After being runner-up in the Open twice, Nick Price finally got his hands on the Claret Jug last weekend
GOLF: Paul Martin
THOUGH it’s flown trans-Atlantically with him, Nick Price still hardly ever puts his Claret Jug down. It overflowed with champagne on Sunday evening, causing a champion’s hangover, but on Monday after a three-hour kip on his brother’s sofa he drank more from it, this time sharing the joy, and the bubbly, with his brother and his 72-year-old mother, Wendy, who left for Zimbabwe 12 years ago to live in Aylsbury, Norfolk.
Price flew down from western Scotland to show them his silverware, and the love and gratitude he feels for what his family has meant to him. That’s Nick Price all over, one of the nicest guys in sport.
The Claret Jug is the most famous trophy in golf, presented to winners of The Open — they get uppity here if you add in “British”. Last Sunday night, hours after all the spectators had begun their drive, or helicopter ride, towards Glasgow and other parts of the British Isles, the new champion sat serenely on the top tier of the wood-and-iron grandstand overlooking the 18th green, clutching his trophy in both hands and gazing at the panoramic view: the Irish sea, the Ailsa Craig rock and the Lighthouse alongside the magnificent sea-fringed 9th tee.
“All I keep doing is looking at all these names,” he grinned in wonderment. “It’s a Who’s Who of golf. Nicklaus, Player, Palmer, Thompson, Jones … all the way back to the old Morrises and beyond. They were legends as I was growing up.” Then he paused, almost as a modest guy like him should not be about to utter the next words. “Just to think that in a 100 years time some young guy is gonna win it, and he’s gonna look and see my name on there!”
It was on there already. The engraver makes a professional point of finishing his work almost as the winner raises his arms in victory, and certainly before the prize-giving. Truly, he had already begun the ‘J’ for Jasper Parnevik, when the Swede, who had stood on the 18th tee three strokes ahead, bogeyed the last, and Price finished birdie-eagle-par coming up behind him to snatch the Jug, metaphorically, from Parnevik’s grip.
“I feel sorry for Jasper,” said Price. He really meant it: he’s that sort of guy. “But, I think I earned it. He’s young enough to have a lot more opportunities to win than I will have.
“My major concern as I walked down this fairway,” Price told me, “was not to let the atmosphere lull me into a false sense of security.” Par on 18 was enough, but, as Price recalls, “sometimes two putts from 25 feet is the hardest thing in the world, because you don’t want to play over- cautiously and also not too aggressively. But I managed. I remembered how I had lost the 1982 Open (to Tom Watson) when I was well ahead, and I was determined that now the situation was here in reverse, I would not let it slip.
‘It was a lifelong dream being fulfilled. I can’t tell you how hard I worked for it, and how much it means to me.”
The prize-money means little: “it doesn’t last long,” he notes. “This victory brings me a much more important asset: confidence.” He won more than a million dollars on the US tour in each of the last two years, but stands to make many millions more from new endorsements and sponsorships. There are several “one-Major wonders”, but now that he has added this title to his 1992 US PGA victory, there is no doubt who the best golfer in the world today is.
More trophies are headed the way of the current crop of Southern Africans, predicts Price, and the future looks even brighter. “I think it’s just our time. It’s just great for our region. There is so much competition among us Southern Africans in world golf. When one does well, the others feel: Hey, we can do that as well. What’s more, I’m sure this win, and Ernie’s great victory in the US Open, is going to inspire a lot of Southern African youngsters to have a bit more drive, a bit more determination.”
For Price, there is no secret formula for success, though his mother believes she knows the key: “Nick tries so hard and never gives up.”
He has certainly worked on it. Who knows whether he would have reached his present pinnacle were it not for a fellow-Zimbabwe professional, David Leadbetter? Not quite able to break through as a golfer, Leadbetter’s swing theories were eagerly absorbed by Price. “When I first saw my swing on Leadbetter’s video, I was not happy with it. I owe a lot to David.” So, of course, does Nick Faldo: it was Price who recommended Leadbetter to him.
He possesses what a leading golf-writer this week described as “the grace and charm of a bygone era”. Price says: “My parents taught me that I should never try to be something that I’m not. Sure, I get upset, but I try not to take it out on people around me.”
In part, his sweet reasonableness could be attributed to his national service as a technician in the then Rhodesian Air Force. He saw several of his comrades killed in action and that makes a missed putt or a lost tournament feel far from a catastrophe.
When he returns to Southern Africa later this year, he will be bringing that Claret Jug, to show to those who played with him on the Sunshine Circuit and, back in Zimbabwe, “I want the junior golfers I played with as a kid to see this. Also to take it to Warren Hills and Royal Harare.”
The new champion, now 37, finds it hard to pinpoint the reasons for his relatively late success, with almost all his wins, apart from two in Europe, coming since 1991. Most golf experts believe he has it in him to win several more Majors, and Price himself points out that “many of the greatest golfers won most of their Big Ones in their 30s and even their mid-40s. I have six or seven years left in the big time.
“I have a burning desire to win all four majors before I’m through.” Or perhaps to start off with a second US PGA win, in the next few weeks.
There is one cloud that occasionally obscures Price’s sunshine. His heart-rate went up, he says, to 250 beats a minute as he approached the 17th, and “I had to wait for it to go down a bit before I teed off on the 18th”. His whole family has a history of high blood pressure, and he has tried, unsuccessfully, to cope with the problem by taking beta-blockers.
Yet he remains philosophical about the risks involved. “I have lived with it all my life, and I’m still here.” But, he adds stoically: “If I have to die of a heart attack, I can’t think of a better place than right here.”
He meant on a golf-course, but the 18th at Turnberry, where we were standing, would perhaps be the most fitting place of all. In many, many years’ time.