Faldo: Woz hurt Rory’s fore play
AGOLF GREAT and mentor to former No. 1 pro Rory McIlroy (below) says the young star’s flagging career will take off again following his unceremonious dumping of his former fiancée, tennis star Caroline Wozniacki.
“Caroline (r.) might have been the one; might have been the girl he marries and then has children, and that’s fine,” Nick Faldo (bottom r.) told Confidenti@l on the matter.
But the three-time Masters winner — and three-time divorcé — thinks McIlroy’s newly simplified, and single, life will help to turn around his recent professional collapse.
The 25-year-old had won two major championships before running into a string of struggles. His threeyear relationship with Wozniacki landed in the rough, he got tangled in lawsuits with sponsors and agents, and he struggled to adjust to new clubs after he switched to a deal with Nike, which is worth more than $10 million a year.
Faldo, who has known McIlroy since Rory was 12 years old, raised the Northern Irish phenom’s hackles last July when he suggested he needed to “concentrate on golf.” McIlroy shot back at the time that “Nick should know how hard this game is at times.”
But Faldo now believes the former world No. 1 has gotten things in perspective.
“He’s fortunate that he’s so young that he’s recognized that, ‘Wow, if other things interfere with my golf, it affects my golf.’ Simple as that,” he told us Monday at the Golf & Body NYC training facility. “But he’s fortunate to have learned that at 23 and 24; now he’s 25.”
Faldo said the 2011 U.S. Open champ, whom he spent time with three weeks ago, is mending his heart by hitting the links. “For golfers, shooting good scores is our medicine,” the English veteran said. “That’s his real priority in anything. Many, many of us, if not all of us, if you’ve got problems with any part of your game or this or that, if you start playing nicely and build your confidence, then you’ll see the spring in his step.”
Faldo himself is a high-handicapper in the game of love. He left first wife Melanie Rockall to marry mistress Gill Bennett, only to move on to 20-year-old Brenna
Cepelak, who famously took a golf club to his Porsche 959 when he told her he was marrying Valerie Bercher. That match ended in divorce in 2006.
On Monday night the chatty golf pro, a brand ambassador for Glenmorangie Scotch, official spirit of the upcoming British Open, held a master class at Chelsea Piers Golf Center. The Open Championship starts July 13 at the Royal Liverpool club in Merseyside, England.