Absolutely the only golfer who could prevent Greg Norman from winning this Masters succeeded despite colossal odds. Actually, it is quite a feat, strangling oneself in broad daylight while also attempting to swing a golf club.
Something has to give, and Sunday it was Norman, again. This time to Nick Faldo, who accepted graciously, just when you presumed that he’d been written out of the script.
But as often happens, the sequels are even less believable and more horrifying than the original. “The Great White Shock, Part XIII” was off the charts. It was left to Norman to assure an audience in stunned silence that life goes on, that he will play himself in another tournament coming soon to a theater near you.
Norman is a man’s man, no doubt about it. The question is, when will he become a golfer’s golfer? He has shed enough tears at Augusta National to soften every alabaster putting surface, and spilled enough blood to change the prevailing motif from green to red.
But there Norman was at nightfall, following a self-induced calamity for sports infamy, already peering out from a hole that would have buried a lesser athlete eons ago.
“I’m a winner,” said Norman, smiling from the molars. “I just didn’t win today.”
This admirable attitude runs in the family. Wife Laura, waiting in the car, insisted that the Larry Mize wound of 1987 was worse. And no, Greg won’t fly home to Florida and kick the dogs. His three puppies are named after his favorite beers, and he’ll probably have a few of those.
But elsewhere, adults and children were covering their eyes. It was that painful, that cruel.
“I can’t watch it,” said Nick Price, Norman’s best pal who had finished earlier, leaving the clubhouse as if it were ablaze. “It’s sad.”
Alas, the fire drill was outside. Only Norman knows what went on in his belly, but for sure, his swing was in knots. Sadly, inevitably, these evil vibes beget brain cramps. Butch Harmon, Norman’s guru, said his pupil warmed up well, and seemed as tranquil as Rae’s Creek.
But then, Norman’s notoriously fatal flaw–course mismanagement–crashed this party, and what a grim seance it became. Arnold Palmer blew a seven-shot lead after 63 holes in the 1966 U.S. Open, then lost a playoff to Billy Casper. For Palmer, though, that was an aberration.
More Top Picks Best Cgms Without Prescription For Prediabetics
Norman’s travails border on the occult. If only they were fiction instead of fact. He says he didn’t play like do-do because he was too aggressive. But that was his postmortem last June at Shinnecock Hills, N.Y., where he aimed at flagsticks so stubbornly that he shot himself off the U.S. Open leaderboard.
At No. 9 Sunday, Norman’s lead had been halved, but he still had three strokes on Faldo. To a treacherous green, Faldo played the cautious approach. But Norman lofted a 100-yard wedge at the cup, the ball landed short, and it tumbled down the hill. Bogey for Norman, par for Faldo. Norman, who was pleading discretion, showed too much valor. Why? And then came the back-nine water torture.
Only 24 hours prior, Norman had outplayed Faldo. But they were paired again Sunday, and on second crack, Faldo destroyed Norman by outthinking him. Forget St. Andrews at the 1990 British Open. That was a $20 Nassau compared with Sunday’s Massacre on Magnolia Lane.
Norman’s grotesque 78 barely placed. He almost wasn’t low man from Down Under after New Zealand’s Frank Nobilo posted 69. It was rush hour Monday morning in Australia when native son Norman started leaking oil. And then he crashed.
Can he go home again? Can he show here again? Can he survive these four hours of torment, and all the attendant demons?
“Watch,” said Greg Norman.
If anybody has the right stuff, an industrial-strength backbone beneath all that scar tissue, it is he. But they don’t award green jackets for bravery.