The people call to Tom Watson, but he knows they call to a much younger man.</p><p> Those were the words I wrote the first time I watched Tom Watson play at the British Open in Scotland. The emotion was overwhelming. &ldquo;Toom!&rdquo; people shouted in their rich Scottish accents, and they followed him like he was visiting royalty, like he was a king from that faraway land called Kansas City.</p><p> &ldquo;He looks old,&rdquo; one friend whispered to another.</p><p> &ldquo;We&rsquo;re all getting older,&rdquo; the other whispered back.</p><p> That was 10 years ago. That&rsquo;s how far we&rsquo;ve come &hellip; it has been 10 years since Tom Watson was seen in Scotland as the gallant old warrior, the walking legend who had won five British Opens, and had beaten Jack Nicklaus at Turnberry, man-to-man, in the greatest golf match that had ever been played. Ten years ago, people around the birthplace of golf understood that a full Watson revival was too much to hope for &mdash; as the day lengthens the cold strengthens, they like to say over there &mdash; no, they were content to just see the grand old man make a couple of great shots, sink a putt, chip one in, remind them for a fleeting moment of days gone by.</p><p> &ldquo;Toom!&rdquo; they yelled.</p><p> So, what words can describe what&rsquo;s happening now &mdash; 10 years later? Tom Watson is almost 60. He had hip replacement surgery less than a year ago. He had played in only five Champions Tour events, and he had not finished in the top three in any of them. He shot an 83 on a Friday at this year&rsquo;s Masters and talked, quite seriously, about not being able to compete on a big golf course. &ldquo;I played like Sam Sausage,&rdquo; he said.</p><p> So what words can describe what&rsquo;s happening now? Tom Watson at age 59 leads the British Open (along with someone named Steve Marino). More. Tom Watson leads the British Open at Turnberry, the same place where he beat Nicklaus in that famed Duel in the Sun way back in 1977 (almost three full years before that someone named Steve Marino was born). More, Toom leads the British Open while Tiger Woods &mdash; <em>the</em> Tiger Woods &mdash; goes home after missing the cut.</p><p> It is all so impossible, so ridiculous, so mind-numbing that there is nothing even in the great and often stunning history of this game that compares. </p><p> Nicklaus winning his sixth Masters? Remarkable &hellip; but he was 46 (not 59) and Augusta National was made for his game. </p><p> Ben Hogan winning the U.S. Open at Merion barely 16 months after a near-fatal car accident? Remarkable &hellip; but he was still a relatively young man (38 years old) and was actually at the peak of his golf powers. </p><p> A 20-year-old Francis Ouimet beating the incomparable Harry Vardon at the 1913 U.S. Open? Remarkable &hellip; but how can you compare that or anything else to an almost-60-year-old man on an artificial hip leading the British Open on the golf course that he made famous when he was a young man? This is Bobby Thomson hitting <em>another</em> pennant-clinching home run 32 years after the first. This is Michael Jordan making another championship-winning shot when he&rsquo;s 59 years old. This is Lance Armstrong winning another Tour de France &mdash; in the year 2031.</p><p> This is &hellip; well, it&rsquo;s unbelievable, that&rsquo;s all.</p><p> Funny thing: Watson always believed he had something supernatural like this in him. He always believed that &mdash; even as he got older, even as he found that golf courses overpowered him, even as his putter betrayed him and every part of his body hurt &mdash; even then, he would have one weekend when things went right, when his swing clicked, when a few long putts dropped. And then he would make magic. He did it for one round at the U.S. Open in 2003 up in Olympia Fields, Ill. &hellip; but only one round. Then, the clock struck 12.