by Andy Farrell
Perhaps Norman was still fretting about the frailty of his back or the lack of coordination he felt in his swing on the very first shot of the day. ‘As we stood on the second tee,’ Faldo wrote in Life Swings, ‘I could feel the nervousness emanating from Greg. He gripped and regripped his club time and again, as though he could not steel himself to hit the ball. “Obviously, something is going on in Greg’s mind,” I thought to myself. Courageously – and the White Shark has never been less than courageous on a golf course – he matched my birdie four on the second where he showed sublime touch from off the back of the green, which suggested that he had pulled himself together.’
Norman certainly had no problem with his tee shot, outdriving Faldo by 50 yards. His second shot, however, trickled through the back of the green into the first row of spectators. Once the folding chairs and the people had been pushed back, and with two stewards raising the gallery rope above his head, Norman putted down stone dead and then tapped in for his four.
Faldo had hit a five-wood for his second shot into the front-right bunker – the hole was cut on the right wing of the green as it usually is on Masters Sunday – and played a fine recovery shot to two feet. Norman was back to even par for the day but Faldo had kept his deficit at five. Given the power and the touch shown by Norman here, it was one of the day’s many contradictions that Faldo should be the one to birdie all four of the par-fives. It is also sobering to think that Norman played the par-fives in three under and still managed to score a 78.
‘Greg Norman has always been the guy who is going to win the Masters one year. It’s been that way since his first appearance at Augusta National, sporting a gold neck chain and unbelievably white blond hair,’ wrote Robert Green in Golf International. ‘Norman, Augusta and Sunday have come to represent one of golf’s more unsettling ménages a trois – not so much the Great Triumvirate, more the Folies-Bergère.’
Norman made his debut at Augusta in 1981 and led after an opening round of 69. So far he had played mainly in Australia and Europe and this was only his second major in America. After the round he talked about his outdoors, seaside life growing up in Queensland and it was a headline writer for the Augusta Chronicle who christened him the ‘Great White Shark’. It was better than his initial nickname of the ‘Brisbane Bomber’, but Norman was at first uncomfortable with it. Soon, however, he embraced being one of golf’s leading predators, in a line of succession from the Golden Bear to Tiger Woods, and it was a unique brand to let loose on the corporate world when he started to tee it up as a businessman.
That first year, Norman was lying third after three rounds but owing to a quaint Masters custom of the time, that meant he was paired with the leader on the final day. Before pairing players by score on the weekend became de rigueur, tournaments such as the Masters would more likely spread the leaders out, at one point entrusting the third-round leader to elder statesman Byron Nelson for the final round. For Norman, it meant he had the best seat in the house as Tom Watson held off Jack Nicklaus and Johnny Miller, while his own fourth place was an encouraging start. Was it also an omen? It was the first of ten times in major championships that he played in the final pairing in the final round and he only won once.
That victory came at the Open Championship in 1986, the year Norman did what became known as his ‘Saturday Slam’, leading after 54 holes at all four majors. At Augusta, Norman led by one from a large group of players that included Seve Ballesteros, Nick Price and Bernhard Langer. When Norman had a double bogey at the 10th, it looked as if Ballesteros, after an eagle at the 13th, would win a third green jacket. But just ahead of the Spaniard, something extraordinary was going on. Jack Nicklaus, at the age of 46, was making one last charge at Augusta and the galleries were roaring their heads off.
Ballesteros could hear it all, especially the cheers for Nicklaus’s eagle at the 15th and then the birdie at the 16th, just before Seve faced his second to the 15th. He hit a miserable four-iron that never had a chance of clearing the pond in front of the green, a moment accompanied by a strangulated cheer. Ballesteros was done and Nicklaus added another rousing birdie at the 17th. The ‘Olden’ Bear had come home in 30 for a closing 65 and his sixth green jacket.
