Child’s play beats golf for Bubba
IN A plush hotel not far from Royal Birkdale, a select crowd has gathered for breakfast and Bloody Marys as excitement for The Open reaches fever pitch. The audience — which includes footballing royalty and golf aficionados Kenny Dalglish and Alan Hansen — has congregated to spend an hour inside the colourful, unorthodox world of Bubba Watson.
He is here to promote the G/Fore clothing brand he will wear in the coming days but what follows is a candid insight into the highs and lows of his career and the questions he needs to answer about his future.
Watson, a dual winner of the Masters, is not expecting to collect his third major here. This season has been miserable, with seven missed cuts including at Augusta and the US Open.
A positive way of looking at the past six months would be to say there have been three top-10 finishes but when that is put to him, the 38-year-old’s response is revealing and honest.
‘It’s terrible,’ he says. ‘There have been some highlights but what I believe has happened is life. Sometimes you get focused on something and it hurts somewhere else. The whole thing I have focused on this year is family.
‘How do you make your wife feel like she is your princess, your queen? How do you make your kids feel like they are the only thing in the world? My two-year-old is letting me know that she is two years old. She’s sleeping about two hours a night, jumping on her bed, screaming and hollering! My five-year-old son just wants more attention. So do you just keep focusing on golf? Or do you focus on life?’
You wonder how long he will persist with the grind of the tour. He and his wife Angie adopted their son, Caleb, and daughter, Dakota, and golf does not provide the joy they give him.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied when reminded that he once said he would retire after winning 10 PGA titles (he has nine). ‘Do you walk away when you hit your number? Or do you play and keep grinding it out? It just depends on where life takes me. Ask me after the 10th. I’ll probably say, “I’m playing golf forever!”
‘Then a few weeks later I will start missing cuts and I’ll quit. The beauty is I have got status on tour for the next six years. I could quit for three of them and then come back. It’s a hard life!’ Yet it has been a life with rewards and Watson could not leave without recounting his first success at Augusta five years ago, which was made possible by his miraculous hooked wedge from 160 yards that landed 10 feet from the pin to topple Louis Oosthuizen in a play-off.
The story which resonated most, though, was the one that came immediately after. ‘It’s just a green coat,’ said Watson. ‘But, honestly, it’s the best coat you will ever put on. ‘When I won it in 2012, I hid it from everyone. I didn’t let anyone look at it, nobody took a picture of it.
‘I just use to put it on and stare in the mirror! But, seriously, the first thing I did… We adopted Caleb two weeks before. I had only seen him for three days but Angie was unbelievable and she said “Just get out of the house and go to the Masters”. ‘So when I got home and I won, the first thing I did when I got home was wrap Caleb up in it. It’s a moment I’ll treasure forever.’