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UBS HONG KONG OPENNovember 19, 2008Nick FaldoFANLING, HONG KONG RODDY WILLIAMS: Welcome to the 50th anniversary of the UBS Hong Kong Open. A few things about the Ryder Cup, and then we'll move onto questions about the tournament. NICK FALDO: Well, it's good to be back in Hong Kong, and though I never won the Hong Kong Open, I won the inaugural Johnnie Walker back in 1990 at Fanling, so got some good memories. I can remember I first came here in the late 70s when we had to stop in Bahrain and it took about a day to get to Hong Kong, so really it was quite a trip. It's good to be here and very grateful, I would like to say a big thanks of course to UBS, who continue to support my Faldo Series, and without their support in Asia, we wouldn't have elevated it to the level that we have now, and so now we are in a position that we are seriously talking about taking the Series global. So that's quite exciting times for us with the Series. And obviously there's been a few since The Ryder Cup, I did a BBC piece last week, and I guess the only -- I enjoyed it, and as I said, I enjoyed it so much that week, it really was a great experience. If somewhere down the line there's another opportunity to be captain, I would seriously consider it. I think out of respect to UBS and this event, that's about it on The Ryder Cup, let's stick to the tournament, please. RODDY WILLIAMS: What memories do you have of the course going back to 1990? NICK FALDO: Well, those memories were nice. I think I shot -- did I shoot 62 or 63? Wasn't it 63? I remember eagling -- was it 62? Was it really? Well, that's all right then. I holed a bunker shot which we now play as 13, the par 5. I remember holing a bunker shot there and I think it was a bit later in the round, because I think the course was vitally different, wasn't it. We finished -- I don't know if we hopped across and it was a different route back in those days. But no, it's a nice golf course. It's short by pro standards now, which helps me. So I'm sure the guys -- it's in great shape this week, very good. It's a little bit greener than last year, and so I think it will play -- it plays a fraction longer, but maybe that makes it a little easier for these guys, envisage the scoring will be pretty low this week. RODDY WILLIAMS: You've seen the game develop over here from the early days to what we have now; how important has the Hong Kong Open been in the development of golf in Asia? NICK FALDO: Well, as you said, it's been a regular stop for a lot of players, a lot of the Australian players have come up through here back to Europe or whatever, and we've done the same, come through Hong Kong going to Australia. Yeah, it's always been a well-respected event I think. Q. What are your hopes this week? NICK FALDO: Well, I haven't played since last year competitively. I think I'm struggling to get ten rounds of golf and probably ten hours of practise. You know, it's been a busy year this year obviously with television and Ryder Cup. But I'm glad to be back out on the golf course for a bit of fun this week. The only problem is the body. You know, when you haven't played a lot, the arms are hot. Got a lot of -- I had the wrong strings in my tennis racquet, you see, so now I've got natural strings. But that's done my arms in. So my arms are pretty hot right now, trying to get rid of that tendonitis from that. RODDY WILLIAMS: How much have you missed the competition? You haven't played competitively for a long time. NICK FALDO: I don't miss it now. I've been in television now for four years, so I've come off the golf course. I'm 51 now, so I'm quite happy. I had my playing days, and I've moved on to do other things. Q. I respect your statement about wanting to talk about the Ryder Cup, but since The Ryder Cup, no one's really heard from you, and I know on The European Tour we haven't really heard from you; just wondering, now that the dust has settled, can we get from you a view of what you think about it? NICK FALDO: That's precisely it. What's been said has been said, so we've moved on. We're two months on now. Q. How has the past year been for you? NICK FALDO: The past year? Oh, it's been -- obviously it's been an exciting year for me. Television is fun. I enjoy that, GOLF CHANNEL and CBS. We've had a big year with Tiger; what he did in the summer was amazing, and obviously the injury. I think golf's been pretty exciting. The big six has changed. Tiger being out, we've had Phil and we've got Camilo Villegas and we've got Sergio and still got Vijay in there and Anthony Kim there maybe bubbling under. So it's kind of a change at the top, the leading players, so that's exciting. And they are all good characters, as well, so that's really good for television. I've obviously been doing a lot. Ryder Cup was big. A lot of preparation, and obviously the event, and I've been doing other things as well. Still doing the Series. Had a great time with Faldo Series. Went down and took them in Brazil to play the final there, and obviously have the Asian final at Mission Hills in March. What else have I been up to? A bit of fishing, a bit of tennis. Got an hour's lesson from Pete Sampras, so that was pretty good. I saw the serve right from close-up. So that was pretty impressive. RODDY WILLIAMS: Manage to return any? NICK FALDO: Struggling to return. Managed to get a few past him, when we were just rallying, as you do, with Pete. Q. There's a few players here who are being talked about as possible future captains for The Ryder Cup. Have you had any discussions with them? NICK FALDO: No. Q. Is there any sort of rivalry or competition between