For over 60 years, America had dominated the world of golf. Now the fight back was on and it was led by Seve Ballesteros. Seve just oozed charisma and his dashing play, both erratic and blessed with genius, inspired many across Europe to fall in love with the game. He led the way and his peers, Bernhard Langer, Sandy Lyle, Nick Faldo and Ian Woosnam, all followed. Augusta National, that very American citadel, fell to the European invaders year after year and once the Big Five all had a green jacket (or more than one), along came José María Olazábal, Seve’s equally talented Ryder Cup partner. Under the captaincy of Tony Jacklin, Europe beat the Americans and turned the match from something of an American victory procession into the keenly contested event that we know today. Others who came through this European nursery of great talent, before settling in America, were Australia’s Greg Norman and Zimbabwe’s Nick Price. Curtis Strange became the best of the Americans, twice winning the US Open and only just failing in his hat-trick bid.
‘Severiano Ballesteros,’ wrote David Davies, ‘is unquestionably the finest, greatest thing ever to happen to European golf. No golfer has ever made more impact on a whole continent than the dashing, crashing Spaniard: Seve of silken swing; Seve slash-and-burn; Seve of the Spanish Main, sword in teeth, carrying off the crinolined crumpet.’
Ballesteros was the first, both by birth date and deed, of a group of five European golfers born within a year of each other. ‘Lyle, Langer, Woosie and Faldo were the players in seats 1A, 1B, 1C and 1D,’ said Ken Brown. ‘But none of them was the pilot flying Concorde. Seve was the pilot.’ He made ‘Seve fans’ of people who knew nothing of golf. He was the Arnold Palmer of Europe. ‘But it does Seve Ballesteros a disservice to compare him to anyone. He was unique. He was Seve,’ added Brown. Nick Faldo said: ‘Seve was golf’s Cirque du Soleil. The passion, artistry, skill, drama, that was Seve.’
He was wild and brilliant by turns. He hit the ball hard, found it, and did whatever was needed to escape. In his pomp he did not drive the ball as poorly as imagined, and as back trouble made inevitable later. But at Lytham in 1979 he won the Open without troubling many fairways. ‘The dust of that brutal assault has not yet settled,’ wrote Peter Dobereiner. ‘It will take a while for the spectators of the violence to recover. We are dazed like witnesses to a nearby explosion – not a scratch on us but the medics know that we are candidates for a cup of sweet tea and a quiet lie down.’
Seve greeted opponents thus: ‘I look into their eyes, shake their hand, pat their back, and wish them luck, but I am thinking, “I am going to bury you”.’ He took on shots no one else would play. Brown said: ‘He had the confidence and the sheer audacity to take on the course in a new way. The rest of us didn’t have the skill, or the power, or the balls. Some of us, all three.’ His three-wood from a bunker, sliced from 245 yards in the 1983 Ryder Cup was the greatest shot Jack Nicklaus said he had ever seen.
Nowhere was better suited to Seve’s style than Augusta National. He won two Masters, but he should have won more, not least against Nicklaus in 1986. He felt most loved in Britain. His joyous celebration on the final green at St. Andrews in 1984 became a lasting image, but there were also dark moods, controversy and ructions with officials on both sides of the Atlantic. A passion for beating the Americans drove his Ryder Cup exploits and he formed a stupendous partnership with compatriot José María Olazábal. They had ‘no sorries’. Ollie said: ‘When Seve gets his Porsche going not even San Pedro in heaven could stop him.’ Diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2008, he faced the operations and treatment, and ultimate defeat, the same way he did his golf. He always believed in ‘destino’.
Colin Montgomerie tells the tale that could define Bernhard Langer’s approach to golf. Langer is all about attention to detail. It is improbable that Langer would need Monty to tell him a yardage but presumably he was merely double-checking when he asked the Scot what was the distance stated on a sprinkler head. Told the number, he then followed up by asking his Ryder Cup partner: ‘Is that from the front of the sprinkler head or the back?’ Montgomerie shakes his head at that. ‘That’s Bernhard,’ he said.
