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In Good Nick Six Major Championships. 30-plus Tour wins. The best Ryder Cup record in history. A skilled broadcaster. A burgeoning business empire. And now with Valhalla behind him, Europe's best ever player has every reason to be satisfied. BY JASON DASEY
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Photo courtesy of Katnook Estate
e sits across from me i n t he lou nge of T he Hong Kong Golf Club and there’s a reassuring familiarity about the man who’s been described as Europe’s best ever player. For someone who turns 52 in July, Nick Faldo remains remarkably boyish: a few more wrinkles perhaps, but he still has that abundant mane of dark brown hair parted to the right, and those piercing blue eyes that can burn right through you. In fact, he doesn’t a look a lot different to the golfer who won his sixth and final Major title on the second Sunday of April 1996, reeling in Greg Norman at Augusta National to complete one of the most remarkable comebacks in Masters history. www.hkga.com
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“Right now, I live day-to-day and think ‘how can I enjoy today and have I given some enjoyment to somebody else?’” But despite appearances, Faldo has evolved and reinvented himself on many levels, not least of which relates to his public persona. The once intense and single-minded go-getter has transformed himself into a media-friendly golfing great who, among other things, is the lead analyst for American network, CBS. Instead of shunning interviews and revealing as little as possible about himself as was often the case during his playing days, the Englishman now embraces them, as he sees television, radio and newspapers as a useful shop window to his many corporate ventures. “I’m very fortunate,” he tells me. “Right now, I live day-to-day and think ‘how can I enjoy today and have I given some enjoyment to somebody else?’ Whether it’s a fun golf tip or a silly line on television and somebody gets a laugh out of it, then I think I’ve had a great day.” 52
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His business interests – including the Faldo Series, a development programme for talented young golfers and Faldo Design, his course architecture division – are growing all the time. So much so that the former obsession of the exworld number one – competitive golf – is now just an occasional luxury. “[Playing competitive golf] means a lot of pain these days,” he says. “When you haven’t done it for so long, it’s very difficult to gear up. The body’s basically saying: ‘Time out. You’ve sent me around the world for the last 30 years. We’ve had enough of this.’ I don’t quite have the stamina and batteries that I used to have.” Of course, that line between the witty retired legend and the hardened golf professional was temporarily blurred when he stepped back into the cauldron last September as Europe’s captain at the 37th Ryder Cup in Kentucky. He was widely criticized in the British Press for almost everything, including his selections, his tactics, his demeanour, his speeches and even his jokes as the Europeans were comprehensively outplayed to lose the coveted trophy for the first www.hkga.com
time since 1999 and for only the second time in 15 years. To some, it seemed doomed from the start. Despite his stellar Ryder Cup playing career, Faldo was seen as too abrasive and self-centred to be given the job of guiding Europe to victory over Paul Azinger’s Team USA. It was almost as if the famous Faldo ego got in the way of team bonding, with Colin Montgomerie among those who observed that the Europeans at Valhalla resembled the disjointed American teams of recent times and vice versa. Faldo rejects any notion of an unhappy camp: “I was there in the team room so I know what was going on and what really happened, how the decisions were made and everything,” he says. “For me, the Ryder Cup was a fabulous experience. I did get quite a kick and a buzz out of just being in the team room again.” Faldo’s contentious pick of Ian Poulter as a wild card ahead of Darren Clarke was vindicated with the flamboyant Englishman winning more points than any other player. But the tactic of stacking the Sunday singles, with his best players starting last, backfired when the Americans wrapped it up with four matches to go. With hindsight, what might Faldo have done differently? “In my view of the banking situation right now, a few people would love hindsight. But like anything in life, you can’t work that way. You deal with what is happening right now and make the decisions on the information you have right now. You can’t go backwards. It doesn’t work.” Indeed, he could never be accused of excessive
naval-gazing and failing to move on with life. As long ago as 1991, he was working on turning his name into a brand with the launch of Faldo Design, which creates golf courses from scratch or re-designs existing layouts. Around the same period, his contemporaries Sandy Lyle and Ian Woosnam – both born within nine months of him – were also household names in the UK but only the Hertfordshire-born Faldo went on to execute the same vision of global dominance. When I spoke to him in Hong Kong, eight Faldo Design courses had been completed – including his most recent, Roco Ki, described as a lush, botanical garden in the Dominican Republic - with a further eight in the pipeline. So what special characteristics define a Faldo course? “What I pride myself on is that really aren’t any,” he says. “We literally go from the desert to the jungle to the mountains to the forest or onto the beach so it’s real fun. You try to put your own individual stamp on what you feel fits the environment best.” He’s equally proud of the Faldo Series which was launched in 1996 as a youth circuit to help develop European players but is now going global with a Grand Final last year in Brazil plus a thriving Asian version. His successful graduates include European Tour players Nick Dougherty, Ollie Fisher and Rory McIlroy, as well as Taiwanese star Yani Tseng, who earned LPGA Tour Rookie of the Year honours in 2008 thanks largely to her brilliant performance in capturing the McDonald’s LPGA Championship, her first Major. “We’re touching on 4,000 competitors now
Multitasking (clockwise from top right): moments after receiving the green jacket from Ben Crenshaw in 1996; in the booth; with Yani Tseng at the 2006 Faldo International Series Grand Final at Fanling. www.hkga.com
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“I wanted to go and win Majors. I wanted to be successful and I wanted to be famous. I wanted to have lots of money. I wanted to have choices. If we can keep creating opportunities so we can have different choices, that’s about the best thing we’ve got in our lives.”
