by Andy Farrell
As the 1996 Masters unfolded, Frank Chirkinian, the legendary producer who pioneered the way golf was covered on television, ‘recognising the parallel [with 1956], told everyone to let me run with it, and I did, describing Norman’s frame of mind while everything was falling apart,’ Venturi recalled. ‘For me, it was very tough to watch. Afterward, Norman told me: “You got into my brain.” He seemed surprised. “Greg,” I reminded him, “I’ve been there.” ’
The sensitivity, born of Venturi’s own experiences, shown to Norman on the CBS telecast, was not to everyone’s taste but Chirkinian, a friend of the Australian who was working at the Masters for the last time, had no truck with any critics. ‘There’s no reason to say anything when a television picture is already telling the whole story,’ he told Steve Eubanks. ‘Some members of the print media criticised us for not saying on air that Greg Norman was choking. That really ticked me off. I mean, why say it? The viewers could see for themselves what was happening. It’s obtuse.’
Chinese Fir
Hole 14
Yards 405; Par 4
AFTER MOVING away from the 13th green and, usually, its stunning backdrop of azaleas, the course turns back on itself for the 14th hole, Chinese Fir. It was Louis Alphonse Berckmans, a member of the Beautification Committee, who named the holes in 1932, working with Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts. The committee had suggested ‘concentrating in the vicinity of each hole a massed profusion of a distinctive variety of trees or plants that bloom during the winter season’. Remember, the course was intended only to operate in the winter.
Berckmans was 74 years old and no golfer but he became a member of the club and his younger brother, Prosper Jr, was the club’s first general manager. Their grandfather, the Belgian Baron Louis Mathieu Edouard Berckmans, bought the old indigo plantation in 1857 and turned it into the Fruitland Nurseries, which imported plants and trees from various countries. Their father, Prosper Julius Alphonse Berckmans, who helped to popularise the azalea, continued the nursery until his death in 1910 and a few years later it ceased operation.
But many prominent features remain today, such as the azaleas and the long row of magnolias that guards the drive up to the clubhouse, known as Magnolia Lane. The clubhouse, which was built in 1854 and became the baron’s home, was the first cement house constructed in the American South, while outside it is the country’s first, and still the largest, wisteria vine. A big oak tree that stands next to the clubhouse on the golf course side also dates from the 1850s; it is here that people are referring to when they arrange to ‘meet under the tree’.
Various pine trees dot the property, loblollies being the most common, with some more than 150 years old (particularly down the 10th) and others dating from the 1930s when the course was built, although more have been added in the last decade. A few of the plants after which the holes are named were already in place but most were planted specially. The Masters Media Guide estimates that more than 80,000 plants of over 350 varieties have been added to the course since it opened.
All of which goes to show that a hole without water, or even a bunker, such as the 14th, can still be visually stunning – and awfully difficult to play. Since 1952, when a bunker to the right of the fairway but not especially far from the tee was taken out as it only inconvenienced some of the older members, it has been the only hole on the course without sand, although the 5th, 7th, 15th and 17th holes started life without bunkers when the course was built. It is the contours on the green that make the 14th such a tricky proposition and where the hole is positioned makes a difference all the way back to the tee shot.
Still leading by two strokes, after the final pairing’s first ‘half’ for six holes, Nick Faldo had the honour at the 14th and drove down the right side of the fairway, only to see his ball catch a slope and run down to the trees on the edge of the fairway.
Greg Norman hit a three-wood down the left side of the fairway, seemingly in better shape. But the pin was on the top left shelf of a green that essentially sweeps down in tiers from left to right, as well as containing a myriad of other slopes. Norman had to land his approach well up the left-hand side of the green but it pitched sufficiently short and right of the pin that it caught the slopes and ran down to the third of the tiers on the right-hand side of the green, leaving a monster putt. These were the very same slopes which helped him out on Thursday when the hole was on the right-hand side of the green but now each roll of the ball took it further from the target.