Langer, the son of a Czech who escaped a Siberia-bound prisoner of war train in 1945, is a man of patience and perseverance, of a strong Christian faith and an unshakeable resolve. He has won more tournaments on the European Tour than anyone bar Seve Ballesteros but his greatest win possibly came in the German Masters in 1991 in a playoff. Little remarkable about that except that the previous Sunday Langer experienced something that might have crushed a lesser golfer.
The 1991 Ryder Cup at Kiawah Island had come down to the last putt of the last hole of the last match. Langer had six feet and two spike marks to negotiate and did not hole it, giving victory to America. ‘To some there was a quality so raw and cruel in the circumstances of the US victory as to leave a residue of hollow sadness,’ wrote Thomas Boswell. Ballesteros said: ‘No one in the world could have holed that putt. Not Jack Nicklaus, or Tony Jacklin and certainly not me.’ Langer kept his composure that night until Seve consoled him. Once Seve started crying, Langer could not hold back his own tears.
Langer is the most marvellous middle-iron player but his putting always lacked consistency. Three times he battled back from the yips, often career-ending for others, yet on two occasions he mastered the lethal greens at Augusta. Both his green jackets were won on Easter Sunday. He tried putting crosshanded, then moved his left hand down the shaft and clamped his forearm to the shaft with his right hand, then tried the long putter. ‘I don’t care what it looks like,’ he said. ‘We don’t get paid for looking good.’
He also said: ‘It really doesn’t matter if a putt goes in. To me, what matters is that I give the whole subject over to God. I just say: ‘If you want me to make this putt or win this tournament then it will happen’, if not he has other plans for me. Good things can come out of everything. When you go through bad times, good can follow, because you learn more in bad times than in good times.’
Langer never won the Open despite a number of chances. But he claimed the British Senior Open Championship at Carnoustie in 2010, and won the US Senior Open the very next week in Seattle, another remarkable fortnight in the life of a remarkable German.
The day after Sandy Lyle won the Open, he threw a party where he spent most of the time either collecting trays and trays of Chinese food or doing the washing up. The year after he won the Masters, he served up haggis at the Champions’ Dinner. ‘Everybody had some on their plate,’ he said, ‘but most of it stayed on the plate.’ Lyle was one of the best players in the world and, although his form did not last, he has always been one of the most loved.
He grew up at Hawkstone Park, the son of a Scottish professional, and developed naturally from hitting ball after ball. He and Seve Ballesteros were kindred spirits. Seve once said Lyle was the ‘greatest God-given talent in history. If everyone in the world was playing their best, Sandy would win and I’d come second.’ There was never the driven ambition of a Nick Faldo. Peter Alliss said: ‘Sandy goes along in a world of unconscious competence.’
When it came to hitting a one-iron he was better than competent; only Jack Nicklaus was in the same bracket. On the dangerous 14th hole at Sandwich, after getting into trouble off the tee, Lyle smashed a two-iron onto the green and holed from 40 feet for a birdie-four. It propelled him into contention and despite fluffing a chip in Duncan’s Hollow by the 18th green, he became the first British winner of the Open since Tony Jacklin in 1969. Not even Seve could have been a more popular champion
Three years later Lyle was in a bunker off the 18th tee at Augusta yet hit a seven-iron onto the green. Herb Warren Wind called it the greatest bunker shot in the history of golf. ‘A sharp cry of admiration arose for this brave and wonderful stroke,’ wrote golf writer Cal Brown, ‘and then a stunning silence spread through the gallery as the import of the shot registered.’ Lyle holed the putt, danced a little jig and started Britain’s four-year reign at the Masters.
Yet Lyle’s form did not last. Strange to think he never played in the Ryder Cup after the heroics at Muirfield Village in 1987. What had come so naturally, now could not be fixed by the game’s great instructors. This became the enduring contrast with Faldo. Up until then, Lyle had always had the upper hand. David Davies wrote: ‘Lyle dominated as if by right at every level he experienced right up to the very heights of the game; Faldo had to grind away, experimenting, adapting, adopting, learning things that Lyle had absorbed as a child. Lyle was long, Faldo was not. Lyle ambled amiably round the course, chatting about this and that; Faldo, needing to concentrate all his efforts and energies on golf, was dour and uncommunicative. For a man with an ambition that burned as brightly as did Faldo’s it was galling in the extreme to be beaten so often by such a seemingly casual talent.’