Off the course: (from top): Faldo the fisherman; the much-lauded Roco Ki in the Dominican Republic, a Faldo Design.
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so we’re trying to set some new goals and see what we can reach in the next three to five years,” he says. “I was told as a kid that one in 10,000 has the dream and goes onto to make it as a professional. If can we improve that to three in 10,000, well, we’ve done a good job.” This was the third meaningful interview – spaced roughly a decade apart - that I’d done
with Faldo. The first was at Wentworth in the late 1980s when he was in the middle of that purple patch where he won a Tiger-like five Majors in five years – he had a stunning eighteen top-10 Major finishes between 1987 and 1996 and was the most feared player either side of the Atlantic. The second meeting was just after the Millennium at Georgia’s second tournament, the Bell South Classic, a week before the 2000 Masters when Faldo was playing on the PGA Tour. At that time, he told me that he was able to concentrate more on golf again after sorting things out in his personal life in the wake of a notorious incident a couple of years earlier that saw former girlfriend Brenna Cepelak smash his Porsche 959 with a 9-iron, inflicting £10,000 damage. He’s always provided plenty of fodder for the tabloids – sadly, his third marriage to Swiss public relations agent Valerie Bercher ended after he filed for divorce in 2006 – but Faldo remains a proud, if sometimes distant, father of four. In December, he played in a father and son event for the first time, teaming up with 19-year-old Matthew to finish joint-seventh
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at the Dell Webb Challenge in Florida (The Normans were 10th and the Nicklauses 15th). His only son is a student at the University of the West of England in Bristol and has no plans to follow his father’s career path. Matthew and his sisters Natalie, 21, and Georgia, 15, are from his second marriage to Gill Bennett. His youngest daughter, Emma, is from his relationship with Valerie Bercher. “Emma, the little five-year-old, has me completely hooked,” he confesses. “‘Daddy, I need a new dress for the Ryder Cup,’ she tells me from the back of the car. ‘Daddy, I love you’. And I look in the mirror and she’s not even looking at me. She’s working me for 20 minutes. And sure enough we end up in the dress shop and buy her a dress. Then I get told off by the big girls for being too soft, but I love it.” ‘Soft’ isn’t a word that you’d often associate wit h Fa ldo whose menta l fort it ude got him home down the stretch at three Open championships – in 1987, 1990 and 1992 – and three times at the Masters, in 1989, 1990, 1996. Almost thirteen years on, the last of his Augusta green jackets still defies logic after Faldo’s final round 67 alongside Greg Norman’s 78 turned a six shot final round deficit into a five stroke victory. When I ask Faldo about his strongest, single memory from that final Major success, it’s almost as if he’s on a therapist’s couch, transported back in time, as a descriptive stream of consciousness flows from his mouth. “The first thought I had was obviously the 18th green, then it was that shot I hit at 13 [a sweetly struck 2-iron to the heart of the green which set up an easy two-putt birdie]. The next thought I had was ‘wow’ when I walked onto the 12th green and suddenly I had a two-shot lead. It’s like bang-bang-bang. “There are still a lot of emotions from that day. Obviously for me, it was a little further on in my career. I didn’t quite have the self-belief that I had from 1990 to 1992. I had to walk myself through that day mentally and keep myself going. For me, it was probably one of the best mental days I’ve ever had on a golf course.” As he looks back on his life so far, he’s filled with gratitude but not with surprise. Bold, brave and brash, you could certainly never accuse Nicholas Alexander Faldo of speaking with false modesty. www.hkga.com
“I did have visions. I wanted to go and win Majors. I wanted to be successful and I wanted to be famous. I wanted to have lots of money. I wanted to have choices. If we can keep creating opportunities so we can have different choices, that’s about the best thing we’ve got in our lives.”
The Faldo File DATE OF BIRTH: 18 July 1957 PLACE OF BIRTH: Welwyn Garden City, England TURNED PRO: 1976 (Plus 1) MAJOR VICTORIES: 6 (British Open – ’87, 90, 92; Masters – ’89, ’90, ’96) OTHER PROFESSIONAL VICTORIES: 34 RYDER CUP RECORD: Played 46: Won 23, Lost 19, Halved 4 ACCOLADES: 1977 Rookie of the Year; two-time European Tour Order of Merit winner (1983, 1992); 1990 US PGA Player of the Year; World Number 1 for 95 weeks; awarded MBE in 1988; inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1997
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