner and declare for the Grand Slam, but, as Nicklaus allowed the thought to drift across his mind in the '70s--the outlandish hope of winning the Masters, both Opens and the P.G.A. in the same year--Watson is still amenable to a good dream. "What are dreams made of?" he asks. "I dreamed of birdieing 17 at Pebble Beach, but I also practiced the same chip shot that week on the slope in back of No. 2 green."

It does not bother him that, before the shot, most people watching may have been hoping he would botch it and Nicklaus would win, because they were thrilled despite themselves when he made it "I'm pleased for you," Nicklaus said. Everyone was.

-- By Tom Calahan This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.