The perfectionism of Nick Faldo was obvious to everyone; the passion for the game that lay behind it less so, particularly if the end result was not up to standard. ‘Everyone suffers on a Faldo round, Faldo most of all,’ Brough Scott wrote. ‘Anything less than perfection gets a terrible black mark. Out on the course it will never be easy to love him. For he does not love himself.’
Penetrating the Faldo bubble was hard and his attempts to engage, the Norman Wisdom fake trips or the cringing rendition of ‘My Way’ after winning the 1992 Open, were often misguided. Instead, Faldo’s passion for the game comes out far more in his television commentary, or his commitment to junior golf with the Faldo Series, or simply talking about his practice regime or his course design work. Days after visiting his newly seeded Chart Hills course in Kent, I was wandering around Crans-sur-Sierre on pro-am day when from a distant tee the knight-to-be’s voice echoed around the mountain tops. ‘What did you think of my baby?’ he was desperate to know.
Faldo was always sporty but at first he ran, he swam and he cycled. Then he saw Jack Nicklaus on television playing at the Masters and was hooked. To a schools career officer who suggested only one in 10,000 make it in top class sport, he replied: ‘Well, I’ll be that one, then.’ With his height, his swing was always elegant but he thought it was not good enough. With David Leadbetter he took two years to remodel it. He became less handsy and relied more on the bigger muscles of the body, building a swing that was less likely to break down under pressure. His decision to tamper to such an extent was not always applauded or thought necessary but the proof of the pudding came in the eating. Six major titles were sweet indeed. At the very least, he had gone through a Hoganesque process whereby after so much hard work, confidence crowded out any lingering doubts. To express his flair for the game, he needed such strong foundations. He dealt in precise subtleties, fading or drawing an approach to the yard, with or against the wind, using the contours of the ground, which drew admiration while Seve and Sandy produced flamboyant escapes, generating affection.
He did whatever it took, like making 18 successive pars to win at Muirfield in 1987. Twice he took on Greg Norman and defeated the Shark, in the third round at St. Andrews in 1990, leading to a carefree crowning the following day, and, unforgettably and remorselessly, from six strokes behind at Augusta in 1996, Faldo relentlessly forcing Norman’s greatest ever collapse. ‘Don’t let the beggars get you down,’ Faldo told Norman as they embraced at the 18th. Notorious were the battles Faldo had with the press down the years. But leading British sports writer Hugh McIlvanney wrote: ‘There was in the years of his prime something quietly beautiful about the relentless, slow-burning courage with which he played golf. His balls were unbreakable. Among British sportsmen, Nick Faldo ranks with the greatest of the great.’
After Sandy Lyle handed the green jacket to Nick Faldo, who put it on himself as only the second person to successfully defend at the Masters, Faldo then handed it on to Ian Woosnam. Wee Woosie was the youngest, shortest and latest developer of Europe’s Big Five but his place among them, suggested by his tour victories and his record in the Ryder Cup, where he shared a formidable partnership with Faldo at one point, was confirmed with his triumph at Augusta. At the 18th he smashed his drive way over the bunkers on the left and had only a short pitch from the midst of the gallery to the green, where he holed a Woosie-length putt, as David Davies described it, meaning one of around five feet, four inches. Earlier Woosnam had been heckled something rotten. ‘Hey, you’re not on no links course here,’ he was told. Woosie, the farmer’s son whose strength came from lugging bales of hay, only bristled more. Tom Watson, his playing partner, told him how Don January would turn to the gallery in such circumstances and very politely say, ‘F... you very much.’
Around that time, Augusta always seemed to come up with the best player in the world, whether Ballesteros, Langer, Lyle, Faldo or Fred Couples in 1992. In 1991 it was Woosnam. His first big year had been 1987 when he won the World Cup with David Llewellyn for Wales and was also the first British winner of the World Match Play. In succession he beat Faldo, Ballesteros and Lyle, all on the 36th green. Like Lyle, Woosnam grew up in Shropshire but took the country of his parents, rightly so since he learned his golf at Llanymynech, which has 15 holes in Wales and only three in England. At a Hereford Boys event, Woosnam lost to Lyle and said: ‘One day I’ll beat you.’ Lyle replied: ‘You’ll have to grow a bit first, Woosie.’ After the 1987 World Match Play, Lyle added: ‘If he ever grows up, he’ll hit the ball 2,000 yards.’
