Slaying the Tiger Read online

  Bubba Golf is an explosive, edge-of-your-seat show that produces triumph and tragedy in almost equal measure. It rises from the unapologetic individuality of its practitioner, and would be impossible for anyone else to duplicate. And while it’s unfathomable that another golfer could even imagine the shot he pulled off at Augusta, much less execute it, it’s equally impossible to imagine Bubba winning his first major in any manner that could be called routine. This is a man who operates at many speeds, but “average” is not one of them.

  “I’ve never had a dream go this far, so I can’t really say it’s a dream come true,” he told the TV cameras at Augusta, showing the sense of poetry and drama that would come to define his public persona. He broke down in tears as he hugged his mother and thought of his son, Caleb, the one-month-old boy he and his wife Angie had adopted two weeks earlier. At age thirty-three, he was a new father and a major champion. He looked to be armed with a new outlook, and it seemed like his career trajectory could only sail higher. He had us in the palm of his hand.

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  The second Bubba is the one that took this affection—you might even call it love—and systematically spoiled it.

  In 2013, Bubba couldn’t find the winning touch. He managed a couple of top-tens, but failed to make the right shots at the critical moment. Coming into the Travelers Championship in late June—on the same course, River Highlands, where he won his first tournament—he was running out of time to capitalize on the momentum from the previous year. The Connecticut course suited him, though, and with just three holes to play on Sunday, he held a one-shot lead on the field.

  On the tee at the 171-yard par-3 16th, he was stymied by the wind and stuck between clubs. He consulted with Ted Scott, who convinced him that he should use a 9-iron instead of the 8-iron. Bubba listened, and whether a fugitive gust of wind rose from nowhere or the club was simply wrong, the ball hit the front of the bank and rolled backward into the water.

  Bubba turned to Scott with a look of indignation. “Water,” he said, biting off his words. “It’s in the water. That club.” The two proceeded to the drop zone, where Bubba took a penalty and hit his third shot over the green. “You’re telling me that’s the yardage?” he asked Scott. He turned away in disgust. Moments later, when he missed his putt for double bogey, he looked back at Scott and whined, “There’s just no reason for me to show up.”

  The CBS cameras caught everything, and the incident became infamous; the video had more than one million views on YouTube before it was removed. On the broadcast, David Feherty summed up the collective reaction: “Now, wait a minute…hey, you hit it, bud!”

  Watson took a triple bogey on the hole, and lost the tournament. Later, when pgatour.com’s Brian Wacker asked him about the exchange with Scott, he blew up.

  “Don’t try to make me look bad,” Bubba said. “You always do. Don’t. Don’t. We’re not talking anymore.”

  The incident painted Bubba in an unflattering light, and it was not an isolated embarrassment. In 2011, he traveled to Europe to play in the French Open near Paris. He missed the cut with back-to-back rounds of 74, but it was his conduct off the course that provided the real fireworks, and led to exchanges like this one:

  Q. I heard you went to Paris yesterday?

  BUBBA WATSON: Yeah, yesterday.

  Q. Did you like—what did you see?

  BUBBA WATSON: I don’t know the names of all the things, the big tower, Eiffel Tower, an arch, whatever that—I rode around in a circle. And then what’s that—it starts with an L, Louvre, something like that. One of those.

  Ignorance is one thing, but Bubba also managed to distinguish himself in France as a temperamental prima donna. He wouldn’t accept any interview requests with foreign outlets, demanded his own courtesy car when someone had the audacity to suggest he share with a European golfer, complained about the lack of ropes keeping the gallery at bay, and howled about the fans with their cameras and phones.

  He was the caricature of an ugly American, and fellow pro Stuart Appleby called him out on Twitter, writing, “I’m not perfect all the time, but it is not acceptable to come to another tour and more than once show a lack of respect.”

  The cherry on top of Bubba’s international diplomacy sundae came when he told reporters that he would probably never return to Europe—except for the British Open, because it was a major.

