Faldo’s One-Shot Masters Dream

One shot.

In 1971, images of Jack Nicklaus and the Masters flickered on a TV screen across the Atlantic and Nick Faldo, three months shy of his 14th birthday, knew right away what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

His mother cut his hair the following day and sent him off for lessons at a club outside London. But in his mind’s eye, he was standing in the shadow of a Georgia pine, club in hand, with the shot to win the Masters. He quit school not long after and played every day, wearing out a glove a week with this ferocious appetite for golf.

On Sunday, Nick Faldo stood at the most treacherous bend in the farthest reaches of Amen Corner at Augusta National. He had plugged his tee shot in the back bunker on No. 12 and the dream was suddenly very fuzzy. He was staring at a ribbon of green, the bunker in front and Rae’s Creek, the watery grave just beyond. Ray Floyd was three strokes ahead and one hole behind, carrying a reputation as one of the best front-runners playing the game. There was plenty to think about.

One shot.

From 1985 through early 1987, Faldo remodeled his swing with the help of teaching guru David Leadbetter and thousands of hours of practice. But riddled with doubt, he returned to the old one whenever he felt his collar tightening. He lost tournaments and sponsors, but worst of all, he lost respect. Faldo was “El Foldo” in the newspapers; on the practice tee, some pros who saw him struggling pronounced the experiment a failure.

On Sunday, Faldo was paired with the charismatic Nicklaus and the size of the stage was testing his nerves. He is one of the most deliberate golfers ever--if truth be told, excruciatingly slow--and when he won the British Open in 1987 by making 18 straight pars in the wet and cold of Muirfield on the final day, it only confirmed many people’s opinion of him as little more than a plodding technician.

He carded double bogey right out of the box, missed easy birdies at Nos. 3 and 4 but never came unhinged and reached the turn in 1-under 35.

After that, the ball at 12 floated out of the sand, and his 15-foot comeback putt for par teetered at the edge until “I yelled at the top of my voice ‘Go!’ ” Faldo said with a smile, “and the ball proved it had good ears. . . .

“That’s when I thought, ‘you never know,’ that might be the one that starts it all.”

Rejuvenated and taking bigger risks as he went along, Faldo ran off three birdies over the next six holes and parred the final two. Then he sat in the scorer’s tent and watched Floyd line up a 6-footer at No. 18 to determine whether he had to go to a playoff. And waited.

One shot.

In 1989, Faldo went into a playoff with Scott Hoch and dropped his approach at No. 10, the first extra hole, into a bunker. He used three more strokes to get up and down, but Hoch missed that infamous par putt of just 2 1/2 feet. Thus pardoned, Faldo drained a putt 10 times that length at the next hole to win his first Masters.

On Sunday, he went into a playoff with Floyd wanting this one more than the first but with a nagging feeling that he owed the course one. Instead, he needed just two to finish from the same bunker at 10, and let out his breath when, at the 11th, steady Ray Floyd dumped his second shot into the drink.

Faldo had only to cover 150 yards with the club in his hands and find land and he was almost certainly the Masters champion for a second time. And the first thing that went through his mind “was don’t go and follow him.”

Needless to say, Faldo did not. He used two judicious strokes to cover the last 18 feet, and all the questions about unrealized potential and untimely chokes, about his new swing and his old habits, fell away with a click, like the ball into the cup. And replaced by questions like these:

Are you the No. 1 one player in the world?

“I’m not,” he responded with a sly smile, “worried or concerned about that.”

Why is winning three majors better than two?

“It means I’m on an up. The majors are the real thing in golf,” he said. “You never know when and if you’re going to win another one.”

Moments after he won this one, Faldo climbed into the passenger seat of the lead cart in a three-cart procession back toward the clubhouse. It putt-putted slowly up the 11th fairway, stopping briefly in front of the tee to pick up his wife, Gill. She jumped into his lap, buried her face in his neck, and the two spent some of the rest of the ride smooching.

Back near the 11th tee, one groundskeeper poked another in the ribs, pointed at the cart and said, “Look at that.”

“Look at what?” the other replied, “Haven’t you ever seen a man kiss his wife?”

“Not that, dummy,” the first responded. “They’re driving over the tee.”

Not to worry. Nick Faldo just about owns the place. After all, he’s had his eyes on it ever since he was a lad.