A walk from the wild side

ANYONE who thinks they’ve had a tough life should take time out to read up on Angel Cabrera.

The reigning Masters champion had an upbringing so traumatic that nothing he faces on the golf course seems like that big a deal.

His father abandoned the family when he was just three years old and his mother took his two younger siblings away, leaving him to be raised by someone else.

“You were born on the street, you have to defend yourself to survive, work to eat, steal a chicken to make a soup,’’ Cabrera once said. “All of that makes you stronger.’’

Things were so tight that Cabrera and a friend once stole a dog from a local Japanese businessman and sold it back to him.

“I asked him if he wasn’t afraid of chicken snakes in the hen-house at night or the dogs or the owner,” Cabrera’s Texan coach Charlie Epps said of the former caddie’s youthful escapades.

“He said, ‘Charlie, when you’re hungry you’re not afraid of anything.’ He’s not afraid to lose. So the secret is, you’ve got to learn how to steal chickens.”

Francisco Aleman, a long time commentator for ESPN Deportes said: “He had a very cruel infancy. These things that happened to him as a little boy marked his personality.”

Now aged 40, Cabrera feels perfectly at ease as he bids to become just the fourth player to successfully defend the Masters.

The others were Jack Nicklaus (1966), Nick Faldo (1990) and Tiger Woods (2002).

“I think winning the Masters is the most difficult thing in golf,” Cabrera said at Augusta yesterday. “So anything that comes now is more accessible.”

Assessing his chances of retaining the title, Cabrera said: “I think the chances, I have the possibility. Maybe I haven’t had the great results lately, but I do feel the chance is out there and I feel confident about it.”

Cabrera’s victory in a three-man play-off with Chad Campbell and Kenny Perry was the stuff of dreams.

At the first extra hole, he was in trees right of the 18th, ricocheted back to the fairway trying to play through a narrow gap and made a brilliant par from short of the green.

This year his son Angelito has made the trip to Augusta and Cabrera couldn’t resist showing his son the gap he tried to play through last year.

“I’m the one who wanted to go see that shot, but he was a perfect excuse, and I said, well, I hit the shot that way and it came out that way, and that’s what happened,” Cabrera said with a grin. “He said, no, you’re crazy, there’s nothing there to shoot at.”

Overcoming impossible odds is nothing new to Cabrera. Now he hopes to join Pádraig Harrington, Vijay Singh, Ernie Els and Phil Mickelson and become a three-time major winner. “I think it would be a great honour to be able to be on that list,” he said, “especially now I think it’s going to be harder for players to get to that list.”

Whatever happens, returning to Augusta as the defending champion is a special feeling.

“It was a great sensation, a great satisfaction going down where I had left it last year with the jacket on,” Cabrera said of his drive down Magnolia Lane earlier this week. “It’s very hard even to describe what I felt.”

Asked what his remembers of last year, he said: “I think when that winning putt, that putt I sank to win the tournament is something that’s always going to stay in my mind forever.”

Growing up, he didn’t own shoes, never mind golf shoes. This week he’s changing in the Champions Locker room.

“It’s very hard to describe what it’s like to walk in there to see all of the names on the lockers and look around and see Ballesteros, Faldo, Nicklaus, it’s a great experience and it’s hard to describe,” he said.

Winning another major is all he thinks about but he denies that he once said he would win five Grand Slams.

He said: “First of all, I said that I wasn’t going to win five; that I would like to win five, but there’s a hunger, the challenge, and it’s always out there and trying to get it.”

As every great player knows, a hungry sportsman is a dangerous beast, even if his nickname is “the Duck”.