Faldo/Norman (3 page)

Those who did not see the result as a foregone conclusion were certainly in the minority, although some time after the 1996 Masters, the sports columnist Ian Wooldridge admitted of Faldo’s victory: ‘Shamefully, I confess that on the previous evening, emboldened by several martinis, I’d backed Nick to do it and thereby won the biggest bet of my life.’ (Details unknown but Ladbrokes had Faldo at 7-1 before the final round, Norman at 1-8.)

Ron Green, in the
Charlotte Observer
, wrote: ‘Greg Norman won the Masters on Saturday. Now, if he can only keep from losing it. Don’t worry, he won’t lose this time. Surely, not this time. He has a six-shot lead over Nick Faldo, who doesn’t score a lot of 65s and 66s, the kind of scores he’ll need to even have a chance of catching Norman. Phil Mickelson is another shot back, but he drives his ball into the camellias too much and has to play trick shots to make his pars. Nobody else is in the game. It will be Greg Norman against himself out there Sunday on those rolling fairways where so many of his demons have been born. It is a formidable opponent.’

Meanwhile, Australian journalists were up late on Saturday night concocting tributes for their Monday morning newspapers, which would arrive on readers’ doormats as the final round was taking place. The
Sydney Morning Herald
may have indicated that Norman was Australia’s greatest sportsman since Bradman. They changed their tune after the following day.

On Saturday evening, after his third round, Norman was asked if he had ‘thought about the ceremony and the jacket, and will you think about that tonight?’ Norman was not falling for the cart-before-the-horse trick. He replied: ‘No, I haven’t. I never have in the past. When you’ve got the lead in a tournament, you
don’t think about the end result. You just think about what you’re doing at the time and relax and chill out. If you get ahead of yourself, it is not going to work. So, I’ll wake up tomorrow and do what I’ve been doing and get ready for the 1st tee.’

Temptation was everywhere, however. After a late practice session, Norman went back to the locker room, where a friend said: ‘Your last night in here.’ Masters champions use a different changing room upstairs in the clubhouse. Another longtime friend of Norman’s, Peter Dobereiner, the great golf writer for
The Observer
and
The Guardian
, was attending the Masters for the last time. He died in August that year, with Norman paying a handsome tribute: ‘To think of golf without Peter Dobereiner is like a bunker without sand, a fairway without grass, a flag without a green. His dry humour, wonderful understanding of the game, coupled with his deep love for the sport, is going to be sadly missed.’ But now, standing at the urinals in the (downstairs) locker room at Augusta, Norman could do little more than force a smile when Dobereiner remarked: ‘Well, Greg, not even you can fuck this one up.’

What Norman and Faldo did during the final round of the 1996 Masters is a matter of record. But what happened before their 2.49 p.m. tee time remains open to speculation. Not least for Norman himself. Asked on the Sunday evening if his routine had been anything different the night before or that morning, Norman replied: ‘No, nothing different. Everything was pretty much the same. I did the same process.’ Asked if he had slept well, he answered: ‘Yeah, I slept great. By the time you get back and eat, you don’t get to sleep until 12, 12.30 a.m. But I wake up every morning at nine. I had a lot of good night’s sleep. That wasn’t my problem.’

During the week, Norman’s back had played up and he had to curtail his practice on Wednesday. But after treatment from both Fred Couples’s back specialist and then his own trainer, he was fine once the tournament got under way. He did not mention it in his Sunday night press conference, but when interviewed for the ABC TV documentary programme
Australian Story
, which aired in Australia in September 2013, Norman said: ‘Again, there’s more to it than people realise. Because I did have bad back issues that morning and I tried to walk it off but I couldn’t. I told my coach, “Today’s not going to be easy.” ’

This made news around the world along the lines of Norman suddenly changing his story. That is not true and is unfair in the sense that he would not have wanted to discuss the full extent of his back issues during the tournament. In 2009, on the eve of his return to the Masters after a six-year absence, Norman told Jeff Rude of
GolfWeek
: ‘My timing was off. I knew on the driving range before I teed off. My back was bad on Saturday, and I woke up Sunday morning very stiff. I went for a one and a half mile walk to try and loosen it up. But on the range, my turn wasn’t good. You look at all the shots from the 1st hole on – they were just three or four yards out. The more I pushed it, the harder it was. So you feel like water going through your fingers. It’s just disappearing.’

Augusta National, with its hills – proper ski-slope inclines – is no place for someone with a bad back to walk all week. In
Breaking the Slump
, also published in 2009, Jimmy Roberts wrote that Norman woke up with a stiff back. Norman told him: ‘No matter what I tried to do in a short amount of time on the range, I couldn’t get the club squared up.’

In his
GolfWeek
piece, Rude quoted Norman’s then coach, Butch Harmon, who had masterminded his rise back to being world number one after a couple of poor years at the start of the 1990s, as saying he had noticed his man ‘didn’t have it’ on
the range on Sunday. Harmon said: ‘He was definitely a different person physically and emotionally. He fought his back all week but played within himself. Sunday, it was like he tried to push everything. There was a tremendous amount of anxiety in his body that day.’ However, in a
Golf World
interview published in September 1996, Harmon, while saying Norman’s whole nervous system was out of synch, also said: ‘I never anticipated it would happen that way. I didn’t see anything before the round on Sunday – whether it be swing mechanics, personality or nerves that gave me any indication that would happen. I was in a state of shock.’

