CBS Sports and Golf Channel’s lead analyst Sir Nick Faldo summed it up succinctly in six words.
“I’m enjoying trying to be competitive,” he said.
Straight and to the point, which isn’t always the case with wordy analysts, who are known to wax on poetically. This week the usually entertaining, often funny and always critical Faldo will go from talking a good game to attempting to play one.
Not the easiest trick to pull off — stepping away from the booth and onto the golf course as one of 78 players teeing it up at the Pacific Links Bear Mountain Championship. He goes off the first tee with American Joe Daley and popular Swede Jesper Parnevik at 10:52 a.m.
“I have two different roles. TV has been great and it is great. I’ve been up there 13 years now and we’re all carrying on, but it was nice to throw some golf in for a change,” Faldo told a gaggle of media on Thursday.
“It’s very difficult because it’s not just a case of not playing enough. The first couple of weeks you get through having a lousy swing, so you work on that pretty hard and you hit it a little better. Then it’s learning to pull the right club and course strategy,” said Faldo, who is competing in just his fifth Champions event of the year.
He missed the cut at the U.S. Senior Open Championship, tied for 72nd at the American Family Insurance Championship and tied for 61st at The Senior Open Championship on his native soil in England. At the Shaw Charity Classic in Calgary two weeks ago he opened with a 67, followed with a tidy 64 before ballooning to a 73 for a tied for 21st placing.
“That’s what I learned up in Calgary, you have to pick the right shot at the right time. I can fade it or draw it. If I pick the right one it gets close. If your decisions are good you get close,” he stressed.
“My No. 1 stat on TV, if you hear me talk on TV, is I used to have a 15-foot circle. If you hit it inside 15 feet, it’s birdie chances. It might stretch to 18 feet. On that particular day [in Round 2 in Calgary] I was inside 15 feet 10 times so that’s why I shot 64,” he said. “On Sunday, it was maybe one and a half times. That’s what you have to do. It’s easier said than done.”
An avid fisherman, Faldo will not do that this week, focusing on the golf.
He described Bear Mountain as a course with tricky greens with plenty of undulation, with many firm and fast. And as for no broadcast this week on Golf Channel, he said: “It is surprising. I don’t know the reasons why.”
But at least the six-time major champion (the 1987, ’90 and ’92 Open champion and 1989, ’90 and ’96 Masters winner) will escape the wrath of any critical analyst.
