Tom Watson has a reputation for being one of golf’s gentlemen, a great upholder of tradition. So when the eight-time major champion says the game has a “growing problem” with mobile phones, it is worth listening to him.
Watson says his fears are twofold. Firstly, he believes phones detract from the experience of watching live sport.
“Look at Augusta,” the American notes, referring to the Masters, where “patrons” must surrender their mobile phones on entry. “The crowds there…you see joy all over their faces. I mean, they’re actually talking to each other. They are present with each other.”
Watson, 76, grabs my phone off the table and holds it up. “I was in a restaurant in Geneva earlier this week, and I’m looking down at a table, all four people are on their cell phones like this [staring down at my screen]. Not speaking with each other at all. You know, this thing right here... it takes away a lot of the joy. You know what I mean? You lose the experience of humanity. And I’m guilty of it too. But Augusta, I really like the atmosphere at Augusta because of no cell phones.”
Watson’s other fear is less obvious, but equally well-made. “We have an issue with betting,” he says. “You can bet on each individual shot [in golf]... and I hate to actually make this public, but what really concerns me is that somebody’s going to be on a cell phone like this, and he’s got the betting app up, and he’s got this guy out here…‘I’m going to bet that he misses this putt.’ And he clicks his $100 bet, and then yells in the guy’s backswing... that’s what concerns me.”
Watson sighs. We are sitting in the Birkdale clubhouse overlooking the 18th green on the first day of this year’s tournament. I ask whether he would support a ban on mobile phones at all the majors and big events such as the Ryder Cup. “Oh, absolutely, absolutely.”
Look back at footage of Watson winning his five Open championships, including his one here at Birkdale in 1983 when he beat Andy Bean and Hale Irwin by a stroke, and you have to say he makes a good point.
The crowds following Watson up the 18th 43 years ago were all right there with him in that moment, cheering, applauding, two policemen in their old-fashioned “bobby hats” on either side of him. Watson recalls the scene like it was yesterday. “I had hit a beautiful power fade off the tee with my Toney Penna Model 1 driver,” he says, smiling. He then had a long wait while Craig Stadler, up ahead, had to get a ruling.
Eventually, Watson was able to hit his second shot, a two-iron, which he hit “dead flush”. Only he did not see his ball land as the crowd, “just like the Red Sea, came back together like this”, he said, clapping his hands.
When Watson finally made it to the green, his caddie Alfie Fyles getting knocked down en route in scenes Watson describes as “mayhem”, he was delighted to find his ball just 15ft from the hole. He had two putts to win. “I told myself ‘Don’t get too frisky with this!’ and I hit a terrible putt, right in the neck of the putter, but it rolled up to within a few inches.”
Watson, who is back at Birkdale in his capacity as a Rolex Testimonee, says the win made up for the disappointment of 1976 when he arrived at the Southport links as the defending Open champion, having claimed his first Claret Jug at Carnoustie 12 months earlier. He began with a triple-bogey and ended up missing the 54-hole cut.
“So many wonderful memories,” he says, rolling his eyes. Watson’s favourite memory of 1976 is seeing a mysterious figure wearing “a bonnet, plus-twos and a jacket” and realising it was the great Bobby Locke, the South African who won the Open four times in the 1940s and 1950s. “I walked over to him and introduced myself,” he says. “And we had a wonderful conversation. I so admired what he had done in the game. I watched him hit a few balls. He hit it solid, right in the square in the club face like this.” Locke would have been 58 by then.
It is remarkable to think that Watson’s career, which also included two Masters wins and a US Open, bridged both Locke’s and Rory McIlroy’s. And he was competitive at both ends. At the age of 59, Watson went within a whisker of winning the 2009 Open at Turnberry, 32 years after his “Duel in the Sun” with Jack Nicklaus. He overshot the 18th green and could not get up and down. He would still be the oldest major winner by almost a decade. Does he have any regrets?
“No, it’s over and done with,” he says. “I scared the kids. They looked up at the big yellow scoreboard and they saw ‘Watson’ up there. They said ‘That’s not a B [for Bubba] after that!’ But yeah, woulda, coulda, shoulda. It would have made a great story. But you know, I really can’t complain too much. Stewart [Cink] didn’t miss a shot in the play-off; he played great.” The deflection is typical of Watson.
We make our way over to the Rolex Suite, which overlooks the parched 18th fairway. Watson, whose fourth wife, Dorothy, is with him, recalls the similarly baking hot weather at Turnberry in 1977. They had the “smallest room at the top of the hotel” with windows that hardly opened. “It was 90 degrees,” he says. “We filled up the bathtub full of water and if we got too hot, we’d go in there, we’d soak in the cool water, and then come out and put the towels on the bed and just lay naked on the bed.”
It was far from luxurious, but you sense Watson would not swap those memories – or the riches on offer to today’s players – for the world.
The American was the first to apologise for the behaviour of the fans at last year’s Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black, describing it as “rude and mean-spirited behaviour” and admitting it made him “ashamed as an American”.
Watson still flinches when Bethpage is brought up, adding that the treatment dished out to Wyndham Clark by his own countrymen at last month’s US Open was similarly “awful”. He says he hopes it is just a minority. Such as the use of mobile phones on the golf course, aggressive heckling is not part of his vocabulary.
“It’s pretty limited,” he says. “There has to be respect. You know, kids see the pros coming off the 18th, taking their caps off, shaking hands, whether the guy just beat his brains out or not. That’s part of the game. And that’s a really good image for professional golf, to show that.”
Rolex is a Patron of the Open and has been the Official Timekeeper of the Open and The R&A since 1981.