by Andy Farrell
FALDO/NORMAN
FALDO/NORMAN
The 1996 Masters:
A duel that defined an era
ANDY FARRELL
CONTENTS
Introduction
Hole 1: Tea Olive
Hole 2: Pink Dogwood
Hole 3: Flowering Peach
Hole 4: Flowering Crab Apple
Hole 5: Magnolia
Hole 6: Juniper
Hole 7: Pampas
Hole 8: Yellow Jasmine
Hole 9: Carolina Cherry
Hole 10: Camellia
Hole 11: White Dogwood
Hole 12: Golden Bell
Hole 13: Azalea
Hole 14: Chinese Fir
Hole 15: Firethorn
Hole 16: Redbud
Hole 17: Nandina
Hole 18: Holly
Scores
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
INTRODUCTION
Everyone who saw it has their own memories of that fateful day. You only have to mention the 1996 Masters, and Faldo/Norman, and they come tumbling out. Television viewers recall simply how difficult it was to watch, how the prolonged agony became so disquieting. Those who were on the course remember the unnatural hush, people looking at their feet as the final two players passed by, spectators flooding for the gates well before the finish.
The outcome had appeared certain when Norman led by six strokes at the start of the day but the reversal of fortunes was so dramatic that Faldo eventually won by five. ‘It was a wedding that turned into a funeral,’ someone said of the atmosphere. Others’ instinct was immediately to mention the press conference afterwards when Norman fronted up to every last question about how devastating it must be for the green jacket to slip through his hands yet again, repeating as often as was required that he would be fine, thank you.
My own memories are less about the golf and more about technological failure and human ineptitude. A freelance golf writer at the time, the Saturday of that Masters was the first time I had done the main report for a national newspaper from a major championship. The five-hour time difference with the UK creates its own problems – and in 1996 there was no broadband or Wi-Fi to come to your aid, e-mail and mobiles not yet standard parts of the kit – but having to use four different machines to file each of the four editions to the Independent on Sunday only added to the chaos. The initial problem was the failure of the modem on my battered old Apple Mac, while another laptop, kindly but unwisely lent by a colleague, died when I spilt Coca-Cola on it. A borrowed Tandy, that clunky but indestructible pre-laptop word processor, enabled me to file the ‘on the whistle’ close-of-play report.
Sunday was taken up with retyping a myriad of stories destined for Golf Weekly magazine while the brief from The Independent for a sidebar story on Norman’s previous Masters disasters appeared simple enough. Alas, midway through the afternoon it became increasingly apparent that the way I had written the piece would not stand up. As I was frantically rewriting, Martin Johnson, who was sitting next to me in the Augusta press room and had exactly the same brief for the Daily Telegraph, was in relaxed mode. The old pro did not have to change a single word.
It is fair to say that retreating from a post-round huddle with Colin Montgomerie, who had delivered a five-star woe-is-me rant after taking a triple-bogey eight at the 15th for the second day running, on this particular occasion I was less than sympathetic and inclined to observe that Monty did not know the half of it.
It was more than a decade later that the first germ of an idea for this book emerged after seeing the original stage version of Frost/Nixon in London. Peter Morgan’s play set up the series of interviews as a battle of wills, almost as a sporting duel. But rather than boxing or fencing, it suggested to me the long-drawn-out psychological warfare of golf. And the notion that a supposedly dominant participant should ultimately capitulate under the sustained pressure and perseverance of his opponent suggested one tournament above all others: the 1996 Masters. It seemed obvious this was a story worth retelling.
Looking back, the events of Sunday 14 April 1996 not only sealed the verdicts on both men – Norman, the great showman whose go-for-broke golf let him down too often when it mattered most; Faldo, feared and respected rather than loved but at his best when the pressure was at its greatest – but also on an era of the game. After Tom Watson, the latest in a long line of American golfing legends, had dominated in the early 1980s, a new group of international stars had emerged – including Seve Ballesteros, Bernhard Langer, Sandy Lyle, Ian Woosnam and Nick Price. Faldo and Norman, both having been ranked as the world’s best player for lengthy spells and after numerous head-to-head contests, were the last men standing from that new generation.
