GOLF’S NEWEST cult hero was born 33 years ago; it’s just he grew up, and reached his potential, on Sunday at Augusta National. Bubba Watson – who defeated Louis Oosthuizen at the second hole of sudden-death to win the US Masters – is very much his own man: he hits a pink driver further than anyone on the planet; tweets verses from the Bible; steadfastly avoids alcohol or tobacco; works incessantly to aid children’s charities, and has a new green jacket in his closet.
On Sunday evening, as the crowds formed a guard-of-honour to herald golf’s newest Major winner from the Butler Cabin up to the practice putting green where Charl Schwartzel formally placed the 42-inch (long) jacket on Watson’s shoulders, there was a sense that a form of deliverance had taken place. Bubba had arrived, and seems destined to be around for a long, long time.
The manner of Watson’s win in a quite remarkable final round, one which featured an albatross – from Oosthuizen, a four-iron from 235 yards on the par five second hole – as well as a couple of holes-in-one was something to behold.
The most iconic shot of the lot was one conjured up in a mind that races at the speed of light on the 10th, the second hole of the play-off, where Watson audaciously hooked a 52-degree wedge through a gap in the trees. Watson had 164 yards to the hole, and used a TV tower as his marker in setting the ball towards it and hooking it 40 yards in the air before it came to rest some 10 feet from the flag. It was a shot that any of the greats would have been proud to call their own.
“I have no idea where he was,” said Oosthuizen, the 2010 British Open champion. “Where I stood from, when the ball came out, it looked like a curveball going to the right. I knew he had to hit a big hook, but an unbelievable shot.”
And, yet, such audacity is what makes Watson stand out from the crowd. His image has been built on his prodigious driving – he has either led or been second on the USPGA Tour’s driving distance stats since joining the tour in 2006 after earning his card through the secondary Nationwide Tour – but he is different in so many ways.
He has never had a lesson. He has never talked to a mental coach. He has never talked to a nutritionist. And he has learned to live with and control his ADHD (Attention Deficit Disorder) without resorting to any medication.
How did it all start for Gerry Lester Watson Jnr, who was given the name Bubba by his father on seeing his newborn 9lb 3oz son all those years ago.
“He looks like a Bubba,” said the dad, a Vietnam veteran whose death in 2010 served to make the golfer more determined than ever to realise his potential.
He started out hitting plastic golf balls into a five-yard dirt circle in his yard and learnt how to curl them at a whim. When he progressed to real balls, it was the same. Why hit them straight when you can have so much fun moving them this way or that? His philosophy was different. In his school days and later, he wore the Plus-Fours associated with the late Payne Stewart. He wore pink socks. He was called Bubba, a kid from the Florida panhandle.
On tour, he played early practice rounds with Tiger Woods who simply loved watching the way Watson could hit shots nobody else could even envisage. On the practice range on Saturday, before the third round, Nick Faldo watched as Bubba used one club – his wedge – to hit a variety of shots from 70 yards up to 176 yards. He hits each and every shot with an excess of movement, with his body and his feet, to make golfing purists cringe.
He is what he is.
And, of course, has been known to put his two feet in it. Last year, at the French Open, Watson refused to share a courtesy car with the Indian golfer SSP Chowrasia and referred to the Eiffel Tower as “that big tower”, the Arc de Triomphe as “the arc I drove round in a circle” and the called the Louvre “something that starts with an L”.
On Sunday, he began the process of making his own iconic status in the game. “I just want to play golf, I’m not ready for fame,” said Watson after his play-off win over Oosthuizen. His own deeds, however, took any chance of that out of his hands. He will have to get used to playing the fame game.
And, of that future, Watson remarked: “Who knows? That’s the best part about history, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know the future. We don’t know anything. Hopefully, I keep crying. Hopefully I have the passion to play golf and keep doing what I’m doing.”
Watson’s final round display – where he shot 68 to Oosthuizen’s 69 for the two of them to finish on 278, 10-under-par – featured a run of four successive birdies on the homeward run as the noise decibel levels around the course grew and grew. “I dream about it, I just never made the putt. I never got this far in my dreams,” responded Watson when asked if he’d ever envisioned winning the green jacket.
And, after hitting his unbelievable approach around the trees on to the green, where Oosthuizen’s bogey left the American with two putts for the win, Watson revealed the missed 12-inch putt by Korea’s IK Kim in the previous week’s LPGA Major, the Kraft Nabisco championship, forced him to take an extra moment to steady himself.
“I hate to say this, but the young lady who missed the putt at the Ladies Major, I thought about it. I wanted to make sure I focused hard because I knew how delicate these situations are and how this may never happen again.”
For the deeply religious Watson, the win on Easter Sunday – which has moved him to fourth in the latest world rankings – marked his arrival as a Major player. “As an athlete, as a golfer, this is the Mecca. This is what we strive for, to put on the green jacket . . . this is an honour.”