Woosnam hit the ball huge distances with one of the sweetest swings in the business, his only thought to ‘turn and swish’. ‘There’s nothing mechanical about Woosnam at all,’ said Jack Nicklaus. ‘He’s about as smooth and flowing a player as I’ve seen.’ John Jacobs, the master coach, said: ‘For me Ian Woosnam swings the club exactly the way I think it should be swung. He is the perfect exemplar of the secret of long hitting – clubhead speed correctly applied.’
His swing took him from a camper van and a diet of baked beans, to owning his own private jet. An unreliable putter stopped him achieving even more. He once said: ‘I became the best in the world and I thought I had to change everything to stay the best. I tried to change my swing and that was a load of rubbish. I went to a sports psychologist and that was a load of crap. I’m a natural.’
Nick Faldo and Ian Woosnam might have added to their major tallies but for Curtis Strange. In the late 1980s Strange fought an almost single-handed rearguard action against the rise of European golf. He was three times the leading money winner on the PGA Tour and suffered disaster in the creek at the 13th at Augusta to lose the 1985 Masters to Bernhard Langer. He was a grinder and it was his quest for a hat-trick of US Open titles that came to define his career. At Brookline in 1988 he got up and down from a bunker at the last hole to tie Faldo and then won the playoff comfortably. He said: ‘It means what every little boy dreams about when he plays by himself late in the afternoon. He has three or four balls; one’s Hogan, one’s Palmer, one’s Nicklaus and one’s Strange; 99 per cent of the time those dreams don’t come true.’
A year later at Oak Hill, Strange won again and Woosnam was one of the runners-up. Not since Ben Hogan in 1951 had someone won back-to-back titles. Only Willie Anderson at the start of the century had won three in a row. All his efforts and all the focus were on his attempt to match Anderson at Medinah. A 68 in the third round put him in contention but a 75 on the final day left him in 21st place. ‘I could never have imagined the feeling I had leaving Medinah that day,’ Strange admitted. ‘I’ve never quite found the right words to describe it – the wind went out of my sails like never before in my life and it lasted a long, long time. When you drive and work so hard to do something … disappointment is the wrong word, it’s just a letdown.’
Strange never again won a tournament. He had always played with what was described as a ‘barely controlled rage’ and he was often fined for the sort of industrial language that any hacker might use about their own golf. After Medinah, it all got too much. He suffered from headaches and lethargy and the intensity seeped from his game. ‘Maybe I lost enthusiasm because I knew my game was going south. I couldn’t stop it for a while. The pressure to play well every day was part of it. We only have so much energy, mentally and physically, to be the best. The first thing that goes is the mental edge. Except for Jack Nicklaus, it’s only for seven or eight years.’
One regret he later admitted to was not travelling to the Open Championship in some of his best years. Typically, the more people said he should go, the more he resisted. When he became a television commentator he interviewed Tiger Woods at his first event as a professional in 1996. When Woods said he expected to win every time he teed up, Strange laughed and said: ‘You’ll learn.’ Woods won his fifth start as a professional and kept on winning.
Harvey Penick, a publishing phenomenon in his ninth decade with his Little Red Book, told his pupils, whether on the tee or the green, to ‘take dead aim’. As for putting, he believed the younger Willie Park had it right that a ‘man who can putt is a match for anyone’. Penick believed in ‘dying’ the ball into the hole so as to ‘give luck a chance’. He died, aged 90, on the Sunday before the 1995 Masters. Two weeks earlier he had given Ben Crenshaw his last putting lesson: ‘Take two practice strokes on the green before you putt. Don’t let the head of the club pass your hands on the stroke.’ On the day before the Masters, Crenshaw, the 1984 Masters champion, Tom Kite, the 1992 US Open champion, and Davis Love, soon to be the 1997 USPGA champion, flew to Austin to attend Penick’s funeral. The following Sunday Crenshaw won, without three-putting once, and Love was second. Crenshaw doubled over in grief on the 18th green. ‘I had a 15th club in the bag and it was Harvey,’ he said. ‘It was like someone had their hand on my shoulder this week and guided me through.’
