Faldo/Norman (23 page)

Jack Nicklaus says Augusta’s 12th hole is the most dangerous in golf. The kidney-shaped green is extremely shallow, seemingly too wide for its depth. Rae’s Creek runs in front of the green, waiting to catch tee shots that are not struck properly or weakly pushed, as well as little pitch shots from the drop zone and, if the initial shot has gone over the green into one of the bunkers or up onto the bank behind, recovery attempts that come out far too strongly. The biggest problem with the tee shot is gauging the strength of the wind, and its direction since the breeze swirls manically in this corner of the course, trapped between the pines behind the green and those behind the tee. There have been three holes-in-one here, most recently by Curtis Strange in 1988, but also a 13 by Tom Weiskopf in 1980.

Golden Bell is one of the most familiar holes in all of golf and Augusta National one of the most familiar courses thanks to its exposure year after year, the Masters being the only one of the four major championships to be played at the same venue. The First Annual Augusta National Invitation Tournament, as the event was initially known before co-founder Clifford Roberts persuaded
Bobby Jones that everyone else knew it simply as ‘The Masters’, was played in 1934; the 77th version took place in 2013. Of the other major venues, the Old Course at St Andrews has hosted the Open 28 times up to 2010, while Prestwick, the birthplace of championship golf, has been stuck on 24 Opens since 1925.

The Old Course has become familiar to many who have not even stepped foot there thanks to regular television coverage not just of the Open but, since 1985, the Alfred Dunhill Cup and the same sponsor’s Links Championship. But St Andrews is all about being there, experiencing the spirituality of the place, and does not look at its best on the television screen. Even when actually there, it can take some time to get to know, as Jones discovered when he failed to complete his first Open there in 1921. But he came to love the place, winning there in 1927 and setting his Grand Slam in motion with victory in the Amateur Championship in 1930.

Augusta National tends to be love at first sight, though, whether on screen or in reality. Thanks to high definition and three-dimensional television, which bring out the gradients in a way regular 2D pictures can’t quite capture, the expectations are pretty high for the first-time visitor but they are always surpassed. It was the same for Jones when he first saw the old nursery site in the early 1930s. ‘It seemed that it had been lying there for years just waiting for someone to lay a golf course on it,’ Jones said. Dr Alister MacKenzie, responsible for such gems as Royal Melbourne and Cypress Point and, like Jones, a fan of St Andrews, set out the initial routing, with Jones hitting thousands of shots during the construction phase to get the course just right.

The genius of the design was to offer a course that was enjoyable to play for any standard of golfer, that would not embarrass regular members and guests but, under tournament conditions, would test the finest players to the limit. ‘Our overall aim,’ Jones
wrote in
Golf is My Game
, ‘has been to provide a golf course of considerable natural beauty, relatively easy for the average golfer to play and at the same time testing for the expert player striving to better par figures. We hope to make bogeys easy if frankly sought, pars readily obtainable by standard good play and birdies, except on the par-fives, dearly bought.’

In contrast to many of the courses built in the early 20th century in America, with narrow fairways and thick, deep rough, where a ‘shot poorly played should be a shot irrevocably lost’, in the words of William Fownes, whose father Henry created Oakmont, Augusta National offered open fairways and little in the way of rough. Hazards such as water and sand were minimal but strategically positioned to allow higher handicappers to tack around them but to challenge the better players going for a big shot such as trying to hit a par-five in two. Again, the contouring on the greens and mounds surrounding them tax those unwilling to accept the medicine they deserve for getting out of position. There was a route for everyone, even out of the trees, but always a well-positioned shot was rewarded with an easier next one.

‘MacKenzie and Jones both felt that Oakmont and other adamantly punitive courses rewarded straight, conservative shooting at the expense of the games more thrilling elements,’ David Owen wrote in
The Making of the Masters
. ‘A good golf course, they believed, is one that consistently supplies situations in which superior players can demonstrate their superiority. Houdini thrilled his audiences by escaping, not by being trapped.’ Golfing escapologists Arnold Palmer, Seve Ballesteros and Phil Mickelson, with nine green jackets among them, were thankful to be allowed to show off their thrilling skills to such good effect but each might have won more often if they had not got into trouble quite so much.

British golf writer Leonard Crawley, a fine amateur golfer as well as the correspondent for the
Daily Telegraph
, played the course for the first time in 1947 and noted the St Andrews influence but added: ‘They have not copied one single hole on those maddeningly difficult and infinitely fascinating links, but they built 18 great holes, every one of which is perfectly fair and provides a problem. It seems to me that each one demands that a player shall firstly and foremostly use his brains and not merely his physical and, in these days, mechanical ability to hit a target from a particular range. It restores the ideas of some of the old original golf links which furnished the world with those great players upon whose methods and tremendous skill the modern game is now based.’

Since Jones retired after his Grand Slam in 1930, no one has used his golfing brain to better effect than Nicklaus, who holds the record of six Masters victories with four runner-up finishes to boot. ‘Augusta is one of the toughest golf courses as far as the mental challenge,’ Nicklaus said. ‘You have to think on each and every shot you hit. There are dangerous shots all over the course. I never felt there was a place you could relax at Augusta.’

But it was a moment of luck that really propelled the Masters and Augusta into the limelight when the 1935 champion Gene Sarazen hit the ‘shot heard around the world’, a four-wood second shot at the 15th that went into the hole for an albatross. Instantly the shot, the course and the tournament found a place in the game’s folklore and it is has been building on it ever since. Wrote Owen: ‘The double eagle [as an albatross is known in America] is more than just a notable moment in Masters history; it is woven into the fabric of the course.

