Win or Lose, He Plays as If He’s Having a Ball

Golf, someone once said, is not a game, it’s a sentence.

Guys play it as if they’re going to the electric chair. You’re expected to wear this frown, go around tight-lipped, nerves jangling, teeth on edge. Cat burglars get more fun out of their jobs.

If you smile, you’re suspect. If you laugh, they figure you just don’t understand the situation. If you look like you’re having fun, they figure you’ll be back cleaning clubs by the time the leaves fall.

You’re meant to approach the ball as if it were ticking. It is your mortal enemy. There are five things that can happen when you swing at a golf ball, and four of them are bad.

You ever wonder why golfers play so slowly? Because, to a man, they’re secretly hoping they’ll get a long-distance call, or an earthquake will hit and they’ll have to stop play before they have to hit the next shot.

But every so often, a golfer comes along who doesn’t look as if he’s wrestling a dragon or milking rattlesnakes for a living. Who doesn’t look as if he just heard the Germans were outside Paris or the dam had broken.

Walter Hagen was like that. He always looked as if he were just coming home from an all-night party and took off his top hat and white scarf just in time to tee it up. In fact, sometimes he had. He advised the pros to be sure to smell the roses along the way and never mind the buzzards.

Arnold Palmer always managed to look like a guy who was enjoying a good fight when he got on the course. He played the kind of reckless, swashbuckling game that made him come across as a member of a boarding party from a pirate ship or a guy who couldn’t wait to bet the hand.

But most other players come from a different school. They like to tiptoe around a course as if they were afraid to wake it up.

The public likes those go-for-broke guys who look like they’re having a ball out there and not expecting a stock market crash.

And this is where Gregory John Norman comes in. This is why he’s the pet of golf galleries everywhere from the temples of Malaysia to the braes of Scotland.

Greg doesn’t look as if he’s stranded on the deck of a sinking ship out there. He looks as if he’s doing exactly what he’d like to be doing, having the time of his life.

They don’t make the golf hole that can scare Greg Norman. Or the lie. He hits a bad shot, he laughs at it. Win or lose, he doesn’t come into the press interview as if he’s the chief suspect in a child kidnaping case, but as if he’s a star. He’s as unself-conscious as a puppy with a ball of yarn.

He’s flashy. He’s got this shock of platinum hair that makes him look a little like Jean Harlow from a distance. When he smiles, which is a lot, his teeth light up like a keyboard. He could give Liberace lessons in glitz.

Best of all, he looks like what you think a world-class athlete should look like. The way you’d like to look if you made your living in sports. If you think this is common, you don’t know golf. They got guys in this game who can’t see without glasses. They got some who can’t see too well with glasses. They got guys who look like department store Santa Clauses and guys who look as if you could mail them home or clean cannons with them.

Not our Greg. Greg Norman looks is if he were made by Michelangelo. He’s got this wide, sloping shoulder of the practiced surfer. He has no rear end to speak of, and so little waistline you wonder how his pants stay up. He could pass for a light-heavyweight boxer, or a wide receiver for the Bears or an outfielder for the Red Sox in any bar in the world.

If you wanted to be a golfer, this is the one you’d want to be. Like a lot of great athletes, energy just seems to radiate out of him just sitting still. He never saunters after a shot like a lot of players. He goes after it like a lion on the spoor of a wounded zebra.

He doesn’t take this nice, slow, feathery loop at the ball like a mechanical player. He lashes at it as if it were something he caught coming through his bedroom window at 2 o’clock in the morning.

He doesn’t try to hit it, he tries to disintegrate it. He slides into the ball at impact like a cop crashing into a locked door on a vice raid. “He could hit a tennis ball 300 yards,” Lee Trevino once marveled. “He could hit a rock 250.”

He grew up in Australia so it takes more than a 10-foot putt or water on the right to scare him. He never even took up the game till he was 16 because he was having too much fun scaring sharks. He got his nickname, the Great White Shark, because the first time they saw him on shore they thought it was something that had escaped the set of “Jaws.”

All this would be nice but not relevant if he couldn’t play the game.

Greg Norman can play. He’s not just another pretty face, he has become that most important adjunct to the pro tour--the man to beat.

Golf is a funny game. It needs someone’s ball to play off, so to speak. The guy a golf gallery always asks “How’s (leave blank name of man to beat--in the past it’s been Jones, Nelson, Hogan, Snead, Palmer, Nicklaus) doing?”

Greg Norman is now that player.

He won more money last year than any player in the history of the game. He came within a couple of putts or short approaches of posting the most incandescent one-year record any player has had since the storied Ben Hogan’s 1953 or Bobby Jones’ Grand Slam of 1930.

Greg Norman was second--by a shot--in the Masters. He led the U.S. Open after three rounds, he won the British, and he led the PGA by four shots after three rounds and lost it only to a trap shot on the 72nd hole by Bob Tway that was 1,000-to-1 against.

He didn’t win down here at the MONY Tournament of Champions this week but he was, as usual, the one to beat, the one to watch. Like Ruth striking out or Dempsey getting up, this Great White Shark creates great excitement even missing. Other guys play golf, he dramatizes it. Golf had better hope he continues to find it more laughs than hunting sharks.