Nick Faldo: If I crash my car in Montana, no one will know I’m there

My Sporting Life is The i Paper’s look behind the curtain at what drives sports stars to greatness. This week, we speak to three-time Open champion and three-time Masters winner Nick Faldo about the best year of his life, driving too fast on remote roads and his real love: fishing. People still talk to me about the 1996 Masters I beat Greg Norman to the Masters title in 1996 from six shots behind, and I’m still fortunate enough to be reliving that because literally every week somebody will say, ‘Oh, I saw you and Greg, Masters ’96.’ They get all the facts right too, which is cool. That started so many people getting involved in golf. They either say ‘I picked up some clubs from that day,’ or ‘I went and got a Pringle sweater!’ We’re 30 years on from that, and that one is the one that’s been relived the most out of all my majors. Faldo’s duel with Norman (right) was watched by millions on TV (Photo: Getty) I feared nothing at my best I won Masters and the Open in 1990. Augusta and St Andrews, you can’t really win at two better places. Those two were special. And when you’re playing great, you feel like you’re in more control of the game of golf than it is in control of you. There’s nothing better than going on a golf course when you actually feel like you could do something each day, rather than feeling the trepidation. It’s like ‘Right, I can grab this thing by the scruff of the neck.’ You’re just going out there and trying to play as best you can, and you don’t fear anybody or anything. I’ve had the odd moment of that, which is very nice. Faldo lifted the claret jug three times in his career (Photo: Getty) My dark days were my own fault I went through a self-inflicted swing change. That was the dark days. I was trying to rebuild a swing in the middle of a year of golf, which was just stupid. You don’t do that mid-season, you should limp it out to the end of the year, and disappear for a couple of months with your team. But we never thought of it like that. We didn’t have anything like “backroom staff”. That was tough because I was getting beaten up by the media. Fortunately and amazingly, I never got mega down or depressed about it, it was just mega hard work. This was just the process, and I had to keep dreaming and believing that it was just going to get better, even though it didn’t for quite a while. That took some serious determination. I’d love to be a professional golfer again now I wish I could have another go in this era with all the technology, all the equipment. It would be interesting to see how good I could have been. In my era, you beat it out of the blooming ground. You hit golf balls. You learnt by where your divots were going. These days, they’ve got so much good information. I’ve always said, if you’re 15-year-old and talented and you bring some dedication to it, you open your eyes and your ears, there’s so much fantastic factual information. If you do a good job on sifting through what I would deem as facts now, you’ve got to come out as a hell of a golfer. They’ve taken the guesswork out of it. Faldo counts his win at St Andrews as one of the most special (Photo: Getty) Somebody holds a phone up, and you got your golf swing on it. You can put some app on it and lines and angles if you want, crazy stuff like that. We did it but it was the days of the camcorder. It was this big thing, which you couldn’t pause because the picture would be jumping up and down! I get scared I’ll die alone in a ditch After Covid when no one really knew what the heck the world was going to do, we wanted a bit of space. We ended up in Montana because the scenery and the space is amazing. I love my fly fishing, so we’re very happy up there. It’s a great spot. Montana’s nearly twice the size of Great Britain and we’ve got 1.1 million people. So we want to keep it that way. I drove for an hour and a half the other day and it scared me because there was nobody on the road. And I’m zipping along because there’s no lines, and I thought, ‘If I come off and disappear in the bushes, nobody’s going to know I’m in there!’ I’ll drive four hours to fish with Huey Lewis In the 80s, we were all Huey Lewis fans, weren’t we? Because of how big Huey was then. I was in Hawaii for a tournament at the end of 1987, I went on the range and this voice went ‘British Open champion’. I turn around and it was him. He loves his golf. We made friends and then he says, ‘Well, I fish. I’ve got a place in Montana.’ I said, ‘Oh!’ so I went to visit him, stayed, fished. And we’ve stayed friends. We’re probably in more contact now because I pop across – well, pop across in Montana, it’s like four-hour drive – and have a fish with him, and a bit of golf. Read more James Gray: ‘You’re too f**king strong!’ – a day at the golf with Rory McIlroy Ian Baker-Finch: I won the Open at Birkdale. Six years later I was sobbing in the locker room I love Montana because it’s so remote When I was visiting Huey in the 90s in Montana, I had to go to the bank to cash a traveller’s cheque, to get 50 bucks. The lady says, ‘Do you have any ID?’ Well, because I didn’t carry ID in the early 90s, and I’m like, ‘I guess you don’t know about my golf swing.’ And then I look at Huey and he says, ‘I don’t know him.’ I said, ‘I can’t believe it, I’m world No 1!’ Anyway he eventually vouched for me, but it was our little laugh. I’ll go out on the river with anyone – if they’ve got a boat! I do now get recognised in Montana but everybody’s nice. They’re all hardworking people up there. And I don’t mind being bugged. A lot of people say they watched me back in the day, or they miss me on TV – or they say ‘do you want to go fishing?’ and I say ‘ooh, let me take your number!’ Lindsay looks at me and says ‘You’ve never met this guy, you don’t know anything about him and you want to go fishing with him?’ I say, ‘Yeah, what if he’s got a boat, and he wants to take me out?’ You just float down and you cover lots of water, miles and miles of river in a morning or a day. It’s all trout, catch and release. Everything’s gorgeous. You’re either on a giant river like Yellowstone, 200, 300 yards wide, or you’re wandering in bushes in a creek, flipping it around a bush to catch a little tiddler. They’re gorgeous, colourful little things, and it’s quite a skill. Watch The Open exclusively live on Sky Sports and NOW this weekend