THE MASTERS : Sharks, Azaleas Don’t Mix

If I were Greg Norman, the last place in the world I would want to find myself is the Augusta National Golf Course.

It’s like Napoleon going back to Waterloo. Lincoln revisiting Ford’s Theater. Little Red Riding Hood on her way back to grandma’s.

This is a Hall of Horrors for him. This is where God let him know there was something about Greg that ticked Him off.

Greg Norman is the last guy you would want to sit next to in a lifeboat. Don’t buy any stock he has. Even if he’s got two aces showing, call him.

His nickname and logo is The Shark. It probably should be The Snake. As in snakebit. Norman has asp-bites all over him.

But the Masters of 1987 was almost the ultimate indignity. The situation was this: Norman, in 1986, had all but taken the Augusta National apart. He beat everybody in the field except this one 46-year-old golfer who had not won a tournament in years--fellow by the name of Jack Nicklaus.

Nicklaus got him by a shot.

Now, getting beat by Jack Nicklaus at any age is nothing to stay up nights worrying about. After all, that was Jack’s sixth Masters victory, his 70th tour victory and about 100th overall. But the very next year, Norman shot himself into the lead again. This time, he got into a playoff. Not with a player who had won 69 other tournaments, with a player who had won only one other tournament. On the second extra hole, Norman was on the green. His opponent, Larry Mize, was off the green.

Students of the Norman Invasion know what happened next. Mize chipped in. Norman missed the putt.

Norman had been there before. The Titanic of golf was in position to win the 1984 Open at Winged Foot when he hit an iceberg--Fuzzy Zoeller. That made him uneasy but not suicidal.

Then, in the 1986 PGA, he was sitting on the 18th green with a winning putt. His opponent, Bob Tway, who had been on the tour only one year, was buried in a sand trap. Guess who holed out?

It got worse. Norman was in a three-way playoff for the 1989 British Open. People couldn’t bear to look. It was like watching a baby carriage roll down the hill into the water.

Norman lost two tour events in 1990, the Nestle and the New Orleans, one when Robert Gamez holed a seven-iron, no less, and David Frost chipped in out of a bunker.

Norman got afraid to look up. A ball would be going over his head into the hole. He began to be in a permanent state of shock.

He never let on. He seemed to be in a chronic state of affability. You would ask Greg Norman--in sepulchral tones--about his bad luck and he would shrug and laugh. After all, golf is that way. The most unfair of games.

But losing four majors to forces of nature, three of them in playoffs, is not a shruggable offense. It’s an indignity. The bleeding, as usual in golf, was internal.

Golf is not a game you can play looking over both shoulders at once. You can’t concentrate waiting for another shoe to drop. Golf is tough enough when your confidence is brimming, optimism is rampant, God’s on your side and the breaks are readable. When you’re half-afraid you’re going to hit an iceberg again, it becomes an unplayable lie.

Greg Norman had always exuded confidence on the golf course. It was as if he thought this was an easy game.

It’s an attitude that irritates golf. It lays in wait for guys like this. It went shark-hunting.

Greg never let on that he had the ghosts of tournaments past to exorcise. He didn’t have to. You could see by the leader boards. He was having trouble staying on them. He was having qualms of confidence. The fates didn’t have Greg Norman to kick around anymore. He went from $1,165,477 in a year to $320,196, from first on the money list to 53rd.

What you do in a case like that is consult a psychiatrist. Greg Norman took his case to the best: the guy in the mirror.

“I started to talk to myself in the mirror. And I got all the right answers,” he confessed Wednesday in a pre-Masters news conference at the site of his nightmare at Amen Corner. He faced his misfortunes, didn’t bury them in the back yard.

This is a new Greg Norman. This is not the Shark, the predator who is going to take the game of golf by the throat and haul it off and hang on a wall. This is a Greg Norman who respects the game and doesn’t take liberties with it.

This is a Greg Norman who admits he doesn’t simply take an eight-iron and flail it 160 yards, he drops down one club and hits the more controlled shot. They say in baseball there is a point at which a player ceases to be a “thrower” and becomes a pitcher.

Greg Norman has changed from a hitter to a player. He used to just take the club back and fire at the horizon. At one U.S. Open, Lee Trevino observed, “Norman makes the rest of look like we’re hitting tennis balls.” Nick Price said Tuesday, “Greg just overpowered the ball.”

Sometimes with catastrophic results. In one British Open (1990), Norman, trailing Nick Faldo by a shot, saw Faldo hit the ball into the impenetrable gorse. Norman could have bunted the ball and won the hole. Instead, he busted it out into a pot bunker in the middle of the fairway. Gave the advantage right back to Faldo.

In another British Open, in the playoff, the commentator on TV (Jack Nicklaus, no less) told the audience that a sand trap 300 yards out “doesn’t come into play.” Oh, yes, it did. Norman hit right into it. That was all for that tournament.

The question now becomes one of whether that Greg Norman will show up at this week’s Masters--or whether the new play-the-percentage, respect-the-course Greg Norman will.

If the former, look for him to be watching a ball sailing over his head into the hole for the tournament again.

But, if the latter, maybe his new low-key, less-obtrusive game may allow him to smuggle the victory into the clubhouse before the gods of golf can collect themselves and shriek: “Hey, that’s Greg Norman down there! And we let him get away!” And one of the others will say: “Greg Norman feathering a seven-iron?! No way! It’s just somebody who looks like him.”