He’s Best, but Luck Is Worst

The only thing you knew for sure about the playoff for the 118th British Open was that Greg Norman wasn’t going to win it.

Norman’s luck on a golf course would have to improve to be merely considered bad.

Greg’s only chance to win the Open was to do it in the clubhouse. If his 13-under-par had held up, he would have won the cup sitting down. Once he had to go back out on the course with a club in his hands, the gods of golf, the most perverse deities in the whole pantheon, had him right where they wanted him--in execution position, ripe for catastrophe.

They get everybody, those malevolent monsters. They got Ben Hogan at Olympic in 1955, Arnold Palmer at the same club in 1966. They got Sam Snead at Spring Mill in 1939.

But they dump all over Greg Norman, their favorite whipping boy. If I were Norman, I’d give up the game and go into something fair, like fighting oil-well fires. They’re never going to let this man win anything important on a fairway anywhere in the world.

They torment him terribly. You remember how he was standing on the 18th green with the 1986 PGA in his back pocket? He was lying two, his opponent was lying two--in a bunker. Well, Bob Tway chipped in over Greg’s head, you might say, and in the background you could hear the ghostly cackle of the demons of golf.

A guy chipping in--in that situation--is about as likely as a guy winning a lottery. But a year later, in the Masters, Norman was standing on a green, the 11th, in a playoff against Larry Mize. Mize was far to the right of the green in a position where, you would have to say, he’s lucky if he makes 4. Norman had a birdie putt.

So Mize chips right into the hole. For a 3 and the green coat. Naturally, Norman misses the birdie putt.

I would have to recommend you steer well clear of Norman if you’re ever in a thunderstorm together. Don’t get in the same lifeboat with him. As a matter of fact, don’t share a cab--or an elevator--with him. If anyone says, “Room for one more,” check to see if Greg is in there before you get in. Somebody up there has it in for him.

All week long, I’d been congratulating myself that I didn’t go to this year’s British Open. It looked, till Sunday, as forgettable as your mother-in-law’s birthday.

I mean, let me ask you, don’t you hate it when you go to a movie where they’ve taken a classical story and spoofed it up? Like, “The Bride of Frankenstein” pokes fun at one of the great boo stories of all time. Cheapens it.

I was never so mad in my life as when they turned “The Three Musketeers” into a vehicle for the Ritz Brothers. Or where the werewolf of London turns out to be Don Knotts. King Kong is a musical. Godzilla stops and does shtick in the Catskills.

Well, that’s the way I felt about this British Open. It was just another damn spoof. British Opens are supposed to be like Boris Karloff, Jack the Ripper. Frankenstein. Terrifying. Halls of Horror. Eighteen holes of silent screaming.

Gales are supposed to sweep across them. Rain is supposed to slant in sideways. Winds are supposed to rake the fairways, bend the pins. Sand is supposed to blow in your eyes.

It’s not supposed to be a walk in the park, a day at the beach.

It was this year. You would have sworn you were looking at a member-guest four-ball in Palm Springs. The sun beat down, the rough hadn’t grown. There was no breeze. Boris Karloff was wearing a dress. Bela Lugosi drank milk.

I couldn’t bear to watch. What fun was this? The golfers were in their shirt sleeves and not bundled up like sailors on the Murmansk run in the North Atlantic. Their teeth weren’t even chattering, their lips weren’t blue. I half expected to see the Ritz Brothers on the tee.

All those 64s and 65s and 67s were getting to me. It wasn’t par, it was parody.

Then they had the first four-hole playoff in the history of this venerable sporting event, which began when Lincoln was President.

Immediately, things were looking up. It was something new in golf. We have had four-hole playoffs in this country, but that’s because no one got eliminated on Nos. 1, 2 or 3.

I decided to watch it to see where Greg Norman would get it in the neck. I knew it wouldn’t be the first hole. The gods like to tease him more than that. He birdied the first hole. If it had been a true sudden-death, he’d be British Open champion today.

But I knew that wasn’t to be. And it wasn’t. When Norman came to the last hole, I knew that golf’s version of the Titanic was going to go looking for the iceberg.

“Watch this!” I told myself as he lined up to the right of the tee. “Here comes the crash and burn.”

Sure enough. Greg hit the best drive of the day, a long, screaming tee shot right in the middle of the fairway. Only it went into one of those little pot bunkers that Jack Nicklaus had just said “don’t come into play.” Jack had meant that they were too far out for anyone to reach. Super Greg reached one. And got penalized for it. They got him again.

Tommy Bolt used to greet undeserved misfortune by looking up at the sky when these things happened and shake his fist and shout, “Me again, huh, God?” But Greg is the guy who really goes around with this little black cloud over his head. Greg Btfsplk.

Mark Calcavecchia only thinks he won the 1989 British Open. We who are longtime observers of the runaway perversity of this game know better.

Calcavecchia was the surest thing since Man o’ War. Greg Norman? He shouldn’t have bothered to tee it up. They were out to get him. Again.

The only way Greg is ever going to win one of these things is in a mask and under an assumed name. The minute the gods see that white hair, and white teeth, and sliding tee shot, they start sticking pins in their Greg Norman dolls.

Something about him just ticks them off. Maybe they’re like me. They just resent the hell out of a guy who shoots a 64 in the last round of the British Open. That can get to you, all right.