When Putting Goes Bad

ON A BRIGHT WINTER DAY with the temperature stuck at around 40 and the ground still heavily patched with snow, Tom Watson stands in the center of a very empty Kansas City Country Club, lofting nine-iron shots at a practice green.

Again and again he taps a ball into position between his feet, hesitates barely an instant, then launches it with a controlled, muscular swing. His sturdy compactness exaggerated by baggy rain pants and two baby-blue sweaters, Watson alternates shots that gently fade from left to right with those that draw in from right to left. In minutes, he has covered the small green, some 125 yards away, with a dazzling rash of white Titleists.

But when Watson grabs his putter and marches to the green, the results aren't as impressive. Although to an inexpert eye there is nothing conspicuously out of sync in his characteristically short, brisk putting stroke, few of his four dozen putts end up in the hole.

To Watson, it's a pattern that has gotten wearisome: first, a beautifully struck approach shot that zeroes in on the flag as if pulled by a magnet. Then a mediocre putt. Golf is basically two games - golf and putting - and among its countless cruelties is that while all the basic shot-making skills can endure to the grave, the crucial little swings on the green that require no exertion at all rarely make it intact to middle age. And although Tom Watson is only 38, with an earnest fair-skinned face that is still boyish, he is in the midst of the struggle with his putting that becomes the theme of almost every great golfing career as it moves even slightly past its prime.

In his 18th year on the Professional Golfers' Association Tour, Watson finds himself at one of the more suspenseful points in his brilliant career. From 1977 through 1984 he dominated the tour as thoroughly as any golfer ever has; during that period he won seven titles in what are considered the major tournaments - the Masters, the United States Open, the British Open and the P.G.A. Championship - and 32 tournaments overall, topping the annual money-winner's list five times.

But then, suddenly, came The Slump - three years in which his putting touch vanished, and he didn't win so much as a J.C. Penney Classic. Now he has embarked on The Comeback. It started last June when he finished second at the U.S. Open, and many feel it was consummated in San Antonio in November, when Watson won the Nabisco Championships, the final tour event of the year.

But while that win put a nominal end to the slump, for Watson, a ferocious self-critic, it has far from proved he's back to what he was three years ago, the world's finest golfer, the man he refers to as "the Watson of old," or occasionally just "Watson." "San Antonio meant a lot," he says. "but all it proved is that I can win one tournament. Watson won't be back until I win three or four more."

TOM WATSON HAS SPENT THE last three years stuck in an intolerable limbo. Although his game has fallen off, nothing is going to convince him he's ready for the semiretirement of legends like Jack Nicklaus and Lee Trevino, golfers who are so unquestionably past their prime that nothing is ever demanded of them, and whose rare victories, like Nicklaus's at the Masters two years ago, evoke such tender nostalgia they become cherished national moments.

Then, too, the mantle of greatness doesn't fit Watson as comfortably as it does Nicklaus; nor can he offer the populist charm of a maverick like Trevino. A passionate athlete who has always been slightly trapped inside himself, Watson has never felt the inclination to offer the public anything but his golf. "If people want comedy," he says, "let them go to Las Vegas and watch Joan Rivers."

Watson's genuinely thorny personality - he once accused another famed golfer, Gary Player, of cheating - separates him as well from the younger generation of touring pros, a generally unflamboyant, noncontroversial bunch cultivated more and more at college golf factories. Watson, a graduate of Stanford, which he attended without an athletic scholarship, is at least as interested in talking about Nicaragua or the Presidential campaigns as the crisis in his golf game. He barks out his often cantankerous views - "Gary Hart is a jerk" - un-self-consciously. Walking the golf course in Kansas City, when a writer mistakes a squirrel's nest for a crow's nest, Watson makes no attempt to conceal his disdain: "You don't spend much time outdoors, do you?"

Even his physique and metabolism are distinct. With his powerful legs and enormous forearms, the 5-foot-9-inch Watson is built more like a welterweight boxer than a golfer. And as he bounds down the fairways, he exudes a far more aggressive energy than most of the competition, who have given the pro game an almost somnambulistic quality in recent years. Watson may have grown up in affluent circumstances, learned his golf at the posh Kansas City Country Club, but he is one of the genuinely tough characters on the P.G.A. tour.

As Stan Thirsk, a golf coach who has known Watson since he was 11, remembers, "Tom was always such a polite little guy, with that impish smile, but as soon as he got you on the golf course, he wanted to beat your brains out." The killer instinct obscured by that gap-toothed country-boy face prompted a high school coach to dub him "Huckleberry Dillinger."

