Slaying the Tiger Read online

  Later in the summer, I spoke with Stephen Bunn, vice president of the College Golf Fellowship, a group that also collaborates with the PGA Tour Fellowship to run weekly Christian Bible study sessions at each Tour stop—sessions at which Watson is a regular. In the course of a long conversation about his beliefs and his mission in golf—since 1998, Bunn has played a key role in growing the organization, to the point that they now receive over a million dollars per year in donations—I asked if the attendance at the Bible sessions had grown in the past decade. He hesitated a moment.

  “People can be prohibited from coming to something because of who’s there,” he said, speaking carefully. “They’ll know that in that group there are going to be both moral guys and immoral guys, and there’s going to be guys who might have a stench of Christian body odor. I can’t think of one, I’m just saying….”

  Bunn was too diplomatic to mention anyone by name, but it’s hard not to think that one of the players poisoning the well is Watson. There’s an aggression and a sense of superiority to his faith. You can see it in the way he sends Bible verses to friends, or casts them at the media like a fire-and-brimstone preacher in his pulpit. Bubba isn’t just a Christian; Bubba is special. Bubba is the best Christian.

  —

  As you might imagine, my attempts to engage him went poorly. A select few journalists are able to gain his trust with time and persistence, but I was new to the Tour and didn’t have that luxury. As much as Bubba is generally disinclined to speak with established media, he was even less eager to open up to someone he didn’t know.

  Still, I had to try. After laying what I thought was a decent foundation at press conferences in the first half of the year, I made my first one-on-one approach at the Travelers Championship in late June. He had just finished his Wednesday pro-am*2, and I waited inside the roped-off putting green while he made his way down up the hill past the 18th hole, signing autographs for fans. He looked irritated, and when he finished he gave his playing partners a signed ball before issuing a terse goodbye. Free from the crowds, he walked toward me, and already I had the sense that my timing was poor. Unfortunately, I was committed.

  “Bubba,” I began, but the words were barely out of my mouth before he snapped.

  “I can’t talk right now!”

  I had seen this type of reaction before, and I would become more familiar with it as the season wore on—his face flushes, he becomes tense, and he recoils in a defensive posture, as though you’ve just insulted his mother or asked to borrow money. I had been rejected by other golfers so many times that it practically became a pastime, but this was the first time the situation felt truly hostile—like I had cornered a panicked animal. Maybe I should have walked away, but I didn’t.

  “Well,” I continued, ashamed at how meek my voice sounded, “I just wanted to introduce myself.”

  “You’ve done it,” he barked, moving past me. “You’ve introduced yourself.”

  I had an idea, though, something I thought might appeal to his ego, and his sense of his own humble origins.

  “I’m writing a book about the Tour,” I offered, “and I think the story of your childhood and where you came from hasn’t really been told.”

  He flashed me a suspicious look. “You’re writing a book about my childhood?”

  “No, it’s about the PGA Tour,” I tried to clarify, “but you’re a big part of that this year.”

  Thinking we were now in a legitimate conversation, I took two steps toward him on the practice green.

  “We’re practicing now!” he yelled, and then Ted Scott, the man he publicly humiliates once or twice a year, jumped in front of me like a secret service agent shielding the president from a pistol-toting lunatic.

  “We’re practicing!” Scott echoed.

  I trudged away, thoroughly beaten and humiliated.

  I made my second effort two months later, at the WGC-Bridgestone, and that attempt somehow felt even more doomed. Again, I found him on a practice day, and this time I made sure he had finished his work on the putting green before I approached. Again, I got the flushed face and the frantic eyes when I brought up the idea of a short interview.

  “I’m not going to do that,” he yelled, bristling once more with that surprising anger. I wondered if I had murdered a family member of his in a past life. “I’ve got offers to write my own book,” he said. “Why would I give it to you?”

  I considered the logic of this, and found the argument fair—though I wished he could get past the idea that I was writing an entire book about him. I didn’t want a repeat of our last confrontation, and had by this point fulfilled my own sense of obligation—I hadn’t succumbed to cowardice and avoided him completely, as I desperately wanted to do—and so I prepared to leave. Unfortunately, we were going in the same direction.

