Masters golf: Tom Watson reveals unity chat at Champions Dinner
There are rules to observe at the Masters, including knowing your place, and never run. But as Tom Watson discovered, golf’s civil war is the elephant in the room.
An hour before the ceremonial start to the Masters. I’m front row at the tee box. Clutching a great bagel and terrible coffee. A gentleman strolls over and gives the warmest of handshakes. “Sir, do you please mind waiting under the tree? There’s kind of a pecking order to these things.”
I’m clearly not at the top of it. I stand under Eisenhower Tree and wait for the cue to join the queue. I’d run back to my spot but running is banned, so I walk quicker than Jared Tallent at the London Olympics to get a decent view obstructed only by the broad shoulders of Steve Elkington. I’m tempted to shake his hand and say mate, do you please mind waiting under the tree? There’s kind of a pecking order to these things.
An American guy with a zoom camera and southern twang says he’s seen the last 32 of these things. His eyes are watery. “Gets me every time,” he says. “Allergies? He replies, “Nicklaus.”
Out walks the 88-year-old Gary Player, fit as a fiddle, all things considered, saying something about the ball being harder to place on a tee these days, all things considered, doing a high kick and bunting one up the middle. Then out walks the 84-year-old Jack Nicklaus, who has seen better days, all things considered, and he tells the audience to “watch out left and right,” which isn’t a bad line, all things considered, before doing a little hook in what is likely his last appearance. Then out walks the 74-year-old Tom Watson, saying something about Nicklaus never hitting a hook off the first in his life, which is a bit of a stretch, all things considered, before he hits the longest and straightest drive of the lot.
Nick Faldo is one of the thousands in attendance. He has sideburns and a green jacket. Perhaps if Greg Norman is to be frogmarched out of the joint, Faldo will be assigned the honours. One club member tells another, “Golly, happy Masters!” and that member moves down the line and says, “Golly, happy Masters!” and that member does the same, and on it goes about a dozen times and then golly, the tournament is officially up and running after a two-hour delay on Thursday morning because it’s been bucketing down all night and most of the morning.
“Thank you so much for who you are and what you have done,” an Augusta National member tells Nicklaus, Watson and Player as they settle in for what resembles a fireside chat.
Watson on beating Nicklaus in the 1977 British Open at Turnberry: “Coming off the 18th green, Jack grabbed me around the neck, and it wasn’t a nice soft grab.”
Nicklaus: “I wasn’t trying to break your neck, but I thought about it.
Watson: “He looked at me and said, ‘Tom, I gave you my best shot, but it wasn’t good enough.’ The thing is, he followed up and said, ‘Congratulations, I’m very proud of you.’ At that moment in my career, I had just changed my golf swing so I could have more trust in it. I won a bunch of tournaments. I had a couple of tournaments before the Masters, and then I won another tournament before The Open Championship. I was flying pretty high and learned to trust my golf swing. When Jack said that, coming from the best player in the world, I said to myself, ‘You know, maybe I can play with the big boys. That was a defining moment.”
Watson on golf’s civil war. “We all know golf is fractured with the LIV tour and the PGA tour doing the different things they’re doing. You know, I got up at the Champions Dinner, really a wonderful event. We were sitting down and we were having great stories about Seve Ballesteros and people were laughing and talking. I said to (Augusta National chairman) Mr. (Fred. S.) Ridley, I said, ‘Do you mind if I say something about being here together with everybody?’ He said, ‘Please do.’”
Watson continues: “And I got up and I said – I’m looking around the room and I’m seeing just a wonderful experience everybody is having. They’re jovial. They’re having a great time. They’re laughing. I said, ‘Ain’t it good to be together again?’ And there was kind of a pall from the joviality and it quieted down. And then Ray Floyd got up and it was time to leave. I hope the players themselves took that to say, you know, we have to do something. We all know it’s a difficult situation for professional golf right now.”
Watson adds: “The players really kind of have control, in a sense. What do they want to do? We’ll see where it goes. We don’t have the information or the answers. I don’t think the PGA tour or the LIV tour really have an answer right now. I think in this room, I know the three of us want to get together. We want to get together like we were at that Champions Dinner. Happy. The best players playing against each other. The bottom line – that’s what we want in professional golf and right now, we don’t have it.”
Nicklaus: “The best outcome is the best players play against each other all the time. That’s what I feel about it. And how it’s going, I don’t know. I don’t want to be privy to it. I talked to (PGA Tour commissioner) Jay (Monahan) not very long ago, and I said, ‘Jay, don’t tell me what’s going on because I don’t want to have to lie to the press and people that ask me questions. I said, ‘How are you doing? He said, ‘We’re doing fine.’ I said, ‘Okay. That’s all I want to know.’ If Jay thinks we’re doing fine, we’ll get there, I think we’ll get there. And I certainly hope that happens. The sooner, the better.
Player: “It’s very simple. Anytime in any business whatsoever, not only in the golf business, there’s confrontation, it’s unhealthy. You’ve got to get together and come to a solution. If you cannot, it’s not good. The public don’t like it and we as professionals don’t like it, either. But it’s a big problem because they paid all these guys fortunes to join the LIV Tour. I mean, beyond one’s comprehension … now if these guys come back and play, I really believe the players that are loyal should be compensated in some way or another. Otherwise, there’s going to be dissension.”
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