SOUTHLAKE, Texas – At 33 and apparently rising, Brian Watts expected the 2000 PGA Tour season to be his best year yet. Signs indicated an upward graph. A dozen Japan Golf Tour victories in 1994-98. That British Open playoff loss to Mark O’Meara at Royal Birkdale and a top-20 world ranking in ’98.
The next year, his first full Tour campaign as a seasoned professional, he ranked 57th in earnings and was one of only a few to make the cut at all four majors and The Players Championship.
Familiar with his new surroundings, he envisioned a trophy and a higher stack of cash. Instead, the new millennium ushered in a dizzying medical ordeal that plummeted Watts into a golf oblivion that still exists today. Beset by one injury after another, mainly involving his hip, back and knee, he hasn’t played competitively for any extended period in five years and hasn’t had a pain-free season since last decade.
His body, despite his having seen about a dozen doctors, deteriorated to the point Watts announced his retirement at the end of 2005.
“I never dreamed I’d have all these problems,” Watts said recently from his six-bedroom dream home in Vaquero, a gated golf community near Dallas.
But at 42, he hasn’t stopped dreaming. In the past couple of years, he happily discovered the root of his health issues, rehabbed and exercised vigorously, fine-tuned his game and in late June began yet another comeback, this time back in Japan.
Playing on a sponsor exemption in his first start anywhere since Japan Golf Tour Q-School last fall, Watts shot 69-75 June 19-20 and missed the cut by a shot at the Mizuno Open. The top four earned berths into next week’s British Open.
So though he won’t return to this year’s Open Championship at Birkdale, site of his most visible moment on the world stage, he is armed with hope. Without Tour status or world ranking points but ready and able to play wherever he can, Watts aims to regain a competitive edge and tackle PGA Tour Q-School this fall from a position of strength, for a change.
“I think I can play my way back to the Tour,” he says. “I’ve played a lot of good solid rounds (in the mid-60s at Vaquero). It can be done. But being 42, I know the odds are small. I don’t know what I have in me. The good thing is the desire to play never left. When I retired, it wasn’t because of lack of desire. It was because I didn’t have the body to do this. The only thing that kept me going was the desire to play.”
Louisiana-based Rob Noel, his swing coach since 1992, has seen Watts as “low as can be.”
Now Noel sees a swing, body and spirit better than they’ve been in at least four years. “The only thing stopping him is getting back in tournament shape,” Noel said. “When you’ve been out of competition for four years, you can be hitting it great at home, but it’s different when the ropes are up. It’s a re-learning experience.”
While 2004 British Open champion Todd Hamilton wonders whether his friend and neighbor enjoys golf “as much as he needs to get back and win on Tour,” Noel sees a driven sort.
“The thing about Brian is, he’s game,” the coach said.
“I think he’s going to make a comeback. He’s relentless and strong-willed. His daily routines show how bad he wants it. Most guys would’ve been done years ago.”
Watts, too, is equipped with something most top players don’t have – the perspective of hitting golf bottom, of having livelihood stolen in his prime. When you have all that promise and your body breaks down and you don’t beat 112th in earnings this decade, you learn lessons. Plenty of them.
“The body is so fragile,” Watts said, beginning the list. “And you can never take anything for granted. You can never walk into a doctor’s office thinking he can fix you. I’ve had quite a few opinions. I learned you have to go to the bottom of the onion (to find the cause). I was so stubborn that I tried to play through the health issues.”
Watts deems himself “very, very blessed” because of a great family and sound investments. The silver lining is he has spent years at home with his wife, Debbye, and their three children, now ages 5-11, and coached hockey, football and soccer. That is, when he wasn’t visiting doctors.
Walking pneumonia and a left hip injury struck in 2000. Surgery in January 2001 fixed a torn labrum. The next year brought two herniated back disks, torn knee cartilage and two hip injuries. By the 2002 Florida Swing, he couldn’t bend over. He got his card back at Q-School but six months later told people he was quitting because of a bulging disk that would limit him to 30 starts from 2003 to ’05.
“That was a miserable, miserable time,” Watts said. “Not knowing what was wrong then was the low point. I still thought I could play golf with a mindset of ‘never say die.’ I’m happy to have answers now.”
At the insistence of fellow Tour player Paul Stankowski, Watts on Jan. 17, 2006, went to see Troy Van Biezen. The acclaimed Dallas-based chiropractor practices Active Release Technique, a soft-tissue treatment that removes scar tissue in muscles to improve range of motion.
