Nick Faldo retired after 19 years as a golf broadcaster. Here’s what his friends and colleagues had to say.
It’s the end of an era on the CBS broadcast.
After 16 years wearing the headset for the network, Sir Nick Faldo said goodbye from the booth during the final round of the 2022 Wyndham Championship at Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Sunday. The six-time major champion, who has a deep history at Sedgefield dating back to his PGA Tour debut at the 1979 Greater Greensboro Open, was honored with a plaque behind the ninth green on the club’s Wall of Fame where he joins the likes of Charlie Sifford and Arnold Palmer.
The broadcast also featured a handful of messages from Faldo’s former and current colleagues both on and off the golf course, and it got to be pretty emotional at times. So much so that Dottie Pepper at one point joked, “Are you guys able to call this or do you want me to take it?”
Afterward, he was asked if the boos he received from spectators near the first tee had anything to do with his dreadful tee shot.
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland – Ian Poulter nearly did the unthinkable with his opening tee shot at The Old Course at St. Andrews.
He nearly toe-pulled an iron off the tee at the huge double fairway out of bounds, a feat only performed by Ian-Baker Finch at the 1995 British Open, which effectively sent him into retirement as he battled the driver yips.
“When I walked off that 1st tee, (I thought) is it Ian James Finch or what could this be? It was 5 feet from out of bounds,” Poulter said. “The barrier was in the way, took a drop, and got off to a decent start after that really.”
Poulter made par at the first and by the end of the round signed for 3-under 69, a solid performance after an inauspicious start.
Afterward, he was asked if the boos he received from spectators near the first tee had anything to do with his dreadful tee shot.
“Didn’t hear one,” Poulter said. “I actually thought I had a great reception on the first tee, to be honest. All I heard was clapping.”
When it was suggested that the boos were the result of Poulter joining LIV Golf, Poulter continued to downplay that he was heckled. (The heckling isn’t audible in the video of the shot posted on YouTube, but several tweets by those around the tee noted that Poulter didn’t get a warm welcome.)
“Oh, my gosh, I have heard not one heckle. In three weeks, I’ve heard nothing,” he said.
Ian Poulter almost goes OB on his tee shot at the first hole.
Poulter has been the most vocal player to oppose having his membership suspended by the PGA Tour, and was among the players who challenged the DP World Tour’s ban of LIV Defectors at last week’s Genesis Scottish Open, a co-sanctioned event between the two tours. Eventually, he received a stay of his suspension and was allowed to compete. Poulter noted that he has ignored reading any of the stories being written about the upstart league’s challenge to the current golf world order, and claimed not to have heard R&A Secretary Martin Slumbers’ comments that took a hard stance against LIV Golf.
“Purposely haven’t looked at all. So I don’t want to know. You can tell me, I’m not going to listen. I’m here to play golf,” he said. “This could probably be my last Open Championship at St Andrews. So I’m trying to enjoy it despite the questioning.
“I’m staying out of the way. I’m not reading social media. I just want to play golf, right? I can only do my job. If I listen to a lot of nonsense, then I’m going to get distracted. That’s never going to be good for me. I’ll leave it to the clever people to figure stuff out, and I’ll just play golf.”
Poulter’s round did include one moment that was the polar opposite of his opening tee shot. At the ninth hole, he sank a putt from 150 feet for an eagle two.
“I kind of hit it two cups out to the right,” he cracked. “Longest putt I’ve ever made by a mile. You don’t ever hole those putts. Two-putt from there is a pretty good feat.”
And while Poulter was adamant that he didn’t have hecklers on his opening tee shot – charging that his thousands of admirers must have drowned out the one heckler, if there even was one – he did acknowledge that he heard from a boo bird at 17.
“We always have one out of several thousand people that say something silly most days,” Poulter said.
What did he say to the person shouting at him? “I said there’s always one American in the crowd.”
Golf agent John Mascatello, who was the head of the Wasserman Golf Group, has died at age 61.
Golf agent John Mascatello, who was the head of the Wasserman Golf Group, has died at age 61.
Wasserman is one of the more prominent sports marketing and talent management companies, with representation across all major sports including the PGA Tour, the NFL, MLB, NHL as well as national media personalities.
Mascatello represented more than 30 players on the PGA Tour, according to Ian Baker-Finch during a segment acknowledging Mascatello’s passing on CBS on Sunday during the final round of the Travelers Championship.
“He was a huge presence out here on the PGA Tour,” Baker-Finch said. “For the golf community and fraternity … a huge loss.”
Marc Leishman, one of Mascatello’s clients, spoke about him during a post-round interview with CBS reporter Amanda Balionis. He later spoke with reporters about him.
“It was a tough day. One of our close friends passed away this morning. So, yeah, John Mascatello. Was definitely thinking about that and trying to. … it was kind of. … made things a little. … golf is obviously not the be all end all. Thinking of his family.”