them? NICK FALDO: I don't know. I don't know who is putting their name forward for the next one. It's not discussed yet the, so I think still got to wait for a couple more months before names are put in the hat. Q. Jiménez and Olazabal have been talked about, and Langer said he would do it if he was asked. Is there any discussion? NICK FALDO: No, not that I would know of. RODDY WILLIAMS: You mentioned these are exciting times in golf at the moment, obviously we've just had the start of The Race to Dubai, and you've seen the development of European golf over the years, now that you've almost hung your clubs up, what do you think of this latest new development and what it's going to bring? NICK FALDO: Very exciting, very exciting for European golf. I think this is the opportunity that's been created by America -- we discussed a couple years ago at one of the meetings, America stopping their season in September. It's given Europe an opportunity from October, November, December to have a shot window in the world of golf, and they have taken advantage of that. I think it should be a great event. Guys have just -- with that kind of bonus, that will get the guys' attention, I'm sure. RODDY WILLIAMS: Would it have been something you would have fancied a few years ago? NICK FALDO: In my day, no kidding, yeah. Gee, yeah, we just played for the love of the game, didn't we, little silver trophies. Q. Young Rory came through your Faldo Series, didn't he, and I think he's 64 in the world now, which is pretty impressive, still very much in his first full year. Just your thoughts on him, and when did you first come across Rory? NICK FALDO: He was 11 when he started playing. He obviously played a while, and I helped him quite a bit when I had like a till Team Faldo, we called it, and I remember we had a very good session at Brocket Hall one time together, and in Ireland, as well at Ballyliffin. Yeah, I think he's a talented guy. He came straight out and I wasn't surprised. He had some freedom to play at Carnoustie last year, and loved the weather, one of the few guys who put a set of waterproofs on and be quite comfortable. So, yeah, a very talented guy. Q. Was he a cut above in your Faldo Series? Was he a standout pupil? NICK FALDO: Obviously, the guys who have come through, Ollie Fisher, and obviously Nick D., they are different, yeah. They have a different -- they have more hand-and-eye coordination, they have that look in their eye. Q. You could tell something special about them, even back then? NICK FALDO: Yeah, you can, the guys -- it's the inner confidence, that's the most important thing. Q. When you see guys like Ollie and Rory coming through, I guess it gives you a feeling that the Tour is in good hands? NICK FALDO: I think so. Nick Dougherty is still pretty young, isn't he. I think there's been a good breed of low 20s age-wise, yeah, guys coming through. Q. Can I pick your brains, talking about the youngsters coming through, now with the benefit of hindsight, would you have done things any differently in your career? You did a lot of technical things, didn't you? NICK FALDO: Yeah, with hindsight or with new knowledge, yeah, you'd do so much differently. The most obvious one now is I was a technical -- I enjoyed understanding the golf swing and what-have-you, and I think for me, if I had this opportunity now, the way they have it, it's basically computer golf. You can go to the R&D centers with your company, and I'd camp out there. I'd go and live there. I would live across the street. I'm with TaylorMade now. I would live across the street in Carlsbad. Seriously, go over there every morning and do my technical work, because you can do an hours area work with a computer and get the read out and it basically says you're doing it right or you're doing it wrong, so it doesn't lie. If somebody sees your putting stroke, and the machine says great; if this stroke is producing the perfect roll, you wouldn't go off messing and experimenting, would you. You'd go, okay, I'll take that on to the putting green and just work it into me, and you can keep going back and checking it, and this is the great thing about technology. They can do it by numbers. You can go in and have this readout of everything with your stat and your roll, and speed of stroke and blah, blah, blah, everything. So you would have thought, the most obvious is when you win a tournament, you go back in there and literally take a blueprint of you, and that is your swing; and how you've putt when you just won, and you've deemed you're playing great. And it would be wonderful to store that sort of thing. And most obvious was my rebuild of golf swing, and that was two years of belting behalf balls, which I would never advocate now. I would say, you go off -- because we know so much more about the physical side, as well. That was 20-odd years ago when we were still in that era of don't touch weights because you are going to ruin your golf swing. Well, now through biomechanics and all of the physical side, we now know how to build a golfer physically. I would have done that very differently. I would have rebuilt my body to cope with the new swing that I wanted, because I think in that time, thinking about it, I must have taken a big risk just hitting that many balls. You twang your arms and that sort of thing, could have caused an injury. So all those sort of things. And they are in a totally different environment on Tour, as well. When we started, it was a bit of a guess. You'd go into tournaments, I remember my first tournament, you got in a taxi to be taken to the Monday qualifying and they didn't even know where the golf course was; we were