Except Norman had not given up, despite his gallery having shrunk considerably. He birdied the 14th hole, the 15th, then the 16th and the 17th for four in a row and a tie with Nicklaus at nine under. A birdie to win, a par for a playoff. Despite having hit his driver at the 18th all week, and the fact that he had become the best driver in the game – long and straight – he hit a three-wood off the tee and then had 175 yards to the green. He and his caddie Pete Bender agreed on a four-iron but Norman sailed it well right of the green into the gallery and over towards the 10th hole. He chipped back down but could not make the 16-footer to tie.
‘I let my ego get the better of me,’ he said afterwards. ‘I was going for the flag. I was trying to hit it too hard and too high and spun out of it.’ In The Way of the Shark, Norman said the idea had been to hit an ‘easy four-iron’ rather than a hard five. After all, it was none other than Nicklaus, after they had played together in the Australian Open years earlier, who had advised Norman to learn to ‘hit more delicately with longer clubs to gain additional control’, rather than to hit hard every time. But instinct had taken over. It was either the wrong shot or the wrong club, but it was certainly muddled thinking. The result was not pretty.
A year later Norman again suffered disappointment on the 72nd hole at Augusta. On that occasion, he did hit a driver off the tee and put his second on the green. His birdie putt from 22 feet looked as if it would fall but just stayed out. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Norman said. ‘I could feel the ball going into the hole.’ A par meant a playoff with Ballesteros and Larry Mize. Seve departed after the first extra hole, trudging up the hill from the 10th green in floods of tears having again been denied his third Masters title.
Norman and Mize went on to the 11th and the American, who grew up in Augusta and had worked on the scoreboards at the tournament during his youth, shovelled his approach well wide of the green. Norman had an eight-iron and simply made sure he found the green. He was convinced there was no way Mize could get up and down. Imagine how shocked he was then when Mize holed his chip from what was measured as 140 feet.
Norman was not even looking, as he concentrated on how to nudge his putt down to tap-in range. But he soon found out when he was hit by a wall of sound and looked up to see Mize running around in excitement and the crowd going nuts in the background. After all that, there was no way Norman would hole his putt to stay alive. ‘This is probably the toughest loss I’ve ever had,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes.’ It happened just eight months after Bob Tway had holed a bunker shot at the 72nd hole to deny Norman at the previous major, the 1986 US PGA. No one had ever suffered such a brutal double-whammy. ‘All I can say is that at least I was there for both of them.’
Norman was not quite there in the 1988 Masters, finishing fifth only after a closing 64 from too far back. But the next year he again came to the last hole needing a birdie to win and a par to get in a playoff. He hit a one-iron off the tee and then went with the five-iron for his approach, this time coming up short on the upslope in front of the green. ‘It just didn’t fly, it hung up in the breeze,’ he said. He did not get up and down and missed out on the playoff, in which Nick Faldo beat Scott Hoch for his first Masters title.
A good weekend in 1992 got Norman up to a tie for sixth and he said: ‘If I can figure out a way to play the first two rounds better, I might be able to win this S.O.B. one of these days.’ Two years later he was a shot out of the lead at the halfway stage but slumped to 18th place. Two years after that, he had certainly figured out how to play the first two rounds – indeed, the first three rounds – but to no avail once again.
Norman’s ability to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory was not confined to Augusta National. ‘There’s no place I play where I haven’t screwed up at some point
,’ he once told the Sunday Telegraph. At Sunningdale during the 1982 European Open, an earthworm emerged from the ground behind his ball just as he was about to hit and in trying to adjust his shot, Norman ended up in the gorse and that was that. His first runner-up finish in a major came at the 1984 US Open at Winged Foot when he birdied the 17th to tie for the lead but then at the last, as was to be repeated at Augusta two years later, pushed his second with a six-iron into the grandstand on the right. This time he holed a remarkable 45-footer for his par and Fuzzy Zoeller, who thought it had been for birdie, waved a white towel from back down the fairway in a salute of surrender. In fact, Zoeller tied with Norman and the next day they played an 18-hole playoff. Norman was never at the races, losing with a 75 to a 67 and waving his own white flag as the pair marched down the 18th fairway.
