Jim McCabe: Tom Watson’s admirable legacy

If Arnold Palmer romanticised the American pilgrimage to the Open Championship and Jack Nicklaus cemented its competitive importance, Tom Watson humanised it.

He said it was okay to concede our American ignorance about links, that it was not a sign of weakness to say that we didn’t like what we didn’t know. But so, too, did Watson teach us that it didn’t have to be at first sight, that love could come, with patience, understanding, and admiration.

It had to be a give-and-take relationship, however. You had to give up your biases. You had to take time to study.

“I didn’t like links when I first came over,” Watson said, and that sentiment is easy to understand. He’s a true mid-westerner, having grown up in Kansas thousand of miles from the nearest ocean. Even when he matriculated at Stanford, golf in that West Coast landscape was of the parkland variety, trees to the right, trees to the left, thick rough where the fairways stopped.

Carnoustie in 1975 was his first go-round with the Open Championship and while the young star on the American PGA Tour — then 25 and in his fourth years as a pro — won in a play-off over Aussie Jack Newton, the style of golf didn’t enamour him.

“Didn’t like the uncertainty of it, didn’t like the look of the bounce, just didn’t like it,” Watson said. “I played the ball through the air.” That he grew to be among the most ardent supporters of links is a fascinating part of the Watson legacy, for he insists that even in 1977, when he won his second Claret Jug, or 1978, when he played for first time at the Old Course, he didn’t get this bouncy stuff. Then, it clicked; golf demands a great skill set and links, Watson told himself, challenges that skill set in a most creative and invigorating way.

“Up to then, I fought it,” he said.

When he accepted it and opened his arms and his mind to the challenge, it was if he were reborn. No longer was he just an American golfer; he was a links hero and a man of the Scottish citizenry, much like the great Peter Thomson of Australia. In many ways, perhaps owed to four of his five Open wins — only Harry Vardon, with six, has won more — coming on Scottish soil (Carnoustie, Turnberry, Muirfield, Troon), Watson was more beloved here than in his native United States.

Not that the American public rejected him. Far from it. It’s just that Watson came in after Palmer and Nicklaus and just as the game was becoming more global and spawning easy-to-like stars such as Greg Norman. There wasn’t enough room for unyielding love, but America extended to Watson admiration and respect and in a strange way, we probably became embarrassed to see how the Scots revered him, as if that was proof of our blindness.

We should have appreciated him more.

As it should have been, the 144th Open Championship and the Old Course was the stage for Watson’s 38th and final Open Championship, his run stretching back to Carnoustie 1975 with only three breaks (1996, 2004, 2007). It was probably owed more pomp and circumstance, rather than a weather-induced 4.50pm tee time yesterday that put the 65-year-old on the inward nine in a cold, raw, dusk.

The race against time had been conceded for months. “When you get to that position in your career (where you just hope to make the cut), then it’s really time to hang them up,” he said.

But the race against daylight? It was only the small, final piece to a large and flavourful picture, the exact time of his walk over the Swilcan Bridge a mere detail. It would be emotional, no doubt, but the chance to say farewell and thank is of the moment; the duty to appreciate and admire is forever.