Watson's world is turning

Golf Digest, August, 1999

We're in Kansas City, riding with Tom Watson to lunch, when he nods toward Brush Creek, a little stream moving along a manicured gully through the fancy Mission Hills neighborhood.

"See how the creek bottom is paved with concrete? For four, five miles, it's paved," he says.

A creek that's a highway?

"They say Tom Pendergast had a friend in the concrete business. Also, they say there are bodies in the concrete."

Some place, Kansas City.

The haberdasher Harry Truman might have become steel-spined, give- 'em-hell Harry Truman anywhere. He for sure did it in Kansas City, where he sold shirts, collars and hats until Tom Pendergast, the notorious political boss of the heartland, decided Harry ought to run for office for the greater good of Kansas City, Harry Truman and especially Tom Pendergast.

Wyatt Earp drank in Kansas City, Wild Bill Hickok played faro, and dusty cowboys lusted to reach "the rip roarin' Sodom and Gomorrah of the Short Grass." Such tourists kept 147 brothels humming, including the famous mansion of Annie Chambers, who at 90 discovered God and gave her mansion over to missionaries, who, first thing, redecorated.

Today all that's gone. In its place stand art museums, theaters, hospitals and 20th-century cathedrals where football and baseball are worshiped. Patrons of the arts and philanthropists have long since tamed Kansas City, though the poet Carl Sandburg once passed through, gazed upon the work in progress and wrote, "They have made their steel skeletons like themselves-Lean, tumultuous, restless."

So we're in town to visit the lion in his den, Watson in Kansas City, a man lean, tumultuous and, now, restless.

What's happening with Watson happens with most of us sooner or later. Just when we think we know all the answers, life asks new questions. Certainty becomes confusion. Doubt creeps in on little cat feet.

On Sept. 4, Watson turns 50. It's that happy moment when a geezer gets to be a kid again, riding the senior-tour car-ousel, one more chance at the brass ring.

Only, Watson doesn't much care. You hear it in his friends' qualified endorsements. "If Tom dedicates himself . . . " "If Tom is focused . . ." "Tom has to have that same fire he had as a kid, then . . ."

Watson of old is now an old Watson. Vibes once emanated from him with such laser-beam directness that longtime confidant Sandy Tatum, the former president of the U.S. Golf Association, said, "Dammit, Watson, you're practically radioactive-they ought to use you as a cure for cancer."

That was before the last two years, when life turned bewildering. Watson said he quit drinking, simply decided to quit and did it, just like that. Such a melancholy song, sometimes sung by people who couldn't quit at all.

His marriage of 25 years and a hundred storms ended in bitter divorce from his high school sweetheart, Linda Rubin. Caught in the wreckage were their saddened children, Meg, 19, and Michael, 16.

There's a new woman in Watson's life, Hilary Watson, once married to the tour player Denis Watson. After her divorce, she shares with Denis custody of their three children, the oldest 12.

And there is this about his golf game: "Tommy hasn't played worth a damn," said his father, Raymond Watson.

Ray is famously crotchety. So's Tom. Quarrelsomeness may even be a family trait. Tom's great-grandfather, the lawyer I.N. Watson, gained notice in the 1930s by crusading against, and helping put in jail, a mighty Kansas City politician who'd been up to no good for a long time: Tom Pendergast.

Accomplices in mischief

We're at lunch near Kansas City Country Club, where Ray Watson once was the club champion. His son, Tommy, cad-died for him, the little, red-headed, freckle-faced, gap-toothed boy, 8 or 9 years old, soldiering on under the 90-pound weight of a steel-bottom leather bag.

We'll have fun at this lunch, because Tom is here with his father and with Ray's lifelong accomplice in mischief, Bob Willits. Ray is a retired insurance broker who's 80 years old, who goes duck hunting and plays golf despite a foot aching since a stroke three years ago. His 1950s-style, flat-top haircut is so bristly you could hit a 3-wood off it.

The Watsons sit across from one another, digging into the day's special, chicken potpie, when we hear a yelp from Willits, a retired paint-and-varnish salesman who's 81 and who has survived two heart attacks and a stroke of his own.

The yelp comes because Willits has spotted an attractive waitress young enough to be his granddaughter's daughter.

"Look-eee there," he says.

"Urgmm," Ray Watson says, as he often does, his relationship with Willits such that they communicate in language sometimes unfamiliar to strangers. By this clump of consonants, Ray apparently has indicated to Willits that the waitress is young enough to be his granddaughter's daughter, because Willits now says, "Still can look, can't I?"

As the waitress walks away, Willits does an oral trick, which sets off some laughter at the table. So Ray Watson asks, "Now what'd he do? That out-and-in thing?"