Faldo/Norman (19 page)

If Faldo was putting on an act, it was all part of the sports-person’s craft. ‘I’ve long suspected that the best players are often the best actors,’ wrote Ed Smith, the England cricketer turned author, for
ESPNcricinfo
in 2013. ‘They are able to project an aura of confidence even when times are hard. This confidence trick is only partly about fooling the opposition. More importantly, it is also about fooling yourself. Mental strength, Steve Waugh once told me, is about behaving the same way in everything you do at the crease, no matter how badly you are playing. The strongest competitors are better equipped at superimposing a better alternative reality that replaces the facts as everyone else perceives them. Hope, optimism, belief – call it what you will. Perhaps it is simply the ability to conjure the feeling of afternoon sunshine on your face while striding into the teeth of a winter gale.’

Starting the day six strokes behind, and having battled his way through a winter gale in recent times, Faldo was displaying a confidence he probably did not feel. He had not won a major for almost four years, had barely contended at a major in the last two years and in the last 12 months his second marriage had fallen apart while his relationship with American college student Brenna Cepelak had titillated the newspapers back home. However, at the conclusion of the 1995 Ryder Cup at Oak Hill, during which he had not been at his best, Faldo had played a vital role in Europe’s victory, withstanding immense pressure over the last few holes to beat Curtis Strange. Of the vital wedge shot to the last, his third on the par-four, he said: ‘Knees went, first time that had happened. It took me to my max.’

His form early in 1996 was good but nothing special. His goal at the start of the Masters was simply to have a good week. Asked at the end of the week about his form of the last two seasons, during which he had dropped from first to 11th on the world rankings, and his Ryder Cup singles the previous autumn, he said: ‘The game just wasn’t as consistent. One of the things I felt was weak was eight-iron, nine-iron and in. You’ve got to get back to those shots and get them around the hole all the time. I simply didn’t play as well, swing as well. There’s a fine line in this game between shooting 68s and in the 70s.

‘To play at the Ryder Cup and have it partly on my shoulder for a short time was absolutely nerve-racking. That was the biggest pressure I’d played under for a couple of years. It was a good booster. But here, you’ve got to survive for four hours out there. My mouth was sore. I was having to swig water at nearly every shot.’

They say the Masters doesn’t start until the back nine on Sunday. It is one of the most familiar clichés in the golfing lexicon, right up there with ‘never up, never in’. Television partly explains this. The Masters was first shown on CBS in America in 1956, with colour being added ten years later to better appreciate the Augusta scenery. At first, only the last few holes were televised. More holes were added over time but it was not until the mid 1970s that the entire back nine could be broadcast.

And although coverage was available from all 18 holes from 1984 onwards, it somehow became the norm to only show the leaders on the back nine – perhaps preceded by the last couple of holes on the front nine – even though it had become standard to show the whole of the leaders’ final rounds at the US Open since 1977. It took until 2002 for the Masters to follow suit. Old habits die hard, however, for many of the local patrons, as spectators at Augusta National are known. If they do not have positions secured on the back nine, many will watch the leaders through the turn and then flood out of the grounds to watch the rest on television.

By 1996, there was plenty of discussion in golf magazines and newspapers about extending the three-hour window for television coverage on the final day. Once again, it was brought up at the pre-tournament press conference given by the Augusta National chairman, Jackson Stephens. The previous year Stephens had promised to look into it. The answer: no change. ‘It’s been studied and the answer is that we’ll just stick with what we do.’ Emphasising that the three-hour broadcast was only interrupted by 12 minutes of commercials, Stephens added of the prospect of any additional airtime: ‘Until we can be sure of the same quality of television presentation, I just don’t think that it deserves further consideration.’ Another year, Stephens was asked if he watched the Super Bowl and replied, in his mighty slow, southern drawl: ‘Fourth quarter.’

Apart from a close finish to a Ryder Cup, the last couple of hours of Masters Sunday are the best golf television there is. But, as 1996 showed, plenty can happen on the front nine that is also essential viewing. Norman could have been out of sight, but instead, another classic afternoon of drama was in store.

It is the course itself, and in particular the sequence of holes on the back nine, that dictates the drama. The front nine plays marginally harder but things tend to happen very quickly after the turn. Historically, the 10th rates as the hardest hole on the course. The 11th is the second hardest and the 12th is the joint-third most difficult. While the third-round leaders, playing last of all, are confronting this stretch of beasts, those playing ahead have reached happier hunting grounds. Two of the next three holes, the reachable par-fives 13 and 15, rank as the two easiest on the course and while the 16th is no pushover, it has seen almost double the number of holes-in-one as the other three par-threes put together.

With this concertina effect, there are certain to be multiple changes on the leaderboard, as players drop shots over the stretch from 10 to 12 and recover them from 13 to 16. But with water in play at the 11th, 12th, 13th, 15th and 16th, disaster can await anyone so eagles and birdies sit side-by-side with bogeys, double bogeys and worse. Players have won the Masters by charging home in as little as 30 shots – witness Gary Player in 1978 and Jack Nicklaus in 1986 – and after stumbling back to the clubhouse in 40 – Player, again, in 1961, and Craig Stadler in 1982.

‘It is remarkable how rapidly the Masters is transformed from breathtaking sporting pageant among the glories of a Georgian spring into a savage challenge of a player’s ability and an assault on his composure ruthless enough to leave a scar on his soul,’ wrote Peter Corrigan in his preview of the 60th Masters in the
Independent on Sunday
. ‘The battle for the famous green jacket
doesn’t really begin until the final nine holes and by then Augusta National has shed the trappings of paradise and takes on the character of a snake-infested swamp.’

