Spots of rain were picked up by the TV camera as Rory McIlroy negotiated the ascent to the ninth green at Augusta National on Thursday. He was one over par, having followed a double-bogey on the seventh with a birdie on the long eighth.
rior to the evening’s main switch to the American broadcasting hosts at CBS, Sky’s Nick Dougherty was picking the brains of a three-time Masters winner. “Augusta was always very special for me,” said Nick Faldo. “I loved the way there was just you and your caddie inside the ropes. No photographers. Nobody else.”
On this masterpiece from 90 years ago, the words of Bobby Jones seemed to fit perfectly. “Golf is a game that is played on a five-inch course — the distance between your ears,” Jones once observed, unwittingly diminishing the architectural skills of himself and his design partner, Alister MacKenzie.
Then came a confusion of voices. In their endless search for something novel to embellish their broadcasts, CBS interrupted their British colleagues with an on-course interview linking the 2008 Masters champion Trevor Immelman with McIlroy on the ninth.
I was genuinely stunned. After observing McIlroy’s exemplary responses to the media earlier in the week, I couldn’t believe he had agreed to this. Whatever about the backroom boffins, surely Immelman, as a past champion, should have known better? Apparently not. Having crossed to the other side of the mic, he had obviously agreed with everything the move entailed.
In the process, we had seen the Holywood star at his most vulnerable. The link lasted only a few minutes, was entirely forgettable and seemed to have no material effect on McIlroy’s game. But it was the very idea of it which should have raised alarm bells in the McIlroy camp at the very outset.
We’ve seen quite a deal of Faldo on Sky over the last few days. It brought me back to my early years at the Masters which the Englishman dominated. With victories in 1989 and 1990, he became the only player to emulate Jack Nicklaus by winning back-to-back titles. Of course, Tiger Woods later did it too.
Generous words from Woods last week, when he confidently predicted McIlroy would win the Masters one day, were no more than a measure of El Tigre’s recent change of attitude towards his rivals. You can be sure he wouldn’t have uttered those words 15 years ago when they would have threatened the Woods domain.
Nothing in sport is assured. I remember that we had similar thoughts about Greg Norman and Ernie Els regarding their prospects of securing a coveted green jacket. And I remember Norman’s candour in the wake of yet another Augusta disappointment in 1999, when he finished third from the final pairing with Jose-Maria Olazabal. In 23 appearances, he was runner-up three times and in the top-10 on nine occasions.
As he walked up the 72nd in 1999, Norman could hardly credit how natural the whole thing seemed for his playing partner. The Shark found himself thinking: “It’s as easy as that; he’s won the tournament.”
Yet Faldo never believed in trusting to appearances. He deliberately made himself something of a lone wolf. And at a time when he needed friends in the game, he seemed to make a point of creating enemies. Even now, he believes it was an image which contributed to his success.
“It’s very difficult to eliminate bad memories from this game,” he said, “and fortunately, I don’t have many at Augusta National.”
In fact, positivity seems to greet him around every turn. Like on the new extended 13th, where his two-iron second-shot of 215 yards in 1996 set up a birdie which gave him the lead in his famous duel with Norman. This is the area which journalist Pat Ward-Thomas famously described as “... the long green fall of the course towards the lowest reaches where the mighty 13th curves hard against its background of woods ...”
And later that afternoon, Faldo found himself determined to have a four-stroke lead going up the last. Which he did, and won by five.
From this Sunday morning in 2011, McIlroy talked about a life which is light years removed from his current situation, disappointment notwithstanding. After rounds of 65, 69 and 70, he was on 12-under par, leading the Masters by four strokes from Jason Day, Charl Schwartzel, KJ Choi and Angel Cabrera.
“When I got up that morning, Ulster were playing in the Heineken Cup and even after watching it, I had time to kill,” he told Derek Lawrenson of the Daily Mail. “Every TV channel I put on, all I could hear was people talking about me. Seeing yourself on television or pick up a newspaper with an article about yourself and it takes a lot of self-discipline to ignore what people are saying or writing.
“Greg Norman rang me afterwards and we talked about the importance of not letting people inside your bubble. I learned after that Masters not to watch television, go on Twitter or anything like that.”
Before redemption beckoned in the US Open at Congressional two months later, there was more than ample time for reflection on a closing 80 at Augusta, where he was pushed down to a share of 15th place with Immelman among others, behind another South African, Schwartzel.
“I definitely went to Congressional with something to prove after the Masters. I wanted to show a lot of people that the golfer they saw on the Sunday at Augusta was not the real Rory, that I wasn’t somebody who folds under the pressure or chokes. But to get to that point, I had to look long and hard at my game because I wanted to be quickly in contention again at a Major.”
As he looked towards a return to Augusta in April 2012, he said with typical directness: “After everything that happened there, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t the one I’d really like to win.”
Though 11 years have elapsed, there is still plenty of time to secure this precious target and he will be aware of a need to change. And a return to his boyhood mentor in the Faldo Series, might be a good place to start.