Penick had first placed a club in Crenshaw’s hands when he was eight. Crenshaw and Kite, who both grew up and remained in Austin, were his favourite pupils. Kite said he never saw Crenshaw miss a putt from the age of 12 until he was 20. When he was 15 Crenshaw’s father gave him a putter christened ‘Little Ben’. It turned out to be a faithful servant. ‘I leaned on that putter hard to bail me out,’ Crenshaw said. ‘It did some extraordinary things.’ But it was not always well treated. ‘We’re going to get you for child abuse, you treat him so poorly,’ Dave Marr told him. Crenshaw’s nickname of ‘Gentle Ben’ proves Americans can do irony.
After a fine amateur career he became a favourite on tour but he had to wait a decade, and suffer five runner-up finishes, before his first major at the age of 32. ‘You could have watered all the botanical wonders on the course with the tears of joy that were creeping down the cheeks of the thousands whose hopes he had crushed so often,’ wrote Dan Jenkins. Crenshaw, a golf historian as well as a noted course architect, said: ‘I could give you a million reasons why I love Augusta; why it’s as exciting as your first date, as exhilarating as a ride on a giant wooden roller coaster and as comfortable as an old shoe.’
Crenshaw was the Ryder Cup captain in 1999 at Brookline. The Americans trailed by four points on the Saturday night but Crenshaw said: ‘I’m a big believer in fate. I have a good feeling about this. That’s all I’m going to say.’ The following day the America won the singles by 8½ points to 3½, the biggest comeback ever in the event. Passions turned to anger among the Europeans, however, when the Americans celebrated on the 17th green before José María Olazábal had a chance to putt.
Tony Lema was 32 when he died in a plane crash. Payne Stewart was 42 when he too perished in a private jet. Four months earlier he had won the US Open for the second time but his concern had been for Phil Mickelson, the runner-up, whose wife was due to give birth for the first time. Stewart told him: ‘You’ll win the Open but now you have more important things to do. You’ll be a great daddy.’ At that year’s Ryder Cup at Brookline, Stewart had a spectator who heckled his singles opponent, Colin Montgomerie, ejected and ultimately conceded the match once America had won and pandemonium had broken out. Montgomerie carried a photograph from that day in his business folder. ‘Every time I pull it out I think back to the moment Payne gave me the match and how fragile life can be,’ he said.
At Stewart’s funeral, Paul Azinger said: ‘For many years it seemed like Payne Stewart was first in Payne Stewart’s life. But not long ago this began to change. We saw a man as interested in people as in golf. A man who played to win but truly loved others at the same time.’
Stewart was a brash American who wore his trademark plusfours, for many years in the colours of the local NFL team where the tournament was taking place. He had a graceful swing and a touch to his short game that helped him prosper on British links. He was twice second at the Open and would prepare for his trips to Britain by visiting Ireland. ‘If I ran for mayor in Waterville it would be a landslide,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why they have accepted me so much but we have a very good time. We get into the pub, get round the piano and I bring out the harmonica and before you know, it’s about four in the morning.’ His early career saw him play all round the world in order to establish himself, and in Kuala Lumpur he met his Australian wife Tracey. Two major titles did little to change him but his two children did. ‘This walk I am having in Christianity is being led by my children,’ he said.
Stewart was twice runner-up to Lee Janzen at the US Open, in 1993 and 1998. ‘He’s more outgoing than most people on tour,’ Janzen said, ‘but his style of play is exactly the opposite. Nothing fancy, hit the fairways, hit the greens and try and make a few putts.’ At Pinehurst a year later Stewart holed vital putts down the stretch, including from 15 feet for a par at the last. He vanquished Mickelson, Woods, Singh and Duval, with Stewart a worthy champion.
On October 25, he, his three colleagues, and the two pilots, died when their Lear 35 private jet lost cabin pressure shortly after takeoff from Orlando. The plane continued to fly on autopilot, with all on board almost certainly dead, until it ran out of fuel and crashed into a field in South Dakota.