  So the long-drive outburst at Valhalla was just the latest of Bubba’s greatest hits, and it wasn’t even a surprise. Earlier that week, before any of it happened, Doug Ferguson at the AP had mused that although Bubba was a 33 to 1 shot to win the tournament, he “could get much better odds on annoying someone.”

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  But we haven’t answered the question: Who is he?

  For as much as he craves attention, Bubba Watson is loath to reveal his past. Karen Crouse of The New York Times is one of the few writers to earn unfettered access. In an excellent story called “Growing up Bubba,” she details how his father, Gerry (Bubba’s first name is also Gerry), a Green Beret who served in Vietnam, first took his son to a driving range in the panhandle town of Bagdad, Florida. The boy was six, and it was there that he began playing with a sawed-off 9-iron. Gerry was his only teacher and, according to Bubba, he’s never had a formal lesson.

  Scott Michaux of the Augusta Chronicle unearthed another telling detail—Bubba’s father wanted him to play baseball, but to nobody’s surprise, Bubba was an irritable teammate who expected perfection from everybody else. He would become angry when they failed, and he once yelled at a coach whose son made four errors in a game.

  Golf was a no-brainer: He could rely on, and blame, only himself. (Though, as we’ve seen, he does manage to get creative within those limitations.) His inventive hook-and-slice style developed in part because he spent his days whacking away at Wiffle balls—bending them in every direction—and in part because of the varied terrain and tight fairways of Pensacola golf courses, which demanded creative thinking.

  On the Golf Channel’s interview show Feherty, Bubba opened up about his father’s struggles adjusting to civilian life when he returned from Vietnam. He spoke in his usual clipped style, arms crossed, leaving off pronouns and keeping the narrative tight. Even so, he couldn’t hide his emotion.

  “They lived on Pensacola Beach,” he told Feherty. “It was before beach property was really a thing to have so he was the man around the beach. Went to jail a few times—we just won’t say the number—but been to jail a few times for fighting. Just not knowing how to deal with it, a lot of guys don’t know how to deal with stuff, because that’s what they were trained to do…when I was born my mom said ‘no more.’…so he straightened up and changed and just was a hard worker and just kinda left that life.”

  The more you learn about Bubba, the more you understand that Gerry was the dominant influence in his life. Even Bubba’s emergence as a flamboyant loner came straight from the old man, who wore colorful handkerchiefs to work and inspired his son’s bright clothes and equipment.

  Chris Haack, the future coach at the University of Georgia, was working with the American Junior Golf Association (AJGA) when Bubba first burst onto the junior golf scene, and had a front row seat to one of the most singular players he’d ever come across. “He wore these canary yellow knickers or hot pink shorts,” Haack remembered. “He stood out—he was just kind of the guy who had attention drawn to him, and I think he also liked the attention, and wanted to be recognized.”

  He never changed. In 2011, an AP story by Doug Ferguson listed the ways he sought the spotlight—how he inserted a pink shaft into his driver when he made the PGA Tour, how he always made sure people were watching when he drove on the practice range, and how he campaigned on Twitter to be on the Ellen DeGeneres show. “And then he would try to explain that he only plays golf for the love of the game, not to get any attention,” Ferguson wrote.

  The article came too early to mention Bubba’s purchase of the General Lee car from The Dukes of Hazzard, o
r the various goofy YouTube videos he made with friends, or his 1.3 million Twitter followers, but the idea comes across—Bubba is an attention hound, right down to his driver cover, which is a miniature shirtless Bubba doll in overalls.

  In Michaux’s Augusta Chronicle profile, there’s an old photo of Bubba wearing a typical childhood-era outfit: two-tone golf shoes, long white socks, red knickers made for him by his grandmother, a white-collared shirt with an American flag pattern, and a white Panama-style hat with a blue, star-spangled band.

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  “Everything he hit was a big rope hook,” said Stephen Hamblin, executive director of the AJGA and someone who watched Bubba play from an early age. “He introduced a cut later on, but oh God, he hooked everything.”

