Norman Keeps On Stormin’

For golf, it was the worst news since the word came Hogan couldn’t putt any more, Palmer was turning gray and Nicklaus was building courses instead of dismantling them with a one-iron.

Golf is a game that doesn’t need square grooves, courses with railroad ties all over them or even trick games made for television. Golf needs stars. Without them, the game is headed for the deep rough.

That’s why the game was ready for smelling salts at the published report that Greg Norman--Greg Norman!--was going to have to quit tournament golf. For the game, it had all the dismaying effect of a ball in the water on the 72nd hole of the Open. Golf’s gonzos from Deane Beman to the heads of networks and cable operators gazed at the report with all the horror of a guy who just found a rattlesnake in his hip pocket.

Golf can ill afford to lose a player of Norman’s magnetism. He has what Hollywood used to call “star quality.” No one ever looked out at a golf course and said, “Which one’s that?” when Greg Norman went by. You may not be able to tell David Peoples from Peter Persons, may get mixed up between Ken Green and Billy Ray Brown or not know whether it’s Dan Pohl or Don Pooley, but no one ever mixed up the Great White Shark with the minnows.

Charisma comes in many forms. Ben Hogan had it in the sheer relentless drive--a grim, dogged pursuit of perfection, stalking the game of golf as if it were a dangerous animal he had to bring to bay. You got goose pimples when Hogan came down a fairway a shot behind and the ball sitting prettily where it usually sat, in the exact center of a par-five fairway.

The young Arnold Palmer was as exciting as Cagney with a machine gun in a gang war. Arnold brawled with the golf course. Arnold made a two or a 12 with the same reckless, go-for-it fervor of a guy jumping through a skylight. Jack Nicklaus treated a golf course with the disdain normally reserved for your inferiors. He taught it its place.

Norman is as exciting on a golf course as Dempsey with his man on the ropes or Joe Montana with a man open in the end zone. There’s no defense to his game. Like Palmer in his prime, he goes for a two. He’s never tried to par a hole in his life. He never hits the safe shot. A case in point was this year’s British Open. Norman, trailing the eventual winner, Nick Faldo, by two shots came up to the 12th hole in the third round. Faldo slapped his drive over in the deep gorse. He looked like a double-bogey, at least. Norman’s play, then, was to hit a nice conservative bunt out into the fairway, make his sure par and, perhaps, tie up the British Open.

Not our Greg. The Shark reared back, took his full 360-degree slide into the ball--and knocked it way out into the ozone and into a fairway trap. The last place he wanted to be. He dissipated his advantage--and his opportunity to win the Open. A longtime Norman-watcher in the press room sighed. “God couldn’t have reached down and gotten Greg to swing easy,” he admitted. “Not even if He grabbed the club.”

This sort of derring-do is good for a game in which the goal seems to be to amass money, not victories. But Norman plays for twos, not seconds.

So, when the British news service this week reported that Norman was thinking of calling it a career because of a wrist injury, golf needed smelling salts.

Norman has a wrist injury, all right. The facts are, he’s had it since he was a teen-age rugby player in Australia. He’s played with it all his life.

“I aggravated it when I hit a rock at the 10th hole on the second round at the Open in Brookline in ‘88,” Norman recalled as he stood on a practice tee at Sherwood Country Club the other afternoon, getting ready for his annual Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities tournament, an event that pits the 20 of the most celebrated players in the game against each other in team competition.

“Almost every golf shot I’ve ever hit, I feel pain,” he admitted. “I had a bone scan and a CAT scan. The cartilage and ligaments were torn, and I’m always going to have it. There’s some arthritic growth and scar tissue, but there’s nothing operable that will help.

“But I have no intention of quitting golf.”

It’s something you learn to live with. You and I live with a slice or a spasmodic putting stroke. Norman lives with a wrist throb at impact.

Norman has won nine tournaments on the American tour and 58 others around the world, including the 1986 British Open and every tournament of note on the Pacific Rim.

But Norman is almost as famous for the tournaments he didn’t win. He lost the 1986 PGA when Bob Tway chipped in--out of a sand trap--over his head on the final hole at Inverness. He lost the 1987 Masters when Larry Mize chipped in over his head on the second playoff hole. He lost the 1984 U.S. Open in a playoff to Fuzzy Zoeller. He lost the 1989 British Open in a playoff to Mark Calcavecchia. He’s good. Just don’t call him Lucky.

Only a Greg Norman of today’s tour players could bring off a Ronald McDonald tournament where 80 selected sponsor-players pay $20,000 to the charity for the privilege of playing two rounds with the world’s greatest 20 golfers. No other player today rates that kind of identification.

His tournament is a mixed bag of team play with the legendary likes of Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Raymond Floyd, Hale Irwin and Chi Chi Rodriguez trading scrambles and best balls against the more contemporary opponents such as Curtis Strange, Mark O’Meara, Mark Calcavecchia, Wayne Levi, Ian Baker-Finch, Ben Crenshaw and Lanny Wadkins.

You can see why the game hopes the Shark continues to play with pain for years to come. Besides, it evens the odds a bit for the rest of the field.