For Norman, It Was One That Gets a Tway : In a Capricious Turn of Events, Golf Decides Who Wins Crown

Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer--even Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen, Harry Vardon--can rest easy. The Greg Norman era is not with us after all.

You can throw away all the shark metaphors, even put away the shark head covers, logos, clubs, putters and put the shag bags on hold.

The wait-and-see news is that Robert Raymond Tway won the PGA golf tournament Monday.

The temptation is to regard this as the fairway equivalent of someone you never heard of striking out Babe Ruth, knocking out Jack Dempsey, shooting Jesse James in the back.

It’s easy to think of it as a historic injustice on the order of Jack Fleck beating Hogan out of his fifth Open, or a young Marciano knocking out Joe Louis.

It’s too early to tell. The tournament may someday come to be known not as the one Greg Norman lost but the first major Bob Tway won. It’s the fourth tournament he’s won this year. And, after all, Ben Hogan had to start some place.

Still, we’re faced with apparent anti-history.

For Norman, it wasn’t supposed to be a contest, it was supposed to be a coronation. He had ripped through the first three rounds of this tournament like a modern Lochinvar. He had appealed to the public. He had done it with a swashbuckling flair that made him the most appealing figure to come into the game in years. It was an Errol Flynn part.

Someone said if you didn’t like Greg Norman, you wouldn’t like pie a la mode, hot chili, pizza with everything, John Wayne movies or stock car racing. You were some kind of a wimp.

Greg Norman was a man’s man. Almost a comic book hero. A truck drivers’ delight. The favorite of every guy who ever smoked a cigar, ate with his hat on, bet the aces or ordered eggs over easy. You figured Butch Cassidy was this kind of guy. He gave new meaning to the word macho.

He even qualified as a victim of undeserved misfortune.

He lost the tournament Monday because a guy chipped in on the 18th hole out of a sand trap. You can’t get much unluckier than that. That’s like getting run over by your own car.

He lost because golf is the unfairest of the games men play. Life may not be fair, but golf is downright malicious.

Greg Norman has led all four major golf tournaments after three rounds this season. He has lost three of them--two of them on the last hole.

I don’t want to talk about the shot that won it. You can read elsewhere about it’s being the shot heard round the world of golf. You can hear it likened to the punch that flattened Joe Walcott, the home run that won the pennant, the slam dunk or Ralph Sampson turnaround that slew the Lakers.

You won’t read that here. That’s because the view here is that the shot was all too predictable.

You see, that’s the way golf is. Contrary. Perverse. Mocking.

Look it up. Tom Watson sank such a shot to win the 1982 Open over Nicklaus. Lee Trevino won one of his British Opens with such a shot.

These things always win golf tournaments. Golf is never won by the guy who plays the hole impeccably--knocks the ball down the fairway, onto the green and takes the requisite one or two putts. Golf is the most ornery of athletic activities.

Golf hates golfers. It is almost Satanic. It is the cruel sport.

Jack Nicklaus, standing near the 18th green with a microphone, knew this. Nicklaus has been the victim of enough of the game’s cruel pranks himself to know when one is imminent.

When Tway pushed his second shot into a bunker on 18, Nicklaus quickly observed on the air: “He is in the best place he could be. That’s the best place to miss it.”

Norman had played the hole the way the book says. He hit a drive and a wedge, which hit on the green below the hole. Except it snapped back onto the fringe. Golf was getting him in execution position. He played the hole the way it was diagrammed.

Tway had driven it in the right rough, from which he had to make a bogey if he tried to hit it anywhere but into the sand. Actually, from where he was, an experienced player might have aimed it for the trap.

To a weekend player, a ball in a sand trap might be about as welcome a sight as a spider in your soup.

Tway didn’t aim the ball in there. He just got lucky.

Experienced golf watchers knew it was Norman who needed the miracle. They couldn’t bear to look. They just shuddered, closed their eyes as Tway swung and listened for the ball hitting the bottom of the cup.

That demonic laughter you could hear rolling through the pines and fairways of Inverness Monday night was the malevolent spirit of golf. The Heinrich Himmler of sports. The game doesn’t need a champion, it needs an exorcist.

The malice of the game is also evident in the rule of thumb that says that every tournament ever played will consist, even for the great player, of one cold round in the four. Even Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus and Bobby Jones had them. Even auld Tom Morris.

A player might have rounds that would register on the thermometer as hot-cold-hot-hot--or hot-hot-cold-hot. The really great players had to learn to recognize their cold rounds early and steer them carefully into the clubhouse in a nice, safe, cautious 72 or 73 or even a 71. Take no chances.

The Ben Hogans never had a cold last round.

But Greg Norman wants to bang the cold round in the nose. He didn’t respect it but got his cold round all gift-wrapped and booby-trapped for him on Monday. He got a 76.

As if that wasn’t enough, some ghoulish type with a microphone decided at the press conference, which the game Norman was he-man enough to attend: “Is the monkey back on your back?”

That of a man who had just seen a ball chipped out of a sand trap over his ball mark on the green and into the hole, costing him maybe a place in golf history, to say nothing of $140,000.

It pleases me to report that Greg Norman didn’t kill him. But you can see that golf is a very tough game indeed. Like life itself, not at all fair. Or even kind.