Faldo/Norman (25 page)

He then hit a ‘half five-iron’ approach, a low runner that used the various contours of the green to such effect that the ball finished three feet from the hole. ‘It was a shot we were working on all week in the breeze,’ he said. This is the sort of creative shot, yet played under the maximum strain, that the constant ‘fine-tuning with Lead’ was all about. ‘Everyone says Nick is so technical but he is far from a robot,’ Leadbetter said. He is so feel-orientated. He has an uncanny ability to control his irons, which is all natural feel. He is very creative, very sensory, very artistic.’

At the 17th Faldo hit a four-iron to 20 feet and two-putted for another birdie, while Cook had only got a par moments earlier. Then the American bogeyed the last. ‘I was alive, I was dead, I was alive again, then I was pretty much dead,’ was how Cook summed up his day. For Faldo it was the reverse. Once more he needed a par at Muirfield’s fearsome 18th to join only James Braid as a two-time Open champion at the course. This time he hit a three-iron from 196 yards to 25 feet and took the two putts he had in hand. Afterwards he was a wreck, in no fit state to give a winner’s speech – lowlights included thanking the press from the ‘heart of my bottom’ and trying to sing
My Way
; he regretted the latter but not the former.

‘It’s the enormity of it all,’ he gasped in the interview room. ‘The pressure was so great. Thank God that putt on 18 was only one foot. I might not have been able to manage more. That it turned around was unbelievable. I had this horrible feeling of what it would have meant to have had a four-shot lead and to end up losing. It would have needed a very big plaster to patch it up. It went from almost a disaster to the absolute ultimate.’

Like this third Open victory, Faldo’s third Masters triumph was another story of disaster and the ‘absolute ultimate’. Few people knew how big a plaster Norman would need but Faldo was one of them after his Muirfield experience. Now he was playing the perfect round while Norman was self-destructing. But Faldo had managed to turn it around then, so he had to expect the Shark to attempt to do the same, however much onlookers thought the die was cast.

There were some things that Faldo and Norman had in common, as well as having been ranked the number one player in
the world. They both took up the game late, at least by modern standards: Faldo was just short of his 14th birthday, Norman was 16. They were both inspired by Jack Nicklaus. And they both admitted to being perfectionists. It was how they dealt with the last that may point a clue as to why one ended up with six major titles and the other only two – ‘only’, as if it was not a considerable achievement in itself.

In a
Sports Illustrated
profile that was published on the eve of the 1996 Masters, Rick Reilly wrote of Norman: ‘The biggest problem with a compass that’s always fixed on Perfect is that golf is the most imperfect game. There are too many variables: wind, funny hops, golf gods who might think being handsome, cool and ridiculously talented is enough; majors we’ll dole out to somebody else. The greatest golfers did not think Perfect. Walter Hagen used to count on missing seven shots every round. If he missed only six, he broke out the champagne.’

Reilly quoted Bruce Edwards, who caddied for Norman as well as Tom Watson, as saying: ‘Greg has that tremendous ability to have six or seven straight birdies but then he’ll get pissed off with a bad bounce or a bad result. I expected Greg to react like true champions react. If Watson hits a bad shot, he’ll watch and take it and say, “That’s my punishment.” ’

‘Hell, that’s not fair,’ was Norman’s response to the
Sports Illustrated
piece. But in 2011 he told
Golf Digest
: ‘It’s funny about pressure, because people often assume I didn’t welcome it. In those situations, I usually felt… I liked it for some stupid reason. But obviously the recipe wasn’t quite right. I’ve analysed it, big time, and I see more now. Because I’ve opened myself up to the realisation that I wasn’t perfect, even though for so long I tried to be perfect and was sort of blinded by fear of failure to admit flaws. I still became the number one player in the world for other reasons, but I did some things wrong.’

This was a realisation that Faldo made during his career, not after it. ‘He’s done a wonderful job of changing his game over the years, not just his physical game but his mental game,’ Norman said when the pair met in a
Shell Wonderful World of Golf
contest on the Old Course at Sunningdale in 1994. ‘As one of his peers, who has the utmost respect for him, he’s got that ability to lock in and be very tenacious.’

Norman won the exhibition with a 66 to a 67 but it was only close because the Australian dropped a couple of shots at the last two holes. Most days of the week, you would prefer to cross many fairways to catch a glimpse of Norman or Ballesteros, Lyle or Woosnam, Fred Couples or even John Daly. But on Sunday afternoons, with a big prize on the line, Faldo was riveting in his own way. ‘One look at him in competition,’ wrote Jaime Diaz in
Golf World
(US) in 1993, ‘peering down another perfectly shaped iron shot, his eyes narrowed and his mouth grimaced, it is evident he is playing for more than money, more even than being the best of his time. Faldo is playing for the little cups, as he calls them. For History.

‘It is a higher narrower path, and a sense of mission is palpable in Faldo. For all the criticism of the monotony in his game, this passion has made him a dramatic golfer, one whose intense sense of the moment lifts him to the occasion. How else has Faldo been able to win twice at Augusta National GC? On a course that rewards risk-takers, long hitters and supernal putters, Faldo has transcended himself.’

Faldo won six times at the two majors that are all about flair (the Masters, and the Open on the links of the British seaside) and never at the two majors that, in theory, reward monotony. It was not for want of trying. At the US Open he lost a playoff to Curtis Strange at Oak Hill in 1988 and just missed out on a playoff at Medinah in 1990 before finishing fourth at Pebble Beach
two years later. His best result at the US PGA was joint second behind Nick Price at Bellerive in 1992, while he just missed the Azinger-Norman playoff a year later and was twice fourth.