Two years later at the US Open at Shinnecock Hills, Norman was leading after 54 holes for the second major running. But he was not feeling well, was diagnosed with pneumonia and had no answer to the fast greens and strong winds of the final day. Five bogeys in eight holes from the 8th meant a 75 as he dropped to a tie for 12th place, six strokes behind the 43-year-old Ray Floyd, who had charged through the field with a 66. For the second major running, Norman had lost to a player who had become the oldest ever to win that championship.
At Turnberry a few weeks later, Norman did hang on to win his first major title and that was the year he went on to complete the ‘Saturday Slam’ by leading after 54 holes at Inverness in the US PGA. The closest anyone had got to such a feat was Ben Hogan in 1953, when he had led after three rounds of the three majors he contested that year. Of course, Hogan won all three of them. At Inverness, with rain delaying much of the final round until Monday, Norman’s four-stroke lead started disappearing early on the back nine. He ended up coming to the 18th tied with Tway and both men missed the green. Norman was in the better spot, with a relatively straightforward up-and-down, while Tway was in a deep bunker front-right of the green. When Tway holed his shot, Norman had to match him with his chip from just off the fringe and ended up taking a bogey.
Lee Trevino once said: ‘God never gives a golfer everything, he always holds something back. Jack Nicklaus didn’t get a sand wedge and Greg Norman didn’t get any luck.’ It is undeniable that Norman was hugely unlucky on occasions and not for the reason that you might surmise from Gary Player’s assertion that ‘the harder I work, the luckier I get’. Norman was not just one of the most talented golfers in the world, he was one of the hardest-working.
But it is also undeniable that Norman had a habit of getting in his own way. At Inverness, he came home in 40. A shot saved here and there, and by his own description it was only a matter of inches in most cases, and he would have been out of reach of Tway’s dagger to the heart. ‘Greg does all right until the head comes off and the turnip goes on,’ Australia’s Jack Newton told Golf Digest. ‘I don’t think it is bad luck. He has some bad breaks but you make your own luck. Technically, there isn’t much wrong, either. The biggest flaw in his game is his course management. The bottom line is, it sucks.’
Johnny Miller, former US Open and Open champion, said: ‘Greg can only play one way, and that’s aggressively. When he tries to play conservatively his brain short-circuits. His wires get crossed and the sparks start flying. The worst thing you can tell Greg to do is to swing smoothly and just hit it down the middle. It won’t work – he’ll hit it in the bushes every time.’ Yet, time and again on the last day of a major championship, it is a conservative approach, as demonstrated often by Nicklaus and followed diligently by Faldo, that gets the job done. Norman’s habit of going for broke was only ever rewarded with two major titles.
Dan Jenkins wrote in his report of the 1986 Open that until his victory at Turnberry Norman’s ‘suitcase had flown open on Sundays. He can let it soar in a peculiar direction now and then. Greg’s feet seem to move on most swings with any club in his hands. He addresses his putts on the toe of the clubhead. He sprays his irons both right and left when he goes bad. He often makes you wonder about his judgment. Despite those things, his power can be awesome and his touch at times is enviable. At Turnberry he managed to keep all of it together for a spell, and there were moments when it looked like everybody else in the game could forget golf and go play polo with Prince Charles.’
By winning the Open, Norman did fulfil one of Peter Dobereiner’s prophecies. Writing in a 1984 profile, he stated: ‘A few more guesses are in order at this stage of his career as, at the age of 29, he is poised at the crossroads. Will he take the Pilgrim’s Progress path to greatness and spiritual fulfilment? Or will he be diverted into the lush byways of winning millions of dollars without causing a flutter among the record books? Well, I will wager my Scottish castle, my Black Forest shooting estate, 20 of my most attentive handmaidens that he will win at least one major championship. Beyond that I would prefer to hedge my bets. It all depends on that core of ambition and determination residing so deeply within him that even he cannot unravel its secrets.’