‘Every important shot is played against a backdrop that consists of every other important shot, all the way back to 1934. Every key drive, approach, chip and putt is footnoted and
cross-referenced across decades of championship play. Every swing – good or bad – has a context. The history of the tournament is so vivid in the minds of the competitors and spectators that it almost has a physical reality on the course.’

After players have failed to emulate Sarazen at the 15th, they have to walk over a bridge that is now named after him to get to the green. The bridge over Rae’s Creek to the 12th green is named after Ben Hogan for his then tournament record score of 274 in 1953, while the bridge back across the stream from the 13th tee is named after Byron Nelson, who picked up six strokes on leader Ralph Guldahl by scoring a birdie and an eagle at the 12th and 13th in 1937. And if your ball refuses to stay up on the bank above Rae’s Creek at the 12th, then you are just not destined to win as Fred Couples was in 1992, when moist and slightly longer than usual grass on that bank saved the American in the final round.

But it is not just the good stuff that gets remembered at Augusta. Weiskopf is not the only player to have a 13 on the course; Tommy Nakajima did likewise at the 13th hole in 1978. ‘Augusta is easy until you start doing things wrong – and it’s easy to start doing things wrong,’ said Tom Watson. ‘Each wrong decision or wrong shot can multiply on you; it can spiral on you. It exposes every weakness. It exposes your doubts. I’ve seen it happen and it’s happened to me. Augusta has a singular ability to make you feel helpless.’

At Augusta, a player has to contend with his own past disasters and everyone else’s demons as well. This is exaggerated for the generation of golfers who grew up with ever-greater television coverage of the tournament. Players fear making a mistake because the consequences of doing so are seared into their memories. So on the 12th tee, as the wind swirls and swirls, players stand motionless, one hand on the head of a club that still rests in the bag, as if auditioning for the role of
The Thinker
by Rodin.

As Jones himself wrote: ‘When a player is familiar with a course, as each hole is played, it is natural for him to conjure up in his mind visions of the way in which he has encountered trouble before on that hole. There is then a part of his concentration taken up with something he ought not to do, and that is so much taken away from the ability to play the stroke correctly. This is nothing but fear – dread of what may happen to the shot about to be played.’

‘There is an element to Augusta that has a scare factor to it,’ Faldo said. ‘You know where you can’t miss the ball. All the chip shots are tough. You have to loft the ball perfectly onto the green and you’ve got to release it and let it run perfectly. If you get either one of them fractionally wrong, it makes a massive difference. So that is always in the back of your mind. The great thing about Augusta is that the more you bail out, the harder it gets. You have to stay what I call “defensively aggressive”. You’ve got to be able to hit the ball as close as you dare to the ultimate spot. You have to control your fear to hit the shots you have to hit.’

A great dichotomy about the Masters is that players have to get to know the course – only three golfers have won on their debut – in order to understand all the subtleties of the design, but that also brings experience of what not to do. The course forces players to think, but the trick is not to think about the bad stuff. Under pressure, however, that becomes harder to do and the pressure increases as the week goes on. ‘Every day, every minute, the greens become a little more difficult to read and the fairways become narrower,’ said veteran US tour player Frank Beard.

He added: ‘It is hard to spar with history and tradition. You have to be able to keep it out in front of you like it’s a punching bag and you punch at it. I could never quite get the right perspective the way Nicklaus could. I don’t think I ever felt like I was worthy enough to win a Masters. I dreamt of it, but I don’t
think I ever saw myself in the winner’s circle. When we went to Augusta, Nicklaus became someone different. He was worthy. He was a champion.’

Sports psychologist Dr Bob Rotella told golf writer Dave Shedloski: ‘This is probably the one tournament – because of what Augusta is, what it represents – where guys go into it with so much desire to win that it almost overwhelms them psychologically. They make one mistake and they take it way too seriously. They try to get their games too perfect, and they try too hard. Then there’s an intimidation factor of stepping onto this very important golf course, this historic place where you better dress right and act right and talk right, and it gets you out of your comfort zone. They have so much respect for the place that they don’t want to mess up in any way. Throw all that into the mix of wanting to do great there, combined with getting into the history books – all of that comes to bear and might be more important than the golf course itself.’

After the second round of the 1996 Masters, Faldo was asked for his strategy on playing the 12th hole. ‘Well, I try to breathe in and out,’ he said. On the same day, Corey Pavin was asked what it was about the hole that ‘seems to be driving everybody up the wall’. He replied: ‘Isn’t that like a standard question every year?’

Pavin added: ‘The green is very shallow. I would say at most the depth from front left to back left is 15 yards and in the middle from front edge to back edge it is probably ten feet.’ The moderator for the interview, Augusta member Dan Yates, confirmed those figures before Pavin continued. ‘Also, it’s a very flat green. So a shot that you hit in there, it’s hard to hold it because it is not hitting into any slope. That makes it difficult. And anything
that trickles over the green, there’s a slope behind the green, so it will go away from you.

‘And there’s the creek. It’s a shot you want to cut. The way the wind is blowing today, it’s right to left in your face and if you miss your shot a little bit, it’s going to get hung up in the wind and come up short. If you go left, it’s going to go long. You have to be precise with it. And when the wind’s blowing, it’s hard to be that precise.’

In
Life Swings
, Faldo wrote of the hole: ‘Standing on the tee, you have to make a decision on exactly where you want to land the ball; you cannot afford to pick a club then change your mind or you will have to start the thought process all over again. Given the brutish angle of the 12th green, if you intend to go for the heart of the target area then suddenly think, “No, I’ll go left,” you will have too much club, but if you decide to go right, you will come up short. It is one of the subtlest holes in world golf.’