Somehow Greg Norman won only two majors. Only? More than enough for most but not Norman. Not for the attention he compelled as a golfer and a character. This striking man with a blond mop from Down Under was nicknamed the ‘Great White Shark’ on his Masters debut in 1981 and, inevitably, it stuck. ‘If you wanted to be a golfer, this is the one you’d want to be,’ wrote Jim Murray. ‘Like a lot of great athletes, energy just seems to radiate out of him. He lashes at the ball as if it were something he caught coming through his bedroom window at two in the morning.’
As a cash generator Norman is in the same league as Arnold Palmer and Tiger Woods. He may be the most successful ever golfer-turned-businessman, with interests in course design and construction, turf licensing, wine, clothing and restaurants. And for much of the 1990s, it seemed, he was number one on the world rankings, his record at the top only overtaken by Woods. Before Butch Harmon coached Woods, Harmon coached Norman and harnessed his massive power so he became the longest, straightest driver in the game.
Although so often not the case, at his best Norman did manage to avoid grasping defeat from the jaws of victory. At Royal St. George’s in 1993, Norman won his second Open with a 64, the lowest closing score ever to win an Open, to defeat Faldo, Langer, Pavin, Price, Els et al. Gene Sarazen, in his last visit to an Open, said: ‘This must be the greatest championship ever played. I’ve never seen such shots.’ Norman agreed: ‘I never mishit a single shot. I am in awe of how well I hit the golf ball today.’
Yet Norman became the second man after Craig Wood to lose a playoff at all four majors and in 1986 did the Saturday Slam, leading after 54 holes each time but only winning at Turnberry. He will be remembered as much for the titles he did not win as for those he did. More, maybe. There were cock-ups, approaches blazed way right of the final green, and conspiracy of fate: Bob Tway holed out from a bunker at the 1986 USPGA and Larry Mize chipped in at the second extra hole to win the 1987 Masters. He only came to terms with those two after breaking down in tears in a television interview with former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke in 1992. He almost won the 2008 Open as a 53-year-old but the 1996 Masters was his greatest disaster. Peter Dobereiner, though he regretted it afterwards, told him in the locker room on the Saturday night: ‘Not even you could f... this one up.’ Norman led by six at the end of the third round but lost by five to an imperious Nick Faldo. ‘I’m a winner,’ he said, ‘just not today. I’m not a loser in life.’
Donald Trump told Golf Digest: ‘Greg can be controversial, but people who profess to have a problem with him are just jealous. He looks better than they do, he plays better than they do, and he’s a better businessman.’
Nice guys don’t come first, unless they are called Nick Price. When he won the 1994 USPGA, Dan Jenkins wrote: ‘Nick may have three majors now, but that’s not the best thing about him. He’s as nice a guy as you’ll find in the game.’ Price disputes the ‘nice’ tag, but only in the sense that ‘I just wish someone would say I’m friendly or warm or however you want to describe me.’ Price was born in South Africa of British parents and grew up in what was then Rhodesia. He did his military service at the time of the country’s civil war that led to independence. It gave him a perspective on the game he chose to make his profession. ‘Military service taught me that golf wasn’t the be-all and end-all in life and that I was fortunate to do something I loved,’ he said.
His mother asked just one thing of him: ‘I don’t care how successful you are, what you’ve done in life, how much money you make – it doesn’t matter. All I want to see every time I see you is a smile on your face. Then I know I’ve done well.’ Price learned his lesson well. When the Golf Writers Association of America inaugurated an award in memory of the late Los Angeles Times writer Jim Murray to honour a player who, in being approachable and accessible, ‘reflects the most positive aspects of the working relationship between athlete and journalist’, the first winner was Nick Price; the second was Arnold Palmer.
Price followed the same route as his friend Greg Norman, first playing in Europe, then settling in Florida. For a time in the 1990s the pair dominated the game. Price was always a superb ball-striker but his putting could be variable. He let the Open slip away in 1982 and six years later had it prised away from him by Seve Ballesteros. Finally, he broke through at major level by winning the 1992 USPGA. Two years later he had won the Open and the USPGA back-to-back. His monster putt on the 17th green helped him to victory at Turnberry, while he was magnificent at Southern Hills, five up at halfway and winning by six. Ben Crenshaw said: ‘He’s a man in full flight. He’s striking the ball better than anyone since Hogan and Nelson.’ Price said: ‘I’d always dreamed of playing that way, and I finally did it at Southern Hills. It was what my journey was all about.’
