Faldo/Norman (11 page)

After his second round at Augusta, Norman was asked about the difficulty of following up on a low score such as a major record-equalling 63. Typically, he brushed the idea aside. ‘I don’t think there was any difficulty,’ he said. ‘I knew when I was headed to the golf course today with the breeze blowing the way it was, the greens were going to be firmer and quicker. I’d already factored that into my mind.

‘I factored in that there were situations where you had to be more conservative. I actually thought I played better today than yesterday. I put the ball in the right place under the circumstances, except on the 11th and 12th holes. Overall, my play was solid. I don’t know about the difficulty of coming back. I just kept my game going the way I had done the day before.’

So he did on Saturday as his lead built and built. But now it was Sunday and the lead was coming down. The bogey at the 4th meant his advantage was down to four strokes. There was to be some relief at the 5th hole, a sign that this could still be a day where the momentum would see-saw. Faldo, with the honour, drove to the right and then his second with a four-iron bounced through the green into a bunker. Measuring 435 yards at the time – it is one of the holes that has been stretched since – it doglegs from right to left. Norman also missed the green, almost going into the same back-left bunker but his ball stopped on the fringe and from there he got down in two with only the tiniest of tap-ins required for his par.

‘There is not a pin on that green where long left is good,’ Jim Furyk once said, ‘especially when the hole is on that little knob front-centre. You’re not going to save par from there.’ Norman had managed it but he was only inches off the green. From down in the bunker, Faldo would not save his par. He came out of the sand ten feet short of the hole and missed the putt on the low side. With the Englishman’s first, and what would prove his last, bogey of the day, Norman’s lead was back up to five strokes.

In matchplay terms it was a hole back to the Australian but it would turn out to be his first and last of the day. Had it been straight matchplay, Faldo would have wrapped it up with six holes to spare. Norman, and all those watching who were rooting for him, might have preferred such a quick kill but, under the protocol of the four-day strokeplay marathon, he still had a sizeable lead.

R
ATHER OMINOUSLY
, the 6th tee at Augusta is perched at the top of a precipice and Greg Norman was about to throw himself off the cliff. A five-stroke lead almost a third of the way through the final round of a major championship proved not to be an effective parachute. He would lose ten strokes to Nick Faldo in the remaining 13 holes, nine of them going in the next 11, so that even by the time he got round to the 16th, all hope of winning the Masters had long gone.

At the bottom of the bank under the tee, spectators can sit and watch as balls fly way over their heads to the green. It is one of the great gathering places of golf. To the right of the 6th green is the 16th green, and farther to the right is the 15th green. Late on Masters Sunday the place is abuzz with excitement as the destiny of the green jacket unfolds. A stream, in fact an extension of the tributary of Rae’s Creek, used to run in the valley between the 6th tee and the green. It was too far short of the putting surface to be in play so for a few years a pond was created instead but that was not in play either, so it was filled in and the stream buried underground. However, the area is not short of dramatic water hazards, with ponds in front of the 15th green and to the left of
the 16th. Shots can be lost on those holes in dramatic fashion but the par-three 6th is a more subtle affair. It was at this hole, almost imperceptibly, that the decisive thrust against Norman was about to begin, with the first of two birdies in three holes from Faldo.

Norman, with the honour back after his opponent’s bogey at the previous hole, pulled his seven-iron but for the first time in the day found the green with a full approach shot. The 6th green has a number of sections on different levels and Norman was down on the front-left section. The pin on Masters Sunday is often in the back-right quadrant, its highest point, and this is where Faldo now took aim with a seven-iron. ‘I have always regarded this as one of the key shots of Augusta week,’ Faldo wrote in
Life Swings
, ‘because you know your game is on if you can hit this spot consistently.’ He certainly did now. It was the Englishman’s best shot of the day so far. It pitched just short of the hole and stopped four feet behind it. Norman made his par but Faldo holed the putt for a birdie two.

With the way the course was set up at the time, players often divided it in their minds into two sections: the first six holes, containing two devious par-threes, three tricky par-fours and only one par-five; and the remaining 12, containing all the familiar risk-and-reward holes from the back nine. ‘There’s a run of holes, 3, 4, 5, 6, those holes are brutal,’ said Duffy Waldorf. ‘The first time I came here, I had no idea how different that part of the course is than the one you see on TV.’

Brad Faxon told
Golf World
(US): ‘Holes 1 through 6, you say, “Just let me make pars, please, please, please.” There are just so many don’ts. Don’t hit it left on the 1st green. Don’t hit it left on 2. Don’t leave it short on 3. The don’t at 4 is, I don’t know how to hit it on the green. At 5, don’t hit it short. Or right. Or long. And at 6, don’t hit it above the hole – not that you can usually help it.’

Even though he parred all the first six holes on Thursday, Norman played the sextet in one over, two over and one over par on the next three days. That made him four over par on the first six holes for the week. With his birdie at the 6th on Sunday, Faldo played the same 24 holes in one under par. That difference of five strokes matched the Englishman’s eventual winning margin. They both played holes 7 to 18 in 11 under par for the week. Faldo the plodder matched Norman the dasher on the death-or-glory holes but made fewer mistakes on the tricky opening stretch. But this Masters was far from won or lost yet, with 12 holes still to play. With his birdie, however, Faldo had got back to within four strokes, the margin Norman had led by two evenings earlier after the second round.

