Golf World - May

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BUBBA WATSON
just WHO Is tHE REAL
BuBBA?l
To some, he’s a humble, affable country boy. To others he’s a difficult and
moody cry-baby prone to temper tantrums. John Huggan reports.
It is day three of the 2012 Masters
and Bubba Watson – one day shy
of winning his first Grand Slam
title – is playing with former
Open champion Paul Lawrie. On
the 1st tee Watson aims 40 yards wide of
the right fairway bunker, then hits a huge
Southpaw cut that starts over the trees
and finishes in the middle of the fairway.
“Ridiculous,” is the word going through
Lawrie’s mind.
And there’s more. Having repeated
that shape of shot with every (pinkshafted)
drive, Watson arrives at the par-5
13th, a sweeping right-to-left dog-leg.
“If ever a hole sets up for Bubba to
slide his tee-shot round the corner, it is
that one,” says Lawrie. “But no. Aiming
over the top of the trees on the left,
he hit a massive hook. I looked at
my caddie. Neither of us could
believe it. I would struggle to clear
those trees with a wedge and the ball
teed up. But he blasted a driver way
over the top. It was a joke. Of course,
he then dumped a 9-iron into the
back bunker when he should have
hit wedge. But that’s how he plays.
Bubba goes his own way, with no
obvious rhyme or reason to
anything. When he has an obvious
shot, he does the opposite.”
Still, while it may be possible to
question Watson’s strategy, there
can be little argument that he is
doing something right in the first major
of the season. The man no-one calls
Gerry anymore will arrive at Augusta
National this spring having won two of
the last three Masters. Only seven men –
Horton Smith, Ben Hogan, Arnold
Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Nick Faldo, Tiger
Woods and Phil Mickelson – have
previously been able to make the same
boast. He is keeping illustrious company.
Quintessentially American – born and
raised in the Florida panhandle –
Watson calls himself a “new age
redneck” and owns the original ‘General
Lee’, the orange Dodge Charger car
featured in the television series ‘The
Dukes of Hazzard’. Such an image has
negative as well as endearing
connotations, of course, and Watson
lived down to the insular and ignorant
half of that glib stereotype during a wellcompensated
visit to the 2011
French Open.
After shooting 76-74 at Paris
National to miss the cut,
Watson blamed his abject
performance on a
distracting mixture of
crowd behaviour, ringing
mobile phones and clicking
cameras. Things got even worse
when he dismissed three of
Watson celebrates a putt
dropping... but his demeanour is
not always so amiable.
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the French capital’s
most famous
landmarks as “the big
tower”, “an arch in the
middle of the road” and
“this building that starts with an ‘L’.”
Versailles Palace was similarly denigrated
as “that castle next to where I am
staying”. Needless to say, none of the
above went down well.
Since that blundering nadir, Watson’s
public image has improved, but not
across the board. In favourable press, he
is portrayed as a God-fearing, happy-golucky
family man devoted to his wife and
two adopted children. All of which has
some truth to it. But there is a darker
side to Watson’s eccentric personality.
According to many of his peers, he
would comfortably win any poll
designed to identify the most unpopular
player on the PGA Tour.
“His weakness may also be his
strength,” says one insider. “He gets
criticism from other players because he
moans and groans so much. He abuses
his caddie terribly. But by not taking
responsibility for anything, he passes the
blame for bad shots. Mostly though, he
is massively unpopular on tour because
he is nothing like the image he portrays.
He is seen as a phony. Most people are
disliked for the same sort of reason –
pretending to be something they are not.
He is appealing to the public because he
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May 2015 Golf World 61