tent. “I figured it would take a miracu- lous shot to even get the ball within 10 feet of the hole,” he said. He was then interviewed live by Whitaker, who all but handed Nicklaus the trophy. Before sending the action back to Watson at 17, the typically un- flappable veteran former CBS announc- er, who was in his first-ever appearance on an ABC golf telecast, actually said to Nicklaus, “It’s a pleasure to be in your time.” Both the sentiment and the termi- nology were awkward, but they clearly reflected the sense, now permeating the ABC production staff, that Nicklaus had already won. “We all thought he (Nicklaus) had done it,” admitted Jastrow. “He had won the Open there in ’72, and he had won the amateur there in ’61, and … he had a way of making other people fall away. He did it 18 times in professional majors, and we all thought he had done it. When Whitaker did the interview with him to the left of the 18th hole, it was more or less a winner’s interview.” Throughout his career Watson had modelled himself after Ben Hogan; that is, he’d made a pregame routine of practising the toughest shots that that day’s course could present. If a course had deep bunkers, he’d practice deep bunker shots. Lots of trees meant low
ABC was thinking the same thing. In fact, only a few minutes after Watson missed the green, Terry Jastrow, the producer of ABC Sports Golf, dispatched Jack Whitaker to interview Nicklaus in the scoring tent. Meanwhile, David Fay was watching the tableau unfold before him. “We’re all watching the telecast and we all see where Wat- son’s ball goes,” said Fay. “Jack’s beaming, feeling really good at that point. So Meeks is doing his numbers and stuff, and Jack Whitaker turns to Jack Nicklaus and they’re chatting, and no one is really watching the monitor, except me.” Watson’s ball, which lay in a spot where Chandler Egan had positioned a bunker more than half a century earlier only to be overruled by the strident Pacific winds, had become the focal point of the sports universe. Jastrow, directing the tele- cast for ABC, demanded shots of the lie. The path to the pin and the location of the ball had become a form of true north for photographers and cameramen, who would need to locate the pellet and then assess the best angle from which to film Watson and his next shot. A herd of writers, rules officials and spectators scurried about. As Watson, in his dark blue Fila-logoed sweater, bluish-gray slacks and coffee-coloured spikes, clambered towards the green, Edwards pre-empted the gloomy conclusion at which his boss and much of the world had already arrived. “Hey, let’s see what kind of lie we have,” he said to his crestfallen employer. “We can still get it up and down.” At the moment it must have seemed like the empty en- couragement of a friend, but as the duo drew closer to the lie, Bruce glimpsed the ball. “I could see it,” he said later. “That meant it wasn’t buried completely, which gave us at least a fighting chance.” Suddenly Watson went from thinking “dead” to thinking “life support.” Nicklaus was watching on the ABC monitor in the scoring
SUPER LOOPER Bruce Edwards waited a long time to win a major caddying for Watson.
64 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA
JUNE 2025
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