A year on from their climactic encounter at Augusta, the game would have a new superstar. Tiger Woods had the power of the Australian and the precision of the Englishman, which proved an all-conquering combination for so many years. No matter whether the Tiger era is over, enough golfing history has been made in the meantime that it is relevant to be reminded of an earlier age.
So why write this book now? The 20th anniversary in 2016 might have been a more logical moment. But then Adam Scott won the Masters. After so many disappointments, usually involving Norman, Australia had a wearer of the green jacket. And the connections with 2013 did not stop there. Justin Rose won the US Open to become the first Englishman to win a major championship since Faldo 17 years earlier. Phil Mickelson, who pipped Frank Nobilo for third place in the 1996 Masters, won the Open Championship at Muirfield after two decades of trying, while it was at Muirfield that Nobilo became a member of the BBC television commentary team. Now a respected pundit for the Golf Channel in America, Nobilo had had an initial BBC outing back in 1996 when he joined Steve Rider as a guest after his round, offering eloquent observations on Norman’s collapse and presaging his future career. At the US PGA in 2013, Jason Dufner equalled the major championship record of 63, just as Norman had done at the 1996 Masters. And there was even a golfer, Inbee Park, trying to win her fourth major championship of the year at St Andrews, where Masters founder Bobby Jones started his Grand Slam in 1930.
It was time indeed to return to the story of Faldo/Norman and the duel that defined an era of the game when an Englishman and an Australian vied to be the best player in the world.
Tea Olive
Hole 1
Yards 400*; Par 4
GREG NORMAN came to the 1st tee with a six-stroke lead. This was the final round of the 60th Masters and everyone standing around the tee box – no need for grandstands at Augusta National as there are at the Ryder Cup and even the other major championships these days, the players are separated from the public by a simple rope line – believed that he was going to win.
So did virtually everyone else who had come onto the grounds that morning, now lining the 1st fairway or staking out the prime positions around the course. For those just yards away around the 18th green, nothing could be more certain than the identity of the winner who would salute them at the end of the afternoon. Television viewers might have thought something similar, except coverage of the climax of golf’s first major of the year did not start for another hour or so. But make no mistake, this was going to be a parade, at the end of which the Norman Conquest of Augusta would finally be complete.
Perhaps only two people were not thinking along these lines. One was Norman himself. He could not afford to. He still had a tournament to win. He led by six strokes but they had only played 54 holes, there were 18 still to come. A quarter of the marathon still to be raced. Norman told himself to treat the round as if he had no lead at all. If he wins on the day, then he wins the title. Keep it simple.
Another person who did no
t think it was a foregone conclusion was the other player standing on the 1st tee. Nick Faldo did not think he would win. But he had not ruled out the possibility that he could win. If nothing else, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, he was going to pretend he could win and see what happened.
Most people, however, chose to believe the evidence of the leaderboard, which showed Norman at 13 under par for the first three rounds. He had equalled the course record of 63 in the first round to lead by two strokes, and then followed up with a steady 69 in tricky conditions on Friday to extend his lead to four strokes. On Saturday he again added two strokes to his lead after returning a 71 to the 73 of his nearest opponent, Faldo. Norman appeared to be striking the ball as well as ever and, just as importantly, had the assured look of a player who was in control of his game and his mind. Not even playing alongside his old rival in the third round had disturbed his equilibrium.
But Faldo had not gone away. His putting had gone through a wobbly patch on the back nine on Saturday but had come good just at the right time, producing a birdie at the 17th hole and a par-saver at the last to ensure he again played alongside the leader on the final day. Faldo and Norman had spent 20 years crossing swords on the fairways of the professional game. In the previous decade they had each in turn been the best golfer in the world. Following on from Tom Watson and Seve Ballesteros in the early 1980s, Norman and Faldo had become golf’s premier rivalry.
