Out of left field - Chat with Bubba Watson

He is afraid of the dark yet loves the limelight. Sometimes he aims right and hits the ball left and sometimes he aims left and hits it right.

His swing is a mass of different movements yet it repeats itself as regularly as a Swiss watch. He was christened Gary yet is known as Bubba. He loves children yet has none of his own. He has won millions of dollars this year alone yet has little idea what is in his bank account. He once bought a Lamborghini and sold it shortly after his wife rode in it for the one and only time. “She didn't like it,” he said simply.

Meet Bubba Watson, as idiosyncratic a man and golfer as there is in the game at present. Few hit a golf ball so far or manoeuvre it as well as he can. This combination of exceptional vision, unusual power, a vivid imagination and very rare hand-eye co-ordination make him to be one of the longest hitters on the US tour and have contributed to his winning three tournaments and playing in the Ryder Cup in the past year, and as a result, to climbing to 11th in the world rankings (as at May 30.) Add to this that he is relentlessly restless, has a child-like enthusiasm, tweets continually and possibly suffers from attention deficit disorder (ADD), and the picture emerges of one of the most unusual men in professional golf.

At Royal St George's this July Watson, 32, will be playing in only his third Open. And if it is easy to guess why he lasted only two rounds at St Andrews last year (he couldn't get his putter going) it is more difficult to work out why he missed the cut at Turnberry in 2009. The answer is, having arrived on the Sunday before the Open, he was immediately quarantined in his hotel room, suspected of having swine ‘flu. He had to stay there until Wednesday afternoon. “Not much time for practice,” he said, smiling wryly.

Not a normal excuse, that, is it? But there is precious little that is normal about Watson, a man who has never had a golf lesson in his life, once won a junior tournament by 42 strokes, doesn't drink or smoke, drives very, very fast cars to the legal speed limits and no faster, has an average clubhead speed of 128mph, a 44 1/2 inch long driver and a registered ball speed of nearly 200 mph (nearly 30 mph faster than the average on the US tour) and is happiest when in the company of children. “He loves his toys,” Amanda Ausink, a member of Watson's management team, said. “He has every one known to man and the biggest child of all is Bubba.”

Watson was born in November 1978 in Bagdad, Florida, “a two-stop light town outside Pensacola,” according to Jens Beck, his manager. He was a hefty baby, weighing in at more than 11 lbs (which is two lbs less than Peter Alliss was at birth). Seeing the size and weight of his son, his father nicknamed him “Bubba” and Bubba he has been known as since. The name on his birth certificate is Gerry, which in the US is pronounced Gary.

“What strikes me about Bubba's character is his integrity,” Angie Watson, his wife, said. “He won't tell even a white lie if he can avoid it. He has a heart the size of Texas. If it wasn't for me poking my nose into our bank account every so often he would have given away our money to children. Kids love him. We were in Seattle recently and it was 36 degrees outside and there was Bubba out there with the kids playing basketball. “He is witty. He makes me laugh. He is fun to hang out with. When he plays tennis he hits a lot of drop shots. He spins the ball all over the place sometimes so the ball bounces back at him. He likes wake surfing, wake boarding. He will go at 70 mph on jet skis. He never ceases to amaze me. We play golf together a lot.

He can hook it three yards or 60 yards. He doesn't get stressed about things. He pays his bills on time. He is impatient with bad drivers. He practises more than he lets on but he is not the sort who will beat 6-irons for 30 minutes.”

Watson's position at the address is unconventional. His feet often point southeast, his body northeast. Then his ball starts out to the northeast before swerving in the air sometimes as much as 30 yards to end on target. He moves his feet during the swing and they slide one towards the other after impact and often end up pointing in a different direction to the one they were pointing at the start of the swing. After Watson's ball has left the clubface, he goes through a quick ritual, bending his body this way and that as if he is trying to influence its flight. He twirls his club and leans to one side or the other. Sometimes he stands, one leg raised, like a stork, for 10 seconds or so.

He moves the ball in the air not just on the occasional stroke but on all strokes and it is this desire to take what other players and instructors see as risks with his swing in order to gain this ball movement that makes them suggest his swing will always be occasionally suspect under pressure.

To Watson, though, hitting the ball the way he does is safe and correct not dangerous and incorrect. “It all comes down to the half inch or so on either side of impact,” Watson said. “For me, if I know I'm coming in and going to hook it this way or cut it the other way, it is easy for me to get into that position. On the golf course I see shapes. I attack the pin if the pin's on the left, cut it in there. If the pin is on the right, draw it in there. To hit a straight shot your body has to be straight on. That is hard for me. There are occasions when I have to hit a straight ball, but it's a harder shot. In fact, it's the hardest shot in golf.