The 14th hole is a very gentle dogleg from right to left, not nearly as pronounced as the 2nd or the 13th, for example. Since a number of holes are shaped in this direction, Masters lore maintains that a right-hander who draws the ball (or a lefty who favours a fade) has an advantage at Augusta. As usual in these parts, it is a little more complicated than that. Few courses demand such an array of shots, fades and draws, with virtually every club in the bag.
In The Making of the Masters, David Owen refutes the theory that the right-to-left hitters have an inbuilt advantage. ‘Although it is true that several holes on the course have fairways that bend to the left and therefore seemingly favour players who can draw the ball off the tee – the 2nd, 5th, 10th, 13th and 14th holes immediately come to mind – the matter is not so simple as it may at first appear. (And it doesn’t help to explain the Masters success of Hogan, Nicklaus, Faldo and Woods, to name four notable faders.) One usually overlooked fact about Augusta National is that all of its notable right-to-left holes, including the 14th, have wide-open landing areas on the right but severely punish shots that are hit too far to the left.’
Take the 13th: how many players have overdone the draw off the tee and ended up hooking into the creek on the left of the fairway, or over it into the trees? Ian Woosnam was over there in 1991 but managed to make a bogey and went on to win. Others have not been so lucky. Such mistakes, according to Owen, ‘violate a cherished piece of local knowledge: play away from the doglegs. On all the holes that seemingly favour players who can work the ball to the left, the only sure way to get into hopeless trouble off the tee is to hit a hook.’ He adds: ‘On holes where draws are seemingly favoured from the tee, the greens often demand approach shots that move in the opposite direction.’
A high fade is usually the best way of softly landing a shot onto the (usually) rock-hard greens. Faldo would spend weeks before the Masters practising his high shots and utilising them in the tournaments on the run-in to Augusta.
It depends, however, on where the flagstick is and with the back-left pin position on the 14th, getting close with any sort of shot is extremely difficult. Norman was just left of centre of the fairway with his tee shot and could not manage to get his approach close. Faldo’s aim had been to open up the green by finishing in the right half of the fairway. And, as local knowledge avers, erring away from the dogleg does not lead to severe punishment. In fact, despite a tree a little way in front of him to the left, Faldo had a perfectly clear line to the green and safely found the heart of it, the contours again rejecting his ball from the top tier but leaving it on the middle plateau, 30 feet from the hole.
Norman faced a putt from more than 80 feet, up, down, and up again, and it was a brilliant effort. He got the pace almost exactly right and the ball came up six inches short and to the right of the hole. He tapped in for his first par since the 7th. Faldo, although from under half the distance, could not quite find the same touch and his lag putt came up three feet short. Still work to do, but he popped it in to maintain his two-stroke advantage.
It had been a golden decade for the Masters. From Jack Nicklaus winning the 50th edition at the age of 46 with his spectacular blast-from-the-past charge in 1986 through to Ben Crenshaw putting everyone through the emotional wringer with his victory for the recently deceased Harvey Penick in 1995. And the final round of the 60th Masters was proving one of the most incredible ever seen. But it was to be the end of an era. The next edition of the tournament, in 1997, would prove to be one of the most significant m
oments in the history of golf: the start of the age of Tiger Woods.
Woods played six rounds as an amateur in the Masters, finishing 41st in 1995 and missing the cut in 1996. After finishing his second year at Stanford, Woods made the cut at the US Open at Oakland Hills, finished 22nd at the Open Championship at Royal Lytham, where he won the silver medal as the leading amateur, claimed his third successive US Amateur Championship – not even Bobby Jones had done that – and then turned professional. ‘Hello, world,’ he said at the great unveiling, with a cheque for $40 million from Nike in his back pocket.
When Woods won on his fifth appearance as a pro, at the Las Vegas Invitational in a playoff over Davis Love, he qualified for the 1997 Masters. He won again two tournaments later, claimed the PGA Tour’s Rookie of the Year, was voted Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year and featured liberally in the end-of-year musings in the golf magazines. Tiger was all the golf world was talking about, which must have been a blessing to Norman.
He began 1997 by winning the Mercedes Championship, the old Tournament of Champions which starts the year, for his third victory in nine events as a professional. Then came Augusta, where he made his third appearance – his first since turning pro. As the US Amateur champion, Woods was paired with Faldo, the defending champion, on the first day. Already one of the favourites for the title, there was much attention on the 21-year-old but at first his swing was out of sync.
