Sandy Lyle’s relationship with the Masters has had everything you might expect and more – inspiration, echoes of the past, triumph, tickled toes and, now, this week a competitive farewell.
The 65-year-old winner of the 1988 tournament, who last April confirmed that this year’s event would witness his final appearance, added his official retirement from the PGA Tour Champions two weeks ago.
“This is the last one,” he said after finishing last among the 76 competitors who completed play in the Galleri Classic. “I’ve travelled the world for 50-odd years now. You get to know the guys you play with and you’ll miss them to a certain amount, but you’ll still see a lot of them on television.”
The 87th Masters will, therefore, will be his 101st and final major-championship start, completing a journey that began when he failed to make the cut as a 16-year-old in the 1974 Open at Royal Lytham & St Annes.
Even then he was known as a precocious talent, one whose prodigious and clean-hitting was spoken of in awe by his team-mates in the county team of Shropshire, among them Ian Woosnam. He was feted for being a natural, perhaps overlooking the relentless hours he put in on the range at Hawkstone Park Golf Club, shaping shots both ways around the oak tree in the middle of it, watched by his father, Alex, the professional.
In time, the world’s finest found themselves equally agog at Lyle’s skills. Seve Ballesteros famously said: “If we all play our best, Sandy would win and I’d be second.”
The Spaniard would, of course, lead Europe’s golfing renaissance, and in 1985 the dam burst when his peers joined him in conquering the majors. Bernhard Langer won that year’s Masters, Lyle claimed the Open at Royal St George’s (breaking a British major drought that stretched to 1970) and, by the end of that year, Europe had also won the Ryder Cup for the first time in 28 years, with Lyle contributing 1½ points to the cause.
His greatest moment was yet to come, but Lyle had a taste of the future when he was paired with Jack Nicklaus in the final round of the 1986 Masters – the best seat in the house for arguably the greatest Augusta Sunday of them all.
Ahead of the 1988 tournament, Lyle and Woosnam challenged Ballesteros and Greg Norman in a practice match that they quietly christened “Shropshire versus the World.” They were overheard by an Augusta patron, whom they in turn overheard asking: “Shropshire – where’s that?!”
The truth is that plenty of Brits struggle to locate the county. It is halfway up the English/Welsh border on the English side, far away from established hotbeds of golfing talent and yet, in an era of abundance for Europe – an era in which Ballesteros, Lyle, Woosnam, Nick Faldo and Bernhard Langer were all born within 11 months of one another – two of them were also born just a few miles apart.
They would grow up playing golf together, and yet Shropshire’s whereabouts would remain a mystery because Lyle would represent the land of his father (Scotland) and Woosnam was always a Welshman who crossed the border to be born and then hit balls.
The pair were victorious in their scrap with the Spaniard and the Australian, little knowing that it would be the first and least significant of their triumphs on the property over the coming years.
For Lyle, the transformation was swift. By Saturday evening, he held a two-shot lead over the field and cast his mind back to that thrilling Sunday alongside Nicklaus. “The memory intensified my desire to experience it again in the future,” he wrote in his autobiography. “But this time as the centre of attention.”
Unfortunately, he was suffering badly with hay fever. “No problem,” said his wife-to-be, Jolande, a reflexologist: she took his toes in hand and tickled him to sleep.
Lyle’s successes went beyond the majors. In all, he won 30 times around the world, including the 1987 Players Championship ...
Next day, tied for the lead with Mark Calcavecchia and playing the last hole, he drove his ball into the fairway bunker prompting one of the defining moments of that joyous era of European success in Georgia: not only a 7-iron shot of exceptional skill, but the commentary of Peter Alliss on BBC television that accompanied it, with first his promise that the ball would slip back toward the hole and then his urgings for it to do so.
When the birdie putt dropped to clinch victory, Lyle performed a clumsy little jig, and it felt as if all of Shropshire let out a roar into the night – I know because I was there, a young golf fan astonished that a fellow from up the road could take on the world and beat them. All that summer, I and fellow junior golfers attempted to hit balls like Sandy. Every half-decent bunker shot had an Alliss commentary, and every important putt holed earned an awkward dance of delight.
It was the start of a remarkable four years. Faldo won in 1989 and 1990, Woosnam in 1991. Britain became addicted to the technicolour world of Augusta National, very late Sunday night viewing and this gloriously unlikely British dominance of the green jacket. It has never felt the need for rehabilitation.
Lyle’s successes went beyond the majors. In all, he won 30 times around the world, including the 1987 Players Championship, but his main tour successes dried up after 1992. A game that had apparently been so simple to him suddenly became confoundingly complex. Lyle pottered on, frustrated but never a man to rail furiously against the fates.
He’ll clip his ball around Amen Corner for a final time this week, quite possibly while wearing the braces (i.e., “suspenders,” for U.S. readers) he has taken to in recent years.
It gives him something of a Huckleberry Finn/Tom Sawyer vibe and it is entirely fitting – a simple Shropshire lad blessed with the remarkable knack of mastering an infuriating game and beating the world at it, sometimes with his old county teammate Woosnam, at other times all on his own.
E-MAIL MATT
Top: Sandy Lyle will step away from competitive golf this week at Augusta National.
Andy Buchanan, AFP Via Getty Images