When It Comes to Collapses, Norman Is the Master : History Shows Golf Gods Must Have It In for Him

Did you ever think you’d see a Shark drown? In two feet of water?

If you were watching the Masters last weekend, you did.

There’s only one golfer on the planet who can regularly beat Greg Norman in a major tournament. That’s Greg Norman.

Greg Norman is no match for him at all. It’s the one pairing he should positively dread. Greg Norman absolutely brings out the worst in him.

I have heard of guys who go into a final round six shots ahead who lose. But usually by one or two shots. Not five. That’s not a choke, it’s a goiter. Norman must have had trouble swallowing by the back nine. You’d think he would have trouble putting a tie on before the week was out.

Other players are famous for last-round charges. Norman is famous for last-round discharges. He goes backward more than Mussolini’s Navy.

It’s shocking. How can a great player who shoots a 63 on a course one day have trouble breaking 80 three days later? How can a guy who ties the course record on Thursday shoot 15 strokes higher on Sunday?

Well, if you’re Norman it’s--well, maybe not easy, but surely possible.

What in the world happens to Norman? Why can’t he smuggle that trophy safely in the clubhouse when he has a six-stroke lead with 18 to play? Why do the gods of golf have it in for him? It happens too often to be coincidence. You can make book he will find some way to turn the tournament over to some guy who’s just standing there hoping to save second. Once can be an accident, twice a coincidence, but when it keeps happening, it’s Norman.

Golf is a cruel game. It always seemed as if Norman were being bedeviled by what Aristotle called “undeserved misfortune.” People chipped in as he was on a green with a one-putt to win. They were off in a hazard or the rough or some other place the less-skilled find themselves. He got beaten by guys named Mize or Tway, guys you would never otherwise have heard of.

But if the opposition didn’t find miraculous ways to defeat him, Norman would step into the breach. He had plenty of reserves. He would find ways to beat himself without any help from anybody.

The ways he lost through no real fault of his own are too well known to bear repeating here. Suffice it to say, no one in golf history ever found himself the victim of shots that were right out of Lourdes.

But when you examine the ways Norman met the challenge himself, you find a curious stat emerging: Norman simply weighed in with a last round that he seemed to have imported his brother-in-law--or some other 20-handicapper--to shoot 78 for him.

Take the 1986 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills. Norman was leading that tournament by a shot after three rounds.

Then, Norman shot a final round 75. Only eight golfers in the field of 70 had higher scores for that day.

In the 1984 Open, Norman shot gritty, sub-par golf for the last three rounds to make the playoff with Fuzzy Zoeller. Then, he shot 75. (The Fuzz shot 67.)

Is it, then, only the last-round jitters that bring a lump to our Greg’s throat? No. Not exactly. In the 1988 Masters, he shot a final-round 64. Unfortunately, that year, he shot a dismal first round, 77. He started the final round 11 shots behind the eventual winner, Sandy Lyle. So, his 64 came up four shots short--because Lyle kept the wheels on in his final round (71).

It seems to me that what’s at work here is what I have referred to as Murray’s Third Rule of Golf. You know it. And it is this:

In every tournament, it is my long-held belief that every golfer will have what I call a “cold” round. Even winners have one.

But only one. Their other rounds are “hot.” A winner must have three of those if he is to win.

So the trick, to me, is to see to it that your “cold” round is not Arctic. In other words, you live with it. You manage it.

The instant you detect the gremlin in your swing, the uncertainty in your putts, the minute you see that what bounced luckily for you on other days is not going to be so agreeable today.

That is when the great player must see to it that his “cold” round, which has a possibility of being an 80, comes in at, say, one or two over par. You coddle it. You take no chances with it. You accept that the gods are not smiling at you, that they are in a punishing mood this day. You cut your losses. You clinch with the course. You bunt. You punt. Jab, not slug.

Hogan never had a cold last round. Nicklaus, almost never. But Hogan won a U.S. Open once in which he opened with a 76. A top player may go cold-hot-hot-hot or hot-cold-hot-hot with his rounds but never hot-hot-hot-cold.

In any case, what you must do with your cold round is keep it from being disastrous. It is a little like staying in the poker game when you keep getting dealt a succession of small pairs. You curtail your betting.

It seems to me Greg Norman didn’t do this, maybe doesn’t know how to do this. Ken Venturi, the announcer, differs. Venturi thinks Norman undertook to play a game he was unfamiliar with--conservative, don’t-take-chances golf. I don’t think so. The balls that Greg hit in the water looked suspiciously to me like the product of a guy who still thinks the next card will be an ace, who doesn’t understand that he is in for a deal of treys and fours, that he has to be careful how he bets. Norman says to the course, “I’ll see you and raise!”

On a day when his golf game was betraying him at every swing, Norman seemed to be going for the pin on No. 9 where he hit it disastrously short because the pin was there, on No. 12 where his ball fell in the water on a trajectory to the pin and on No. 16 where he finally lost all chance on a ball that went into the water because the pin was tucked down near there.

Norman turned a cold round into an icicle. He had an 11-shot turnaround. A lagged putt here and there, a shot for the fat part of the green instead of the dangerous corner where the hole was cut could have made the difference.

To be sure, Nick Faldo shot a 67, but that was in a pressure-less back nine by the 12th hole after Norman had gone bogey-bogey-bogey-double bogey.

Faldo merely went par-par-par-par for those holes. Faldo didn’t win it. He inherited it.

Norman will now go down as the Fred Merkle of golf. He went down like the Titanic. Not since the famous blow-up of Sam Snead at the Open in 1939 when Sam came to the 17th hole needing only two pars to win and proceeded to go bogey-triple bogey, has the game seen anything like it.

I once dedicated a book to “every guy who ever struck out with the bases loaded, took a 10-count, fumbled on the goal line, double-faulted or bet into a pat hand of aces full . . . and every guy who ever closed a bar alone at 2 o’clock in the morning.”

For all of the above, you can now substitute Greg Norman. Like Gen. Custer, he doesn’t just lose, he makes an art form out of it. Calling what he did losing is, as someone said, like calling the Johnstown Flood a leak.