  The flair for the dramatic, too, was present in its nascent stages. Hamblin can vividly recall a moment from the 1996 Canon Cup, a co-ed east vs. west junior match play competition held in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, when Bubba was teamed with Shauna Estes (now the head women’s golf coach at Arkansas) in the alternate shot session on the second day of competition.

  “It’s the last match,” Hamblin told me. “Everyone else is done, all the kids are up by the green, and they’re on 18. It’s a par-4 dogleg left, and there’s a creek that runs in front of the green, all the way around the left and all around the back. And the green kinda slopes, kinda right to left into the creek. Pin front left.

  “Shauna’s got this long sweeping downhill putt, going to break a ton. She gets too cute with it, leaves it about eighteen feet short. So Bubba’s got this putt, it’s eighteen feet and it probably breaks six feet. So he’s got his back to the kids, because he’s left-handed, and they’re all over here sitting down on the edge of the green. Everybody—kids, coaches, parents. And if he makes this, they win the match for the east. So he gets over this putt, and the second the putter touches the ball, he turns around, puts his arms up in the air, and walks to his teammates. He’s not even looking at it. He’s not! Everyone’s still watching, and he’s holding his hands up. And the ball goes in!

  “The hair stood up on the back of my neck. And of course, everyone went crazy. I saw that and went, ‘This guy’s a totally different cat.’ I couldn’t believe it, I hadn’t seen anything like it in my life. I went, ‘He can’t be that good. That’s total bullshit.’ Well, he’s that good.”

  —

  Haack may have the best perspective on Bubba, having watched him from childhood to college. But even he can’t explain what contrary spirit sometimes takes hold of the former Bulldog. His theory hinges on the idea that despite Bubba’s attempts at presenting a cavalier face to the world, deep down he feels intense pressure. He still hasn’t fully learned to cope, and when something goes wrong, he succumbs more quickly than others to the natural inclination to blame anybody but himself.

  This defensiveness seems to stem from insecurity. He was always a poor student, which was a constant source of self-doubt, as was his lower-middle-class upbringing and the contrast it presented with the wealthy kids of the junior golf world. Then, too, he must have felt like an oddball for his strange swing—a reckless creation compared to the mechanical precision he saw in others.

  He compensated in different ways. When things went well, he embraced his difference and let it swell his self-image. When things went poorly, he looked for somebody else to blame.

  “I would be willing to bet you that deep down he regrets he did that,” said Haack, of the long-drive contest at Valhalla. “But at that particular moment, there was something there that struck him wrong, and he was just going to do totally the opposite of what everyone wanted him to do.”

  When Bubba came to Athens after a stint in junior college to improve his grades, he found a trailer where he could live cheaply near campus. He played well for Haack his junior season, won a tournament, and was voted a preseason All-American the next year. But if there’s one constant among those who remember Bubba’s childhood, it’s doubt—doubt that he could ever conquer his own attitude, doubt that he could ever thrive even on a college level.

  As if fulfilling those lowered expectations, Bubba had a falling-out with Haack that may have been begun when he went for a par-5 green in two at the NCAA championships against the coach’s orders. That’s only a rumor, but Bubba sat out the next year and watched all five playing teammates, including Erik Compton, become All-Americans.

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  After leaving Georgia without a degree (he would later reconcile with Haack and earn his diploma in 2008), Bubba toiled on the minor tours for years before finally earning his way onto the PGA Tour in 2006. He had proved everyone wrong, and once he made it, he never looked back.

  The one thing he couldn’t do at the PGA level, and had never done on the Nationwide Tour, was win. His nerves, which he had generally overcome against everyone’s predictions, still hindered him when a tournament was on the line. At age thirty-one, he didn’t have a single PGA Tour win to his credit. His attitude on the course soured, and he became so negative that Ted Scott threatened to quit. It was a bold move—Scott had a lot to lose. But the process was becoming miserable for everyone, especially Bubba, and a change was in order.