In 1986 a ranking system was introduced by Mark McCormack’s International Management Group, then agents to Norman and Faldo, among others. It has since evolved into today’s Official World Golf Rankings but in its first decade of existence it showed Norman’s dominance of the game. In all, the Australian spent 331 weeks as number one; Faldo was the next best on 97 weeks.
It was during that year (1986) that Norman won his first major championship, the Open at Turnberry. He won it again at Sandwich in 1993, the greatest performance of his career as he raced clear of all the best golfers of the day, including Faldo.
But in between Norman’s twin triumphs, Faldo won five majors – the Open three times and the Masters twice – putting him alongside Ballesteros as Europe’s most successful player. When it mattered most, Faldo came out on top more often. Wasn’t it Norman’s hero Jack Nicklaus, the game’s greatest major winner with 18 titles, who said that he could play his game longer than others could play theirs? Let the other guy make more mistakes than you.
Faldo also learnt to do just that, by stifling his natural flair, completely revamping his swing and absorbing himself in the task at hand to the exclusion of all else. His reputation for being almost machine-like was sealed by his 18 pars in the final round of the 1987 Open at Muirfield, his first major victory. At other times, when not quite on his game, he wore his perfectionism so fussily that Brough Scott wrote in the Independent on Sunday in 1991: ‘Everyone suffers on a Faldo round, Faldo most of all. Anything less than perfection gets a terrible black mark. Out on the course it will never be easy to love him. For he does not love himself.’
A choice between watching Norman or Faldo was no contest. When Norman arrived in Europe, the ‘Brisbane Bomber’ was right up there with Ballesteros in the thrill-a-minute department: his Scandinavian looks from his Finnish mother, Toini, combined with the surfer boy image straight from central casting by the Australian tourist board (long before Crocodile Dundee, this). ‘Norman is a sight worth seeing on a golf course,’ wrote John Hopkins in the Sunday Times in 1984, ‘and not only for his guardsman’s walk, his parchment-coloured hair and a voice that echoes around the fairways. He hits the ball as if his life depends on it. From the top of his backswing, when his powerful shoulders are fully turned, he brings his club down at high speed, often grunting with the effort, and swinging so hard that his hands are swept through, up and around his head until his body position resembles a reverse C. When his dander is up, he creates such an impression of power that you wince when he makes contact.’
Now, on Sunday 14 April 1996 both men stood side by side awaiting their opening shots of the final round of the Masters. The date was significant: the last three winners on April 14 had all been non-Americans: Ian Woosnam in 1991, Bernhard Langer in 1985 and Gary Player in 1974. Further confirmation that Norman was on to a good thing arrived with news that the previous five winners of the Masters had played in the final pairing on the last day (as would the next 12). It was the perfect spring day in Georgia, ideal golfing conditions and both men were dressed similarly, in black trousers and white shirts, Faldo with vertical stripes, Norman with dark geometric shapes and, of course, his trademark hat.
It was a black wide-brimmed synthetic straw hat, a golfing version of the Akubra bushman’s hat. In his youth, Norman had had a scruffy old straw hat that he wore down at the beach or while fishing or boating. He continued with the old favourite when he took up golf, even if his mother (the golfer in the family) thought it inappropriate for the golf club. It seems a distant past, compared to the modern ubiquity of golfing caps, when the game’s stars went bareheaded, as Faldo was this day. In fact, Faldo always looked a bit odd when he later adopted a cap, his distinctive features hidden as they are for virtually all today’s leading players, a strange uniformity prevailing.
Norman, by contrast, looked eye-catching whether showing off his yellow mane or sporting the Akubra. Of course, the latest version featured his ‘Great White Shark’ logo, the nickname bestowed long ago on his debut in the Masters having not just stuck but become a brand in itself. The hat, as so much with Norman, suggested that anything other than winning was not an option. But the more inevitable not winning became that day, the more incongruous the hat became. Curiously, Norman won his two majors hatless, his most distinctive feature unhidden, albeit under the softer rays of the British seaside sun.
