Norman Can’t Miss This Event : Golf: Sore wrist and all, he’s the featured performer in charity tournament at Thousand Oaks.

Greg Norman’s right wrist doesn’t hurt all the time. Only when he hits a golf ball. This, of course, would be OK if he was, say, a field-goal kicker. But when your resume lists your profession as World’s Best Golfer, then a bum wrist is a real problem.

Despite a pain in the wrist when the club strikes the ball, Norman will tee it up and wince for three days starting this morning in the $1-million Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities Invitational at Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks. Among Norman’s playmates in the 54-hole event are Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Curtis Strange, Ray Floyd, Mark Calcavecchia and Chi Chi Rodriguez.

The tournament’s goal is to surpass the $1 million that last year’s inaugural event raised for charities, which Norman said would ease his pain a bit.

Doctors have determined that the pain in his wrist is caused by an arthritic condition in an area that Norman injured during a football game as a youth.

And it will not, he has been told, get any better.

“It actually hurts pretty bad on about 80% of my shots,” said Norman, who reinjured the wrist during the 1988 U.S. Open at Brookline but, despite the pain, climbed to the No. 1 spot on the PGA money list in 1990 with $1,165,477, winning the Doral Open and the Memorial tournament along the way.

“I learned to put up with it most of the year, and now I have to learn to put up with it forever, the doctors said. Even surgery would be no guarantee.”

For the spectators--the few, the proud and the rich who shelled out $200 apiece for a ticket--the unique tournament offers guaranteed enjoyment.

The 10 two-man teams will play a different format each day, starting with today’s best-ball round. Saturday, the teams will play alternate shot, and Sunday, some of the best golfers in the world will play a duffer’s delight, the scramble, in which the best shot of each player becomes the team’s shot. For example, each golfer hits the ball off the tee and then selects the better of the two drives. From that point, each partner drops a ball and hits his second shot. The pattern continues onto the greens, where each player putts from the same spot.

Last year’s winning team of Strange and Mark O’Meara rattled the very difficult Sherwood course to the tune of 26 under par for 54 holes, including a round of 10-under-par 62 on the final day using the scramble format. The 62, however, was four strokes behind the scramble round’s best score of 58 turned in by Norman and Nicklaus.

Challenging Strange-O’Meara and Norman-Nicklaus this year will be the teams of Palmer-Peter Jacobsen, Bruce Lietzke-Andy Bean, Rodriguez-John Mahaffey, Gil Morgan-Tom Weiskopf, Wayne Levi-Hale Irwin, Calcavecchia-Ian Baker-Finch (not a threesome), Lanny Wadkins-Ben Crenshaw and Floyd-Fred Couples.

And the tournament is not entirely for charity. The winning team will split $250,000.

The Levi-Irwin team may be the best of the bunch, at least from this year’s performances. Levi won four tournaments and $1,024,647, ranking him second on the money list to Norman. Irwin was sixth with $838,249 and won the U.S. Open in June, following it the next week with a victory in the Buick tournament.

The idea for this event came from Norman two years ago.

“I was talking with a friend after a member-guest tournament in which we had used this format,” Norman said earlier in the week while practicing at Sherwood. “And I wondered, ‘What would this format be like with the best golfers in the world?’ I brought the idea to the McDonald’s people, and bang, here we are.”

The personal preference of Norman is the scramble.

“Oh yeah, that’s the one,” he said. “I think all aggressive players like the scramble. It lets you let it out, to reach back a bit and give it a little extra pop. I like it a lot.”

And the tournament, Norman said, appears to have found a permanent home.

“This is the place,” he said. “At the time, it was just the right place at the right time and it was available. But now, knowing what we know about the course and the whole area, there will be nowhere else for this tournament. It’s such a beautiful spot.”

With a $150,000 membership fee and the purchase of a home or home site around the course a stipulation for membership, you would guess it might be a beautiful spot.

“If I lived in the L.A. area and could afford to belong to this club, this is the first place I’d come to,” said Norman, whose golf earnings in 1990 were well exceeded by his endorsement contracts.

Then he smiled. “Well, OK. I could afford to live here,” he said.