Typical of the heady mixture of brilliance, carelessness and misfortune was the final day of the 1989 Open at Royal Troon. Norman birdied the first six holes and posted a 64 to end up in a playoff with compatriot Wayne Grady and America’s Mark Calcavecchia. Norman then birdied the first two holes of the Open’s inaugural four-hole playoff. But a bogey at the par-three 17th left him tied with Calcavecchia and then at the 18th Norman spanked a driver into a bunker 310 yards away, something he never considered possible. He found another bunker with his next, went out of bounds over the green with his third and picked up. Calcavecchia’s second birdie at the 18th of the afternoon gave him his sole major title.
‘Destiny has a funny way of saying, “Hey, this is the way it’s got to be,” ’ Norman said. ‘But we all accept fate. It’s what keeps us coming back, hoping. You’ve got to think positively. I have to believe my time will come soon.’
The following March at Doral, the Shark destroyed the Blue Monster course with a closing 62 and managed to win a four-man playoff that included Calcavecchia by chipping in for an eagle at the first extra hole. But, still, the outrageous hits kept on coming his way. A few weeks later at Bay Hill, Robert Gamez holed a seven-iron from 176 yards on the 18th fairway for an eagle two to beat Norman by a stroke. A month after that, David Frost holed a 50-foot bunker shot at the last to again condemn Norman to a one-stroke defeat. ‘If other guys hole their shots and beat me, I have no control over that,’ Norman said rather wearily. ‘At least it means I have been in contention.’
It is a contradiction in golf that a player who goes along quietly and ends up in the top ten at the end of the tournament has had a ‘good week’ while a player who is in contention but loses gets a whole heap of trouble, despite the fact that they have beaten all but one other player – or two or three if they have just missed out on a playoff. Norman always prided himself on putting himself ‘there’ – in contention, where it matters, the hottest part of the crucible. He won more than 90 times in his career, and you can’t do that without putting yourself at the sharp end of things regularly and being able to handle yourself when you get there, but he got burned so often it was bound to have an effect.
‘Why me?’ would not be an unreasonable question, especially after the Mize chip-in of 1987. He put a brave face on it but said it felt like ‘somebody had ripped that green jacket right off my back’. Considering his near miss the year before, his victory at Turnberry and then Tway’s bunker shot at Inverness, in a parallel universe Norman might have won three majors in a row and even four out of five. Not even the Australian realised how long the 1987 Masters defeat lingered in his subconscious. ‘I would not be telling the truth if I did not acknowledge that it took me much longer to get over that loss than I would care to admit,’ he wrote in The Way of the Shark. ‘For the longest time, I would tell everybody that I could take it all and keep going. But I was only kidding myself. The truth is that I tried to bury it deep within myself. But the longer
I held it in, the deeper it buried itself inside me. And the deeper something like that gets inside you, the more it harms you.’
From the middle of 1990 – not long after the Gamez and Frost daggers and his third-round capitulation to Faldo at the Open at St Andrews – through most of 1991, Norman’s form deteriorated and his enthusiasm for the game waned. He was burned out. Already interested in many areas of business, he contemplated doing what many others would like to do – ditch the day job to take up his hobby full-time, except the reverse of getting out of the corporate world to play golf. But that seemed like quitting, and he was not a quitter.
A devotee of Zen teachings and motivational gurus such as Tony Robbins, Norman would eyeball himself in the mirror or pull his convertible over to the side of the road near his Florida home and stare at the sky in contemplation. Vowing to become a more resilient person who could learn to expect the unexpected and to put bad breaks behind him and move on, Norman found his old passion for the game returning. He realised he still loved the game and the competition on Sundays, giving yourself a chance to win. Losing was not as good as winning, but it was surely better than finishing early on a Sunday afternoon without having the thrill of knowing the tournament was on the line. He wanted to be the best again and was prepared to start putting in the work again.
He also recalled some advice given to him by Nicklaus: ‘Greg, you are one of the best – the number one, in fact. When you walk out on that 1st tee, people are going to try and elevate their games to your level just to beat you. And sometimes they will, whether it’s with a phenomenal round or a miracle shot. I’ve been through it and I finally realised you have to take it as a compliment.’ It was in a television interview with former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke in early 1992 that Norman finally admitted to the world how tormented he had been by the Mize chip-in and it was a moment of catharsis.