Perhaps he was unlucky not to have picked up one of those championships but many thought Faldo lucky to have won as many majors as he did, when so often other people’s mistakes proved crucial to the outcome. Azinger bogeyed the last two holes at Muirfield the first time and Cook bogeyed the last the second time; Scott Hoch missed a tiny putt in the playoff at Augusta in 1989 and Ray Floyd dumped his approach in the water at the 11th a year later. Faldo invokes the Nicklaus line that other players ‘knew that I could finish but didn’t know if they could or not. Of course, they didn’t know I wasn’t sure but as long as they think it, you have an edge.’

Faldo’s version: ‘It amuses me when fellow professionals say, “Faldo was lucky because he was given a couple of majors.” I mean, how many do you think Jack won because he was in the right place at the right time, when someone else can’t handle it? That’s not being given it. Everyone has their own pressure threshold. Some people can’t handle it on the 1st tee; others crack after 71 holes. That’s all part of the test.’

‘As a golfer, you put your head down and you go shoot a score,’ Faldo said after the second round of the 1996 Masters. ‘I’m in charge of my score and I can’t influence anybody or anyone else, so the rest of it is history.’

History suggests that Faldo could influence the outcome even when he was trailing – as he was by five, three and six going into the final rounds of his three Masters wins, by three with nine to play at Muirfield in 1987 and by two with four to play five years later. ‘I guess I didn’t do too badly with my hair on fire,’ he said. ‘Trailing isn’t really such a bad thing – as long as you have some holes left. You can see what’s going on, you have maybe a little
less pressure on you. Leading the Masters, gosh, it’s almost too much because of all that it means. Behind, you can pace yourself a bit more and breathe.’

But now Faldo was leading the Masters and had driven to the right edge of the fairway. Norman, not exactly able to breathe freely, was still hoping to put some pressure on with two par-fives coming over the next three holes. But he pushed his drive through the first copse of pines on the right almost to the spectator rope line. His ball was lying on the pine straw, making ideal contact less than certain. Norman being Norman, his plan was still to smash the ball on the green and make something happen.

His caddie, Tony Navarro, did not like the play from such a scabby lie. The pin was tucked on the right side of the green, near where the tributary of Rae’s Creek which runs across the front of the green turns up the right-hand side. Norman had 213 yards to the front of the green and was thinking about hitting a two-iron but it was fraught with disaster. As if he had not suffered enough already. ‘We can make four the other way,’ Navarro said, meaning his boss should consider laying up, pitching on and giving himself a putt for the birdie.

‘I wanted to go for the green,’ Norman explained that evening. ‘I wanted to knock a two-iron onto the green and put some pressure on him. I thought that would be a really gutsy play from where I was but Tony talked me out of it.’ Even when he was holding a short-iron club with which to lay up, Norman was still wrestling with himself. Navarro told him: ‘Make sure you want to do it.’ Norman shot back: ‘I want to do the other one.’ But after about three minutes, he finally did hit the lay-up shot down the fairway.

Leadbetter, Faldo’s coach, later observed: ‘His caddie had to drag the two-iron out of Greg’s hands before he played the lay-up shot. He wanted to go for it. If Faldo is six shots ahead – and his own game is normally 60 per cent conservative and 40 per cent aggressive – Nick would raise that ratio to 80-20. So he’s maybe a little more flexible.’

Faldo now had a decision to make as well. And he took even longer about it than Norman. He had 228 yards to the hole and initially thought of the five-wood he had put in the bag that week for just such a situation. But as he put the clubhead behind the ball, something was wrong. Although the fairway slopes from right to left, so his feet were below the ball, the ball was actually sitting on a slight depression that made it a downhill lie. ‘It wasn’t looking right,’ he said. He backed off and then stood over the ball before backing off again, this time to a number of catcalls from the gallery. ‘Too much angle,’ he muttered. Having got himself into the lead, the last thing Faldo wanted to do was give his beleaguered opponent any encouragement by making a mistake.

‘Now it’s all mine to lose,’ he said. ‘Now I’d be very upset if I lost the tournament. It’s as simple as that. I just wanted to play sensibly and not make a mistake and I managed to do that. I hit all the shots where I intended to hit them.’

Although the shot did not suit a five-wood, Faldo’s ball was still lying well enough to take a two-iron to it. ‘I thought about whether I should lay up but it was such a good lie. So I said if I want to go for it, it’s a two-iron shot. It was 206 to the front, so that’s fine. And I knew if I mis-hit the two-iron, I’d hit it left, where I could get up and down.’ Finally, Faldo was ready and stroked the ball onto the green, the shot of the day and the week. ‘I just buttoned it,’ he said. ‘I hit a great shot and it went right where I wanted it to go. That crispy iron shot was the best shot I hit all week.’

His ball was safely in the heart of the green, around 30 feet from the hole. In a strange reversal of the expected pattern, Faldo had ripped a long-iron shot onto the green and Norman had laid up. Faldo, being ‘defensively aggressive’, had delivered the blow that Norman could not. ‘With the pendulum having swung in my direction, I knew one fantastic shot would send out even more forcibly the “I’m alright” message,’ Faldo wrote in
Life Swings
. ‘The visualisation complete, I executed one of the very best shots of my life, the ball soaring as if laser-guided into the heart of the green.’

Norman wedged his third shot to 12 feet and, after Faldo had lagged his extravagantly curving eagle putt down to the hole, he holed the putt to resounding cheers from the nearby grandstand. He had made four but perhaps not in the emphatic manner he had initially intended. Still, there are no descriptions on the scorecard, only figures, and he had avoided putting down a sixth successive five. It was only his second birdie of the day and his fourth in a row at the par-five. Moments later Faldo tapped in for his fourth successive four at the hole and he was now ten under par, still two ahead of Norman. A possible counterthrust had been parried.