If the last three years have changed Watson, it shows in that he tempers his outward determination with reservations about his game. On the one hand he talks of a career about to be relaunched -"The burners quit in the first stage, and the second-stage burners are, hopefully, about to kick in" -and of wanting to show "that Tom Watson can put the work into his game that's needed to win."

But more frequently, Watson's self-assessments are negative. During the off-season, he sounded more like an athlete still mired in a slump than one who had just fought his way out. And although he has started reasonably well in 1988, with two top-10 finishes in his first five tournaments and more than $60,000 in prize money, to Watson it has just been five more frustrating weeks without a win. At three tournaments in a row, Watson went into the final round with an excellent chance to win, only to turn in a disappointing score on Sunday. "It's been bittersweet," he says.

Watson regrets the effect time has had on various parts of his game. He often harks back to a time when his grip felt more comfortable, his swing was more upright and his left side was stronger. But he is most obsessed with reclaiming his old putting skill. Over the winter, working from films of himself from the 1970s, he attempted to recreate his old grip; he has since given it up. The basement in his Kansas City home is littered with 60 discarded putters. "I used to step over a putt at 60 feet and try to sink it," he says. "Now I don't see the line nearly as well. Before I saw the line like I was looking down a pool cue.

"Golf is a game," he goes on. "It's supposed to be fun. If you shoot 80, well, then see if you can shoot 79. If you hit it sideways, see if you can find it." But then, as if answering himself, he adds, "Of course it's hard to have much confidence if you can't get it in the hole. And as for the putting, I don't know if I will ever get it back."

Even Watson's victory in San Antonio didn't restore his confidence entirely because his putting, the part of his game that had always been his stalwart under pressure, felt shaky coming down the stretch.

"I kept leaving myself three-to-five footers for par every time," he says. "I made them all, but they didn't feel good. It wasn't like the old days. I didn't know they were going in."

IT'S THAT QUEASINESS OVER A PUTT, EVEN more than optical and mechanical problems, that can undo an aging golfer. According to Sam Snead, the most frequent winner in P.G.A. history (as well as the oldest; his last tour victory came when he was 52), deteriorating nerves have eventually caught up with the putting strokes of almost every great player, from Nicklaus to Arnold Palmer to Ben Hogan. And although no one is saying Watson's nerves are shot, or that he has contracted the nervous putting disorder known onomatopoetically as "the yips," it is inevitable, according to Watson's long-time coach, that his nerves aren't quite what they once were.

"When you get to be 38, 39, and you've put yourself under steady pressure all those years," says Thirsk, "there is just no way your nerves are going to be as steady as a man who is 25, 26 or even 35."

Forty-year-old Johnny Miller recently told Gordon S. White Jr. of The New York Times that the only way he could steady himself for his winning putt at Pebble Beach last year was by imagining he was his teenage son. The 75-year-old Snead, who has had to rid himself of the yips four times in his career - most recently by adopting a stance in which he faces the hole, crouches next to the ball and with one hand grips the putter just above the head - says that in its most terrifying terminal stages a golfer loses all control of his putter. "You're ready to putt, and the putter won't move, and then when you're not ready, away it goes."

Jack Nicklaus has also had problems the last few years, but he denies that nerves - or putting, for that matter - have had anything to do with it. "My hitting of the ball is keeping me from winning," says Nicklaus, "not my inability to putt." Older golfers moan about missed putts, he says, because no one wants to admit they can't hit the ball anymore.

But as Watson has gotten older he has been hitting the ball better, not worse; that is, his drives and his approaches to the green have become more consistently accurate. According to statistics kept by the P.G.A., the percentage of greens Watson has reached in the number of strokes prescribed for par has gone up every year since his slump began in late 1984. But because he was sinking fewer putts, this improvement did him little good.

"In the old days I sank so many long putts I didn't have to play particularly well to win," says Watson. "Now I have to be firing on all cylinders."

IT SHOULD BE SAID THAT PUTTING IS an extremely difficult proposition for all golfers, regardless of age. Dropping a putt of any distance into a hole four and one quarter inches in diameter requires a list of calculations and movements so precise that one could get the yips just thinking about them. First, the golfer must "read" the green. That is, he deciphers its contours and slopes in order to gauge the proper "line," or path, for his putt, taking into account how much a putt will "break" after it starts rolling toward the hole. Finding the line can be almost as hard as propelling the ball at exactly the right speed along it, and doing both is at least as hard as hitting against major league pitching. As Watson confirms, over the course of a year, any pro golfer would be more than happy if on his 15-foot putts he could match Wade Boggs's batting average.

