He wants the green jacket too much. That’s really it, right?
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“Absolutely,” Greg Norman said. “Nothing in golf would mean more to me. And yes, after all the things that have happened to me here, maybe it has become too important.”
He is sitting beside his locker at Augusta National, preparing for a practice round. Yet, minutes earlier during a press conference, Norman re-created his colossal 1996 implosion and took a stab at closure by adding that if he never won a Masters, he would be only “disappointed.”
So, which is the real Greg Norman? Probably both, for he is an enigma wrapped in a riddle, a swaggering macho man who welcomes motivational stimuli generally reserved for common folk, an ultimate warrior with course management that can be perilously suspect.
“I’m a Type-A personality, no question about it,” Norman said.
Unless there is such a category as Triple-A.
“There’s no red light, green light in me,” he went on.
Or yellow.
Arguably the world’s best golfer, Norman has won but two of the world’s best golf tournaments, British Opens both. Why? Perhaps because the majors require obeying caution flags, and never mind that patience isn’t a staple of Norman’s vocabulary. It violates every bone in his body.
This foot-to-the-floor philosophy has benefited Norman mightily in business, where whatever he touches turns into a gold profit. He is a fanatic about conditioning. While other golfers sleep, Norman’s in the gym. Even when relaxing, he is driven. Couch potato? A day off for him is jumping from planes or diving for sharks.
Consider Norman’s recent notion of a global tour. Golf’s management and labor branches recoiled at the idea, but guess where the sport is pointed? Ah, but Norman attempted to fast-forward the process, or so it was deemed by some contemporaries, a few of them no doubt jealous.
Norman’s “problem” is he fits no mold. Ed Sneed blew the 1979 Masters and had the good sense to vanish. Take 100 members from the broken-hearts club and there are 99 Ed Sneeds. But Norman, the resilient exception, keeps climbing through the ropes, leading with his chin.
“If I was a boxer, would I be dead?” he said, smiling. “Probably. Either that or my mind would be gone.”
But Norman is alert as ever, perhaps so much so that he dwells on delving. A bad shot is a bad shot. Pox on it, and move on. Even Jack Nicklaus, the all-time organizer of golf thoughts, blocked out bogeys so as to envision birdies. Norman, however, sees this puzzle of a game and presumes it’s his mission to discover perfection.
“I’ve just lately gotten to the point where I’ll allow myself four or five mistakes a day,” Norman said. “Whether it’s forgetting my car keys or whatever.”
Applied to his Masters strategy, this new mind set might help this unfulfilled genius. Take Norman’s second shot to No. 9 last April, please. Disregard whether it was an overly aggressive approach, which he rejects. The ball spun down a hill, and its author soon followed that grim trajectory.
“There’s where it started coming undone,” Norman said. He would bungle a six-stroke lead after 54 holes into ignominious defeat by Nick Faldo’s scalpel. “Something was wrong, and I knew it. I just wasn’t quite right.”
But Norman is back, amazing threshold for pain in place, wanting a piece of Augusta National again. A competitor, he intends to stop the bleeding, even if it kills him.