He outdrove Faldo by 70 yards at the 1st, the only problem being he ended up in a greenside bunker for two and took a bogey. He went to the turn in 40 with four bogeys in all on the outward nine. With Faldo out in 41 and struggling as well, the massed gallery started drifting away to other groups. While the veteran Englishman could do nothing to rectify his problems, Woods seemed to flick a switch; on the 10th tee he adopted a new swing-thought which cured the faults in his action, and then started one of the best stretches of golf ever played at Augusta over the last 63 holes, making only three more bogeys for the rest of the tournament.
Now that he had his power under control, he was taking the course apart. At the 13th he hit a drive and a six-iron and two-putted for his birdie, but it was the 15th that really showed that Woods was playing a different game to everyone else. That day David Duval had a nine there and Norman had a double bogey on the way to a 77. Woods hit a monstrous drive of around 350 yards, getting a huge kick forward after landing on a downslope that few others could reach, and a second shot with only a wedge from 151 yards to four feet – eagle. ‘It was a tough day initially but I got through it,’ he said. He came home in 30, six under, for an opening 70. John Huston was leading on 67 but the story was all about Woods.
Faldo scored a 75 on the first day, eight strokes higher than his final round a year earlier, and although he was not playing with Woods on the second day, it was as if he was shell-shocked from being exposed to the ferocity of the new star’s play. He scored an 81, his highest ever round at Augusta. It included a nine at that supposed drive-wedge par-five, the 15th. He missed the cut, as did Norman. Was the latter’s collapse from 1996 still weighing on his mind? He was asked, of course, and, just as predictably, disagreed.
Woods added a 66 on the second day, moving into a three-stroke lead over Colin Montgomerie. This time he eagled the 13th, with a three-wood and an eight-iron to 20 feet, and it was there that he took the lead for good. Montgomerie had a 67 and was asked if he could win? ‘It depends on how Mr Woods fares,’ said the Scot, fresh off his lowest score at Augusta. ‘The way he plays this course tends to suit him more than anyone else playing right now. If he decides to do what he is doing, well, more credit to him, we’ll all shake his hand and say “well done”. But at the same time, there’s more to it than hitting the ball a long way. The pressure is mounting, more and more.’
Mostly on Monty. He puffed his chest out and had a smirk when he outdrove Woods off the 1st tee – Montgomerie had used a driver, Woods a three-wood – but for the rest of the day had a face like thunder. Experience might have been on the Scot’s side, but it was no use to him and there was only one more day left before they would no longer be equal on number of major championships won. Montgomerie had a 74, Tiger a 65. Woods displayed his power at the 2nd, which was 555 yards long but downhill, when he hit a drive and a nine-iron over the green before chipping back to a foot for a birdie. He finished the round by hitting a sand wedge from 109 yards to a foot at the last. He now led by nine strokes from Costantino Rocca.
Montgomerie, 12 behind, pretty much stomped out of the recorder’s hut at the back of the 18th green, up to the clubhouse and then on to the media centre and the interview room. He had not been asked to make an appearance, no official would have dared, but he had something to say. Before anyone could ask a question, the Scot declared: ‘All I have to say is one brief comment. There is no chance – we are all human beings here – there is no chance humanly possible that Tiger is not going to win this tournament tomorrow. No way.’
With many writers on deadline, there were not many bodies in the room, but everyone else was still listening on the internal feed piped to their desks in the main auditorium. After a brief pause, one questioner in the room mumbled: ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Have you just come in, or have you been away?’ Montgomerie asked, getting more than a little frayed at the edges by now. ‘Have you been on holiday?’ But, the questioner reasoned, everybody thought Norman was going to win the year before when he led by six strokes. ‘This is very different,’ Montgomerie opined. ‘Nick Faldo is not lying second and Tiger Woods is not Greg Norman.’
Of Woods, Montgomerie added: ‘I appreciated that he hit long and straight and I appreciated that his iron shots were very accurate. I did not appreciate how he putted.’ The final question harked back to what Montgomerie had hinted at the previous evening, whether Woods was ready to win. ‘He is’ was the emphatic reply before the Scot made a swift exit stage right.