He shared this journey with Jeff ‘Squeaky’ Medlen until the caddie died from leukaemia at the age of 43. ‘He was diligent and conscientious and humble and simple and honest and all the good things any man should be,’ was Price’s tribute. Medlen won three USPGAs in all because in 1991 Price withdrew to attend the birth of his first child and loaned his ‘looper’ to the last player to get into the championship, John Daly.
John Daly, an unknown 25-year-old, late of mini-tours and a winter in South Africa, was the ninth alternate for the 1991 USPGA. When Nick Price withdrew, at the last minute, the sixth, seventh and eighth alternates could not make it at such short notice. Daly set off from his home in Memphis on the off-chance, drove for seven hours, and arrived in Indianapolis at midnight to find a message that he was in the field. Without a practice round at Crooked Stick he went round in 69, 67, 69 and 71 and won by three strokes. The course was so long by the standards of the day that David Feherty said it was the first he played ‘where you need to take into account the curvature of the earth’. It was perfect for Daly’s long-hitting game. He said he just ‘gripped it and ripped it’. His caddie, Price’s man Squeaky, simply said ‘kill’ whenever Daly addressed the ball. He took the lead after the second round and never looked back. Hailed as golf’s new star, Daly said: ‘I’m not gonna become a jerk. If I become a jerk, I’ll quit golf.’
Daly has not quit golf yet, it just seems like it at times. Peter Dobereiner wrote in 1995: ‘There can be no denying that John Daly has brought the profession of golf into disrepute. Repeatedly so. He has blotted his copybook, let the side down, embarrassed his fellow professionals by making a frightful ass of himself and so on. He has been brought to book, hauled over the coals, put on a fizzer, marched up before the beak, carpeted and castigated and given numerous rockets. He has, one has to admit, accepted his various punishments without demur.’ A further decade and a half of misdemeanours can be taken into account.
There have been four divorces – All my exes wear Rolexes, he sang – suspensions, overnight stays in jail, visits to rehab, addictions to Jack Daniels – ‘I started drinking four years after I started playing golf. And I started playing golf when I was four’ – Diet Coke, chocolate chip muffins and gambling, including $1.5 million lost on slot machines in Las Vegas the night after losing a playoff in 2005 to Tiger Woods. In 2009 he had gastric band surgery in order to lose weight and now claims to be more ‘Mild Thing’ than ‘Wild Thing’.
Daly is the only two-time major winner never picked for the Ryder Cup but, at his best, he would have been the ultimate wild card. He had a surprisingly delicate touch to complement his extraordinary length. R&A secretary Michael Bonallack thought Daly might win the 1995 Open on the Old Course and he did, hitting through the wind and laying long approach putts stone dead. Costantino Rocca holed a remarkable 60-foot putt from the Valley of Sin to tie, but Daly won the playoff. Fred Couples said: ‘He’s one of the few players out there I’d pay to watch. I root for him to win more than I root for me.’
An announcement of a new Ryder Cup captain always causes a stir. There are always mutterings, but not in the case of José María Olazábal, captain of Europe in the 2012 match at Medinah in the USA. No one, not a single solitary person, had a bad word to say. ‘It was probably the easiest decision we’ve ever had to make,’ said Thomas Bjørn. ‘He has the passion and the determination that we all associate with the Ryder Cup.’ Paul Casey played with Ollie in 2006 and was a player when Olazábal was a vice-captain in 2008. ‘He is the only person who has twice reduced me to tears with his speeches,’ Casey said. At the 2010 Ryder Cup at Celtic Manor, Olazábal was seconded as an extra assistant by Colin Montgomerie after the Spaniard turned up as a representative of a coffee machine company. ‘We thought that was a waste of his expertise, experience and passion,’ Monty said. Two years later at Medinah, Ollie proved he was not just the man for the job but for the most desperate of situations as, incredibly, Europe rallied from 10-4 down to win by one point. The tears flowed for his friend and inspiration, Seve Ballesteros, that afternoon.
