The Guy Sure Looks Like Tom Watson

Once upon a time there was this young golf player who looked as if he had just arrived by raft from the Mississippi River. He had this red hair and freckled face and a gap-toothed smile that made him look as if he had just stepped out of the pages of Mark Twain. He looked out of place with shoes on. You wanted to sift his pockets for live lizards or balls of string and ask him where he put his fishing pole. You wanted to ask him if his name was “Huckleberry.”

His name, of course, was Tom --but Watson, not Sawyer. All he lacked was Becky Thatcher.

But “The Adventures Of Tom Watson” became an American classic of its own sort.

This barefoot boy from Stanford University played a game they never heard of in Mark Twain lore--golf.

He played it about as well as it could be played. He had this violent, thrashing swing that seemed to create its own wind currents. He seemed to spin for five minutes after he hit the ball and he slashed at it so hard he seemed to recoil like a man who has just fired a heavy cannon.

He rushed into a vacuum in the great game. The Arnold Palmers and the Sam Sneads were just beginning to disappear, and this Tom Watson seemed to be cut from their same cloth.

He went after golf courses like a guy charging a machine-gun nest. He had a take-no-prisoners attitude. His club quivered for five minutes after he hit a ball.

At first, he had the usual talented over-eager rookie problem. He either made a 2--or a 12. He was either in the cup or in the water.

He had a touch around the greens that bordered on the obscene. He could apparently stop a golf ball rolling down a flight of marble stairs and he could make his irons do anything Gregory Hines could do.

Legends grew around him. They told of the time when he was 15 and Arnold Palmer came through town and this little red-headed kid reared back and hit the ball 20 yards past him. He almost won the first U.S. Open he was in--or at least he was leading after three rounds. Then he soared to a 79.

But the golf world figured he would win plenty of Opens. And he did. British Opens--five of them. He won Masters and he won 30 other tournaments and, in 1982, he finally won a U.S. Open, snatching it from the bag of Jack Nicklaus on the world’s toughest Open track, Pebble Beach.

It was, everyone assured themselves, the first of many.

Then, a strange thing happened. This player disappeared. Vanished, without a trace.

In his place, someone had the nerve to use his name and his qualifications on tour.

It was a clumsy forgery. It was as if an Arnold Palmer look-a-like had showed up using a 4-iron where a 3-wood was called for.

What someone should have done was drop four balls in a semi-circle around a hole 20 feet away and challenged the impostor to put them in. If he missed one, he was a fake.

Rich Little would have been ashamed of the impersonation. The best guess was, the real Watson was a prisoner in a locker room somewhere. This one couldn’t putt, couldn’t chip, couldn’t hit a fairway, make a cut, never mind win a tournament. They didn’t know whether to give him strokes or call the cops. They didn’t know whether he was sick or phony.

He hit bottom this year when he was in 12 tournaments and ended up 56th on the money list. He missed three of the last four cuts. The tour was ready to arrest him for vagrancy and when he came to this 87th U.S. Open at Olympic this week, most people thought he was cluttering up the field. When you said “Watson” in connection with a tournament, you meant Denis. Tom would need strokes. He was playing to a “4” on the tour. He wasn’t supposed to be a factor.

Golf is this kind of a game: Just when it begins to look easy, it drifts out of reach--like a coquettish female. It usually strikes just when the player begins to get complacent. It’s an invisible barrier the player crashes against.

Some never pick themselves up and the truck collects them and deposits them in a club-cleaning job some place in Ohio.

That’s what they thought had happened to Tom Watson. He had found out how tough the game was. He was like a mountain climber who suddenly looks down, the deep-sea diver who notices the sharks for the first time.

In the days when he was winning 20 tournaments in three years, a hallmark of Tom Watson’s game was tenacity, an almost irrational belief in his own invincibility.

He never lost that. Whatever other qualities this Watson lacked, the sure optimism the next shot would be an ace, the next hole a birdie never left him.

On Saturday afternoon at the Open, the field ventured out on the no-man’s land that is Olympic’s 18 holes looking like 70 guys who have been asked to break up the Mafia, swim to Iceland, fight Dempsey in a closet.

No one attacked. They were busy trying to defend themselves. They were hoping the course wouldn’t notice them. A kid, playing an unpressured early-morning round had steered it around in 64 before the course was fully awake and it looked as if he were going to get the Open lead all to himself by default.

But, Keith Clearwater probably never heard of the real Tom Watson. The Watson who disappeared without a trace three years ago, the Watson who played with the confidence of a guy who knows the next card is going to be an ace.

Only that Watson could have kept the course--and Clearwater--at bay Saturday.

The Watson who rifled mid-irons to guarded greens, the Watson who rolled in putts through three breaks and a foot of spike marks, was the real article at last.

If he shows up today, the field will be playing for second place just as in the old days.

If he disappears again, he may never be heard from again and the game may have to settle for the bad copy it’s had to put up with for the five years now since he won his only Open and the three years since he’s won anything. He’s got a one-shot lead. For the real Tom Watson, that would be about three more than he would need.