Golf: The man for the big occasion

Nick Faldo is not normally a man to give up a cause the rest of the world sees as utterly lost.

He proved it for all time here seven years ago when he won his third green jacket by drawing Greg Norman into the infinite web of his patience. Result: an 11-stroke swing.

This week, though, Faldo may have enlisted in the no-hope column. He wants to keep a piece of golf that is not covered by a Tiger imprint and has made public his yearning to retain the historical niche currently threatened by the tidal force of Woods.

"No one admires Tiger more than me," says Faldo, who won his first two Masters titles in 1989 and 1990, "but I don't want him to win here. I want the expectations to bring him down - I don't want him to go one better than Jack Nicklaus and me.

"I don't want history to say Tiger Woods won three straight Masters and, oh, who were those others guys who won it two straight years?

"We know what Tiger can do, but there is a lot of weight on him here and when I tried to pull off three straight I felt terrible pressure. I felt I was a marked man."

The trouble for the once-relentless Faldo is that one man's pressure is another's oxygen. Woods, who already this year has won three tournaments and US$2.9 million ($5.3 million), is admitting here to an insatiable appetite for hoarding victories.

It means that as golf weighs his chance of being the first man to "three-peat" the same major title since Peter Thomson tied up the British Open between 1954 and '56 - and bookmakers offer the insanely ungenerous, but probably practical odds of 6-4 in a 94-man field - Woods lightly flicks a philosophical six-iron.

"Whether it's all the things going on outside the gates [women's rights protests] or whether it's the fact I'm trying to win three in a row, all that goes away once it's time to tee up and go," he says.

"Some think that other people's expectations are a heavy burden, but they are not. I always expect to win. It's the way I am, or at least the way I've become. I have to live in my own zone and I feel very confident now.

"I'm happy about my knee surgery. It's great to wake up and know that walking around the golf course isn't going to cause a lot of pain."

Gio Valiante, a psychology professor currently working on a study of the mental strengths of arguably the three strongest heads in the history of the game - the late Ben Hogan, Nicklaus and Woods - believes that the Tiger has cleared new and astonishingly secure ground as he advances on the halfway mark of Nicklaus's total of 18 majors.

A few weeks ago he fell victim to a bug on the Bay Hill course. He vomited and retreated to the toilet. Beaten-down rivals thought that here was a flash of human frailty.

It was, but of the strictly physiological kind. He still won at a canter. For the fourth successive time. Three-peating, four-peating, what's in a digit or two?

Says Valiante: "We know that for him, confidence is no longer an elusive thing that comes and goes. There are four sources of confidence: prior experiences, vicarious learning, verbal and social experience, and psychological state. But the primary source is past performance.

"If I go and ask a girl on a date and she says yes, the next time I ask a girl I'm going to be more assertive. We've seen the pattern here.

"It's why we are able to catch serial killers. We fall into patterns and habits. Like that, winning is a habit, it's natural. Everything around you triggers good feelings. It's one constant reinforcement."

To some it is, of course, more natural than to others. For Woods it long ago became an utterly elemental need, and he is increasingly honest about the thrill of exerting himself over opponents, and this is especially so when a little edge has entered the competition.

He recently admitted to the American writer Tom Callan that he got a special charge from demolishing Colin Montgomerie in the 1997 Masters just a few days after the veteran had suggested he would make all his own experience tell.

Woods was asked whether he got special satisfaction from ransacking Monty's psyche. "Big-time," he purred.

He slices through the psychological jargon when explaining his stunning record.

"What happens to me is that whenever there is a touch of pressure I can tell myself something very important. I can say 'hey, I've done this before'.

"That's very reassuring. You feed on it. It adds to your enjoyment. I've actually won this tournament. I've won on this golf course.

"It's a pretty powerful statement to say to yourself as you're coming down the stretch and you've got a chance to win and you've done it here before."

In 1996 Faldo stood back and watched Norman melt before his eyes. He would like to see the same thing happen to Woods come Monday. He might be wise to brace himself for a little disappointment.

Woods isn't invading history. He's simply mopping it up.

- INDEPENDENT