In Good Nick

Nick Faldo: Six Major championships. 30-plus Tour wins. The best Ryder Cup record in history. A skilled broadcaster. A burgeoning business empire. With Valhalla behind him, Europe’s best ever player has many reasons to be happy.

Moments after receiving the green jacket from Ben Crenshaw in 1996Of course, that line between the witty retired legend and the hardened golf professional was temporarily blurred when he stepped back into the cauldron last September as Europe’s captain at the 37th Ryder Cup in Kentucky. He was widely criticized in the British Press for almost everything, including his selections, his tactics, his demeanour, his speeches and even his jokes as the Europeans were comprehensively outplayed to lose the coveted trophy for the first time since 1999 and for only the second time in 15 years.
To some, it seemed doomed from the start. Despite his stellar Ryder Cup playing career, Faldo was seen as too abrasive and self-centred to be given the job of guiding Europe to victory over Paul Azinger’s Team USA. It was almost as if the famous Faldo ego got in the way of team bonding, with Colin Montgomerie among those who observed that the Europeans at Valhalla resembled the disjointed American teams of recent times and vice versa.
Faldo rejects any notion of an unhappy camp: “I was there in the team room so I know what was going on and what really happened, how the decisions were made and everything,” he says. “For me, the Ryder Cup was a fabulous experience. I did get quite a kick and a buzz out of just being in the team room again.”

Faldo’s contentious pick of Ian Poulter as a wild card ahead of Darren Clarke was vindicated with the flamboyant Englishman winning more points than any other player. But the tactic of stacking the Sunday singles, with his best players starting last, backfired when the Americans wrapped it up with four matches to go.
With hindsight, what might Faldo have done differently?
“In my view of the banking situation right now, a few people would love hindsight. But like anything in life, you can’t work that way. You deal with what is happening right now and make the decisions on the information you have right now. You can’t go backwards. It doesn’t work.”
Indeed, he could never be accused of excessive naval-gazing and failing to move on with life. As long ago as 1991, he was working on turning his name into a brand with the launch of Faldo Design, which creates golf courses from scratch or re-designs existing layouts. Around the same period, his contemporaries Sandy Lyle and Ian Woosnam – both born within nine months of him – were also household names in the UK but only the Hertfordshire-born Faldo went on to execute the same vision of global dominance.
When I spoke to him in Hong Kong, eight Faldo Design courses had been completed – including his most recent, Roco Ki, described as a lush, botanical garden in the Dominican Republic - with a further eight in the pipeline.

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