DON’T DO AS I DID!
19 years on from his infamous Open choke, Jean van de Velde returns to Carnoustie with no regrets and a simple message…
All these years on, and it’s still the question he gets asked the most. How does he sleep at night? Jean van de Velde smiles every time and thinks to himself: if only you knew, you’d understand.
How do you get over the trauma of taking a triple-bogey seven on the 18th, when six strokes or fewer would have won you the Claret Jug? You think about your dear older brother Pierre, who went down to breakfast one day at the age of 46 and died at the table of a heart attack.
How do you get over being mocked continuously by some for wading into the Barry Burn to create one of the most iconic images in Open history? You equate it to the pain of two broken marriages following relationships that lasted longer than 15 years each time, and laugh at the idea there could be any comparison.
Van de Velde even goes back to what happened when he came down to breakfast on the morning of the fateful final round of The Open at Carnoustie in 1999. ‘Do you remember that moment? I picked up the newspapers and the main story was all about the disappearance of John F Kennedy Jnr’s plane on his way to a wedding,’ he recalls.
‘When you think about these things, what is a golf tournament, really? There have been other tough times too that I could talk about, but you get the picture. If you don’t have the attitude in life that “S*** happens” then you’re never going to cope.’
Not for Jean, then, the lifetime of regret that befell American Doug Sanders, after the only comparable final- hole cock-up, when he missed a three-foot putt at St Andrews in 1970 and said years later: ‘Sometimes I even go 30 minutes without thinking about it.’
VAN de Velde, by contrast, still signs photos of himself in the Barry Burn and happily scribbles an afterthought: ‘Don’t do as I did!’ He added: ‘ What was I supposed to do, live in a pub for the last 18 years and drink myself to death? The only time I think about it now is when people ask me about it. Mind you, given it was watched by a worldwide audience of 300 million, I reckon I must have talked to them all by now.’
Since Carnoustie, the well-travelled Van de Velde has lived for spells in his native France, Dubai, and Hong Kong, but it wasn’t a journey in search of peace, rather the sojourn of a curious and contented nomad. He now resides near Valderrama in southern Spain, where we met for this feature. He arrived talking to someone on the phone in French, conducted the interview in English, and ordered coffee and a plate of ham in fluent Spanish.
‘I think if you’re a golfer you have to have the travel gene,’ he says, smiling. ‘There’s probably another two languages where I can get by, and I love experiencing different cultures. I don’t want people to think you’re interviewing the Dalai lama here but living in different places does make you appreciate this beautiful planet, and I’ve got so many memories, both good and not so good, but all valuable.
‘I remember going to a wedding once in Dubai attended by 3,000 people where I was the only non-Muslim. It was a lot different to my own weddings, I can tell you.’
It’s fair to say his career never touched the heights again of going so close at The Open and playing in the Ryder Cup later that year, but it wasn’t because of any mental letdown.
‘I wouldn’t argue with anyone who said I underachieved given I only won twice,’ he said. ‘But I was 33 when I performed as I did at The Open, with my career in front of me. Then, two years later, I lost almost three years of my career with a knee injury suffered during skiing. I broke everything.
‘I had one operation that didn’t go well and had to be redone 11 months later.
‘When I came back I lost the French Open in a play-off and yes, before you ask, I did go in the water at the 18th. The final hole at le Golf National where the Ryder Cup will be played and Carnoustie. I didn’t pick the easiest 18th holes at the two biggest events in my life, did I? You’d certainly rather have a three- shot lead at St Andrews.
‘Anyway, I played three times in two years and then seven months later I won in Madeira. So yes, I should have won more but the injuries definitely came at a bad time.’ Having achieved his goal to come back and win, Van de Velde found his interest waning and packed up the touring life in 2008 at the age of 42.
‘I’d been around and now I had four kids and wanted to be at home more,’ he said. ‘Somewhere along the way, I just realised that as a golfer I had way more of a past than a future.’
Over the past decade he’s done some work for television, played a key role in his nation getting the Ryder Cup, been a promoter for the French Open, and is about to open his first golf academy near where he was born, about 90 miles from the Spanish border.
He’s watched one of his two daughters, Alexandra, become a
civil engineer in Paris while Sophie studies pure mathematics in Lausanne. His two boys, Hugo and Louis, have become sporty teenagers in Hong Kong.
Now he wants to start playing again. Next week, he will be part of the field at the Senior Open at St Andrews.
‘I played a few events in America last year before my knee started to bother me, and I could barely walk for three months,’ he said.
‘Now I want to try again. I’ve got a few events lined up and we’ll see what happens. That feeling in the pit of your stomach when you’re playing, it’s hard to replace.’
First, he will be at Carnoustie this week, where he’s looking forward to mixing with the British crowds once more, and bracing himself for those charming pieces listing the five biggest chokes of all time, with his name invariably at the top.
‘Such a lovely word, isn’t it?’ he says, with a huge grin.
‘I don’t have a problem with people if that’s their perception, but the facts are that I led The Open after 36 holes and after 71 holes I was leading by three. So, if I was going to choke, I had plenty of chances before the 18th hole.
‘It’s certainly true I made some bad decisions, following some bad luck. Only once in your career would your ball ricochet 30 yards off a grandstand into an awful lie with the Burn still to negotiate.
‘Normally, you just head to the drop zone. The lie was so bad I wasn’t sure I could reach the fairway if I chipped out sideways and so I went for it and finished in the Burn.
‘A choke? Don’t forget that at the end of it all I got down in two from a bunker to make the fourhole play-off (he would lose it to Paul Lawrie). That’s not my reading of a choke.’
There will be plenty who consider he protests too much but the truth of the matter is that Van de Velde really isn’t chewed up by it all.
For two days afterwards he cried in the arms of his then wife Brigitte before putting on a barbecue at his chateau in France — one I was fortunate enough to attend — in which he displayed the jovial face to the world he has carried since.
‘Those two days were awful but they were the only sleepless nights I’ve ever had,’ he insisted.
‘Would I love to be heading back to Carnoustie with my name on the trophy? Of course, that’s why we play the game. But it doesn’t stalk me what happened, it doesn’t follow me around and drag me down when I’m feeling low. Luckily enough, I’ve never been that man.’
‘It was awful, but I only had two sleepless nights’