Outwardly, he is the picture of confidence. From the smooth swing that should seemingly come from a man 20 years younger to the easy smile that turns strangers into instant friends, Bruce Fleisher looks the part of the Senior PGA Tour's Big Man On Campus.
Fleisher is certainly a big shot these days, given the 14 tournaments he has won and the more than $8 million in prize money he has earned in a little more than three years on the Senior PGA Tour. But it is often a facade for the defending U.S. Senior Open champion.
In fact, when Fleisher survived a heated final round in last year's Open at Salem Country Club to win by one stroke over Gil Morgan and Isao Aoki, three decades of self-doubt finally began to crumble away. It literally brought Fleisher to tears.
"I just know that everybody's makeup is a little different," said Fleisher, 53, who will try to defend the most significant title of his career in this week's U.S. Senior Open at Caves Valley Golf Club in Owings Mills. "I know what I fight. I fight my self-image. To win that tournament got the monkey off my back."
It had been there since the early 1970s, when Fleisher failed to back up his victory as a 19-year-old in the 1968 U.S. Amateur during his first few years on the PGA Tour. The opportunities for victory were certainly there, but each time they seemed to evaporate.
The tournament that gnawed at Fleisher most was the 1974 Quad Cities Open, where he led by a stroke going into the final hole. He lipped out a 50-foot putt for birdie, then did the same on a five-footer for par. Dave Stockton shot 64 and won by a stroke.
"If I don't three-putt, if I win that tournament, that might have changed my life," said Fleisher. "I thought that hurt my career. I ended up getting $12,500, and I thought I was on top of the world. But I didn't have much success after that. I kind of existed out there."
Self-imposed pressure
The pressure Fleisher put on himself could be traced to what happened right after his Amateur victory at Scioto Country Club in Columbus, Ohio. The cocky kid from Miami-Dade Junior College that everyone called "Flash" had broken the tournament scoring record and was heralded as golf's next big star.
"The next Jack Nicklaus, the Joe Namath of golf," he recalled.
The spotlight found Fleisher again the next April in Augusta, Ga. Making his first appearance at the Masters - his next trip down Magnolia Lane wouldn't be for another 23 years - Fleisher was paired with four-time champion Arnold Palmer in the opening round.
Fleisher shot 69 and would be the tournament's low amateur. Palmer shot 73 and missed the cut for the first time. Fleisher didn't become Jack Nicklaus, or even Jack Fleck. After playing briefly in Asia before joining the PGA Tour in 1972, Fleisher watched others succeed while he flailed.
"I won the Amateur at too young an age. I never had a mentor to guide me," said Fleisher. "I didn't know exactly what I was getting into. I never finished college. I got married. My first year trying to qualify for the tour, I lost in a playoff. I had to sit out a year. I got out of the box slow."
He saw one of his former amateur rivals, Hubert Green, win the 1977 U.S. Open. He watched a friend from the Asian Tour, David Graham of Australia, win the PGA Championship in 1979 and two years later win the U.S. Open. He witnessed countless other guys driving fancier cars and buying bigger houses.
"The longer it didn't happen for him, the more confidence he lost," said Wendy Fleisher, who met her husband in 1967 when she was a 17-year-old freshman at Miami-Dade and married him two years later. "The funny part was we thought he was very successful. We had a wonderful life."
That life came crashing down when Wendy Fleisher developed medical complications after the birth of their daughter, Jessica, in 1980. With his wife seriously ill, Fleisher left the tour and took a job as a club pro in the North Miami Beach area. Wendy Fleisher recovered, but her husband stayed close to home.
Asked about those years as a club pro, Fleisher said: "It was a nice lifestyle, a comfortable lifestyle."
Winning the 1989 PGA national club pro championship might have brought Fleisher a few slaps on the back from the members at the club where he was working, but it didn't completely fill the void that was missing competitively. Two years later, his life changed dramatically.
The breakthrough
After entering several events on the minor-league Hogan Tour and finishing high enough on the money list to be an alternate at a PGA Tour event, Fleisher was invited to play in the New England Classic after Bobby Cole had withdrawn. Fleisher won the tournament, beating Ian Baker-Finch on the seventh hole of sudden death.
With a 50-footer for birdie.
"I can thank Ian Baker-Finch," said Fleisher. "If I don't win that tournament, you probably don't hear of me again. That kind of springboarded me through my 40s."
