Even after winning the green jacket, his behavior remained frosty to outsiders. And to Bubba Watson, almost everyone is an outsider. That includes the other Georgia Bulldogs on Tour, five of whom won tournaments in 2014. Their relationship with Bubba is strained to the point of antipathy. When I asked Brian Harman if Bubba was connected to the other Georgia alums, he could only laugh.
“He’s not, man,” he said, shaking his head. “He’s just not. It’s unfortunate, because we all come from the same Georgia family. At one point, Bubba and Haacker had their differences, they just had a little bit of a falling-out.”
Harman held out hope for a true reconciliation, but Brendon Todd was less diplomatic. After he won the Byron Nelson in May, a reporter had asked him whether he received any congratulations from Bubba, and his response—Todd is as considerate and unpretentious a person as you’ll find on Tour—was uncharacteristically terse. “No, I’m not close with Bubba,” he said. “I don’t expect to hear from him.”
“Bubba’s never been friendly with the Georgia players, and none of us really have a good relationship with him,” he told me later. “I don’t know what the reason is. It definitely seems like he has his group out here and he sticks to that group and he doesn’t really socialize with other people.”