Not only is putting the most difficult skill in the game, it's by far the most important. If par for a course is 72 strokes, 36 of those strokes are allotted for putts. Thus a round is evenly divided between putting and all the other skills combined that are needed to move a ball from tee to green. Further, from the standpoint of scoring, sinking a putt is always worth more than hitting a perfect drive or lofting a lovely iron. Every time you sink a putt you save a stroke; for all the brilliance of a drive or an approach, what you earn is a leg up on your next shot, which won't necessarily be worth a thing on the scorecard. Another way of saying this is that putting is important because it comes last. "You can recover from a bad shot," notes Chi Chi Rodriguez, the former P.G.A. player who dominated the senior tour last year. "But you can't recover from a bad putt."

The significance of putting is so enormous it can seem like a flaw in the game. There is something almost unfair about the fact that the outcome of every hole, every round and every tournament is determined not so much by powerful drives or spectacular, long-range shot-making, but by what is really little more than miniature golf without the windmills.

"Putting is not golf," says Rodriguez. "You could have someone who couldn't break a 100 and they could be putt-putt champion of the world." On the other hand, he estimates that this rarified skill at rolling a golf ball is about 60 percent of the game.

Of course, golf is the wrong place to go looking for fairness. Its intrinsic cruelty - the fact that the best shots often go unrewarded and the worst are inconsistently penalized, what Watson calls "the hardships of the game" - has always been at the heart of its morbid fascination. It's why there are so many good golf jokes and why a round of golf can seem every bit as heartbreaking as the rest of the week.

But over the course of a year golf scoring isn't so much unfair as it is unbalanced, placing a huge premium on the short game, and particularly on putting. And if Watson, his entire game solid except for his putter, is now getting burned by this sad skew, bear in mind that for more than a decade no player took better advantage of it.

IT SEEMS AS IF THE MYTHOLOGY OF every great golfer begins when a relative, usually a father or grandfather, places a cut-down golf club in the small hand of a six-year-old boy, where it fits better than anything ever will again. The only difference in Watson's case was that instead of the usual middle iron, Ray Watson initiated his son with a putter. And it came with very simple instructions: Hit the ball into the hole.

Watson would soon be taught the full swing as well, but mastering the putter was his life's first great project. As he wrote in his book, "Getting Up and Down": "Trying to solve the problems of the different speeds of breaking putts became my obsession, and whenever possible I spent all my time on the green."

It was as if Watson had an innate understanding that the golfer's edge lay not in the long swings, but in the short ones. Within a few summers he had extended his short-game rituals to an area just beyond the putting surface where he began teaching himself all the delicate little chips and pitches and bump-and-runs a golfer needs in his repertoire to save par when he misses a green with his approach shot.

Thirsk remembers Watson spending hours placing balls in "the most terrible places he could think of" around the green - at the bottom of deep trampled rough, in the lip of a trap, right up against a tree. And then, like so many kids in their solitary suburban games, he would fantasize that he had to get himself out of that predicament and into the hole using only one chip and one putt to win the Masters or the U.S. Open. "And this wasn't just one afternoon," Thirsk says. "It was day after day."

It's impossible to exaggerate the benefit Watson derived from these elaborate sessions. One reason he was able to dominate the tour was his special talent for saving strokes on these nasty little trouble shots.

"If he hit a drive 200 yards off line, my only thought was, 'Give us a swing,' " says Watson's caddie, Bruce Edwards. "As long as he wasn't stymied, there was a good chance he'd find a way to get it done."

By the time Watson entered his teens he was showing signs of being a prodigy. At 14, he played an exhibition against Arnold Palmer and a year later another one against Nicklaus, who beat him by just two strokes.

But like many well-off kids who happen to be precocious athletes, Watson wasn't encouraged to concentrate exclusively on golf. In addition to being an avid hunter and outdoorsman, he was an all-around schoolboy athlete, putting away his clubs every year from fall to spring to play football and basketball. When he went off to Stanford, it was without any intention of becoming a professional golfer.

Had Watson felt himself to be more successful in college, he would have followed the pattern set by his father: gotten a job in Kansas City and played a lot of serious amateur golf. But in his senior year he made the typically harsh self-evaluation that there was nothing else he could do. "My golf was the only tangible talent I thought I had," he says today. On a hunting trip that winter, he told his father of his plans to turn pro, and Ray Watson put together a six-man syndicate of his golfing and hunting buddies to sponsor his son on tour.

