GOLF: Jon Swift
IF YOU are prepared to turn a blind eye to a private jet, a multi-million dollar bank account and the type of celebrity status which precludes a visit to the local steakhouse, not much has changed about Nick Price.
The amiable Zimbabwean’s stunning wire-to-wire victory in the US PGA at Southern Hills to add to his gutsy triumph in the British Open at Turnberry, merely put indelibly in the history books the fact of the ample talent Price has always owned.
But at the heart of it all, Price has not varied in anything but calendar years and a new-found strength of attitude from the enthusiastic young man who served his apprenticeship as a professional golfer on the local tour.
“I am struggling to control a game which is uncontrollable,” is the insightful way he puts it. A simplistic assessment of the heights his game has reached perhaps.
For Ben Crenshaw, a great student and historian of the game, contends that Price is striking the ball better than anyone since Ben Hogan. That comment, drawn from a game which recognises that any player can win a major one week and miss the cut the next, is massive praise indeed.
But in recognising that he is merely mortal — and in victory, one of the first things Price did was point to Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson as the true greats of the game — the new world number one unthinkingly increased rather than belittled his own place in the annals of the game.
“If I won every major for the next seven years, maybe I could come close to Nicklaus,” is his low-key assessment of his achievements.
But this is said with the understanding that greatness — lasting greatness — as a golfer is tantalisingly within his grasp.
“I think that probably one of my prerequisites to be an all-time great is for a certain time to dominate the game,” is the way Price sees it.
Interesting then that he has been installed as the world’s top-ranked player on the Sony rankings — only the seventh player to have earned this accolade.
The cold statistics would show you that Price is the first man since Nick Faldo in 1990 to win two majors in a season, the first back-to-back winner of majors since Watson captured the US and British opens in 1982 and the first winner of the British Open and the PGA in the same season since Walter Hagen 70 years ago. They also show that since his maiden major, Price has notched up 16 titles worldwide — winning most of them by a wide margin.
But those historical facts alone do not really show how close Price has come to dominating the game since winning his first PGA title at Bellerive in 1992. To see him scatter a class field in last year’s Million Dollar Challenge at Sun City was evidence of that. There was, to put it plainly, not a man alive who could have matched Pricre over those four rounds.
This was patently the case in the humid mugginess of Oklahoma at Southern Hills, where Price’s 11- under 269 was a full six shots better than second-placed Corey Pavin — ironically, one of the players he left gasping at Sun City.
Price understands the game too well to make wide-ranging predictions about the future. Golf is, as he himself explains, an “uncontrollable game”. And he will doubtless remain not fully convinced of his own looming immortality until he has taken the tournament he told me he most wants.
“If I were lucky enough to be able to choose a major victory — and don’t forget that everything has to be right at the same time to win any tournament, never mind a major — it would be the Masters at Augusta,” is the way he quantified this for me.
“But,” he hastened to add with a characteristic grin, “don’t think I won’t take any of them I can get.”
For Price, the trappings of superstardom have meant the freedom he typifies as “being given large rewards for doing something I really like doing”, but they haven’t really altered the inner core of the man.
He will still be structuring his tournament schedule to allow himself time off for family, fishing and the space to merely have a relaxed few beers with his mates.
It is the way Price has always done it. Even a third major championship is unlikely to change that.