‘There’s so much aura’, three-time champion Nick Faldo explains the Masters

Are the greens as fast as legend insists?

“Faster,” says the 67-year-old man reverentially as he sits up in the sky on the 27th floor of Shaw Centre.

We’re talking about the Masters, which starts this week, whose serenity is a beautiful ruse. The pines soar, stone bridges cross still water, the azaleas bloom. But danger lurks and this man at lunch, his meaty, gifted hands wrapped around a wine glass, has long studied its mysteries as player and commentator.  

Only Jack Nicklaus (six), Tiger Woods (five) and Arnold Palmer (four) have more Green Jackets than Nick Faldo and he lays out the testing lie of this historic land. Of how a few shots can bruise a fine round.

“You can come back in 42 (shots) and you go, ‘I only hit one or two bad shots’. You just were in the wrong place... Then it scares you because you realise, ‘Wow’... and then you have to go to the next hole and deal with it.”

Everywhere challenge lurks. At one point, he says, to some laughter, you come to the 495-yard, par-four 10th hole and you think, “Don’t be short. Don’t go left. Don’t go long. Don’t go right. All right, start again.”

The Masters is an immovable institution, the youngest Major but the only one competed for on the same stretch of land. It means, says Faldo, “you know it” through the years. He means its moods, its subtleties, its history.

“You’ve seen guys collapse with three-shot leads. It’s all been registered. I first watched from 1971 so I’ve seen years of how to win it and how to lose it. It adds a lot of pressure.”

This game is testing enough anyway, its mechanics maddening, its form fickle. As Faldo says about golf, “one minute you are as tough as a bullet and next minute you are as delicate as a flower”.

“You’re either on a spiral going up, all positive, or you’re on a spiral going down. There’s never anything in between. And once you kind of shatter your confidence a little bit, everything becomes hard work and you make silly mistakes.”

And so you have to own so many things to rule at Augusta, humility of course, respect for the course, touch, feel, patience but don’t try it without nerve. Faldo has a truck-full of it. In 1989 he entered the final round five shots back, in 1990 three shots back, in 1996 six shots back. Every time he won. On Sundays, he rose.

His first two wins came in play-offs, a situation that begged for toughness, and perhaps he liked being in that place of tension. “I did. I used to say, ‘Okay, you’ve beaten the rest of the field, now you just got to beat one more person’.”

In 1989, Scott Hoch (“rhymes with choke”, people cruelly said later) had a 24-inch putt to win but missed the hole entirely. He was a good golfer but Faldo was a great one.

“I think Bobby Jones (multiple-time Major winner and co-founder of the Masters) said it best,” says Faldo. “There are two types of golfers: ones who can handle pressure and the ones who can’t.”

Golf can be broken into multiple parts, but “you have to be at 100 per cent of mental strength. I think you possibly can get away with 95. We all have a bit of doubt, but we know how to deal with it. But when you finally execute a golf shot, you have to have 100 per cent trust”.

You can be a “little injured”, you can even get away with a technical hiccup, but “if mentally, you’re going, ‘oh, I’m not sure I can do this. And I hope I don’t do that,’ (then) no chance. The greatest athletes (find) their mental strength when it’s needed, on a Sunday or in the last seconds of whatever game.”  

Hoch didn’t find his, Faldo did.

The Masters is modern yet it leans on tradition. The mystique of the Green Jacket. The creased old heroes who function as honorary starters (last year it was Nicklaus, Gary Player and Tom Watson). The no-phones policy. And through our 40-minute talk on the event, Faldo’s affection for this arena litters almost every sentence.

“There’s so much aura about everything... Everything is perfect. You go to the (British) Open, go behind the scenes, it looks like a junkyard. You got wires and TV cables (everywhere). In Augusta there’s not a wire to be seen, let alone out of place. You drive the perimeter around, everything is pristine, the grass is perfect, there’s no litter.

“I love that. I think it’s so impressive. There’s no sponsorship, there’s no boards... it’s all about the players... It’s a dream to play golf there.”

Former champions return to the Masters, where they have a locker, a Green Jacket which they can shrug on in the premises, and attend the Champion’s Dinner where the previous year’s winner gets to set the menu.  

Faldo grins and says he ordered steak and kidney pie after his first win. “They all panicked at the kidney. Took one smell at the kidney and said ‘No’.” The second time he ordered Shepherd’s pie and English trifle. “They liked that.” The final one he did fish and chips, flying “the cod fillets in from Harry Ramsden’s (a restaurant chain in the UK), the chips, the vinegar, the mushy peas, that was brilliant”.

So what was the worst dinner he ever had?

“Bubba,” he says without hesitation.

Watson, he says, had “hamburger, a bit of corn. It was like going to Chuck E. Cheese”.

At 67 Pall Mall in Singapore, fortunately Faldo’s lunch is of a finer quality.