Traveling around the country mainly by car and playing and practicing from "sunup to sundown," Watson was soon showing intimations of greatness. The first came at the World Open in 1973 at Pinehurst, N.C., not long after Linda Rubin, whom he had been dating since high school accepted his third marriage proposal. In the fifth round of the eight-round tournament, Watson shot 6 under par on the last five holes, holing an eight iron for an eagle and then birdieing 15, 16, 17 and 18. "What impressed me was his ability not only to shoot low," says Bruce Edwards, who at the time had only been carrying Watson's bag for a few months, "but the dramatic way he did it. I guess you could say that it was the first letter of the writing on the wall."

The next year Watson got his first win - at the Western Open, outside Chicago - and at a dinner held in Kansas City to celebrate it, the 24-year-old native son was asked what goals he had set for his career. To become the best player in the world, he replied. "After I said that my father pulled me aside," Watson recalls, "and said, 'Son, those aren't public thoughts. Those are private thoughts.' "

Nevertheless, three years later Watson had done it, wresting the title from Nicklaus by beating him down the stretch of both the 1977 Masters and British Open. During the latter, the two were paired for the final two rounds, and in what many consider to have been golf's greatest head-to-head duel, Watson's 65-65 edged Nicklaus's 65-66. The winning margin was the stroke he stole at the 15th hole by sinking a 50-foot putt that began well off the green.

Over the next eight years Watson staked his claim to golfing immortality, averaging four wins a year and in the process becoming the first golfer to win $400,000 and $500,000 in a year. In 1980 when he took six tour events, plus his fourth British Open and a tournament in Japan, he won nearly a third of the tournaments he entered.

But then at the end of 1984, when the 35-year-old Watson might have been expected to have several years left in his prime, his putting stroke departed. As a result, Watson stopped winning tournaments. Simple as that.

TRADITIONALLY, IN GOLF, THE MAJOR tournaments, contested by not just American tour players but the finest golfers in the world, are where greatness is measured. Watson has won eight major titles. Since World War II, only three men have won more, and only Jack Nicklaus, with 18, is realistically beyond surpassing.

"I am motivated by the majors," Watson says. Last year, his overall record in the major tournaments was second-best in the world. He always plays them well, though it is ironic - and certainly frustrating - that he hasn't added to his major victory total since his last British Open title in 1983.

The major tournaments have taken on added significance for Watson because dominating the pro tour, winning week in and week out, is becoming virtually impossible - for anyone. Today's tour is far more competitive than the one on which Watson won five tournaments in a single year a decade ago. The reason is money.

Ten years ago, the total annual purse on the professional golf tour was just over $10 million. This year it's more than $34 million, with top prizes as high as $350,000. That kind of money turns underachievers into workaholics. There are huge fortunes to be made on the tour, and you don't have to reach the very top to do it. Last year's top money winner, Curtis Strange, who earned $925,941, finished first just three times. More than 30 players won at least $300,000, and such widely unknown players as Mark Calcavecchia, Chip Beck and David Frost earned more than half a million. "Everybody knows that in 10 years they can make all the money they'll ever need," Watson says. "And so they are totally committing themselves to the game."

When Watson arrived on the tour, his work habits were almost as legendary as his shot-making. Lee Trevino recalls an occasion when he spotted Watson practicing bunker shots as he was about to tee off, then played his entire round, had a beer, got ready to go and then spotted Watson, still in the bunker.

Now almost every player on the tour spends hours on the practice range and putting green after every round. And the entire field is capable of winning. "When I came out I had to beat only eight or 10 guys each week," Trevino says. "That isn't the case anymore." Robert Wrenn, a young golfer who had barely been surviving, won a tournament last year by shooting 26 under par, a total that missed the all-time P.G.A. scoring record by one stroke.

Today the tour is full of Robert Wrenns, churned out by the dozen from college golf programs. Players at schools such as Oklahoma State University and Brigham Young University practice five or six hours a day all year round and travel to tournaments every month; by the time they reach the pro tour, they're ready to win immediately.

Which is why, more than ever, it is a golfer's performance in the big events, the major tournaments, that testifies most eloquently to his stature. The Masters, annually the first major of the year, begins April 7 in Augusta, Ga. If Tom Watson is going to have to chance to win it for the third time, his putting game will be particularly important. The Augusta National Golf Club, with its huge, slick greens, regularly tests a golfer's nerve with long, wide-breaking putts. "The Masters puts more of a premium on putting than any of the majors," Watson says. "You get some hellacious putts there."