Lauren St John, in her 1998 book
Greg Norman – The Biography
, wrote: ‘Out on the range, Norman felt nervous but, as he later told his wife, Laura, “It was the right kind of nerves.” He didn’t feel the curious deadness that had come over him at St Andrews in 1990, and he didn’t feel as jittery and nauseous as he had at Turnberry in 1986. He felt hopeful and relaxed. Watching him, Butch Harmon thought his ball-striking was almost perfect. A constant stream of people came up to wish Norman the best.’ Ken Brown, the former Ryder Cup player, was covering the Masters for BBC Radio and remembered watching Norman on the range. ‘He was flushing everything,’ he recalled. Norman’s last shot before leaving the driving range and short game area to go through to the other side of the clubhouse, and the putting green and the 1st tee, was to hole a bunker shot.

Norman himself wrote in his autobiography,
The Way of the Shark
(2006), about his back problems on the eve of the tournament. But in light of future comments, this is strange about the Sunday: ‘I recall walking up feeling hopeful and relaxed. My back was still in good shape, so I knew I had an opportunity to fulfil one of my career dreams.’

Painting the scene before the final round, the 1996
Masters
Annual
reported: ‘On the practice tee, Norman was the picture of relaxation. He chatted with fellow competitor Frank Nobilo and the two made a date for a practice round at the next Tour stop. Norman seemed in no hurry to get down to business, trying on three brand-new shark-emblazoned golf gloves before finding the one that felt just right. Then he worked methodically through a half dozen irons and woods, pausing now and then to joke with his caddie Tony Navarro and coach Butch Harmon. At one point, Norman playfully poked a finger into Harmon’s forehead and all three men laughed heartily. If Norman was less than comfortable with his swing or his situation, he didn’t show it.

‘Throughout the previous three days, the tournament had buzzed with talk of the “new Norman”, the wiser, more serene warrior whose competence had at last matched his confidence. The fellow striping skyscraper two-irons to the back of the range was that Greg Norman.

‘A few steps away, Nick Faldo toiled in a more studious mode. He, too, was flanked by his caddie and his coach but there was no byplay with Fanny Sunesson and his few exchanges with David Leadbetter focused on swing mechanics, Leadbetter stepping in at one point to check club position as Faldo froze at the top of the swing. Team Faldo, it seemed, had serious work to do.’

In fact, Faldo had spent his morning on the phone with his parents, which was atypical on the Sunday of a major, and got so caught up with the NASCAR motor racing on the television that there was no time for his usual hour-and-a-half warm-up session. Sunesson told him he had 57 minutes till their tee time when he walked onto the range at last. ‘In reality, this break in my usual routine was probably a good thing for me as it meant that I just had to get on with my practice,’ Faldo wrote in
Life Swings
, his autobiography, ‘whereas Greg had been down there early, talking to everyone.’

Even Faldo. As the pair waited on the 1st tee, they chatted. ‘Oh, we were talking about photographers,’ Norman reported. ‘The way they do it here at the Augusta National is the best. Like everything else they do here, it’s the best championship we play. We get to play the game without having to ask photographers to move. Sometimes they don’t know they’re in the line of sight of where you want to play. But here they’ve got them situated in fixed positions. Nick said it would be great if we can get this at the British Open and would speak to Michael Bonallack.’ The Masters remains unique in excluding press and photographers from inside the ropes, something the then secretary of the Royal and Ancient was probably used to players complaining about at the Open.

Then there would be no more talking until the 18th green. Phil Harison, the starter for 60 years until his death in 2008, announced: ‘Fore, please, Greg Norman now driving.’ It was a pull into the trees on the left between the 1st and 9th fairways. He had a direct route to the green but his recovery was a fraction short for the tight line that he attempted to play. The ball toppled back into the bunker on the left and from there he came out seven feet past the hole. Faldo had driven safely and then hit a nine-iron to the heart of the green. His 25-foot putt, slightly uphill, came up a touch short but it was a sure four. Norman missed his putt, the sort he had been holing all week, but this one did not come close to touching the hole.

It was a different day, a different Norman: that much was obvious already. Quite when he realised he was in trouble, well before the round or on this 1st hole, will remain shrouded in doubt. The scoreboard reflected only a minor change, and his lead was still commanding at five strokes. Was it to be a momentary blip or was it game on?

*
Hole yardages stated in chapter headings refer to the course as played in 1996.

A
BOGEY WAS NOT
the best start but it was nothing to panic about, either. After an opening hole that is designed to wake up any golfer not immediately on top of their game, the 2nd offers a chance to even up the scorecard. It is a big, sweeping hole that swings from right to left, downhill, so it does not play as long as the yardage suggests.

It usually plays as the second or third easiest hole on the course but that does not mean it is without danger. A ravine on the left is referred to as the ‘Delta ticket counter’ as a trip in there on the first couple of days can lead to a rescheduling of flights for Friday evening and a weekend at home. It was the last of the par-fives at Augusta to concede an albatross, Louis Oosthuizen holing out for a two from 253 yards with a four-iron – before losing to another spectacular shot in the playoff by Bubba Watson in 2012.

Norman had already given a hint of encouragement to Faldo, who was happy to receive any tiny crumb of comfort, so this was the time to recapture the initiative. Yet Faldo, having gained the honour and already driven off at the 2nd hole, certainly noticed a change in the leader. So much for the mantra of only ‘playing
your own game’. Inside the ropes at a major championship is as intimate as a boxing ring.