  Bubba listened. He worked on staying calm and positive, and it paid dividends when he won the Travelers Championship in 2010. He wept then, and spoke about his father, who was suffering from the throat cancer that would take his life less than four months later. He and Scott would put considerable effort into converting Gerry to Christianity in his last days, and though the old Green Beret was resistant, the turning point came when Scott wrote him a letter explaining how much it would mean for Bubba to be able to see his father in heaven.

  He nearly won his first major that August at the PGA Championship after Dustin Johnson grounded his club in a disguised hazard, costing himself a chance at the Wannamaker trophy. Bubba finished in a tie for the lead, but lost in a playoff to Martin Kaymer.

  After two more wins in 2011, he arrived at Augusta National the following April, not knowing that his life was about to change.

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  Even after winning the green jacket, his behavior remained frosty to outsiders. And to Bubba Watson, almost everyone is an outsider. That includes the other Georgia Bulldogs on Tour, five of whom won tournaments in 2014. Their relationship with Bubba is strained to the point of antipathy. When I asked Brian Harman if Bubba was connected to the other Georgia alums, he could only laugh.

  “He’s not, man,” he said, shaking his head. “He’s just not. It’s unfortunate, because we all come from the same Georgia family. At one point, Bubba and Haacker had their differences, they just had a little bit of a falling-out.”

  Harman held out hope for a true reconciliation, but Brendon Todd was less diplomatic. After he won the Byron Nelson in May, a reporter had asked him whether he received any congratulations from Bubba, and his response—Todd is as considerate and unpretentious a person as you’ll find on Tour—was uncharacteristically terse. “No, I’m not close with Bubba,” he said. “I don’t expect to hear from him.”

  “Bubba’s never been friendly with the Georgia players, and none of us really have a good relationship with him,” he told me later. “I don’t know what the reason is. It definitely seems like he has his group out here and he sticks to that group and he doesn’t really socialize with other people.”

  Todd’s early career was filled with heartbreak and doubt, and in his first season, when he struggled and eventually failed to keep his Tour card, he thought it would be helpful to have a high-profile player like Bubba, a fellow Bulldog, as a friend. He was disappointed when he tried to approach and introduce himself, though—the only response was a cold blow-off. It was the same in 2012, after Bubba won the Masters and Todd attempted to congratulate him on the range—nothing doing.

  Todd decided to give him another chance this year. He had just won the Byron Nelson, and he approached Bubba on the range at the Memorial in Ohio. Again, he congratulated him on his season, hoping he might get
a kind word in return.

  “Thanks,” said Bubba, barely looking at Todd as he walked away.

  “I played with him for the first time at the Greenbrier in July for two days,” Todd told me. “He was fine to play with in the sense that we both played our games. I got the sense that he wanted to be buddies, but the feeling I had gotten from the previous five years was so much the opposite. I just couldn’t.” Todd let a small smile creep onto his face. “I was just there to do my work and listen to him complain.”

  Todd may be one of the few Bulldogs who will express his disdain on the record, but it’s a feeling that’s shared, and that comes out in unprotected moments. When, after his best season ever, Georgia alum Chris Kirk failed to make the Ryder Cup as a captain’s pick, his former teammate Kevin Kisner sent a consolation tweet.

  “Don’t worry @ChrisKirk,” it said. “They would probably just pair you with bubba.”

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  Like many of his peers, Todd believes that Bubba hides behind his Christianity without truly putting its tenets into practice. When things get tough for Bubba, retreating to the Bible has become a sort of reflex. At the PGA Championship, when he was asked whether he cared what people thought of him, he was ready with his standard defense.

  “Truthfully, no. Because the way I’m trying to live my life, read the Bible, follow the Bible…no matter what I do, no matter if I win every single tournament, half the world is going to love me and half the world is going to hate me no matter what. You can’t impress everybody and you can’t make everybody happy.”

  It was classic Bubba—reverting to religion, scolding anyone who questioned him, and placing himself above those with the temerity to criticize a man of God. All of which leads to a familiar question: Does he practice what he preaches?