‘The Ryder Cup has been special to me, to my life,’ Olazábal said. His debut came in 1987 at Muirfield Village, the start of a partnership with Ballesteros that brought 11 wins and two halves from 15 matches. ‘I’ve won a couple of majors and it is just you and your caddie. When you win the Ryder Cup, the joy is beyond imagination. You are with 11 other players, their wives and girlfriends, all the backroom staff, and there is nothing to compare.’
Blessed with the same skill and imagination around the greens as Ballesteros, he had a fast swing that produced wonderful iron shots but inconsistent driving. He once said at a formal dinner, ‘This speech is like my tee shot. I don’t know where it’s going.’ He played with an intensity that brought immediate success in the professional game but also mighty sulks when his form dipped. Mostly it was his manager Sergio Gomez and his wife Maite who had to put up with the tirades, or the sullen silences, which might last an entire flight home from Japan. Early in 1994 Maite read Ollie the riot act. ‘You are a disgrace and you will be over as a golfer unless you grow up,’ she said. John Jacobs, the famed golf coach, tweaked his swing, or rather ‘found the right words’ to make Olazábal listen, and that April Olazábal won the Masters. ‘Be patient. You have what it takes to win. You are the best in the world,’ was the note Ballesteros left for Olazábal before the final round. He became the only post-War winner of the British Amateur to win a professional major.
In 1995 and ’96 Olazábal suffered from rheumatoid polyarthritis, which has recurred in recent years. He was not properly diagnosed until he saw Dr Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt in Munich. He recovered to play under Seve in Spain’s Ryder Cup in 1997 and win another green jacket two years later. He recalled: ‘In the mornings, to get to the bathroom, it was only nine feet but I could not get there on my feet. I had to crawl. At that point I thought I would end my life in a wheelchair. I did not think I could ever play golf again.’
‘I’m only here for entertainment value,’ said Colin Montgomerie when ushered in front of reporters and television cameras at one US Open. It was probably a day when it was a case of ‘I’m not the story’, and with Tiger Woods accelerating away from the field he was probably right. But most days he was the story. For a decade and more, Montgomerie propped up European golf, taking the strain between the Big Five and the latest batch of stars, whom Monty captained to victory in the 2010 Ryder Cup. In the Monty era, no one else was anywhere near as quotable, did more, or had more things happen to him.
He won (not just tournaments but an incredible, unlikely to be repeated, seven orders of merit in a row from 1993-99) and he lost, he played sublime golf and he behaved appallingly, berating marshals, cameramen, spectators with crisp packets, butterflies in adjacent fields, anyone, really, who dared to breathe at the wrong moment – it was never going to work with American galleries. In the interview tent he could be charming, or volcanic. In a gale at Carnoustie with the tent rattling as if about to take off, his hair out sideways, a 75 on his scorecard, a daft laddie asked: ‘Was the wind a factor?’ He could only repeat and repeat the question, his face reddening, the voice rising by the octave, before storming out.
José María Olazábal was an early nemesis, beating Monty in the final of the 1984 Amateur, holing two chips, two bunker shots and a full eight-iron. Then came Ernie Els, who beat him at both the 1994 and ’97 US Opens, and Tiger Woods. Monty thought his experience would prevail in the third round of the 1997 Masters. At the end of a dispiriting day, he admitted: ‘There is no way humanly possible that Tiger Woods is not going to win.’ At St. Andrews in 2005, Monty chased Tiger all the way and at the US Open at Winged Foot the next year his approach came up short and right. He took a six when a four would have done it. No one without a major has suffered as many as his five second places. ‘You wonder sometimes,’ he said, ‘why you put yourself through this.’
He was the world number two and might have reached the top spot. He was a magnificent putter until he persuaded himself he wasn’t. He said of his run as European number one: ‘Successful, yes, of course. Happy, no I wasn’t. If I’d been overtaken, I would have felt a complete failure.’ The Ryder Cup always brought out the best in him. ‘And I’m glad it does. My personal record means nothing.’ Olazábal said in 1999: ‘It looks like we are the average workers and he is the gifted one. He doesn’t practise much. He doesn’t need to. He keeps hitting the ball straight down the fairway and straight on to the green and scoring well. What can you say?’