Following a 63 in a major championship, no one had ever scored lower than the 69 Norman returned on Friday. The Australian’s total of 132, 12 under par, was only one stroke outside the record of 131 set by Ray Floyd in 1976. Floyd, who had rounds of 66 and 65, still holds the record but in 1996 no one other than Floyd and Norman had ever scored better than 135 after two rounds of the Masters. Norman led by four from Faldo after 36 holes, one stroke short of the record halfway lead of five by Floyd and also Herman Keiser in 1946 and Jack Nicklaus in 1975.

But the one record Norman created that day which still holds good now is that it was his fifth successive Masters round in the 60s. In tying for third place in 1995, Norman had opened with a 73 but then posted three consecutive scores of 68. Now he had opened the 1996 Masters with returns of 63 and 69. That’s 24 under par for 90 holes at Augusta. The first four of those rounds, and the last four, would have broken the 72-hole scoring
record for the Masters of 18 under par by Tiger Woods in 1997 by three, and two, shots respectively. No further proof is required of Norman’s ability to master Augusta National but it was his failure to find the right sequence in any one tournament that left him without a green jacket.

On Friday Norman was one of only seven players to break 70. He birdied the 2nd hole to get to ten under par and then had his first bogey of the tournament at the 3rd. He immediately had another at the short 4th, the first of three successive fours at the opening par-three. He failed to get up and down from the left bunker but it was his last significant mistake. He got back on track by birdieing the 8th and then completed four fours at the par-fives with birdies at the 13th and 15th holes. He finished the round in style by hitting a sand wedge to four feet at the last.

Yet the real drama of the round came at Amen Corner. Norman hit a fine eight-iron to four feet at the 11th but left the ball in the wrong spot, just above the hole. A shot struck marginally softer might have stayed below the hole, or rolled back down past the hole. ‘When you looked at it, all the spike marks were ten feet below the hole and no one was above it, so you know where balls were finishing,’ Norman said. The pin was cut on the front-left of the green, only four yards from the left (where the pond is) and seven yards from the front of the green. The surface slopes down to the front edge.

So Norman was left with a short putt but a devilish one. ‘That was the quickest putt I’ve ever had in my entire life and ever will have for the rest of my golfing days,’ he said. ‘I took the putter back maybe half an inch. There was no tension in my fingers. There was no pressure on my putter grip. The cops would have had a hard time getting a fingerprint. I hit it and it either had to go in or I knew I was going to have a six-footer.’ Six feet for the return putt might be generous, it might have been nearer eight
but he sank the par putt so there was a happy ending. ‘I’d like to go back there now and knock it with my finger, move it a dimple and see what would happen with the ball,’ he added after his round. ‘That’s why we love playing here. I suppose we get situations like that that we’ve never gotten before in our lives.’

Not everyone was loving it and to some the testing pin positions for the second round, combined with a breezy day and greens that continued to be firm and fast, were a reaction to Norman’s course record-equalling 63 the day before. ‘That must have rattled their cages a bit. The pins could be in the traps by the weekend,’ said Masters rookie Mark Roe. The Englishman would not find out since he missed the cut, a premature end to his tournament and his fund-raising efforts on behalf of Rainbow House, for whom he wore a sunflower in his cap. Will Nicholson, the chairman of the Augusta competitions committee, was not going to do anything other than state that the pins were ‘difficult but fair’ and that they had nothing to do with the 63 on Thursday. ‘We get accused of that all the time,’ Nicholson said. ‘There are some more difficult positions but they weren’t in reaction to nine under. Friday’s pin positions had all been decided before the first player teed it up on Thursday.’

Roe might have benefited from the sort of insight into the greens Czech-born Alex Cejka, another making his debut at Augusta, received from Bernhard Langer during their Monday practice round. Cejka, who had won the Volvo Masters at the end of 1995, took it all on board as he safely made the cut and explained: ‘He showed me some crazy chips and putts. He showed me so many it took about eight and a half hours.’ Older hands were not surprised with Friday’s pin positions. ‘They were a little tougher, definitely,’ said former US Open champion Lee Janzen. ‘None of the pins we saw yesterday or today were anything new. They just used a few of the easier ones yesterday.’

Even Faldo said: ‘There were a couple of racy ones. If you hit it in the wrong place, then it’s scary.’ That was exactly what happened to Norman on the 11th green. But the Shark was not alone. There were 31 three-putts recorded at the 11th hole in the second round, so it happened to one out of every three players. No other green saw more than nine three-putts. Having survived without three-putting for a bogey, however, Norman had to step onto the 12th tee. The day before, the treacherous par-three had played as the easiest of the short holes, and there were no balls in the water. On Friday it ranked the hardest hole on the course.

Ben Crenshaw, the defending champion, made a triple-bogey six, as did Hal Sutton, Payne Stewart and rookie Paul Goydos, who managed it without going in the water. Crenshaw went in twice. His first effort with a seven-iron was 30 yards short and left of where he was aiming, ‘just the sickest looking shot,’ admitted the Texan. ‘That hole had the worst gusts I’ve seen,’ Crenshaw added. In a bowl at the far end of the course, the wind swirls around the trees and leaves players pondering which club to hit to the green that sits at an angle just over Rae’s Creek. Norman took a seven-iron and came up short, the ball rolling down the bank at the front of the green but stopping 14 inches above the waterline. It was the sort of moment of good fortune that helped Fred Couples to victory in the final round in 1992. ‘I thought about that,’ Norman said. ‘I said let’s do what Freddie did. He made a three, I made a three.’ His chip was exquisite, and left him a tap-in for his par.