In 1957, England still bore the signs of the war that had ended only a
dozen years earlier. There was no obvious prosperity. Colors were drab and
unimaginative. Food rationing for meager portions of milk, meat, and eggs
had only recently ended.
The wireless, as it was called then, was the primary medium for home
entertainment, and the cinema—known as “the flicks” for the flickering
images that were projected on the screen—the preeminent nonsporting
public entertainment. Even the Mini, the car of which more than five million would eventually be sold, was still only a pencil drawing on the board
of Alex Issigonis, its brilliant engineer, at his Birmingham office.
It was into this country, a Britain that had not yet fully struggled clear
of the final embers of World War II, that Nick Faldo was born at 57 Knella
Road, Welwyn Garden City, on July 18, 1957. Faldo was one of a quintet
of golfing prodigies who would go on to win major championships that
were all born in Europe in a ten-month span between April 1957 (Severiano Ballesteros) and March 1958 (Ian Woosnam). Bernhard Langer
(August 1957) and Sandy Lyle (February 1958) rounded out the five-ball
that would contribute so much to the success of professional golf in Europe
in the years to come. George and Joyce Faldo were a typical family who, if not struggling to
make ends meet when their son was born, had not yet established any last
degree of financial security. George Faldo worked in the financial planning
department of ICI Plastics. Joyce Faldo was a cutter and pattern drafter for
a firm that sold silk. They lived for Nicholas Alexander, their son and only
child.
We are all children of parental influence, the way we are because of the
way they are, or were, by example—genetically shaped by them, influenced
by them, taught by them, and frequently one parent more than the other
has a dominant influence during the formative years. On the other hand,
some children seem motivated to outstanding feats as a direct consequence
of their failure to gain a parent’s approval.
Harry Vardon, for example, never received the appreciation he expected
from his father, and its lack may have been one of the most powerful influences that drove him to win six Open championships, the first in 1896,
the sixth some eighteen years later in 1914. “Harry is the golfer, but ’tis
Tom who plays the golf,” Vardon’s father once wrote of his two sons. There
was a similar froideur between Greg Norman and his father, and it wasn’t
until Norman was well into his thirties that he and his father were able to
sit down and talk it over. Charlie Nicklaus, a genial pharmacist, was the
dominant parent in the eyes of young Jack, and Arnold Palmer always knew
that if Deacon Palmer, his father, was angry with him he could expect Deacon’s heavy hand or worse. Deacon was a disciplinarian. Earl Woods certainly implanted powerful genes into his son.
If George Faldo, a quiet, somewhat shy man, provided his son with a
considerable physique—long legs and broad shoulders—most of the rest
of Nicholas Alexander Faldo has come from his mother, a tall, vivacious
woman with his high cheekbones. Nor was the early driving force in young
Faldo’s life ever in doubt. Ask if Nick is the son of his mother or father and
the answer is always his mother.
They doted on their son as the parents of only children often do. Joyce
Faldo once recalled the extent of her ambition for him. “We wanted Nick
to be an actor,” she said. “We thought he’d be another Olivier. We took
him to dancing lessons. We tried to interest him in music; we knew he
would win the Tchaikovsky piano prize. He has smashing legs, and I
wanted him to be a model, so we used to go with him to Harrods fashion shows. And then I realized he lived for sport and wanted nothing else. So
that was the end of those dreams.”
Joyce Faldo would take young Nicholas anywhere he wanted to go in
the small family car and take his friends too, fitting these journeys in
around her work as best she could. Later neighbors and colleagues told her
they thought she was doing too much for her son. “We thought you were
mad the way you did everything for Nick,” Joyce Faldo remembers being
told years later by a neighbor. “We thought you were spoiling him.”
Such criticism was of no concern to Joyce Faldo. She was demonstrating such confidence in her son that not only did he never dream he would
fail but she instilled her own belief in him. He is living proof of Freud’s
theory that “a man who has been the undisputed favorite of his mother
keeps for life the feeling of being a conqueror, that confidence of success
that often induces real success.”
“We didn’t think for a moment that what we were doing was wrong,”
she said years later. “It seemed to us to be the most natural thing in the
world to do everything in our power to help Nick. It did not enter our
heads that he might fail. He was so sure of his ambitions to be a professional golfer and win titles that we knew he had what it takes. Besides, people kept coming up to me and saying, ‘You know Nick is very good, don’t
you?’ All we had to do was to sit back and wait.”
The time between 1987 and 1992, and particularly between 1987 and
1990, must have been a joyous time for the senior Faldos. They saw their
son play to a level of consistency that was unmatched.
In July 1987 he won the Open at Muirfield, parring every hole in his
fourth round, an achievement that down the years became rather devalued
by criticism that it was boring golf. A year later he was edged into second
place in the U.S. Open—but only after an eighteen-hole play-off in which
Curtis Strange outlasted him. He won the U.S. Masters in 1989 and again
in 1990, and in the Open at St. Andrews in 1990 he won by five strokes.
In the thirteen major championships in this period Faldo won four, came
in second once, and five times finished in the top 11.
