Faldo/Norman (29 page)

With one stroke, Sarazen had caught Wood and after they tied at the end of 72 holes, Sarazen won the 36-hole playoff the next day. We now remember Sarazen for becoming the first player to achieve the career Grand Slam of winning all four majors, only matched since by Hogan, Player, Nicklaus and Woods. But at the time, it was ‘the shot heard round the world’ that made the bigger
impact. Amid the Depression, six years after the stock market crash of 1928, the timing could not be bettered, according to Price. ‘It would be hard to choose a year in the country’s history when Americans were more eager to accept the element of luck,’ he wrote. ‘The nation had sunk to an emotional low point. It was without hope in the land of promise, without faith in the hard work that had made it so.

‘The game of golf didn’t have much to offer the man in the street, especially now that Bobby Jones was no longer performing the impossible. But it could offer up Eugene Saraceni, the son of an Italian immigrant, making a golf shot that was 40,000 to 1. That it happened on Bobby Jones’s golf course and during his tournament – well, there was hope yet, some things you could still have faith in. Sarazen’s double eagle didn’t make the front pages, considering the aristocratic nature of golf and the threadbare conditions of the public. But it came at a time when people would welcome anything lucky, anywhere they could find it, in the sports pages if they had to and about golf if they must, the closer to the impossible the better. Gene Sarazen’s double eagle qualified as “impossible”.’

The impossible keeps happening at Augusta. Simply looking at the last three decades: Nicklaus’s late charge at the age of 46, Larry Mize chipping in to win a playoff, Sandy Lyle making a birdie at the last from the fairway bunker, Fred Couples getting a ball to stop on the bank at the 12th, Faldo overturning a six-shot deficit to Norman, Woods eagling the 15th with a drive and a wedge on the way to a 12-stroke win. A lack of Augusta’s main currency, drama, in the second half of the 2000s was a serious concern for the current Augusta National chairman, Billy Payne, owing to course changes and cold weather producing less exciting fare, but then the event got back on track. Mickelson from the trees at the 13th in 2010, Charl Schwartzel closing with four
birdies in 2011, Bubba Watson with his miraculous bendy escape from the trees at the 10th in 2012 and even an Australian finally winning a green jacket in 2013.

The Masters is the most anticipated major of the year because it is the first, coming eight months after the last. It means spring is here, or, at least, on the way. In the States the second Sunday in April is about the only time golf has the sporting landscape to itself. The National Football League is well over, college basketball, which induces mass hysteria every March, finished the weekend before, the new baseball season is only just getting going, professional basketball and ice hockey are two months away from their climaxes – and the weather in the northern half of the country is not gentle enough yet to have everyone outside for the afternoon. In Europe, the evening, feet-up time slot is perfect and in Britain we have been transfixed since that four-year spell when our boys could not lose it. In Australia, over a Monday morning breakfast, they kept watching because their boys couldn’t win it.

Part of the reason the United States Golf Association chose to introduce a new broadcast partner, Fox Sports, from 2015 was that Glen Nager, the USGA president, was tired of only hearing about the Masters and its ‘tradition unlike any other’. He felt that NBC was not promoting the US Open as successfully as CBS does the Masters. Nager told
Golf Digest
that while the ‘US Open was considered the premier major championship in golf’ in the 1970s, ‘if we looked at indicia today, the Masters is considered the number one major in golf’. Golf’s highest ever rated broadcast was Tiger’s ‘Win for the Ages’ at Augusta in 1997, and his slam-completing 2001 Masters win was not far behind.

Though Woods has been the perennial favourite at Augusta for the last decade and a half, Mickelson, with his Normanesque impulse to go for broke, has been no less an important figure in providing drama at the Masters. Between them they dominated, claiming five titles out of six between 2001 and 2006. While there is no question Tiger is respected, Phil is loved. Part of the endearment is because he has messed up so many times. And he admitted when he screwed up. When he drove into the hospitality tents at Winged Foot in the 2006 US Open, and had a double bogey to lose to Geoff Ogilvy by one, he said: ‘I am such an idiot.’ For much of his first 46 majors, he held that unwanted tag of being the best player not to have won one. That changed at Augusta.

In 1996, Mickelson was playing in his fourth Masters. He had been seventh the year before and his eagle now at the 15th, combined with Nobilo bogeying the last to fall to fourth place on his own, gave Mickelson solo third place. ‘It gave me a real good opportunity of experiencing being in contention,’ said the 25-year-old. ‘I had it last year, too. If I can keep putting myself in that position, the odds say I’ll break through sometime.’

He had to be patient. His powerful yet sometimes wild game and his imaginative recovery skills seemed well suited to Augusta and he was already talked about as a champion-in-waiting. He finished 12th in 1998, sixth in 1999, seventh in 2000 and third in each of the next three years. It took his 12th attempt, in 2004, to get it right, after a thrilling ding-dong with Els, who was prowling the putting green waiting for a playoff when he heard the roar that meant Mickelson had holed from 18 feet on the final green and become only the sixth player to win the Masters by birdieing the last hole. ‘Oh, my God!’ he said as he hugged his wife, Amy, and their three children by the side of the green.

Mickelson won again two years later and for a third time in 2010, after a fine duel with Lee Westwood. The crucial shot came
at the 13th, from the trees, off the pine straw, through a gap only Mickelson could see, from 207 yards with a six-iron, onto the green. This time the family celebration was all the more emotional since it was the first time Amy had been at a tournament since being diagnosed with breast cancer 11 months earlier.

