ALWAYS A CHAMPION
New passion fuels Watson as game passes him by
PEABODY — When eight-time major champion Tom Watson saddles up these days, he’s not putting his golf clubs in his trunk. He’s putting a saddle on his cutting horse.
That’s the 67-year-old Watson’s new passion, one that never will replace golf but has become a competitive substitute for a game that no longer loves him the way he loved it.
For 27 years, Watson played full-time on the PGA Tour. He continued to compete at that level even after joining the Champions Tour in 1999. He won 39 times on the PGA Tour (11th best all-time), was runnerup 32 times and six times was named Player of the Year. To say Tom Watson once dominated his game is to state the obvious.
Eight years ago, at the age of 59, he came within a par on the 18th hole at Turnberry of becoming the oldest man to win a major, but his bogey forced a four-hole playoff with Stewart Cink. Only nine months removed from a hip replacement, Watson’s body and mind could not hold it together any longer, and Cink became, by his own admittance, the least popular Open champion in history.
Everyone watching outside the Cink clan was rooting for Watson. He had not won a PGA Tour event in 11 years, but for three days and 17 holes, it was 1982 again, the year he won the British and U.S. Opens.
Such heroics are behind him now, Watson admitted yesterday with the same firm resignation with which he once defeated the greatest players in the world. Golf remains his first love, a passion that began at the age of 6, but it no longer loves him back. Now it taunts him, whispering occasionally in his ear and then deserting him in a way that has made saddling cutting horses more satisfying.
“It’s the same Tom Watson, but it’s somebody who kind of knows that the game is passing him by,” Watson said when asked how he’ll feel on the first tee at Salem Country Club this afternoon in the opening round of the U.S. Senior Open.
“I don’t hit the ball as far as I used to or with the authority I used to. You know you can’t compete with the players out here when you’re like that.’’
Watson played his last British Open in 2015 at St. Andrews. He missed the cut but when he walked over the Swilcan Bridge, the old stone arch on the 18th fairway that crosses the burn, he took a bow, waved his cap and clapped toward a crowd welcoming him home for the final time.
A year later he played in his 43rd and final Masters, again missing the cut but pleasing a new crowd giving him an equally emotional sendoff. It cannot be easy to face the fading of one’s game but for Watson it’s part of life even though acceptance of defeat has never been his way.
“It’s not my tournament anymore,” he said of the Masters. “It’s not a tournament that I can fairly compete in, and I don’t belong there. I still have visions that I can get it, that I’ll be able to get it back. It’s much like Sandy Tatum’s unrequited love essay he did about showing up and all of a sudden your game that has been with you all these years leaves you for another person.
“And the sad thing about it, or the nasty thing about it, every now and then it shows up on the practice tee, and it tempts you to say, yeah, maybe I still have it. I hope it shows up tomorrow morning on the practice tee.’’
For so long, Watson was a commanding presence on the golf course but age chips away, slowly eroding the gifts that allowed him to win the British five times, the Masters twice and the 1982 U.S. Open, which he considers the most important tournament of the year. It is why he will put a tee in the ground today, even though things have changed.
“The tournament I always wanted to win the most was our national Open,” Watson said. “Same thing on the Senior Tour. It was always the toughest test of golf that we played. We’d complain, we’d bitch, you know, ‘This is too tough.’ But you know what? That’s what I liked about it.
“My dad said, if you win the national Open, you have done something. You have really done something. That’s when I was a kid. I looked up to my dad, and he said, if you win it, the toughest tournament to win, you’ve accomplished something really special. So that’s why.’’
That’s why he’s here. To face the toughest test. Face it even though he knows he cannot win.
For the great competitor there is nothing more difficult to accept. They are winners in part because they refuse to accept the possibility of defeat. When that changes, as it did for Watson sometime after that 2009 loss at Turnberry, what can replace it? How about a cutting horse? “I’ve kind of gone off in a different direction in my life,” Watson said. “I’m learning now to be a horseman and competing in a whole different arena.
“I kind of want to be in that arena right there, learning how to compete against the best in the amateur divisions in the cutting horse show business. That’s my next challenge. I hope someday I can fairly win a buckle, you know. When you win a buckle that means you’ve been somewhere.”
In the world of golf, Tom Watson has been everywhere but he recently got somewhere on the cutting horse circuit, too. The place all professionals desire. He got to the bank. “I won a check in Carthage, Mo., earlier this winter,” Watson said proudly. “Actually, I didn’t know I won a check. I was in a class of six people in the 2,000 limited rider, and I go in to pay my debt. You know, you go and pay your entry fees, and I paid my $400 for the two events I was in, and I see her writing a check out and I said, ‘What’s that?’
“She said, ‘You won a check.’ I said, ‘I did?’ I won $120. I look at that check — man, I’m more proud of this check than winning the World Series of Golf with a $50,000 check in my hand. That was pretty cool.
“It’s something I hope I can get better at. I hope my handicap drops from a 25 to an 18 to a 9, maybe someday I get close to a scratch, but I may be too old for that.”
Tom Watson may be too old for that or for tournament golf the way it used to be but just to say you saw him swing a golf club once is worth a visit to Salem CC because when he walks to that first tee he’ll be the same Tom Watson he always was. A winner, win or lose.