Montgomerie scored a flustered 81 the next day, matching Faldo from Friday. Paul Azinger, who played with Woods in the second round, had a 77 the day after. Rocca, alongside Woods on the final day, never threatened the leader and scored a 75. Woods posted a fairly conservative 69 and won by a record 12 strokes from Tom Kite. His total of 270, 18 under par, broke the previous record of Nicklaus and Ray Floyd by one stroke. He was the youngest winner at 21 and set records for the last 63 holes (22 under par) and the second nine (16 under for the week). He was the first player to win a major on his first appearance as a professional since Jerry Pate at the 1976 US Open.
And he was the first golfer not from a Caucasian background to win the Masters. The club had only admitted its first black member in 1991 and it took until 1975 for Lee Elder to become the first black golfer to play in the Masters – Charlie Sifford, who was excluded from the PGA Tour for years, had shamefully not been invited when he won two Tour events in the late 1960s. ‘It’s all over with now,’ Sifford said. ‘Lee Elder played, now Tiger has won it. I’m proud of them both.’ Elder was in the gallery on the last day. ‘I came to see history,’ he said. ‘To have a black champion of a major makes my heart feel very good.’ Woods, wearing his already-traditional Sunday red, hugged his father Earl after putting out on the 18th green and said: ‘I wasn’t the pioneer. Charlie Sifford, Lee Elder, Ted Rhodes, those guys paved the way. Coming up 18, I said a little prayer of thanks to those guys.’
When Nicklaus came on the scene, Jones, sitting on a golf cart at his beloved Augusta, famously said: ‘He plays a game with which I’m not familiar.’ Now Nicklaus said of Woods: ‘It is not my time any more, it’s his. Tiger is out there playing another game. He is playing a golf course he will own for a long time. This young man will win many more Masters.’ A year earlier, in 1996 when Woods was still an amateur, Nicklaus had predicted that the younger man would be the favourite at Augusta for the next 20 years, which has proved exactly the case.
Woods’s golf reached a sublime peak in the summer of 2000 when he won the US Open at
Pebble Beach by a record 15 strokes – at 12 under par when the best of the rest, Ernie Els and Miguel Angel Jiménez, were three over par – without ever three-putting. He then won the Open Championship at St Andrews by eight strokes, from Thomas Bjorn and Els, again, with a record score of 19 under and without going in a bunker all week on the Old Course. Nicklaus said: ‘When he gets ahead, I think he is superior to me. I never spread-eagled the field.’ Then Woods won the US PGA at Valhalla, after a dramatic playoff against Bob May, the obscure golfer who came closest to halting Tiger’s assault on history.
Having perfected a fade under the tutelage of Butch Harmon, Norman’s old coach, Woods spent the eight months from August 2000 to April 2001 working a draw back into his game, especially for Augusta and the tee shot at the 13th hole. In 1953, Ben Hogan won the three majors he played in, while Jones claimed the original, old-school Grand Slam in 1930. No one had held all four of the modern Grand Slam events at the same time. Woods took the lead on the third day of the 2001 Masters and kept his nose in front on the last day despite being challenged by Duval, who finished second by two strokes, and Phil Mickelson, who finished three back. Whether it was a Grand Slam, a term usually used to refer to winning all four in the same year, or a Tiger Slam, the man himself could not care less. ‘I’ve got all four trophies on my coffee table at home, that’s pretty neat,’ he said.
Woods in his prime was a combination of Faldo and Norman in theirs. He had the physical ability, power and panache of Norman but he also possessed the course management skills, the determination and the ability to play his own game and let others make mistakes that were the hallmarks of Faldo’s game. Woods would never have let a six-shot lead go in the final round of a major. He would have been the one not making a mistake and forcing his opponent to play more aggressively than the circumstances could allow. Only once in 15 occasions when he led a major with a round to play did Woods not win. Although, all 14 of the majors that he has won to date came when he at least shared the lead with a round to go, while four times Faldo came from behind to win.