This Nick Has Come Into His Own Like No ‘Other’

He was always “the other Nick,” the one who wasn’t winning all those British Opens and Masters and European Orders of Merit.

He looked like the other one--till he got a putter or a chipper in his hand. There, the resemblance ended. “Oh,” realized the cognoscenti, “that’s not Faldo, that’s the other Nick--what’s his name again?”

His name is Price. Like the other Nick, he’s 6 feet or over, 190 pounds, his eyes have the same two-fairway squint to them and his speech the brogue of the Empire. Like Faldo, he’s a British citizen but, unlike Faldo, he was weaned and raised in the colonies.

There was another difference. The other Nick--Faldo--made those seven- and nine-footers. The Nick who was Price three-putted them. From tee to green, they were as alike as their given names and silhouettes. They both lived on the fairway. When they got around the green, though, you knew which was which.

Until this year when, all of a sudden, Price won his first major--and his fourth tour championship: the PGA at Bellerive in St. Louis.

That leaves him three majors in arrears of the other Nick, but there are those in the golf world who feel that gap might very well be closed, that Faldo could find himself Priced right out of his preeminent rights to the given name.

Nick Price finds himself as surprised as anybody at this turn of events and his sudden emergence as one of the world’s great golfers.

It wasn’t as if he were born on a fifth fairway or in a place where golf was a way of life as so many of the champions of today.

Nick’s family background is right out of a Lives Of The Bengal Lancers scenario. Father was a career British military officer, a major in His Majesty’s artillery, assigned to assist the Indian Army in World War II.

After the war, Major Price set sail to seek his fortune in Kenya but debarked on the way in Durban, South Africa, where son Nick (Nicholas Raymond Liege Price) was born.

The major was nothing if not itinerant, the sun never set on him, either, and he moved on to what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, when Nicky was 3.

To the outside world, Rhodesia-Zimbabwe hardly seemed a place to care out a career in golf--it was torn by civil war almost from the time the Price family arrived there--but to young Nick, it was a golfer’s paradise. “It never rained, there was no wind, few trees and the ball carried well.” It did wonders for your confidence, and, in golf, that’s the most important club in the bag.

Green fees were 10 cents. He tried caddying for his brother but gave it up after one hole and decided if he was to carry anyone’s bag it would be his own. He got a set of clubs out of a remnant sale and a pawnshop. He had five hickory shafts and three with plastic coating, one left-handed club and two woods that were meant to be a spoon and a brassie that looked more like something you might poke a fire with. He had two putters. He carried 17 clubs in all, two over the legal limit.

He never had a lesson, but he was on a golf course from dawn till dusk. His mother, glad to have him hanging around some place besides with street gangs, would drop him off at a club in the morning and pick him up at night.

Making a living with a golf club was still furthest from his mind. He modeled his game after his brother’s. “But it was the blind leading the blind--he didn’t know what he was doing right, either.”

He collected every instructional book he could find and remembers watching the Masters on 16-millimeter film in 1970 (Billy Casper won it). He began to play seriously in junior tournaments. Junior golf in Rhodesia was highly competitive. It even had its own Watson (Denis) and high standards.

In 1973, he had an invite to play in the Junior world tournament at San Diego. The hosts paid $500 of the air fare--but the actual cost was $780. “My mum had to come up with the other $280, but she figured it was a good investment if it got the golf idea out of my head once and for all and I would turn to schooling and business for a career.”

Mum miscalculated. Son Nicky won that tournament. He found out he could play with the world’s best. Hal Sutton, John Cook and other future tour stars were in that field. “I came home and told the guys ‘Hey! We can play with the big boys, too!’ ”

It was not all fairways and greens for Nick. First, he had two years in the Air Force to fulfill. Next, he began to find the European tour added wind and rain to the mix. And there was another Nick out there.

He got his tour card at the ulcer manufactory called Q-School. Then, he won the 1983 World Series of Golf, an event that gained him 10 years of exemption from qualifying.

But, like a lot of golfers, he won before he had any clear idea of how. Like so many before him, Nick hit a wall a few years out where his game seemed suddenly to lie in shards. He led the British Open going into the final holes twice but got passed once by Tom Watson and once by Seve Ballesteros. Losing to those is hardly a disgrace, but Nick began to lose to less than Hall of Fame types and to miss cuts in tank stops.

“I started to hit snap hooks, wild slices. It was awful. I had been a pro for 10 years, but I was hitting the ball like a weekend 10-handicapper. I thought I was through. I was having to hit the ball out of places I didn’t know existed.”

He took his game to the tour guru, David Ledbetter. He found out what he was doing wrong. “Plenty,” he advises, “beginning with the grip.”

He almost gave up, but decided someone who could come within a few shots of winning the British Open twice belonged with the big boys.

As a result, Nick is one of the top stars at the Franklin Fund Shark Shootout tournament for children’s charities at the Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks this week. He will be as big an attraction as the host, Greg Norman, the legends Arnold Palmer and Raymond Floyd, and the new lions, Fred Couples and Tom Kite. He won the Byron Nelson and the Canadian Open last year and the PGA this. He has arrived.

And, one of these days, he will really rise to the top. When they say “the other Nick,” they will mean Faldo.