in that era, and you had your own practise balls to go out and hit in the field. So things have come along pretty good now. Q. So take a McIlroy, would you say, go with what you've got? NICK FALDO: How do you mean go with what you've got? Q. Like he's got as far as he has. NICK FALDO: That's what I've been talking about with my Series. The big picture now, talent will get you to a certain level, but now if you really want to compete on the world stage, you have to understand your swing technically. And you have to understand physically how your body works, mentally more even the physiology, obviously dietary, all sort of things. If you want to take your body and your game and your mind to the new level, you've got to do a bit of everything. I mean, Tiger is the best example, isn't he. He's taken all of those levels to a new level and now the guys have really responded. Out on Tour in America, there's dozens of guys with trainers working hard on that. They work hard on the mental side, as well. So that's really -- so if you had a young kid and he grasped all of those things for like five years, you've got to believe, from 15 to 20, you have to believe that he would be a better golfer at 20 than if he would be a talented golfer at 20, you know what I mean. That's the world they are in now. I think they have got to embrace that and take it and take as much on board as you really feel you need. Q. Does there come a point where you've done as much as you can in terms of getting the swing right, and then you should concentrate on playing? NICK FALDO: Like I was saying, if I lived in this world now, I'd be across the road, as I said. I'd work out all the computer stuff and get my readout and go out and practise it. Still the most important thing is getting out on the golf course and making it work on the golf course. You can't stand and beat balls on the range, because there's still learning to play golf and play competitive golf and having that knack of picking the right club and picking the right shots, all those sort of things, that's very important. But you've got to believe that a guy who has developed a swing that he understands, I'm not saying it has to be a perfect swing, because there are some funny swings on Tour. But if it works on a Sunday afternoon in tournament pressure; Jim Furyk knows how to play on a Sunday afternoon, but other guys with a poor swing, it crashes on Sunday afternoon. Well, then you need to go and fix it, you know what I mean. If you don't have that inner belief on how you're doing it and what you're doing, so then it's when I would say we go back and work on it and find the way that -- again, Tiger has taken it in the Nth degree. Remember all of the players in the past had all their idiosyncracies: Jack turned his head, and Gary kicked his knee, and Trevino still talking. Well, Tiger got rid of all that. And it's like, yeah, he's taken away all the frilly little bits. The pressure goes to the weakest point first, and Tiger's weakest point, he raised the bar to his weakest point of anybody else; I guess that's the best way of putting that, gotten rid of all the frills. That's what players have got to do. You have to elevate where your weakest point is and if you have a lot of little twitches and things, Sunday afternoon that twitch becomes a mighty big twitch. Q. Where does Harrington fit in? NICK FALDO: Padraig is a good example how a man can come alive on the back nine and that's what's so really impressive; well, he's done it on all three of those back nines, Carnoustie, Birkdale and PGA. He's a different golfer, and he's able to cope with playing with your adrenaline running at a different speed. That's what's really impressive about him. You can see the eyes, the swing goes fast, but he still knows how to control it, and that's the important thing. Q. Why did he struggle so much in The Ryder Cup? Because he only got half a point at Valhalla and half a point at Oakland Hills. NICK FALDO: I don't know. Ask him that one. (Laughter). I don't know. Q. You talked about the technical aspects of how you would rebuild Nick Faldo; what about the psychological aspects? NICK FALDO: Exactly, that's very important. Because now, psychology in sport is now accepted. In my era, you kind of had to keep it quiet otherwise people thought you were going a little cuckoo. Yeah, as I've said, it's one of the important factors now. You've got to understand the power of the mind and the power of the physical side and physiology and everything. Just enough to make the difference. Q. If you were rebuilding a new Nick Faldo now, would you build a different person? NICK FALDO: I don't know about person, but you'd want the ability to be able to switch on and off. If you can control your mind, switch on and off when you need it, that's very powerful. Q. Just on the equipment, it's transformed the last few years. Do you see the same quantum leaps coming up with equipment? NICK FALDO: Well, I always kept saying no, but I've talked with the guys at TaylorMade and the technology they have got up their sleeve is amazing, absolutely amazing. And they believe they can take it another notch and get the golf ball to go another 20 yards further with the driver. So it's quite amazing. Yeah, obviously within all the guidelines, just the appliance of science of learning centres of gravities and launch angles and inertia and all of this sort of thing, they are taking all of that to another level. Wait until you see the next-sized drivers coming out. It's amazing. RODDY WILLIAMS: Thanks very much for coming in, and good luck in this 50th anniversary. 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