Home | News | Links | Videos | Subscribe | Score Tracker | Contact
Copyright 2005 © Golf International Services Limited and Golf Content Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Golf International Services Limited and Golf Content Limited provide this website to you subject to Terms of Use.
We suggest that you use Internet Explorer 5.0+ for optimized visual features.

What did Bernard Gallacher [the captain] say that evening? It was very quiet. I don’t think anything was said, to be honest. There was no speech. Everyone knew, quietly, what they had to do.

You did it, beating Curtis Strange with that dramatic wedge shot and putt on the final green. After that, you had Seve coming up to you in tears and saying you were a great champion and so on. What did you write in that note to Seve after that?
I just dropped him a quick line to say I really appreciated that, to be acknowledged in that way by a fellow competitor of his stature – it was one of the highlights of my career.

You and Seve are contemporaries, as well as Europe’s two most successful golfers. He has always enjoyed better PR than you in the UK. Why is that?
Because he was the one hitting these magical shots. He was smiling and pumping his fist more and that sort of thing. And, dare I say it, he’s probably marginally better looking than me [this said with a chuckle]. He endeared himself to the public because he made the effort to speak English. He had that while I was the head-down, blinkers-on grinder, so only the hardened golf fan appreciated what I was up to..

What did you make about his comment last year that the European Tour is like the Mafia?
Seve’s obviously feels hard done by with the Tour, and with IMG – anybody he feels takes money from him [laughs.]

Why is it Colin Montgomerie, and not you, who is the opposing captain to him in the Seve Trophy?
It was talked about. I don’t know what happened; I don’t know who cocked that one up. I was told by John Simpson [his manager at the time] that it was going to be me and Seve as captains, but it never happened. I don’t know what he over-negotiated on that one.

You deal in the book with how disappointed you were by Mark James’s
reaction in Germany to your attempts to try to make the Ryder Cup team in 1999, but in the end it was his selection of Andrew Coltart as a wild card over Bernhard Langer – whom everybody, I think including Bernhard, thought was going to get the other one [Faldo nods his agreement with this] – that caused a lot of controversy. Do you think that possibly with Bernhard, as with you, Mark didn’t want anyone in the team room who would be seen as a more natural leader?
Don’t know about that one.

That it would be awkward for him to be captain if you were playing for him?
That one’s never crossed my mind. Hadn’t thought of that one.

You then talk about, with a view to you being a future captain, Neil Coles [the European Tour chairman] suggesting that you should “back off” if you ever wanted the job. But you are one of the ‘Famous Five’. To some people, it would seem logical you should get the job in 2006. Seve and Bernhard have done it. Woosie could get the job in Wales in 2010. There’s Sandy Lyle, who’s a bit more on the periphery. Yet, speech marks, “it’s an issue”. Is that because there are some people who say: “That Nick Faldo is not going to get this job”?
I don’t know. The bottom line is, what is the goal of the Ryder Cup? Answer: to win the trophy. How do you do that? You win the points. So where do politics come into this? If you take all that aside, and this is my simple argument, and you look at my credentials on the golf course and my experience – and probably the experience is more important if you’re talking about the
captain – I’ve been there. I know what happens. Tony Jacklin was fantastic. Tony was great at making you feel one up off the golf course. And he was great at strategy on it. He’d consider the draw and say: “Where are we going to win the Ryder Cup?” How fantastic’s that? It wasn’t: “Well, boys, good luck, I hope you have a nice day.” He’d say: “We’re going to win it in one of these three games, which means we have to put strong guys here, here”...and so on. It was a positive attitude. We were going out to win the darned thing. Gallacher was very good. Seve was great, so passionate. I’ve seen a great variety of captains. The bottom line is that I think I have great experience for the job. And I’ve always been close to the captain as well. Tony was in my ear. Seve was in my ear a lot, discussing a lot of pairings with me beforehand. So if you take it purely on that, looking good. But if you start to throw in the fact that I’m not ‘one of the boys’, and never have been...well, I mean, when you’re the No.1 guy, people knock you. People

knocked Seve, people knocked me. Why? Because you’re the No.1 guy. Which companies do they knock? Microsoft. Do they knock the 100th company in the world? They probably don’t even know who it is. If you’re the No.1 guy, you get knocked. Some people can’t handle the fact that someone else is No.1, for whatever reasons. And then it can get personal. And we’re talking about a long time ago. Everybody changes, everybody moves on. If you’re going to be judged on something that happened 10 years ago, or your opinions of 10 years ago, I don’t think it’s right. If we have a proper interviewing process and they ask you what your game plan is...I’d think it should be based on that. Not on any personal reasons.