This was a dominance that was rare in those days. It took one back to
Jack Nicklaus at his peak, and it was not until Tiger Woods came along at
the end of the century and won the four successive major championships
that Faldo’s record was overshadowed. It can be instructive and revealing to learn how champion golfers take
up the game. Severiano Ballesteros came to it because his brothers played,
and he started when he was no more than a mite by hitting a ball around
on the beach at Santander, his home in northern Spain. It was something
similar with Sandy Lyle, who, at the age of three, was to immediately prove
extraordinarily accomplished when a golf club was placed in his tiny hands.
Likewise, perhaps more so, the case of Tiger Woods, who started swinging
a cut-down golf club around the same time as he started to walk.
Faldo, however, knew nothing of golf until the Easter of 1972, about
the time of his fourteenth birthday. He was watching television at home
when Jack Nicklaus appeared on the screen competing in the Masters at
Augusta National. At that time Faldo was an outstanding swimmer, a good
runner and cyclist. Even then he preferred individual sports, those in which
there was no one else with whom to share the credit, no one to blame when
things did not work out as planned. Seeing this burly man with blond hair
moving among the stately pines at Augusta National was a life-changing
experience for the young Englishman sitting in his parents’ house in Hertfordshire. Entranced, he moved nearer the edge of his seat, and soon his
mother was arranging for the lanky teenager to have a series of golf lessons.
Such was the beginning of golf for the man who would become the best
English golfer (Sandy Lyle’s a Scot, Ian Woosnam Welsh) since Henry Cotton in the 1930s and 1940s or Harry Vardon several decades earlier.
The best in Britain? The best in the world for a while, the most consistent, the most respected, the most admired. At this time, he talked of how
he wanted to know that in years to come people would say to one another:
“I saw Nick Faldo play golf. He wasn’t bad.” That laconic British understatement appealed to Faldo’s humor, a humor as frequently misunderstood
as the man himself.
Where Faldo was so good was in the fact that all aspects of his game
were strong. His driving was straight, if not as long as one would expect
from such a big and powerful-looking man, his irons were crisp, his short
game clinical, and his putting was lethal, a result of years spent putting on
differing surfaces in his parents’ home, from slippery linoleum on the bathroom floor to carpet in the sitting room.
As a champion Faldo had none of the thunderous power of Nicklaus,
nor the velvet touch and imagination of Ballesteros. Yet he was straighter
and steadier than Tom Watson and, at their respective best, certainly as
62 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
good a putter. Sandy Lyle probably had more God-given talent, but possibly less application. There is one famous story concerning the rivalry
between Lyle and Faldo, a rivalry that drove Faldo on and on because it
seemed that Lyle always got better more quickly. Lyle was British-boy and
youths international, was selected to play for his country, won professional
tournaments, and then won his first major championship, all ahead of
Faldo. One day in Boston in 1988 Faldo revealed the depths of his feelings
on this subject. He had just come in from a practice round before that year’s
U.S. Open. He was getting ready for a session on an exercise bike followed
by an hour in the gym. Across the other side of the pool was Lyle, sitting
with a group of friends. “Look at Sandy’s swing,” Faldo said with feeling.
“It goes over, up, down, around, through, in, and out. By rights it should
not work at all, but it does.” He sighed and consigned himself to a longer
session than usual on the bike and in the gym to make up for what was
clearly a differential in talent between him and Lyle.
Faldo’s talent may have been slower in arriving, but it lasted longer. Lyle’s
victories in major championships came in the Open at Sandwich in 1985
and the Masters in 1988 compared with Faldo’s six victories—the Masters
of 1989, 1990, and 1996 and the Open of 1987, 1990, and 1992.
In his array of talents Faldo could not claim to be the best in the world
at any individual skill in the way that Ben Hogan was so coolly precise and
that flexible Sam Snead was such a remarkable athlete. Nicklaus’s mind was
stronger than any since Hogan, a category that now includes Woods. Ballesteros was more thrilling. Norman was longer. Bernhard Langer’s long irons
were more deadly, Faldo’s equal in physical fitness.
Nor would Faldo win a contest for the game’s all-time individual categories. Driving accuracy and driving distance would belong to Nicklaus,
greens-in-regulation to Hogan, putting to Watson, while Gary Player
owned the sand section outright. But in such an analysis Faldo would certainly be very close to the top of the all-around statistics. And remember
that such a measure does not include one of Faldo’s greatest strengths, his
analytical mind, one that was always open to advice, and his visceral instinct
that more often than not he was the one who knew best for himself. Again
and again in the first four decades of his life Faldo did things that appeared
to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, and almost without exception
he was proved right. Over his career Faldo demonstrated the strength of
his mind again and again, starting with his decision to quit a university
Magic by Practice • Nick Faldo 63
place in the United States after a mere couple of months and return to
Britain. Many questioned this decision, suggesting he was a quitter. Faldo,
however, maintained he was falling back in the Unites States, not moving
forward. He did not like the endless medal rounds and wanted instead to
hit balls on a practice ground as he had done at home.