Before the 2003 Masters, 40 years on since Bob Charles won the Open to become the only left-handed major champion, Mickelson was asked who would be the next lefty to win one. The American was more than a bit peeved and declined to answer. As great irony would have it, Mike Weir won that week to become Canada’s first male major winner and Charles’s successor. With Mickelson winning the following year, Weir sparked a run of five victories by left-handers at Augusta in the ten years up to Bubba Watson’s win in 2012. Given the lack of lefties at the highest level, it marked a gross over-representation and brought forward theories that the course is suited to playing the ‘wrong way round’. Martin Kaymer once said that he wished he ‘could play the other way round’ at Augusta. Mickelson, with a smile, retorted: ‘I would love Martin to play this tournament left-handed.’

As seen in the last chapter, the idea that the course favours players who hit the ball right to left is exaggerated. But recent course changes that require greater precision from players bring in the old Trevino saying that ‘you can talk to a fade but a hook won’t listen’. Luke Donald told the
New York Times
: ‘I certainly wouldn’t mind having Mickelson’s cut shot off many of those tees.’

‘There are an awful lot of holes that look more inviting if you stand over the ball as a left-hander. The golf course may have always demanded a certain right-to-left ball flight for the right-handed player, but considering where they’ve moved the tees, it’s exaggerated. It’s a harder shot for a right-hander. It’s just much harder to control a right-to-left draw. And when you have to hit
it farther and control that shape longer like you do now on this golf course, well, the challenge is greater. It’s easier to set up for a left-to-right fade.’

Mickelson loves the 13th hole but says the 12th is another that gives him an advantage based on his shot dispersion as a left-hander. ‘If I pull a shot and aim at the centre of the green, it’s going to go long right or short left, which is exactly the way the green sits. It’s the opposite of a right-handed shot dispersion, which is why it is such a difficult hole. Long, left is trouble and short, right is in the water. You have to hit a perfect shot.

‘But conversely, 16 plays the exact opposite. It’s probably the hardest shot for me, whereas the average right-hander can aim at the middle of the green and if he pulls it, he still carries the water. If he comes out short, right, a lot of times it’ll catch that swale and come down to give you a chance for a par. Whereas, for me, short, left is in the water and long, right is up top.

‘So shot dispersion does make the golf course play differently depending what side you stand on. However, it seems to be a very equal test. It seems to me there are holes that favour one side but there seem to be an equal number of holes that favour the other.’

When Mickelson won the Open at Muirfield at his 20th attempt in 2013, with a closing 66 that included four birdies in the last six holes, his coach Butch Harmon said: ‘I always thought when Greg [Norman] won in ’93 it was the best round to win an Open. But I think this tops it. When you consider the course was playing so tough, so hard and fast, and the circumstances, to go out and suck it up in the way he did was phenomenal.’

Harmon enjoyed some of the biggest highs in golf working with Norman, Woods and Mickelson but the 1996 Masters was
not one of them. Later that summer he parted company from Norman as the Australian tried his luck with Faldo’s tune-up man, David Leadbetter, and Harmon himself concentrated more on Woods. He had few answers as to what happened to the then world number one on that Sunday at Augusta. ‘It was devastating,’ Harmon told Lauren St John in
Greg Norman – The Biography
. ‘I walked around with Laura and Morgan-Leigh and it was one of those things where, as you watched it happen, you couldn’t believe it. The man had played so well for three rounds. He just had such total control, not only of his swing but of his emotions. He had done everything right and to see it all start to come apart was very difficult for a teacher to watch. More difficult for the hurt that not only he was going through, but his family was.’

As Faldo and Norman approached the green at the 15th, they both received a standing ovation. Temporarily, the mood had lightened again. Both had driven into the fairway and had gone for the green in two. Neither had hit it. Faldo went first, from the shadows cast well into the fairway by the pines on the left. He had 212 yards to the flag and hit a four-iron. It landed at the front of the green but must have hit a patch of ground even harder than the rest of the course. His ball sped on through the green and came to rest down the incline behind it. Norman was hitting from 200 yards with a six-iron and went at the flag, which was on the right edge on the green. He came up a little short and right, just short of the bunker on the right and his ball started rolling back down a bank. The pond awaited but on the line his ball was travelling there was a little dell and it stopped in it, short of the water.

Both men now played delicate chip shots. Norman was first up. ‘If we can make this for eagle, we’ll be right back in it,’ he told his caddie. An eagle would have put the pressure back on Faldo and made his chip look even harder. Norman’s ball ran past the
right edge of the hole but pulled up only two feet farther on. It must have looked good all the way because Norman buckled at the knees, fell to the ground and rolled over, a hand instinctively holding the Akubra hat in place. ‘When that chip shot missed, I just went limp,’ he said. ‘My mind left my body and my body left my mind.’

Faldo’s chip was a classic Augusta conundrum – too short or too timid and the ball would come back to his feet; too far and bold and it would never stop before charging down the bank at the front of the green and into the water. He played it as a bump-and-run and it came off perfectly. In
Life Swings
, he wrote, with all due modesty: ‘With the adrenaline coursing through my veins and my throat like parchment, I made it look ridiculously easy by judging the chip to absolute perfection. The ball trickled ever so slowly towards the target, coming to rest three feet from the flag.’