No great surprise ‘odd duck’ Bubba Watson is not popular on the PGA Tour

Bubba Watson was recently voted the least popular golf on the PGA Tour. Steve Elling explains why the two-time Masters champion rubs people up the wrong way.

Bubba Watson enters the 2015 Masters as the defending champion and winner of two of the last three. Jamie Squire / Getty

For those who have been around the ranks of the game’s elite players for the past decade or so, the results will come as no surprise.

Bubba Watson has long been one of the most mercurial and maddening players in the game.

The two-time Masters champion is defending his most recent major title this week at Augusta National, where he again ranks among a handful of favourites. He already won a distinction of another sort this week, however. In a poll of 103 PGA Tour players, he was effectively named the man least likely to win a popularity contest.

That fits more like a lead life vest than a green jacket.

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The website polled players on a variety of issues, ranging from serious to flippant, and asked for respondents to name the player they would least likely defend in the event of a fight in the car park.

It was the wrong kind of leader board. Watson received 23 votes, more than double the amount of cocky Patrick Reed (11) and abrasive Rory Sabbatini (nine) in the next two positions.

It was not an overwhelming win in terms of gross numbers or percentages, but disappointing nonetheless.

There’s one key difference between the trio, though.

Unlike Reed and Sabbatini, Watson cares greatly about his image, which is why he has apologised several times, via social media, for his multiple spiked-foot-in-mouth faux pas over the years.

Watson has always been an odd duck. One day, he is affable and outgoing; the next, he passes the same people in the hallway without a word or glance.

He refers to himself in the third person, which is practically unheard of in golf and rubs many the wrong way.

One day, he is as dialled in and engaged as anybody in the field, and the next, he’s barking at long-suffering caddie Ted Scott or complaining within range of TV microphones about the same weather conditions that everybody else is facing.

Watson is a big kid at heart who ad-libs and carves his way through rounds like Phil Mickelson and Arnold Palmer, though without their seemingly limitless levels of charisma.

The pity is, the game is screaming for colourful characters, and Watson has the toolbox to entertain, when he is not being insufferable.

At age 36, perhaps being bashed in a poll of his peers will serve as a brusque wake-up call.

Just as likely, in keeping with his unpredictable nature, he is just as likely to retreat in the other direction.

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