AUGUSTA, Ga. — She walked into the twilight toward Butler Cabin, a holy place in golf. She might not have thought she’d someday walk through the doorway, but her son did.
Mollie Watson saw her boy, Bubba, win the Masters on Sunday night, the backlit pines at his back when he executed perhaps the tournament’s most clutch shot. From the crowd, through the trees, past a television tower and onto the green, a few feet from the hole on No. 10, the second playoff hole. He 2 -putted for the victory against Louis Oosthuizen .
“That’s his game,” Mollie said.
Bubba Watson is that kind of player, and if you think Sunday was interesting, you should hear about what brought him here. What this day meant to the long-haired kid from Florida that Georgia now calls its own; who came to Augusta and pulled off the biggest win in golf.
Approaching the cabin, Mollie turned her head.
“It means everything,” she said.
The call came on a Monday, a few days before the next tournament on the golf calendar. It was bad news.
Bubba and Angie talked about it on their first date: She wouldn’t be able to have kids. Life deals in facts sometimes. He told her that he could live with that. The fact became undeniable after they were married, the years passing and the adoption attempts failing. Bubba’s father, who Mollie says had foreseen great success for his son, died of throat cancer in 2010.
On March 19, there came another rejection. Adoption is complicated, pieces moving here and there, and often it’s the chessboard that collapses.
“Heartbreaking,” Watson said.
One more call. Bubba was going to work in Orlando, Fla., at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, but this was important. So they called an adoption center in California. All or nothing. That’s how Bubba plays things. That was a Tuesday morning. By that evening, the phone was ringing again. Four years had passed since they began the adoption process. This time, there was hope. The woman at the shelter said she might have something. It was a boy.
They named him Caleb.
They used to dream about it, but who could take such a thing seriously? Bubba was a student and golfer at the University of Georgia, and some of the guys would watch the Masters, 95 miles east of Athens, Ga., and think about what it’d be like to slide on that green jacket.
It’d be a long shot for Bubba, and they all knew it. He didn’t believe in nonstop coaching, and he’d never been the type to endure lessons. He learned golf by smacking whiffle balls in his front yard, back home in the Florida panhandle.
“In the house, too,” Mollie Watson said.
Through those years, he just did what felt right, swinging at the ball and saying to heck with hitting it straight. Even now, there’s a natural — or unnatural, if you’re used to watching most pro golfers — bend in his shots.
“Bubba Golf,” he said they call it. “…I just play golf. I attack. I want to hit the incredible shot. Who doesn’t?”
As a college player and a pro, his unsophisticated style somehow found refined results. The Bulldogs won the Southeastern Conference championship in his first year on the team. In 2001, he turned pro and maintained his swashbuckling style. Even his caddie, Chad Reynolds, grew not only to accept Bubba’s style; he developed a confidence in it.
“If you’ve got a swing,” they’d say sometimes, “you’ve got a shot.”
Bubba came to Augusta without Angie and Caleb, who’s a little more than a month old. They stayed back home in Scottsdale, Ariz. That’s a long way to travel with a newborn, and besides, who would’ve expected the weekend to turn out this way? Who would’ve seen it coming even Sunday afternoon?
He started with a bogey, dropping 3 strokes behind co-leaders Peter Hanson and Phil Mickelson. Then on No. 2, his pairing partner, Oosthuizen, nailed the Masters’ fourth-ever albatross — a double eagle, if you’ve never heard of that one — on the par-5 hole. Suddenly it was Oosthuizen in the lead at 10 under, and the field was chasing the South African player who had experience leading major championships; Oosthuizen won the 2010 British Open.
“I just wanted to run over there and give him a high-five,” Bubba said. “The crowd roared forever.”
Phil was fading, Lee Westwood was inconsistent, and Hanson made two critical bogeys that he never recovered from. Meanwhile the kid with the funky swing kept hanging around, the galleries following him and yelling “Go Dawgs!” as he passed. Bubba has become one of golf’s most popular players; at 34, he’s still young, and his affable way and reputation as a big hitter — since 2006, he has been either first or second in driving distance, and this year his tee shots average 316.9 yards — have earned a following.
The galleries, and in particular the Georgia fans, went crazy when Bubba birdied four consecutive holes on the back nine Sunday, tying Oosthuizen at 10 under on the par-3 16th.
“That’s really entertaining to play with him,” Oosthuizen will say later, “to see the shots that he’s taking on and shots that I don’t really see or I would ever hit.”
They each had pars on the final two holes, and when Watson and Oosthuizen walked up the hill at No. 18, the crowd circling the hole cheered for Bubba, and some of them sang the Georgia fight song. They both missed putts, and in the playoff encore, they missed putts again.
That’s when he introduced “Bubba Golf” to the world. Oosthuizen’s tee shot was perfect; Bubba’s sailed into the trees and deep into the gallery. He was dead meat. Or at least he should’ve been.
He and Reynolds approached the ball, and Bubba leaned over.
“If I’ve got a swing,” he recalled saying, “I’ve got a shot.”
Oosthuizen left his second shot short. Bubba couldn’t see the flag from where he stood, rather using the parted gallery as an arrow to the hole. He swung, turning the club over in that crazy way, and hurried forward for a peek. The ball landed on the green, bouncing and rolling to within maybe 10 feet.
Oosthuizen ended up bogeying the hole . Bubba 2-putted for par . When the ball hit the cup, Mollie Watson ran onto the green.
“We didn’t have any words,” Bubba said. “We just cried in each other’s arms.”
Bubba headed toward the press room, his first news conference as a major champion, and Mollie was caught in the crosswinds.
Walking toward Butler Cabin, she said she could barely see what happened at No. 10.
“I don’t see that good from a distance,” she said, but the gallery’s cheers gave it away.
A few minutes later, standing on the stage where last year’s Masters champion, Charl Schwartzel, slid the green jacket onto Watson’s shoulders, Bubba’s eyes looked toward the sky. There was a helicopter circling, and that made Bubba wonder whether there’d be a way to go back home on this night, rather than waiting for Monday’s flight.
“I can’t wait to get back,” he said. “… I haven’t changed a diaper yet.”
As Mollie walked, she seemed dazed but satisfied.
“His daddy always expected this to happen,” she said. “Always told us this would happen.”
But did Bubba? Could even the confident player, unwilling to embrace limitations on and off the course, have envisioned this?
“You know how that goes,” Mollie said as an Augusta National official opened Butler Cabin’s front door. “In your mind, you do.”