  “I’m going to do it for myself!” he barked. He must have realized he’d forgotten to mention Christianity or charity, and so he turned back for a parting shot: “And my charities!”

  His agents were no more enthused about a formal interview than their superstar, so I soon gave up the fight. I had to settle for asking him questions at press conferences, which, to his credit, he always answered in interesting ways. There is an undeniable charisma to the man, and there are times when his natural energy and charm shine through. In those moments, you catch yourself liking him—at least until he screws it up again, which is never long in coming.

  Those were the two Bubbas who walked the back nine at Riviera that Sunday in February, dividing the golf world as they sought to end a two-year drought.

  * * *

  Jason Allred and Brian Harman had made an early run as the leaders fell, and they lurked two shots behind Bubba as the back nine began.

  For Allred, whose biggest claim to fame was winning the U.S. Junior Amateur all the way back in 1997, this proximity to an actual tournament was uncharted territory. The skinny journeyman with the toothy smile had earned his place in the tournament through Monday qualifying, and nearly set a Riviera course record with a 64 on Friday. The timing couldn’t have been better for the thirty-three-year-old; with his third child on the way, and a golf career that had been mostly lackluster since he lost his PGA Tour card for the second time in 2008. Outside of Q-School, he hadn’t even played a PGA Tour event since the 2010 U.S. Open, and he needed a good result.

  He also managed to capture the media’s attention with his attitude off the course—gracious, emotional, and brimming with gratitude for this unexpected chance. He gave me the shock of my life on Sunday’s back nine when he actually approached me behind the tee box on no. 11. He remembered me from Saturday’s press conferences, and as I tried to keep my jaw from hitting the dirt, he said hello and shook my hand. I’ve seen some strange things on the golf course, but a golfer approaching a media member during a competitive round is by far the most unnatural. I hesitated before accepting his handshake, sure that I was violating at least thirty Tour protocols.

  It was impossible not to like Allred—he cried in sheer joy after Saturday’s round, and it didn’t surprise me at all when Jill Painter of the New York Daily News wrote about the contrast between him and Bubba:

  Bubba Watson—his friend and playing partner—was angry at his caddie because of an errant shot. Watson loudly exclaimed “Wrong club!” three times and kicked the club….

  [Allred] simply walked down the fairway smiling and chatting up the standard bearer the whole way.

  “Oh yeah, Keith!” Allred said later. “He was great. He was high-fiving me the whole round.”

  Allred played bogey-free golf on Sunday, but couldn’t quite muster the birdies he needed to win. Even so, his third-place finish earned him more money—$386,000—than he had won in his entire career. More important, the great finish spread his story, opened the door to sponsor exemptions, and gave him a fighting chance to earn enough money and FedEx Cup points—as one of the Tour’s non-members—to secure a card for 2015.

  Harman gave it a run, to
o, but he hit the same back nine cold streak, making seven straight pars to end his round. The closest anyone came to challenging Bubba was Dustin Johnson, whose 66 was the second-best round of the day. He finished with par to take the clubhouse lead at -13, and when he threw his ball into the crowd, a fat man dove in front of a kid to make the catch. He stood up and smiled, very proud of himself for just an instant, before a torrent of angry shouts rang down from the hillsides.

  Ahead by a stroke, Bubba had a chance to close it out on the 17th, but came up a few inches shy on a twenty-eight-foot birdie putt. That left him the blind tee shot on 18—realistically, the only thing standing between him and the end of the winless slump that dated back to Augusta. Poised over his ball, he gave a final look up the hill, swung the pink club, and ripped his drive 315 yards—dead straight.

  “Nice shot!” Allred gushed, genuinely happy.

  Bubba barely nodded as he trekked up the hill. With 166 yards left, he hit his approach to 14 feet, and, with his quintessential flair for the dramatic, canned the birdie putt and set off a raucous eruption on the hills. He gave a little jab and soaked it all in. That night, his wife Angie told him he needed a better fist pump, but that was his only mistake. With the final birdie, he had posted a 64 to blow away the field. The drought was over.

