Inverness--A True Test of Greg Norman

Are golfers athletes? Are they even sportsmen? Or just artisans?

Is golf a game? Or is it a skill, like watchmaking or diamond cutting?

Do they play it? Or just engineer it? Are they just master plumbers with a complicated set of wrenches? Or graduate agronomists?

Should there be a score connected with what they do? Or should somebody just hand them a rake and a hoe and a box of seed?

Or is that knighthood in flower out there? Are these the modern equivalents of Lochinvar and Sir Gawain? Waving 8-irons instead of swords? Are these romantic figures of history? Or just a company of mechanics?

This question, which has vexed some of the ablest historians of our day, the poets of the sports press box, has waxed heated for quite some time.

The late Jimmy Cannon, for instance, once thrown off a golf course by an over-officious management type, never managed to forgive the great game and each tournament was a signal for his fulminations against it. He labeled it intemperately as nothing more than a chess game in the park, gin rummy with sticks.

Cannon disdained any sport where you didn’t bleed for a living. If golfers were athletes, he sniffed, so were letter carriers, waiters, beat cops. A guy with a night stick was more entitled to his picture on bubble gum cards than a guy with a putter.

Hitting a ball that didn’t curve or that didn’t come with a 250-pound linebacker in close pursuit equated in Jimmy’s mind to guarding a Civil War cannon in the town square. “All you have to do is have shoes that fit,” he groused.

But, if the argument as to whether the golf player is a gamesman or just a night watchman is lively, so is the one as to whether the PGA tournament is a “major.”

The Masters is a major, goes the purists’ argument. After all, Bobby Jones played there. The pines sigh like a cathedral’s great organ and tradition seeps out of every trap. The British Open is a major. That’s where it all began. The U.S. Open is a major. Jones, Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus made it that way. Even Sam Snead helped, by not winning.

The PGA is the stepchild of the game of golf. Once it was a unique tournament, the only one on the professional tour that was match play. Television couldn’t live with that. The attrition rate in head-to-head play was catastrophic. You got Walter Burkemo against Felice Torza, not Hogan against Snead.

It was like making a movie in which John Wayne got killed in the second reel, or the best friend kept getting the girl, or the dog drowned the cowboy or carried the baby into the burning building. It was lousy theater. It wouldn’t play in Peoria.

So, the PGA went to medal play and put it on real estate courses as alike as pool tables or row houses and it became just another week on the tour, as indistinguishable from the other 40 as the B.C. Open or a satellite in Hattiesburg.

The PGA has made a comeback, though, in recent years. They put the show back on Broadway again, so to speak, and this year they have it in the Palace.

Inverness is a great golf course, first of all because it has no greens. They forgot to put them in.

Well, not entirely. But they sure were an afterthought. I have seen phone booths that were bigger. There is barely room enough for the hole on some of them. They make the Masters’ greens look like airports. You can be in the leather on them but not on the green.

It’s a wonderful idea. Putting the world’s greatest golfers on a track like Inverness is like putting Dempsey in with Firpo. It’s going to be a slugfest. Inverness is 6,900 yards of buried lies and about 900 feet of mowed surface. If it was human it would have a tattoo and teeth missing and a very bad temper. But, it’d be an athlete, all right.

So is the guy who’s favored to win it here this week. Gregory John Norman is nobody’s beat cop, in appearance, or ribbon clerk, letter carrier, fry cook or waiter. From tapered shoulder to wasp waist, from his great shock of platinum hair to his wagon-tongue wrists, he looks like a guy who could make his living with any kind of a ball or stick--or without one. All he needed to catch sharks was a bathing suit.

Watching him play a golf course is like watching a lion hunt or a shark bite. He doesn’t play a course, he stalks it. He’s like Joe Louis with his man in trouble, Sandy Koufax with an 0-and-2 count, or Bill Tilden at the net, Wyatt Earp walking down Main Street.

“Greg Norman can hit a tennis ball 300 yards,” Lee Trevino once observed. “Hell, he can hit a plum 250 yards.”

Hale Irwin, former Open champion said this week: “The only difference between my game and Greg Norman’s game is 75 yards off the tee.”

If Norman is as unmistakably athletic as Willie Mays, Inverness is as unmistakably major as Augusta. It is a confrontation worthy of being under the ring lights at Yankee Stadium or on Centre Court at Wimbledon or wherever else real games are played by real athletes.

Norman has a chance to be the next superstar of golf. And a star needs a part. Playing Inverness is like playing Hamlet. Or Rhett Butler.

First, you have to rid the foreground of the dress extras, the spear carriers. Then, by Saturday night, you get Norman and Inverness lobbing haymakers at each other.

Babe Ruth with a fastball or Jack Dempsey in a crouch was never more athletic than Norman against a shirt-button green. And, there’s bleeding, all right. Where it doesn’t show. The worst kind.