50 Sense

Greg Norman still has that steely stare.

His once bright golden hair is fading to white and the wrinkles in his face have become more pronounced, but those baby blue eyes with piercing black pupils haven’t changed.

They can cut through an opponent, will a golf ball into a hole and focus on a task like few others. And often, they see things others don’t.

Lately, for example, they’ve been peering into the future.

Norman turned 50 in February, a milestone significant enough to give anyone pause, and it has him thinking about where he goes from here and how he’ll be remembered in history.

A back injury has kept him off the course since November. He’s scheduled to return next week at the British Open, but he’ll probably play only 10 to 12 tournaments worldwide in each of the next few years, and he said he can’t see keeping any kind of playing schedule past his 55th birthday.

There’s not much he can do at this stage to change his legacy as a golfer anyway. Whether it’s 331 weeks in the top spot of the World Golf Rankings, two major championships, 20 PGA Tour titles or the tournaments he let slip away, that part has been written.

But Norman has seen this transition coming and has spent much of the last decade or so preparing for it. He envisioned and developed several highly successful businesses, so even though he may drift out of the spotlight as a golfer, he says his chapter in the history books is not complete.

“I truly believe that my playing career was a steppingstone to something else,” Norman said. “I played golf for 25 years, and I’m still going to live another 30 to 40 years I hope, so I’ve got a huge amount of time at the tail end of my life to really capitalize on what I developed on the golf course.”

A rash of injuries late in his career has given Norman the necessary time to shift from golfer to businessman. Since 1998, he has had surgeries on his shoulder, hip, knee and, most recently, his back.

He pulled out of the Senior PGA Championship in late May because he hadn’t fully recovered from March 22 back surgery and had planned to make his Champions Tour debut this week at the Ford Senior Players Championship at Dearborn, Mich., but did not enter.

He has entered the British Open next week and the Senior British Open the week after. Then he intends to play in the U.S. Senior Open, the PGA Tour’s International and the Jeld-Wen Tradition -- a Champions Tour major -- and call it a season.

“I’ll be whipped by then,” said Norman, never one to play an exhaustive schedule.

He played only seven events in each of the last two seasons, and in his downtime, he has crafted a thriving business empire. He has a clothing line, a golf course architecture company, wineries, a yacht company and a turf company, among others.

He said he has reached a point in his life where he’s comfortable with what he’s accomplished as a golfer and can walk away from competition satisfied. He has channeled his energy into his business life and expects the number of his golfing appearances to dwindle over the next few years.

“I’ve evolved into spending a lot of time with my business and less time on the game of golf,” he said. “I’ve probably traveled 40 weeks a year since 1976 and it’s nice being home.... I don’t want to travel 40 weeks a year the rest of my life.”

Rare is the player who adds to his playing legacy after age 50. Hale Irwin has done it, and a handful of players who were not well-known as PGA Tour players have made their careers on the Champions Tour, but Norman probably would be defined by his PGA Tour play no matter what he did on the over-50 circuit.

“He could go down in history as one of the most underrated players to ever live,” said Jim Thorpe, a Champions Tour veteran.

But Thorpe added that Norman is one of the all-time greats in golf and placed him in elite company in terms of drawing power should he join the Champions Tour full time.

“He’s one of those guys that can take the place of an Arnold Palmer or a Chi Chi Rodriguez,” Thorpe said. “He’s got that charisma.”

Lately, though, Norman has had a difficult time meeting his high expectations as a golfer. He hasn’t won since 1997, has been in the top 10 only six times since 1999 and has missed the cut in nine of 14 events over the last two years.

“My physical ability to play the game of golf hasn’t been at the level that my mind wants it to be,” he said. “I physically couldn’t do it. I used to fall out of bed and crawl into the bathroom and lie on the tile floor and try and put my back into position so I could get up and get going that day to play golf. You can’t play golf that way.”

Champions Tour player Bruce Fleisher says that everyone over 50 deals with injuries and that once back in the competitive arena, Norman would find new inspiration.

“I think he’d get his juices going again and would look around here and say ‘Gosh, I can kick butt.’ ” Fleisher said. “I hope he’s going to get that feeling back again that he wants to compete.”

The British Open is the one tournament that Norman will always hold in high regard. He won it in 1986 and 1993, and he scheduled his back surgery this year so that he’d be recovered in time to play next week at St. Andrews. But even though he has a past champion’s exemption to play until he’s 65, he’ll probably stop playing there long before then.

“I think of me being 65 in a totally different position than being on a golf course,” he said.

That position is behind a desk crunching numbers or walking the grounds of his latest golf course project or checking the grapevines in one of his wineries.

It’s through those businesses, Norman said, that he could make a much more significant and long-lasting difference than he did as a player.

“It wouldn’t bother me if it happened that way,” Norman said. “The legacy on the golf course will certainly be there to some degree. But when you have a development and you say, ‘OK, that’s going to be there forever and a day’ so my kids’ kids’ kids can say, ‘My great-granddad built that golf course.’ Well, that’s pretty cool when you can leave that kind of legacy.”

A chronic forward-thinker, Norman said the next five years will be a “delicate balancing act” between playing and running his businesses, but slowly moving away from competition is part of his master plan.

The nice thing, he said, is that many of his business ventures will keep him connected to the game.

His clothing line, for instance, focuses on golf gear. His award-winning Australian wines are served in clubhouses across the world, and he has a turf company that provides grass for golf courses. There’s even a hybrid Bermuda grass named after him.

But the way Norman stays most connected with the game is through his thriving course design firm.

He has designed 43 courses worldwide and has 52 under development, including Vellano, a private club in Chino Hills that is scheduled to open in spring 2006. It’s his first design in the Los Angeles area.

“I think I’ve got a pretty good direction of what I want to do with everything I’m doing now,” Norman said. “I don’t see myself going out there and structuring something radically new. I completely enjoy that process of mapping out the next 25 years of my life.”

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Shark tales

Career highlights of Greg Norman, who is preparing to join the Champions Tour:

* Eighty-six victories (20 PGA Tour, 66 international and others).

* Two-time British Open Champion (1986 Turnberry, 1993 Royal St. George’s).

* 2001 World Golf Hall of Fame inductee.

* Five-time Byron Nelson Award winner for the lowest adjusted scoring average (1988, 1990, 1993, 1994, 1995), awarded by the PGA Tour.

* Three-time Vardon Trophy winner for the lowest adjusted scoring average (1989, 1990, 1994), awarded by the PGA of America.

* 1995 Jack Nicklaus Award winner as PGA Tour player of the year.

* 1995 PGA player-of-the-year award winner as America’s top PGA Tour player.

* Had No. 1 world ranking for 331 weeks.