Was Norman a talented showman or one of the golfing greats? This was the day that should have put an end to such questions but actually only intensified them. David Davies wrote in the 1999 book Beyond the Fairways: ‘So, what is he, this blond-haired, icy-blue-eyed man with broad shoulders, flat belly, slim hips and long legs and who is likely to be wearing a big hat, a garish shirt and tight trousers? Is he a great golfer or a charismatic clothes horse? Is he the most imposing player in modern professional golf or a total poser? The questions follow him around the world.’
Norman’s ability to make money, whether on the golf course or in his increasingly successful business ventures, was not in question. Nor was his liking for speed and expensive toys – the cars, yachts, helicopters, jets – nor his energy and zest for life. Good on him. But golfing greatness required something more, something to add to the two claret jugs and to balance the scale against the times he came so close but ultimately failed, sometimes by his own hand, sometimes due to terrible misfortune. Victory at Augusta, the scene of so many previous Masters disasters, was his due. He had been sized up for a green jacket, the symbol of a Masters champion, so often but now it seemed certain that finally he was going to be able to wear one.
From the opening tee shot that Sunday a different story started to unfold, centred around not one but two players. It was uncomfortable, sickening, traumatic at times, and through it all a pensive grimace was glued to Norman’s face. It had been there ever since his eyes first started turning left, following the ball, from his very first drive of the day.
As it turned out, the ‘most imposing player in modern professional golf’, as Davies put it, was to be not Norman but Tiger Woods. Just a year later Woods burst onto the scene by winning the 1997 Masters by a record 12 strokes and his tenure at the top of the world rankings has lasted twice as long as that of Norman’s. And it would take another 17 years for an Australian, Adam Scott, finally to win the Masters, in 2013.
While Norman and Faldo have moved on to new careers with success, the impact of their epic duel at the 1996 Masters has had a lasting effect. Their influence lives on in the new generation of players who have followed each of them, such as Scott and Justin Rose. Norman
heads a number of companies under the umbrella of Great White Shark Enterprises and in the syntax of Twitter has found the perfect expression of his personal mantra: #AttackLife. Sir Nick Faldo, for he was knighted by the Queen in 2009 for services to golf, has created a worldwide junior tournament scheme as well as becoming one of the game’s leading television commentators. Each April the Englishman is ensconced in a tower above the 18th green at Augusta National to analyse and comment for the American broadcaster CBS.
It was below Faldo on the final green that Scott holed a 25-footer and bellowed: ‘C’mon Aussie’. It got the 32-year-old into a playoff with Angel Cabrera which Scott won at the second extra hole when he holed a 15-footer for birdie in the dark and rain on the 10th green. ‘An unbelievable, magical moment – he is now officially the Wizard of Oz. What a couple of putts they were!’ Faldo exclaimed as a nation on the other side of the world celebrated over breakfast. ‘From Down Under to on top of the world,’ added CBS’s Australian commentator Ian Baker-Finch.
Australians had won the other three golfing majors, and winning the Open Championship remains the dream for any young Aussie golfer, as it was for Norman. But not winning the Masters was getting ridiculous. Too many good players had failed in the quest and Norman’s near misses had almost traumatised a nation.
‘Between the Bangles and the Boomtown Rats, it’s pretty much set in underwater-cured concrete that Mondays have a bit to answer for. They certainly have for Australian golf fans, especially during the mesmerising but frequently demoralising heyday of Greg Norman,’ wrote Patrick Mangan in So Close – The Bravest, Craziest, Unluckiest Defeats in Aussie Sport (Norman could have multiple entries in all those categories).
Scott had watched the 1996 Masters as a 15-year-old golf-mad Shark fan and was crying by the end. After his victory he said: ‘Part of this belongs to Greg. He inspired a nation of golfers. He was the best player in the world and was an icon in Australia. He has devoted so much time to myself and other Australian players who have come after him. He has given me so much inspiration and belief.’ Norman had long since gone from being Scott’s hero to his mentor and the champion said he was looking forward to celebrating over a beer with him. Norman, who was watching at his home in Florida, was delighted. ‘There was more pressure on Adam because no Australian has ever won the Masters. It was a monumental feat and I’m so happy for him.’
