Watson's different approach

A change in attitude helped the troubled American love golf again and he knows there are more important things to get worked up about than a round of golf.

Bubba Watson held the first-round clubhouse lead before Matt Kuchar edged ahead yesterday.

While other players waited out the fog delay on the driving range or putting green on the first day of the US PGA Championship, Bubba Watson played games on his phone and threw things at Rickie Fowler while his good friend was trying to sleep. There are, Watson knows all too well, more important things to get worked up about than a round of golf. Even at a major championship.

After ending the first round one shot behind clubhouse leader Matt Kuchar, Watson choked up talking about the difficult year his family has endured, with his father battling cancer and his wife having a scare of her own. "It's kind of emotional now," Watson said, stopping several times to compose himself. "The first doctor told us the wrong diagnosis [for his wife], but we didn't know that at the time, so it was scary. Why do I want to go hit a golf ball around? So that's where the emotions come from."

It was not all that long ago that Watson had a different outlook on life. A fan favourite for his booming tee shots and pink-shafted driver (his favourite colours are pink and lime green), he missed five consecutive cuts last summer, starting at the British Open. Usually good-natured, he found himself getting angry every time he stepped on the course. Finally, his longtime caddie - and good friend - Ted Scott pulled him aside. Watson needed to take time off, quit, anything to change his attitude. If not, Scott said, Watson could find a new caddie.

"There's nothing outside the ropes that bothers me. But inside the ropes, I was letting everything bother me," Watson said. "When he sat there as a good friend of mine and told me that he was going to quit because of my attitude, you've got to change it." Instead of getting worked up about his game, Watson is having fun with it. The week he won in Hartford, Connecticut, he and wife Angie passed a billboard advertising a water park and talked about how much fun it would be to go there. But what professional athlete blows off practice to play at a water park?

Watson did. A few days later, he had won his first tournament. "The win just showed me that we're on to something, the right thing. Let's have fun with our lives and let's have fun with golf," Watson said. "That whole week, I just never thought about winning." Now Watson puts as big a premium on fun as he does on his game. Since arriving at Whistling Straits on Sunday night, Watson and Fowler have been tossing a football around, playing basketball. They even rode scooters with some of the children in the neighbourhood where Watson is staying.

Of course, if any player could use some off-the-course levity these days, it is Watson. His father is battling cancer and when Watson and his wife were visiting him at Christmas, Angie checked herself into a hospital with a severe headache. "She's a professional athlete who had surgery on knees, shoulder, everywhere possible," Watson said of his wife, a former women's basketball player. "So when she wants to go to the hospital, I know something's wrong."

She wound up only being dehydrated. But doctors told the Watsons that, during the course of their tests, they had found a tumour in Angie's pituitary gland. "Two months went by and we did some more tests - man, this is hard," Watson said, stopping to compose himself. Finally, doctors at Duke University told them Angie did not have cancer. Like many taller women, her pituitary gland was enlarged. When Watson won in Hartford, the emotions of everything he has gone through this last year spilled over. "I do this because I love it," Watson said.

"When I've been angry, my wife has yelled at me a few times and said, 'Why are you angry? This is what you love to do. When you're home, when you're not playing golf, you're playing golf with all the boys back home. So you love to do this. So why not just go have fun and do it'." * AP