• April 9 down the years

Faldo takes the Green Jacket

Nick Faldo is helped out by Sandy Lyle © Getty Images

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1989
Nick Faldo won the Masters for the first time. In the third round, he tried very hard not to. Rain delays and a 77 left him very disgruntled, and a Faldo minus a gruntle wasn't nice to be around. But you know how it is at Augusta. A fraction off-line on those glass greens and your next putt is twice as long. But if you're sinking them while everyone else is suffering, you can make up ground very quickly. In his final round, Faldo holed seven outrageous putts, starting with a monster 54-footer at the first. 'You get a sense of destiny', he said. At the 16th, he read an eight-foot break to hole from 20. At the 17th, he hit a 30-footer much too hard. It smashed into the hole. All this great stuff should still have come to nothing. He did only enough to force a sudden-death play-off, and he was very much second-best at the first extra hole. After bunkering his second shot, he left Scott Hoch with a two-footer for the Green Jacket. Not even two foot. But, again, this was Augusta, and 18 inches goes a long way there. It was a downhill snake, and Hoch spent too long studying it, then tapped it gingerly. His putt lipped out, he lost the next hole, and never won a Major. Faldo followed Sandy Lyle as Masters champion and reached a play-off again the following year, when he received another bit of help.

1978
Gary Player won the Masters for the third time. One of the all-time greats, he first won it in 1961. He was 41 by now and this was the ninth and last time he won a Major. It hadn't looked likely after the third round, when Hubert Green shot 65 and led Player by seven strokes. But the man in black trumped it with 64 on the last day, equalling the course record. At one stage, he was one of four men tied for the lead, but sank a 15-foot birdie putt at the last to finish one shot ahead of the other three. At the last, defending champion Tom Watson put his approach wide; Rod Funseth's downhill putt stopped on the brink of the hole; and Green missed a five-footer which would have forced a play-off. Green probably knew it wasn't his day when his very first tee-shot hit a spectator and landed on the wrong fairway.

Meanwhile there was bad luck for some. Tsuneyuki 'Tommy' Nakajima took 13 at the 13th. Later that year, he had a 9 on his card at the British Open.

2006
Winning Majors can be a knack and become a habit. Phil Mickelson acquired the first on April 11, 2004 and picked up the second by winning the US PGA in 2005. Now he won back-to-back Majors by winning the Masters for the second time. Britain's Justin Rose shot 67 in the first round and led by two strokes after the second. But he hadn't found the Majors knack, and his dreadful 81 knocked him out of contention. Mickelson led after the third round, then fought a marvellous duel with Ernie Els, who hit two eagles on the last day. Mickelson tied for the lead by holing a 20-foot downhill putt on the 16th, then won it with a birdie putt from 18 feet at the last.

2000
Vijay Singh won his first Major, the PGA, on August 16, two years earlier. Now he hit 67 in the second round of the Masters, then battled through the wind to take a three-shot lead into the last day and hold it to the end. A perfect shot from the wrong side of the 15th fairway set it up. Again Els finished second.

1972
Jack Nicklaus won the Masters for the fourth time, equalling what was then the record. He set the pace with a first-round 68 and finished three strokes clear. Poor Bruce Crampton tied for second and finished runner-up again in the next Major, the US Open. He was second in four Majors (all behind Nicklaus) without ever winning one.

1995
Ben Crenshaw won the Masters at last on April 15, 1984. Today he won it again and everyone shed a tear. Crenshaw's mentor Harvey Penick had just died, and Ben himself had recovered from Graves' Disease, which attacks the thyroid. He began to overhit putts and lose his touch around the greens. By 1995, he'd recovered so completely that he didn't three-putt once throughout the tournament. He finished 67-69-68 to beat Davis Love by one stroke.

1957
Talking of Masters-winning golfers, Severiano Ballesteros was born today. If charisma isn't a Spanish word, it ought to be. This was golf's flawed genius, famous for following a wild shot with a spectacular recovery. But 'flawed' is a bit harsh for someone who was very successful as well as a pleasure to watch. The legend began when he was only 19: top of the European Order of Merit and joint second at the 1976 British Open after leading before the last round. He won the old event for the first time on July 21, 1979, then twice more, as well as the Masters twice, first after a typically madcap last round on April 13, 1980. He won a record 49 events on the European Tour, including six in 1986 alone, and the Order of Merit six times over 15 years. He won 20 matches in the Ryder Cup, including 11 with José María Olazábal, and helping Europe take the trophy four times. A chronic bad back finished Seve's career, and he survived operations and chemotherapy on a brain tumour in 2008 and 2009.