“My timing is good. I hit the ball dead centre of the clubface,” Watson continued. “That helps with power. I am not very strong obviously. I am skinny. (Although once two stone heavier, he has now slimmed down and his 13 stone is spread evenly around his 6ft 3inch frame.) I am not a muscular man. I use my arc to generate clubhead speed and my timing to get my body, my arms and everything in the right position to hit the ball in the dead centre of the clubface. That is what creates the power for me. The fact that I finish off balance doesn't matter. When the club hits the ball I am pretty good. I am on balance. Look at Gary Player. He walks after the ball. Bobby Jones used to pick up his front foot going back and his back foot coming down.

“Growing up I learned to play with plastic balls. Every day for at least 14 years I would hit plastic balls, even in the rain, because I loved it so much. I learned every type of shot possible, high and low hooks, high and low fades. We have big trees in Bagdad so I had to hit it low, over limbs, under limbs. I went around the house the one way so it was a cut for me. I went around the house another way so it was a draw for me.”

Teddy Scott, his caddie, was a professional golfer good enough to record a handful of competitive rounds in the mid- 60s, so is well-placed to assess Watson's shot-making. “Certain people are gifted with remarkable hand-eye co-ordination and Bubba is one of those,” Scott said. “If you play anything with Bubba, even if he has never done it before, he's really good at it. He is not worried how it looks. He is not trying to make his swing seem perfect. He is using hand-eye co-ordination and his talent. Every week he will hit a shot that will make me go ‘Whoa, I can't even comprehend that.' He is a freak.”

“It's an interesting swing, that's for sure,” Denis Pugh said. “Bubba reminds me of Monty who used to say to me ‘Don't watch me when I'm playing badly because I will probably know what I'm doing wrong. Watch me when I'm playing well and note what it is that is good and tell me so I can concentrate on that and try and repeat it'.”

Just as distinctive is the distance Watson hits the ball. He has a 420-yard drive to his credit from when he was playing on the Nationwide Tour. The tour's longest-hitter these past three years, Watson keeps his distance in check, unleashing it rarely. In the first round of this year's Players Championship, he was playing with Luke Donald. On the 18th, facing the water and with a natural tendency to slice, Watson went after his drive, hitting it 30 yards past Donald's. “That's 330,” a spectator gushed admiringly. “That's what the man from SHOTLink [a measuring device] said.” Later Donald noted that Watson needed only a sand-wedge to reach the green on the hole that actually measured 469 yards that day. “He is impressive off the tee,” Donald said. “It must be nice to have a weapon like he does, the ability to hit the ball a long way, and shape it the way he does.”

In the Sony Open on Maui in Hawaii earlier this year, Watson played a shot that Scott says is one of the best he has ever seen. It is already talked as being the PGA Tour's Shot of the Year. “On the 18th, we had 308 yards to the flag on a downslope,” Scott said. “I could maybe have got a 3-iron off the ground, the ground was so steep. There was a right-t- left wind. His driver has a 7.5 degrees of loft and he has to bend it 40 yards to get it round a hazard. We are standing there looking at the shot and you know what? He said to me: ‘You think driver off the deck?' “I did a double-take. I said to him: ‘I have no idea what you're asking me but if you think you can do it then do it because I have seen you hit shots that I didn't think were possible.' He hit it to ten feet and tapped it in for an eagle. People have been talking about it ever since.”

Watson smiled at the memory. “On a scale of 10 it had a degree of difficulty of 9.5, easily,” he said. “With that lie you could easily hit it low and go into the hazard. I had to try and get it into the air somehow. I could see the shot in my head. I could picture it landing short and rolling the way it did but to bring it off was pretty cool. And then to hole the putt – wow!”

In some ways Watson is a typical American golfer, who attended college, went on to university where he was an outstanding golfer and then turned pro and worked his way upwards in the game. But in one area at least he is most untypical. Watson's parents were not well-off. They could not afford to give him membership of a local country club and private lessons.

His father, who had been a Green Beret in the US Special Forces, retired from the military and took a job at a local power plant in Pensacola for 32 years. He left home at six in the morning and got home at six at night. His mother had two jobs. “She had a paper round for which she got up at 3 am and got home at 5 or 5.30 am. She would wake us up, get us ready for school and take us to school. She would go on to her normal job, which was as a credit clerk. She took her lunch break at 2 or 2.30 so she could pick us up from school and then she went back to work for two hours. They were two hard-working people whose kids meant the world to them. When I cry after winning a tournament my tears are for them and what they have provided for me. They showed their love for me and my sister by the hard work they did to provide for us.

