TOUR Insider: Watson's ties to Greenbrier trump schedule

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Many people in Tom Watson's shoes would have requested special dispensation to break their promise. It would have been understandable to ask permission to bail on his commitment to play The Greenbrier Classic in order to pursue the U.S. Senior Open, especially when you consider that Watson has already won the Senior PGA Championship this season.

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But that's not Watson's style. He's a man of his word and he never batted an eye in regards to keeping his pledge to play in The Greenbrier Classic this week. He told Jim Justice, the owner of The Greenbrier Resort and creator of the The Greenbrier Classic, that he would play this week in West Virginia and that's exactly what he's going to do.

"After I won the Senior PGA, Jim called me and said, 'I don't want to put any pressure on you to play. If you want to play the U.S. Senior Open, I know how much it means to you to play in that,'" Watson recalled. "Very simply I said, 'Jim, I made a commitment to you and I'm sticking to it.'"

Justice said, "He was that quick, no hesitation. He said, 'I've already made my decision. I've told you we were going to be at the Greenbrier Classic. We'll be there.' That was it. You get players all the time changing their game for what they think is best and Tom Watson told us he would be here and that was the end of that."

This is a big week in the world of plus-50 golf, the realm in which Watson most commonly competes these days. Other than his annual appearance at the Masters in the spring and the one week each summer when he's scaring the youngsters by contending at the British Open through guile and grit, Watson is a member of the Champions Tour. That's where his contemporaries can be found. And that's where Watson is more at home, in the land devoid of 500-yard par 4s. Watson would have been one of the favorites at the U.S. Senior Open at the Inverness Club, where first prize is $470,000. He will need to grind hard just to make the cut at The Greenbrier, the first non-major PGA TOUR event he's played since the 2007 AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, where he tied for 19th.

Watson has a relationship with The Greenbrier that runs very deep. Sure, there are financial ties involved; Watson is the golf professional emeritus at the resort. But there are intensely deep personal ties that bind him to Justice and the resort. Those turned out to be too strong to overcome, even for a major championship.

Justice and Watson go way back. Justice remembers playing in a junior event against Watson one year. Justice played a great round and signed for a 71 and "this freckle-faced, chunky little thing with me shoots 66." They've played many rounds since.

Watson was a member of the Ryder Cup team that routed the Europeans 17-11 at The Greenbrier in 1979. But Watson's wife was expecting a child and he was summoned home to be with her and wasn't able to compete. It was Justice's father who piloted the small propeller plane back to Kansas City so Watson could be there for the birth of his daughter Meg.

But that was only the beginning of Watson's love for The Greenbrier. He began to bring sponsors to the resort for a few days of friendly golf starting in 1980, something he continues to do. And shortly after Sam Snead died in 2002, Watson was asked to assume the role of golf professional emeritus that Snead had embraced for many years.

"I said I can't fill Sam's shoes, nobody can the way he swung the golf club and the number of stories he had," Watson said. He accepted the position in 2005 and has fulfilled his obligations, which include hosting the two-day Tom Watson Fall Golf Classic each October, with style and grace.

Watson didn't play in the first Greenbrier Classic last summer, opting instead to play in the U.S. Senior Open. He was conflicted about what to do this year, too, until Justice called and asked him to play. From that point there was no question about his decision.

Can Watson compete this week? It certainly adds another layer to the debate between age and youth. Justice believes Watson is a threat because of his course knowledge. He's already taken $50 from a couple of the youngsters in a practice round this week.

"That's a good start," he said. "Hopefully I'll win a lot more from the kids."

Stan Awtrey is a freelance columnist for PGATOUR.COM. His views do not necessarily reflect the views of the PGA TOUR.