According to the Wasserman website: Wasserman golfers have won nearly 40 events on the PGA TOUR since 2015.
No cliché is more kindly yet bromidic than the assertion that a slumping star will win again simply because he or she is too good not to.
Among the plentiful clichés permeating golf commentary, there is none more kindly yet bromidic than the assertion that a slumping star will win again simply because he or she is too good not to. It’s a polite fiction, peddled about almost every prominent professional who achieved early success only to plunge into, if not obscurity, then at least irrelevance. As analysis, it lies somewhere between sentimentality and sycophancy, but nowhere close to sound.
Golf’s recent run of resurrections began—appropriately enough, for those particular to the low-hanging fruit such narratives represent—on Easter Sunday, when Jordan Spieth won the Valero Texas Open for his first victory in almost four years. A week later, Hideki Matsuyama’s Masters triumph ended a drought of similar duration. And on Saturday, Lydia Ko completed the trifecta (or trinity) with a seven-stroke romp at the LPGA’s Lotte Championship after three years wandering the desert in search of a title.
These comebacks—particularly those of Spieth and Ko—are welcome positives for their respective Tours. Both are likable and engaging personalities whose lack of form never once manifested itself in a lack of class or professionalism. All slumps are relative, of course. The results posted by Spieth and Ko suggest they were more searching than wholly lost, with the odd encouraging hint of familiar brilliance amid too much mediocrity.
Jordan Spieth walks off the first tee box during the third round of the 2021 Valero Texas Open. (Photo: Daniel Dunn-USA TODAY Sports)
But whatever led them back to the winner’s circle—determination, talent, hard work, perseverance—it was assuredly not the mawkish twaddle that they were just too good not to be there again.
Just as cemeteries are full of indispensable people, lesser Tours and broadcasting booths are peopled with those thought too good not to win again. Some of the falls from grace were so precipitous as to become shorthand reference points even for casual fans.
The obvious one is David Duval. He won 13 PGA Tour titles in under four years, culminating in his Open Championship victory at Royal Lytham 20 years ago. A few months later in Japan, two days after his 30th birthday, he cashed his last winner’s check.
The Claret Jug can seem a poisoned chalice for some of its recipients. Ian Baker-Finch won it a decade before Duval, but six years later he wept in the locker room at Royal Troon when he couldn’t break 90 in the opening round. That afternoon he withdrew from the Open and quit tournament golf.
Seve Ballesteros won three Opens but was only 38 years old when the victories dried up, his swing and body decayed beyond repair. A friend of mine once asked Seve—a man not given to modesty—who would win if Europe’s ‘Big Five’ of the ‘80s faced off at their best. “Sandy would win,” Seve replied firmly. “But I would be second.” Yet Sandy—as in Lyle, Open and Masters champion—was finished even earlier than Seve, at age 34, not counting a European Seniors win and a couple of hickory events in his native Scotland.
Lyle’s Open came at Royal St. George’s, where the championship makes its overdue return (pandemic permitting) in July. Four years earlier at RSG’s, Bill Rogers won the Jug, one of seven worldwide titles the 30-year-old Texan claimed in ’81. By ’88, Rogers was working in a San Antonio pro shop, burned out and far removed from his last win. Yani Tseng won two Women’s British Opens among her five majors and 15 LPGA titles, all in a four-year span. She was 23 when the slump started. She’s now 32 with a world ranking of 1,025th. We can reach back further. Ralph Guldahl: 16 wins, three majors, done at 29.
Every one of those stars met the treacly threshold of being too good not to win again,
Ko’s win proved that fine players can rediscover the magic, but if you knew where to look the same week bore reminders that that many simply can’t, no matter how hard they try. Martin Kaymer was third in the European Tour’s Austrian Open on Sunday. The German hasn’t won since the very day he was proclaimed golf’s dominant force—June 15, 2014, the day he won the U.S. Open at Pinehurst No. 2 by eight shots, a month after having won the Players Championship. He was 29 years old with two majors on a 23-win résumé. He’s now 36 but the résumé requires no updating.
Men with lesser records sail on, their careers glorious wrecks of what was once promised. Luke Donald was runner-up in the RBC Heritage five times, but this week he missed the cut for the 15th time in his last 17 starts. The former world No. 1 is almost a decade distant from his last W, and ranked 584th. Matteo Manassero won the British Amateur and made a Masters cut at age 16, and had four European Tour wins at 20. He’s now playing now on the Alps Tour, not a circuit anyone wants to play his way back to.
None of the aforementioned are working less assiduously than did Spieth and Ko, and stand as testament that talent and determination is not always sufficient for reward at the highest level. This is a capricious sport, and the road back to relevance will prove impassable for most. After her victory, Ko credited Spieth with inspiring her. She knew he had been tilling fields that had lain fallow for several seasons before his win in Texas. Perhaps hers will in turn spark someone else who knows they are good enough to win again, and who understands that none are too good not to.