“Dad was a military man. He had a real hard exterior and tried to act like he was tougher than he was. He did spank me. But after I was about 7 he would threaten me by saying: ‘Don't ever make me give you a spanking' and I used to start laughing after I realised he was not going to whip me any more. Mom would threaten me with my Dad. ‘Dad's going to give you a whipping when he gets home,' she would say.

“Dad taught me integrity. It means not believing you're any better than anyone else. Don't expect much. Word hard. Don't lie. Don't belittle or bad-mouth people on the way. He said to me: ‘You have two options growing up. You can be a follower or a leader. You don't want to be a follower because then you will be copying everyone else. Whatever you do in life do it your own way.' I play golf my own way. I am a leader. I don't care what everybody else says.”

There was one time though when Watson paid attention to what other people were saying. It came in May 2010 and it changed his life. For all Watson's charm off the course, his appeal to children, his light-hearted, let's have fun attitude when he was not playing golf, there were moments when he got down on himself so badly on the course that he become difficult to be around. “I was poutin', mumblin', talking about how terrible I was at golf,” Watson said. “Outside the golf course I was everybody's friend. I never had a mean bone in my body.

Inside the ropes I was acting like an immature kid. Inside the ropes from when I was about to tee off on number one until I get to walk off number 18 I was miserable. I was mad, thinking I should be in the top-10 in the world, thinking I should be winning. I didn't want to be there. It is a blessing to play the PGA Tour and I knew that but inside the ropes I wasn't thinking that way. I was immature. I had had four years of playing [pro] golf and playing bad golf. Angie noticed it. She was upset with the me who was on the golf course because I wasn't the same person I was off it.”

It came to a head in May 2010 when Scott, tired of Watson's excessiveness, threatened to stop caddying for him. This was no easy task. He and Watson had worked together since September 2006 and, fellow Christians, had become good friends. It took Scott time to work out what to say – and time to summon the nerve to say it. After all, he thought he might be fired. But then one night over dinner just after Watson had failed to qualify for the US Open, he blurted it out and said he was going to quit if Watson did not change his attitude.

“He was overreacting to everything,” Scott said. “He could hit it to ten feet and be mad that it didn't go in the hole. What prompted me to say something was pain. I'd had four weeks in a row that were really, really tough. He was playing well and getting nothing out of it and it was all because he chose to overreact.

When you put that much stress on yourself, you can't play golf. You have to be relaxed, commit yourself to the shot and then detach. If you take those bad vibes to the next shot then it just keeps on building and you can't play golf. That was what I saw. A guy who would start playing well and then self-destruct. “If you don't care about someone you look at them and say ‘What an idiot' but when you care about someone it is painful. It is like watching your son or brother self-destruct. I said to Bubba: ‘I am going to tell you something. I can't let you do this anymore and if you want to keep doing it then I can't work for you because I am miserable. It is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life and I have no idea how you are going to respond but I need to tell you; I have had a couple of caddies come up to me and say you are a maniac and that hurts me because I want to defend you but I can't because you are being a maniac.'

“It could have been the stress of his Dad getting cancer [Watson's father died in October 2010] or spectators who were saying ‘Man, when are you going to win?' Who knows? It was very difficult for me. At night, I was like, man, I hate going to work and I don't want to hate going to work. I wanted to look forward to it, to doing the best I could.”

To his credit Watson accepted what Scott said. “Teddy was right,” Watson said. “It was right for him to kick me in the butt. It took courage. For him to come to me and say that, knowing that he was making great money and that he could have been fired and that great money goes away, that was a big step. Six months later we were on the Ryder Cup team. We'd had a win. Then we were at the highest we had ever been in the world ranking. Now we've had three wins, the Ryder Cup and all these great things.”

Watson settled back in his seat, a smile on his face. There was a contentment in his brown eyes. He had sat still and concentrated hard for 40 minutes and it was a reminder that though it is said that he suffers from ADD he himself is keen to point out that he has not been diagnosed with it. At this moment he looked the very model of a modern golf professional, what with his sunglasses pushed up above his Ping visor, his Richard Mille watch on his right wrist, his FootJoy golf shoes and the Travis Matthews clothes. It was the end of the interview and he looked as though he felt he had given a good account of himself. He had given his best.

Scott, who was not present, would have been proud of him.