Will Anybody Ever Catch This Shark?

Jaws III. Everybody out of the water! Close the beaches! Put up the nets. Hoist small craft warnings. Ring a bell.

A dangerous predator is on the loose in the shallows hard by Maumee Bay here. Golf needs a Captain Ahab. You need a Herman Melville for this story. Or a Peter Benchley.

Stop me if you’ve heard this, but Greg Norman, golf’s great white man-eater, is leading a major golf tournament here this week.

And the earth is round, water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, and the sun rises in the east. There are bear tracks in the woods.

He should be illegal. Like the corked bat, the spitball and the sucker punch, he should be outlawed for the good of the game.

He might have taken the suspense out of a pretty good golf tournament Thursday. As soon as they let him at the PGA Championship, he may have dragged it off by the hair to his cave.

You can’t make a hole he can’t play, a putt he can’t sink, a shot he can’t make. Maybe they should make him play left-handed. Blindfolded. Blind drunk. On roller skates.

If they give him 14 clubs and a guy to carry them, he makes a travesty of the game. He should be broken up, like the old Yankees or Lombardi’s Packers or Rockne’s Notre Dame.

This is a guy who has won 37 tournaments worldwide. He was in a playoff for the 1984 U.S. Open and he has led every major tournament this year after three rounds. He lost the Masters by one errant shot, the ’84 Open the same way. They should split him, like a stock that gets too unwieldy for easy trading.

Who does he think he is, Ben Hogan? Jack Nicklaus? A young Arnold Palmer?

Golf is not supposed to be susceptible to a surrounder anymore. We’re supposed to have a different winner every week. Something to do with the fact there are more, better players than there ever were, the competition is too fine-edged, no room for error and all that jazz.

So’s your old man. Tell it to the Marines. Write your Congressman. Go soak your head. Greg Norman knows something about hitting a golf ball that the rest of these guys don’t know. At least for the time being. As Bobby Jones said of the young Nicklaus, “He plays a game with which the rest of us are not familiar.”

He has even begun to think on the golf course, which is the last straw. That’s like giving a lion another tooth, a shark another fin. He was bad enough on raw talent. If he adds science to his arsenal, they may as well cancel the rest of the tournament due to lack of interest. Or competition.

Jack Nicklaus, no less, gave him a tip on his pressure game last week. Talk about coals to Newcastle. I can think of, offhand, 105 guys who could use any help Nicklaus could give them more than Greg Norman could. Me, for instance.

Nicklaus had to go and teach him how to handle pressure. That may rank with slipping Custer’s itinerary to the Indians. Overkill.

Nicklaus taught him to grip the club more loosely when coming down a stretch with a several-shot lead. Nicklaus should have taught him to grip it like a guy killing a chicken--in the interests of protecting the great game of golf from itself.

In addition to everything else, Greg Norman is from overseas. Couldn’t Jack find some guy from Dubuque to work on?

Well, we lose wars, auto races, yacht races, car sales and balances of trade nowadays, why not golf tournaments? I mean, where is Raymond Floyd when we need him?

You think Ben Hogan would let all these guys with funny accents come here and take over our game? Don’t they play golf in Texas anymore? Do we have to start giving a prize for low American, Frank Hannigan wants to know?

We’ll either have to tighten up immigration or limit eligibility to guys who can pronounce the a in mate or the l in anything. The way he’s going--$564,729 so far this year, not counting the British Open--Norman may take Rhode Island with him when he returns to Australia for a visit next month.

Even the weather is subversive. It was great for the rutabagas but no help at all for double-bogeys Thursday. The rains had slanted in off the corn rows, filled the cisterns and soaked the fairways of Inverness overnight. Greg Norman, who hits the ball farther than anyone else around but not always straighter, found that the waterlogged fairways would hold his booming tee shots. They didn’t bounce into trouble as they might have on a drier surface.

“The ball came back to you off the tee,” Norman said at the end of his opening-day round of 65. That meant they didn’t go bouncing off into the ankle-high rough.

Norman didn’t even set out to attack the course, he said. He counterpunched it to death. He made five birdies in six holes in one stretch without, so to speak, dipping down into the capital or bringing the big guns into play.

You wonder what will happen when he gets it in the cross hairs. He wasn’t exactly defending himself against Inverness, as the rest of the field seemed to be doing, but neither did he call up the reserves.

If he ever does, they may have to make him play in his own flight. Make him play the slopes of Everest while everybody else plays Augusta. Or Inverness. Or Turnberry.

What I’m saying is, there should be a law against him. He even hits a different ball from everyone else. He calls it a one-piece ball and the beauty of it is, it holds its direction better than any other.

“Synthetic fibers allow you to make a perfect ball,” he said. “You can’t make anything perfect using natural substances because nature doesn’t make things perfect.”

Giving Greg Norman a perfect ball is like giving Marvin Hagler brass knuckles. They should make him play a small rock. He doesn’t need help, golf does. How to stop him is the problem. The National Guard and house arrest may be an option.

Otherwise, this tournament may be over in two rounds. It may be over already.