It gave Fleisher, then 42, a two-year exemption on the PGA Tour. The next year, Fleisher finished a respectable 68th on the money list with $236,516, including a 25th-place finish at the Masters. In 1993, he finished second in the New England Classic.
As he approached 50, Fleisher started following the results on the senior tour. He saw players he competed with during the early stages of his regular tour career having renewed - and in some cases, new - success.
At the 1997 Pebble Beach Pro-Am Invitational, a tournament for PGA Tour and Senior PGA Tour players, Fleisher finished fifth overall, eight shots in front of anyone his age or older.
When he came in second behind Allen Doyle in the senior tour's qualifying school in fall 1998, there was a sudden surge of confidence. Fleisher began to think, "How can they beat me?"
They couldn't.
Starting with wins in his first two senior events - the only player in senior tour history to accomplish that feat - Fleisher became the tour's dominant player. He won five more times that season, and was the first golfer to win more than $2 million in a year.
He was named the Senior Tour's Player of the Year, becoming the first rookie since Lee Trevino to lead the money list. Fleisher won four times in 2000, three times in 2001. He is still looking for his first victory this season, but that hasn't changed the way Fleisher approaches his profession.
He seems totally at ease.
Even recent comments from fellow Senior Tour pros Hale Irwin and Tom Kite, who criticized Fleisher for not using his automatic invitation to the recent regular U.S. Open in Long Island, N.Y., didn't seem to bother him. Fleisher simply said the Bethpage Black Course was too tough for him.
Then there was the way he dealt with a story about the results from a prostate screening test he took during a routine physical two weeks ago in Nashville, Tenn. Fleisher seemed more upset the information was made public than by the fact that the doctors asked him to return after the Senior Open for more testing.
"I'm fine," he said before finishing tied for third Sunday in the Greater Baltimore Classic at Hayfields Country Club in Hunt Valley. "If I had played at Bethpage, I probably would not have had the test for another year, and who knows?"
Hubert Green marvels at the way his old friend - the guy with whom he shared the famed Crow's Nest at Augusta National as amateurs 33 years ago - has handled his rediscovered celebrity.
"The main thing that he has done is that he's handled success so well," said Green. "He's not cocky at all. He's just beaten everyone's brains in."
Said Graham: "A lot of players have used the senior tour as a second chance, but no one has done it better than Bruce. He's as consistent a player as we have. Every time he tees it up, he plays well."
But it wasn't until his victory in last year's Senior Open outside Boston that, at least in his own mind, Fleisher answered whatever doubts remained.
Leading the tournament with an opening-round 69, Fleisher fell one stroke behind Aoki through 36 holes and, after the rain-delayed third round was finished Sunday morning, was four shots back.
On the ride back to the hotel, Fleisher ranted to his wife, his old insecurities spilling over. Once they reached their room, Wendy Fleisher gave her husband what amounted to a pep talk. "She basically said, 'Grow up, you baby,' " Fleisher recalled with a laugh.
Wendy Fleisher said she had taken a similar tack before the final round of the New England Classic a decade before.
"I told him that everyone was feeling the pressure," she said recently from their home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. "This is what he chose to do 34 years ago. I said, 'You can handle it.' "
After playing the first six holes of the Senior Open's last round in 4-under par to climb back into contention, Fleisher made 12 straight pars down the stretch. The rest of those with a chance to win made mistakes, including Nicklaus. When Jim Colbert double-bogeyed 18 to fall two shots behind, the victory belonged to Fleisher.
It completed the largest final- round comeback in Senior Open history. With the victory, Fleisher became only the third player to have won both the U.S. Senior Open and U.S. Amateur. The other two are named Nicklaus and Palmer.
"That's pretty amazing, that's pretty impressive," said Fleisher. "I'm going to go to my grave with that one."
Fleisher is brutally frank when assessing what he has achieved on the senior tour. This is not about redemption - it's simply about making the kind of bucks that allowed him to throw a wedding for his only child at Donald Trump's posh Mar-A-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., last month.
"I'm out here for the money, I'm not out here for the glory," he said. "If you're not a superstar before you get out here, you're not going to become one. That's the way it should be. It's a place to make money. It's a wonderful place to make money."
And a long way from those days when he was considered the Joe Namath of golf.