{"id":14794,"date":"2011-06-16T14:01:20","date_gmt":"2011-06-16T14:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/nick-faldo-a-true-gentleman\/"},"modified":"2011-06-16T14:01:20","modified_gmt":"2011-06-16T14:01:20","slug":"nick-faldo-a-true-gentleman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/nick-faldo-a-true-gentleman\/","title":{"rendered":"Nick Faldo, a true gentleman"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"NickLike Ben Hogan before him, Nick Faldo has dedicated his entire sporting life to the pursuit of excellence with enormous determination. <\/strong>More than any other player of his time, the Englishman has relentlessly pursued the holy grail of golf, that is, total control of the ball. <\/strong>The swing he has built in that endless pursuit has not only sustained him over time, but excelled in the most important moments of the game.<\/p>\n

Between 1987 and 1995, Faldo won six majors: three British Opens and three Masters. Although he has a total of 39 tournament victories worldwide, including six on the PGA Tour, Faldo’s focus has always been on the four majors: the Masters, the US Open, the British Open and the US PGA Championship. Between 1988 and 1993, Faldo consistently placed in the top twenty in Grand Slam tournaments. <\/p>\n

Faldo had based his game on dedication, consistency, tempo and one of the most competitive minds ever seen in the sport. Despite his height and athletic, broad-shouldered frame, Faldo has never been a particularly powerful player. Consistency, distance control, and his unhurriedness on the field are his strengths. His record makes him possibly the best player of his height or taller in the history of the game. <\/p>\n

Four of his majors he won by narrow margins in hard-fought battles, either by one stroke or in playoffs, and often after accelerating from behind on the scoreboard. In the 1987 British Open, Faldo made 18 pars in the final round and emerged victorious when Paul Azinger bogeyed the last two holes. The 1989 Masters was won in a playoff when Scott Hoch missed a half-meter putt. The following year, Raymond Floyd hit a faulty stroke on his approach to the second extra hole in the playoff to give Faldo the victory. In 1992 at Muirfield, Faldo lost a five-shot lead on Sunday, but rallied with birdies at the end to win his third British Open by one stroke. <\/p>\n

At the 1996 Masters, Faldo started the final day six strokes behind Greg Norman, but posted a flawless 67 to take the victory. Faldo’s most impressive Grand Slam triumph came at the 1990 British Open at St. Andrews. He dominated the Old Course with dazzling play and humbled the field with a total of 270 strokes, 18 under par, winning the tournament by a margin of five strokes. <\/p>\n

Born on July 18, 1957 in Welwyn Garden City, England, Faldo had a versatile talent for sports and all the makings of a world-class cyclist. After his parents bought him a racing bike when he was 12 years old, young Faldo upset them by completely dismantling the machine because he wanted to know how it worked. Years later, he did the same with his golf swing. At 14, Faldo took up golf after watching the 1971 Masters on television. One of his first teachers, Ian Connelly, told him, “The easier your swing, the better your shots will be,” advice that helped his pupil a lot. <\/p>\n

Faldo won 10 titles in 1975 as an amateur and joined the European Tour the following season. Over the next eight years, he showed excellent play, starting to win tournaments and laying the foundation for his brilliance throughout his Ryder Cup career. But Faldo seemed to falter in the crucible of major championships, and this did not sit well with his perfectionist nature. <\/p>\n

At the 1983 British Open at Birkdale, another dismal final round convinced Faldo that if he wanted to win majors he would have to overhaul his swing. He enlisted the services of coach David Leadbetter in 1984. For the next three years he recorded poor results as a consequence of taking on a risky mid-career swing change. But the swing that emerged, which emphasized the big muscles of the body in accordance with Leadbetter’s overriding principle that “the dog wags the tail,” was more solid, more reproducible and reliable. Faldo’s victory at Muirfield in 1987 was validation of that change, as were the other five majors he later conquered. <\/p>\n

On June 13, 2009, after six majors, 39 worldwide victories and 11 consecutive Ryder Cups, Faldo, a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame since 1998, was awarded a knighthood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like Ben Hogan before him, Nick Faldo has dedicated his entire sporting life to the pursuit of excellence with enormous determination. More than any other player of his time, the Englishman has relentlessly pursued the holy grail of golf, that is, total control of the ball. The swing he has built in that endless pursuit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":919,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","rank_math_title":"","rank_math_description":"","rank_math_canonical_url":"","rank_math_focus_keyword":""},"categories":[131],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14794\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}