Ralph Vacchiano
NFL Reporter
Bubba Watson has already been to the pinnacle of golf. In fact, he’s been there twice. And he’s had his forever moment too, when he won the first of his two Masters championships with a dramatic shot on a sudden-death playoff hole.
When he was in that moment, and even when he put on his second green jacket two years later in 2014, the feeling had to be incomparable. For a professional golfer, there couldn’t have been anything better.
But apparently there is.
“This,” Watson said in an interview with FOX Sports, “is the greatest thing I’ve ever done in golf.”
What the 46-year-old Watson is doing now is something he couldn’t have imagined all those years ago. He is playing in the LIV Golf League, serving as the captain of his own golf team, and having the time of his professional life. He might have won a pair of Masters, along with 10 other PGA Tour events, and was even once the second-ranked player in the world, but he swears none of that is the same as the challenge, excitement and energy he feels now in the second stage of his career.
And as he finished up his preparations to lead his fifth-place team — RangeGoats GC — into the third event of the season (beginning Thursday at 11 p.m. ET on FS1) at the Hong Kong Golf Club, he insisted that despite Americans’ understandable love affair with golf’s treasured major tournaments, team golf is the real future of the sport.
“Two of the biggest events I’ve ever played in are the Ryder Cup and the Presidents Cup, and both are team events. So we know it,” said Watson of interest in team golf. “We might not want to embrace it in the United States yet, but the world sees it. The world’s embracing it. It’s like anything, it takes time to make change and make history.
“I said a couple years ago I didn’t want to be left behind,” he added. “And I think golf is going this direction.”
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