  After the presser, as Bubba signed the flags a Tour rep slid in front of him, he talked about shooting 14-under on the weekend.

  “I could’ve pouted,” he said, “but I manned up.”

  “Does that imply you’ve pouted in the past?” someone asked.

  “You gotta pout,” he said, in one of those comic moments of self-awareness that almost redeems him. “We think the world’s going to end.”

  Harman, a fiery competitor who had yet to break through and win on the PGA Tour, still had some leftover anger in the media room. When a reporter asked whether it impressed him that Bubba had won without playing “spectacular,” Harman gave the inquisitor an incredulous look.

  “You don’t watch a lot of golf if you don’t think that was spectacular.”

  —

  When I think of Bubba now, after a year in his orbit, two thoughts return. The first is that despite discovering the nuances and the complexities beneath the surface, my gut instinct remains the same—he’s a hypocrite and a prickly narcissist whose occasional flashes of humanity tend to be self-serving.

  The second thought, though, is that I’m thrilled he plays professional golf, and I hope he sticks around for years. Everything he does, from the sacred to the profane, makes the entire sport more exciting. “Did you see what Bubba did?” are words I heard again and again in 2014, and each time, I knew I was in for a good story.

  Everybody has a quintessential Bubba moment that they never forget, and mine came on Tuesday at the PGA Championship, after his strange performance at the long-drive competition. A few of us caught Bubba by the doorway of the press tent, and the short story he told highlights everything that matters about Bubba—the hypocrisy, the aspiration, the self-righteousness mixed with a total lack of self-awareness, and, yes, the reservoirs of generosity brimming somewhere beneath the surface.

  “Last night I sent Teddy and three other guys a verse,” he told us. “James 1:22. I was doing a little study at the house…and it says, ‘Don’t merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.’ ”

  —

  Looking back, you could divide the 2014 season into four distinct waves. The Jimmy Walker Wave had begun in the autumn and crested with his third win at Pebble Beach. Now it had petered out, and conditions were ripe for something new—a second variation on the theme.

  The man from Bagdad, Florida, was waiting. The Bubba Wave began to form in Phoenix, rose up to full, intimidating height at Riviera, and was now rolling eastward, looking for somewhere to break.

  * * *

  *1 An interesting statement, considering he had removed all Internet browsers from his phone earlier that year because he couldn’t handle reading anything negative about himself.

  *2 Each Wednesday at regular events, the Tour stages a pro-am featuring fifty or so of the best players in that week’s field. Those are the pros. The amateurs are the wealthy business people in the area who want to shell out big bucks to play a round with a “real” golfer. They’ll usually pay around ten thousand dollars for the privilege, but it fluctuates. At the Deutsche Bank in Massachusetts, I overheard a participant tell his friends how he had negotiated the fifteen-thousand-dollar pro-am price down to ten thousand, only to be asked later to donate five thousand dollars to the Tiger Woods Foundation.

  3

  TUCSON, ARIZONA

  Jason Day and the Never-Ending Mountain; The Match Play Championship

  The Tour moved away from dense Los Angeles, to the south and east, across the Colorado River and back into Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. Everywhere you looked, the earth was hard and dry, and only the stony Tortolita Mountains punctuated the endless thorny flatlands. The landscape here is a study in progressive shades of brown, from tan to raw umber, with fleeting glimpses of color from the occasional wildflower. The rattlesnakes are still asleep in February, but it’s easy to imagine them lurking in the crevices around the desert floor—blending in with the cacti and the agave plants that look like upside-down pineapples shoved into the baked soil—waiting for a golfer to take one wrong step….