No less important was his decision in the early 1980s to change his swing
under the tutelage of David Leadbetter. Faldo won the Order of Merit in
Europe in 1983 for the first time. This was not enough to convince him
that his swing was strong enough to withstand the pressure of the final
rounds of tournament golf, and so he sought out Leadbetter, a leading
teacher of the era. It was close to four years before Faldo began to play really
good golf again, and during that time there were many who felt he had
made a grave mistake. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” was the view of his
swing. Once again, over the next five years Faldo would prove his decision
to have been the right one for him.
In the Open championship at Muirfield in 1992 Faldo led midway
through the last round, then fell behind. Having led and then lost the initiative, few thought he could regain it. One who did was Faldo himself, the
other was Leadbetter—and on that breezy Sunday they might have been
the only two!
Faldo recaptured the lead and won, as much by willpower as by skill.
Legend recalls that on the fifteenth tee Faldo turned to his caddie and said,
“I am now going to have to play the best four holes of my life,” and
promptly did so—for his fifth major championship.
In the 1995 Ryder Cup at Oak Hill, Faldo walked onto the sixteenth
tee two down in his singles match against Curtis Strange. An hour later he
had won, the manner of his winning of the last hole the stuff of fairy tales.
A drive that tailed off into the rough was followed by a recovery shot hit
to precisely ninety-five yards from the flagstick, a distance with which Faldo
felt most comfortable. There followed a wedge to four feet from where
Faldo rapped home the putt for the one-hole victory that in the final analysis assured Europe of an historic Ryder Cup triumph on U.S. soil. Indeed
over his entire career, the greater the pressure, the more cerebral Faldo
seemed to become at the critical moments. Still, the greatest triumph of
mind over matter might have been the following April when Norman and
64 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
Faldo, who had so often been cast together as the central figures in a crucial round of golf, played out the last round of the Masters.
Norman, who had begun leading by six strokes, was behind by the
eleventh hole and would eventually lose by five, a swing over the eighteen
holes of eleven strokes. As well as the sheer scale of the achievement, in
time that meeting of the two great players of the day would take on even
greater significance. It would be Faldo’s last victory in a major championship and virtually Norman’s last high finish in any future major. It was
as if the enormity of what they had gone through had worn them both out.
For much of the time that he was at the top of his career, Faldo had a
female caddie, Fanny Sunesson, who came from Karlshamm, a town two
hours’ drive from Malmo. At this time female caddies were far from usual
on the golfing scene, and choosing Fanny was yet another mark of Faldo’s
unwavering individualism. Sunesson was and is a hardworking, genial bag
carrier who kept to herself. Faldo had noted her incessantly cheerful attitude, her attention to detail, her vast appetite for work. For the best part
of a decade they were together before late in 1999 Sunesson, by now tiring of Faldo’s lack of success and seeking the sort of challenge that had originally drawn her to Faldo, ended their partnership. Faldo, asked what he
would miss most about Fanny, replied: “Well, it will be hard getting used
to not hearing her say things like: “Did you know there are seventeen different types of hummingbird in this town?” Yet time would heal whatever
dissent may have occurred, maybe none, and their longtime partnership
was revived in obvious good humor in April 2001.
The recurring pattern throughout Faldo’s career was that women played
an extraordinarily important part in the shaping of his life. By the age of
forty-two, he had been married and divorced twice, had one highly publicized fling with a girl barely more than half his age, which was ended, the
tabloid newspapers in Britain took some pleasure in reporting, when she
took a nine-iron and set about the bonnet of his Porsche. He was proposing to marry a Swiss in her twenties who had walked out of her relationship upon meeting Faldo in Switzerland.
The truth is that Faldo is like Coriolanus. He was molded by women,
first his mother, then Melanie, his first wife, then Gill, his second, then
Brenna Cepelak, and currently Valerie Bercher, whom he married in July
Magic by Practice • Nick Faldo 65
2001, with Fanny Sunesson and her relentlessly cheerful presence on his
golf bag for most of the winning streak.
The ultimate test for any sportsman in Britain is the opinion of “the
man in the street,” and there were plenty of times when Faldo was shopping or getting out of his car when someone, unprompted, would shout
out: “Good on you, Nick” or “Well done, Nick. Good luck.”
Nonetheless he remained a figure with a checkered history in the eyes
of the British public, and it was not until the 1995 Ryder Cup, just one
week before news of his leaving his second wife became public knowledge,
that this slight snootiness toward Faldo began to disappear, and it did so
then because of his astonishing fight back to defeat Strange. After this,
Faldo grew in popularity as fast as he had fallen in the past, despite the fact
that by now he was spending most of his time playing the U.S. circuit.
If the case against Faldo is that he became the great champion he surely
was because he was totally preoccupied by golf, then he would probably
plead guilty. An example of that dedication is that the births of all three of
his children were induced to fit with their father’s golf schedule.
Remember, however, how few truly world-class and lasting sportsman
Britain has produced down the years. Nick Faldo is certainly one of those.