Jacques Villeneuve made a huge impact in his first two seasons in F1 © Getty Images

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1981
Geoff Hunt won the British Open squash title for the eighth time. This took him past the great Hashim Khan, who'd won his seventh title back in 1958. To break the record, Hunt had to beat one of Hashim's distant relatives, who was about to become the most dominant player of all time. Although he was only 17, Jahangir Khan had beaten Hunt earlier in the year, and the defending champion was twice his age. The old legs didn't have any more years in them. Still, they got Hunt off to a good start. He won the first game 9-2 and showed his usual determination by coming from 3-0 down to win the second 9-7. He should have sewn everything up in the third, when he murdered the kid with drop shots, leading 4-1 and 5-3. Jahangir would have been forgiven for jacking it in then - but he was made of the same stuff as Hunt, and came back to take the game 9-5 and lead 6-1 in the fourth. By now, the old man was feeling the effects. He'd fallen over, jarred an ankle, and been hit accidentally in the face by Jahangir's racket. And the long rallies were killing him. But this is Hunt we're talking about. The pain monster who fed on exhaustion. Visibly shattered, he still found the reserves to win seven points in a row. At 8-6 he hit a backhand drop shot fractionally too low, then won the service back and put away a cross-court backhand. He won the title in Kent, the county where his dad was born. But it really was the end of an era. This was Jahangir's last defeat for five years, until November 11, 1986.

1896
Teddy Flack wasn't one of the world's great track and field athletes, but then nobody was at these first modern Olympics. He began by winning the 1500 metres on the 7th, using his long stride to outsprint Arthur Blake of the USA and Albin Lermusiaux of France in the long finishing straight. The track was in a very poor state, which almost excuses Flack's time of 4 minutes 33.2, which was 17 seconds slower than the world record. Lermusiaux set a new one two months later. Today Flack won the 800 metres with another sprint and another very slow time, finishing just ahead of Hungary's Nándor Dáni and miles clear of Demetrios Golemis, whose estimated time of 2 minutes 28 seconds is shockingly bad for an Olympic bronze medallist, even on that surface. Flack had moved to Australia when he was a boy; he was the first competitor born in Britain to win an Olympic track and field title. The next day, Flack, Blake, and Lermusiaux took part in one of the seminal races, the first Olympic Marathon.

Meanwhile only three teams took part in the parallel bars team event in gymnastics. They all came from Greece. Dimitris Loundras, who was in the team that finished third, was only 10 years 218 days old, the youngest Olympic competitor whose date of birth has been confirmed (check out the French cox on 26 August 1900). Loundras was also the youngest ever medallist, but the youngest to finish ahead of someone else did it on 10 August 1928.

In the fencing, the sabre event was disgracefully re-staged for the entertainment of a privileged few. The competition was almost over by the time the Greek king arrived. Austria's Adolf Schmal had beaten local hero Ioannis Georgiadis and looked set to become the inaugural champion. Second time round, Georgiadis beat him and won the whole event. Another Greek finished second, to loud applause from the royal latecomer. A total scandal. When the Olympics came back to Athens ten years later, Georgiadis won the sabre again. Funny, that.

1960
The first player to land three drop goals in a Five Nations match. Pierre Albaladejo was so adept at it that he was known as Monsieur Le Drop. Ireland did what they could in Paris, and Niall Brophy scored two tries on the left wing - but they couldn't cope with the French pack, a bunch of big bruisers who handled like backs. They scored three of France's four tries in a 23-6 win that gave them a share of the Five Nations title. Albaladejo was up to his tricks again on April 15 the following year.

1971
Jacques Villeneuve was born in Quebec. He took over from Hill as world champion in 1997 and won a total of eleven Grands Prix, both in his first two seasons in Formula One. Immediately after winning the title, he was saddled with uncompetitive engines. In 1999, for example, he retired in 12 of the 16 races, including the first 11. He carried on until after the 2006 season but reached only two podiums in his last eight seasons. He came to Formula 1 after winning the Indianapolis 500 in 1995. His father Gilles, a faster driver, died in a crash on May 8, 1982.

1989
Deng Yaping won six world titles at table tennis, the first of them today when she was only 16 years 63 days old. In the doubles, she partnered Qiao Hong to a 2-0 win over two other Chinese players (unusually, the march was best of three). Deng and Qiao reached the next four World Finals, winning in 1995 and 1997.

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