  What green exists in this barren patch of desert is muted, beaten into drab olive by the relentless sun. The languid spirit of the desert lingers until the moment you step onto a golf course. There, the bright, verdant fairways will trigger a state of ecological shock as you wrangle with the obvious question: Wait a minute…where did they get the water?*1

  On these courses, the sand traps and rough are easy enough to manufacture—just let the desert have its way with the land, as it’s done for centuries. Any spot that doesn’t receive a steady supply of water becomes “waste area”—a dismissive term that ignores the land’s stark beauty. In late winter, the yellow sunflower-like blooms of the brittlebush and the red flowers of the chuparosa serve as a bright contrast to the plants that will draw blood—the saguaro cacti and the beavertail and the jumping cholla.

  This was the end of the West Coast swing, and Marana was hosting its very last Accenture Match Play Championship. It wasn’t a fond farewell—the company was bolting, the players hated the course, and the tournament’s future was a big mystery. A dull sense of duty pervaded: Let’s get this over with, and move on to greener pastures.

  The Match Play Championship had been in Marana at the clumsily named “Golf Club at Dove Mountain” since 2009. At 7,849 yards, the Jack Nicklaus–designed course was the longest in PGA Tour history, but it wasn’t the length that drove the players crazy—it was the greens. The extreme slopes earned harsh critique from the likes of Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, and Geoff Ogilvy, and the course’s response—to make them very slow, in order to take away some of the downhill speed—made the uphill putts unreadable. A total overhaul in 2010 failed to resolve these issues, and the world’s top players began finding excuses to stay home.

  The situation reached a low point in 2014, when Woods, Mickelson, and Adam Scott all dropped out of the field. For a World Golf Championship event, with sixty-four players competing in a single elimination bracket, this was a disaster. A WGC was supposed to attract the strongest field in golf, but the game’s three biggest stars—and the first-, second-, and fourth-ranked golfers in the world—were no-shows. Woods and Mickelson stayed mum, but Scott admitted that if the event had been held at a different course, he’d be more inclined to make the scene. The Tour wouldn’t officially drop the axe on Dove Mountain for several months, but this sealed its fate.

  The format, too, was headed for the scrap heap. The beauty of the single elimination bracket was the pure excitement of the opening rounds. Unlike the NCAA basketball tournament, where no 16-seed has ever beaten a 1-seed, total chaos ruled in the Match Play. As of 2013, 1-seeds had a first-roun
d winning percentage just over 70 percent, and 2-seeds were even lower at 60 percent. Upsets abounded, and the unpredictability made Wednesday (the Match Play is a five-day event) the most exciting opening round on the PGA Tour calendar.

  The problem came in the messy aftermath. While it’s thrilling to see Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy fall to no-names on Wednesday, it can make for some very unexciting weekend action. This is not always true—past finals have included Woods, McIlroy, Henrik Stenson, Ian Poulter, Martin Kaymer, and Hunter Mahan. But a handful of duds had sneaked into the mix, such as 2002’s Kevin Sutherland vs. Scott McCarron battle, or the lackluster duel between Jeff Maggert and Andrew Magee in 1999. The entire tournament was a calculated risk, and a boring weekend made for unhappy TV executives. The best Wednesday in golf, it turns out, isn’t worth the price of the worst Sunday.

  The confluence of events made 2014 the end of an era in three ways—sponsor, venue, and format. Cadillac took over as the title sponsor for 2015, the Match Play moved to TPC Harding Park in San Francisco, and a new round-robin stage grouped the golfers into sixteen groups of four players each, ensuring that even if a marquee star like Rory laid an egg, he’d be guaranteed three rounds before packing his bags when the elimination portion began on Saturday.

  Match play also produces complicated feelings among pros. Some of them, like the savage god of match play himself, Ian Poulter, love the one-on-one competition. Others, like Phil Mickelson, who held a career 23-21-3 singles record in match play and hadn’t played the Accenture event since 2011, tend to underperform. The detractors do have one good point—it can be quite unfair. As McIlroy pointed out before the event began, it’s possible for a player to shoot 65 and still lose, while another might shoot 74 and win. Consistency is less important—a 10 on a hole is no worse than a 4, if your opponent makes 3—and in a single elimination event, the best player isn’t always rewarded. This is no different from the NCAA basketball tournament, or the NFL playoffs, but golfers aren’t used to it, and some of them bristle at the injustice.