Watts also got help from chiropractor Greg Rose at the Titleist Performance Institute. Watts not only started healing his back, hip and knee, but learned the genesis of his wicked spiral.
Van Biezen found that Watts had no stability or range of motion in his left hip.
On one test, Watts rotated his hip only 4 percent, far below the Tour average of 35 percent, Van Biezen said. He is now up to 20 percent thanks to therapy, and also changed his swing, flaring his left foot, to alleviate hip stress.
“He’s ready now,” Van Biezen said. “He’s a different person.”
The doctor told Watts that because his left hip broke down over time and became dysfunctional because of built-up scar tissue and lack of blood flow, the back and knee became overused while compensating. Hence, two herniated disks and the torn knee cartilage.
“I’d guess that 80 percent of golfers with back problems have a hip issue,” Van Biezen said.
Watts started hitting balls in June 2006, played 18 holes that October but then suffered a foot injury. He entered his first tournament in 20 months, the Russian Open, in August 2007 but then his hip went out before the Japan and PGA Tour Q-Schools.
He paid a $4,000 entry fee but played only nine holes at Tour second stage and ended up with more cortisone shots.
A decade ago at Birkdale, people were talking about the golf shots of this Beau Bridges lookalike who had made millions in Japan a few years after winning 1987 NCAA individual and team titles at Oklahoma State.
Then ranked 35th in the world even though he had never finished better than 40th in nine previous majors, Watts said he hit the ball worse than he had in years in his first three Open practice rounds at Birkdale. But he made an adjustment after his caddie noticed his shoulders were closed at address and entered the final round ahead by two strokes.
He got into the playoff when he birdied the 71st hole from 15 feet and made an all-world sand save from 25 yards at the last. Watts took an upright swing and blasted to a foot even though his right leg rested on the bunker slope and the ball sat close to the back lip.
That week, he had watched short-game wizard Seve Ballesteros hit similar bunker shots and took note. And before swinging, he said he had two juxtaposed thoughts: Getting the ball out, one, and the bunker shot then-neighbor Bob Tway holed to beat Greg Norman at the 1986 PGA Championship.
“I knew it was close because of the reaction of the crowd,” Watts said. “It was loud.”
His Open memories, though, remain bittersweet because he lost the four-hole playoff by two strokes. After O’Meara birdied the first extra hole, Watts failed to match from short range. After O’Meara two-putted for par at the second, Watts missed birdie from 15 feet. That part, he said, “hurts bad.”
“It was really neat to play up to my ability on a world stage,” Watts said. “Nobody knew it, but I played a lot of great golf before that. The memories are mostly fond, but it still hurts today because I realize it was right there. When you have the opportunity to do something great, you have to take advantage.”
That 58-degree wedge from the Open now rests in a glass case in his office, he says, so his children can see a symbol of a great day. Their home happens to sit on a street named Wysteria, where the extra-large houses suggest the housewives aren’t too desperate.
In addition to Hamilton, the neighbors go by the names of Drew Bledsoe, Ben Crane, Brandt Jobe and Watts’ childhood sports idol, Terry Bradshaw. It goes without saying why son Jason’s middle name is Bradshaw.
Like Watts, Hamilton and Jobe became multi-multi-yenionaires playing in Japan, where good golf brings more compensation than respect. (Watts earned 139 million yen during a five-victory 1994 season alone, a haul that sounds almost as impressive when converted to $1.4 million.)
Unlike Watts, Hamilton and former Vaquero resident Justin Leonard decorated their places with the coveted symbol of Open glory, the Claret Jug. One subdivision near the DFW Airport, almost three jugs.
While Watts doesn’t have said silver ornament, he does have a dozen trophies representing his Japanese success. But they aren’t displayed on his walls, which tend to feature family photos. Rather, the hardware rests in two boxes in the garage.
“I put them in there when I tried my first comeback,” Watts said. “I didn’t want to dwell on the past. I wanted to start over. Sometimes when you don’t have anything, you fight for it more.”
Jeff Rude is a Golfweek senior writer. To reach him email jrude@golfweek.com.
Related posts
Tags: body, Brian Watts, British Open, desire, golf, HOME, Japan Golf Tour, Open, Open miss SOUTHLAKE, PGA, PGA Tour, Texas
Post in:
KATANA golf,
Luke Donald,
Maruman golf,
mizuno golf,
Nike golf,
The Open,
US Tour,
XXIO golf