They spoke in the recorder’s area behind the 18th green at Turnberry on Sunday evening. The shots had all been made, one more than they needed and history had been unmade. Tom Watson went off to tell of the extraordinary story he might have written, Neil Oxman walked towards the locker room, the weight of Tom’s bag nothing compared to the weight of a dream with a terrible ending.

There was nobody in the locker room when he got there, not another soul and he quickly cleaned out Watson’s locker, put what needed to be kept into his bag, found an attendant and asked him to make sure the bag was delivered up to the Tom Watson Suite at the Turnberry Hotel. He then went to his car, changed his shirt and set off on a nine-hour journey to his hotel in west London.

Oxman is not the caddie of stereotype, but few of them are. He took to bag-toting to fund his college years and especially his law degree at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. Before graduating and becoming a member of the bar in Pennsylvania, he knew he loved carrying a bag more than practising law. “Oxman,” the Dean of Law at Duquesne says whenever they now meet, “you barely know enough about the law to talk about it at cocktail parties.” True, but politics and caddying were his passions.

He wanted to help get Democrats elected to office and would eventually start a political consultancy called The Campaign Group. They’ve been successful, he’s worked on 650 campaigns, helped presidential candidates, governors, senators, congressmen, and he is recognised as one of the more able players in the game of politics and the media. Over the years, he would be invited to lecture at Oxford University, the University of Pennsylvania and other distinguished places of learning.

But like a kid with a bad drug habit, he could never quit caddying. It wasn’t a secret but he did try to keep it separate. You didn’t want to tell the guy running for the White House that you could not make that meeting in Chicago because you would be carrying a bag at a PGA tour event that week. Once Bob Casey, whom Oxman helped become governor of Pennsylvania, spotted him on television.

“Ellen, Ellen,” he shouted to his wife who was in another room, “you’ve got to see this. Neil’s carrying a golf bag and wearing a yellow jumpsuit.”

On the road from Turnberry to London, he had time to think. Six hundred and fifty political campaigns, 400 PGA tour events, and he wondered what to make of this, the most extraordinary week of his working/sporting life. Turnberry had something you can’t get in the greatest movies. In another corner of his life he reviews them for an NPR (National Public Radio) affiliate in Philadelphia and ends up watching 200 in cinemas every year.

“With a great book or a great movie, you know someone has already written the end. If you are idiot enough, you can skip to the last chapter of the book. With the greatest movie, you can often foresee the end, and anyway you know the director knows, the scriptwriter knows. But we were standing there on the 18th fairway on Sunday evening, Tom had hit his last shot into the green, he had the Jug almost in his hands but still we didn’t know how it would end. No-one knew. The script hadn’t been written. That’s why it was so amazing.

“The actual ending we got would have made it a better movie. While I’m disappointed for Tom, I really am, more than that I’m unbelievably proud of him. I was beside him for the overture, never more than a few feet away through the entire performance and I was there for the epilogue. If he had won the tournament, I couldn’t have been more proud.”

Oxman got to the Pennyhill Park hotel in Bagshot at 5am on Monday, checked in quickly, asked reception to wake him at eight because he had to do his yardages at Sunningdale that morning before carrying Tom’s bag on his first practice round for the Senior Open in the early afternoon. He remembers getting to his room, emptying his pockets of change, taking off his sneakers and he then did something he’s never done in his entire life — he fell asleep with his clothes on.

TURNBERRY revived old memories, offered him new moments that will in time become more memories. There was a scene, after seven or eight holes of the second round, after Tom had made a run of bogeys, when playing partner Sergio Garcia put his arm around him and just said: “Come on, old man.” Affectionate, teasing, funny and, most of all, a gentle rebuke, an implicit “you’re better than this.”

Oxman liked that because Sergio judged it right. Tom had never stopped trying, could never stop trying but it was still good to be geed up. The caddie felt he understood Watson from an August day in 1978, watching him practise from a bunker at Oakmont Country Club a few days before that year’s PGA Championship.