But someone always makes a run and in 1996 it was Frank Nobilo. The Kiwi is the descendant of Italian pirates who made their merry way around their homeland and into the Balkans before decamping for New Zealand. Nobilo, 35, was a regular winner on the European Tour and since 1989 had sported a piratical beard, claiming that whenever he shaved it off he did not play as well. Though bothered by back problems, he had a fine swing and enjoyed playing on courses you could describe as ‘tough but fair’. He had been in the top ten at the last two US Opens and he had a simple answer to questions from the American media about why he was suddenly playing better in the majors – because now he was getting to play in them.

This was his second Masters and, having started the day tied for ninth, he birdied four holes in a row from the 8th. After a particularly fine approach at the 11th, he overshot the green at the short 12th but was on the fringe and elected to putt. He struck the putt far too hard and missed the one back. After his bogey there, he drove into the trees on the right at the 13th, and had to lay up, but holed from more than 20 feet for his fifth birdie in six holes. Nobilo was now five under for the tournament and sharing second place with Phil Mickelson. The left-hander had birdied the 6th to get to seven under, briefly level with Faldo and five behind Norman, but his hoped-for charge never materialised after he bogeyed the next two holes. There was little else to distract from the Faldo-Norman show.

Overall in the 77 Masters up to 2013, 49 of those leading with nine holes to play went on to win, while 37 lost (some inevitably as there can be co-leaders out on the course but not co-winners). Lee Westwood got himself into the lead on the 10th tee in 1999 and then out of it pretty quickly, finishing in a tie for sixth. ‘I felt sick,’ he recalled. ‘I feel nervous like anyone else, but that’s as nervous as I’ve ever felt. I didn’t handle that situation as well as I’d have liked to. That’s the first time I had ever experienced a lead in a major championship, so it’s bound to come as a bit of a shock.’

Norman twice failed to hold on to the lead with nine holes to play at Augusta, as did the last three 63-hole leaders, at time of writing. In 2013 Angel Cabrera went on to lose in a playoff to Adam Scott; the year before Louis Oosthuizen, out in front thanks to his albatross at the 2nd hole, lost in a playoff to Bubba Watson; and in 2011 Rory McIlroy just lost it totally. The young Northern Irishman had led for three days and despite an outward 37 still had his nose in front until his tee shot at the 10th. His drive finished between the Peek Cabin and the Berckmans Cabin – the latter named after the Belgian baron who founded the Fruitland Nurseries on the site in the 1850s – after hooking his drive into one of the 150-year-old pines and getting a horrid bounce backwards and farther left.

Never before had the CBS cameras had to focus their lenses on that area of the course and when they finally picked him out, the long-distance and unsteady pictures only added to the sense that we were intruding on a very private grief. McIlroy hacked his way to a triple-bogey seven, before three-putting the 11th for a bogey, four-putting the 12th for a double bogey and then pulling his drive at the 13th into the tributary of Rae’s Creek that runs up the left-hand side of the fairway. He slumped over his driver, close to tears. It was a desolate image that might have become
a defining one. But it turned out this was the moment the boy became a man. After an 80 he braved the media and said: ‘I just unravelled. It was a character-building day, put it that way.’ And two months later he won the US Open by eight strokes.

The only cabin a golfer in the Masters wants to end up in is the Butler Cabin, where the green jacket ceremony is performed for television. But since McIlroy’s miscue from the 10th tee, the cabins to the left of that fairway have become one of the visitor attractions for patrons, especially those on practice days for whom it might be their only time on the grounds. Another new spot that draws a crowd is way down the hill from the same tee, deep in the trees on the right. This is where Watson ended up when his left-handed drive failed to cut back to the fairway. In the perfect illustration of his self-proclaimed ‘Bubba golf’ – ‘If I have a swing, I have a shot’ – he then hit a miraculous recovery that took a right-hand turn halfway through its flight and ended up on the green. ‘As soon as I saw it, it just set up for a perfect draw, well, hook,’ Watson said. ‘It was only about 15 feet off the ground until it got under the tree and then it started rising, and hooked about 40 yards. Pretty easy.’

For any visitor to the Masters, whether newcomer or veteran, the first few steps onto the course, almost automatically, tend to be down the 10th before going on to catch the familiar vista of Amen Corner that opens up halfway down the 11th fairway. It is a magical walk. When the club opened in 1933, and for the first Masters the following year, this was how a round of golf at Augusta National started as well.

Dr Alister MacKenzie, the famous Scottish architect who designed the course with help from its founder Bobby Jones, originally intended the holes to play as they are numbered today. But just before the opening he and Jones reversed the nines, deciding that what now stands as the front nine was a far superior
challenge. However, given that the National is only open in the winter, closing in the harsh southern summer, frost delays were a problem in the dell where Amen Corner sits. By starting on what is now familiar as the front nine, play could get underway earlier and by the time golfers got round to the 11th and 12th the winter sun had made them playable again.

Switching back was a fortunate move for the tournament as it has provided the opportunity for so much drama over the closing stages. But it was soon clear that the 10th hole could be improved. Originally the green sat at the bottom of the descent off the tee, near where the large, sprawling and tentacled bunker lies in the fairway seemingly not in play. It used to be a green-side trap. Moving the green farther back and up an incline made for a stronger hole and also avoided the flooding problems that plagued the original green. The old bunker in the fairway was once reached by a huge drive by Tom Weiskopf and today it is probably in range for the monster hitters – Watson’s drive into the trees was roughly level with the sand – but the hole requires a hard right-to-left shot to take advantage of the tilt of the fairway and the combination of modern driver head and ball are not conducive to shaping such a shot so players tend to hit a draw (or a fade for the lefties) with a three-wood.