Opinion
What makes Greg Norman grate is perhaps what made him great
Malcolm Knox
Journalist, author and columnistThe new ESPN documentary on Greg Norman finishes with his final-day collapse at the 1996 Masters, the last in a decade of major tournament disappointments.
This story might have ended there, but the trauma didn’t. Three years later, Norman again put his head in the noose for a day-four duel, this time going shot for shot with Jose Maria Olazabal, sharing the lead until the last five holes when the Spaniard just holed all the putts that Norman just missed.
So many of us loved Greg Norman, the golfer, for this moral courage. Sure, there was the charisma and the talent, but the greatest thing about him was his resilience. The gods singled him out for one punishment after another, but he kept recovering and coming back for more. Golfing history is full of players who never recovered from one Bob Tway, one Larry Mize, one Paul Azinger. (In fact, not even Tway, Mize or Azinger fully recovered from their improbable hole-outs that deprived Norman of major prizes; none was sighted again after that single Norman-conquering moment.)
Not only did Norman recover from each shattering blow, but he kept bouncing back. The 1996 Masters was as brutal a humiliation as has ever been seen in a globally watched sporting event. The man who had such a thin skin he was berating journalists on the morning before that round had such a thick skin that he could still put his feet in the furnace until, three years later, Augusta had finally finished with torturing him.
What courage. What – for want of a better word? – character.
The memory of Norman’s cursed playing career is so vivid, the sympathy for his bad luck so strong, that I am one of many struggling to square this picture with the dismally compromised avarice that Norman presents today. Say it ain’t so, Shark – or if you can’t, say what it is about you that we’ve got so wrong.
Like most of the golfing world, including contemporaries such as Wayne Grady and erstwhile hero-worshippers such as Karrie Webb, I just don’t get it. Is Norman’s role as the chief recruiter and salesman for the Saudi sportswashing tour a contradiction of those qualities we so admired on the golf course? Or is it in some way their reassertion? We took it for bravery. Instead, was it something else?
Greg Norman has dug himself into a huge hole.Credit:Simon Letch
The vacuous glibness of his fob-off of the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi – “We all make mistakes” – and the admission that perhaps he doesn’t get worked up about Saudi Arabia’s violently homophobic laws because he doesn’t have any gay friends, are not completely out of step with some of the stuff that poured out of the hole in Norman’s head in his prime.
You were always ready to enshrine Sharkie until he’d say something that pulled you up. After one of the greatest rounds in golf, his 64 at Royal St George’s to win a shoot-out for the 1993 Open with Nick Faldo and Bernhard Langer, Norman showed his gift for weird utterances: “I am just in awe of myself.” And, famously: “I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and my father.” There was always a suspicion that beneath the depths lay a profound shallowness.
In his way, Norman found a personal answer for his golfing disappointments; he would bury them under a pile of money so vast that nobody might see them. Even while still playing, as if hedging his bets, he devoted himself to becoming as rich as Croesus, through retail, property and golf course architecture. He was good at business; becoming the world’s richest golfing magnate could be achieved without someone else queering the pitch by fluking the shot of their life.
Karrie Webb has lost respect for her childhood idol Greg Norman.Credit:AP
Norman’s taste for money was different from that of Phil Mickelson, the other principal actor on the breakaway Saudi golf tour. Mickelson, a year ago, produced one of sport’s great achievements, winning the PGA Championship at 50. Incredibly, he did it with his usual daredevilry, the nerve that is the first thing to desert the ageing. This weekend, he is the first healthy golfer in half a century not to defend a major championship, and the PGA at Southern Hills is poorer for his absence. Yet Mickelson’s taste for a gamble has long been a problem for him. His punting debts almost sank him a few years ago, and now he is wagering his entire reputation in petrodollars.
But still: why? Norman and Mickelson might feel hard done by, for their unrealised potential: Norman fried by that sequence of lightning strikes, Mickelson suffering the fact of his career coinciding with Tiger Woods’s. Maybe, with a mere (!) eight major tournament wins between them, Norman and Mickelson have bunker-sized chips on their shoulders that they want to fill in with truckloads of cash to add to the hundreds of millions they have already banked.
Maybe there is no why. Whatever it is, it’s brought them to the same place now.
Maybe they believe in a low-ball moral equivalence: all the world does business with Saudi Arabia, so why shouldn’t they? They’re hardly the first sportspeople to take money from sponsors who use games to cleanse their foul deeds; why is this example beyond the pale when so many others pass without comment?
We can speculate on those questions, but what we can’t answer is how the strength of character these figures have displayed, under the examination that golf exacts more ruthlessly than any other sport, can be reconciled with their actions now. Professional sport, where the competitor is so naked and alone, gives us a window into the mysteries of the human heart. So we think. Or is that just another illusion?
Sublime sporting moments, which we took for displays of fortitude, might undergo renovation. When Mickelson mastered his middle-aged nerves and the field at Kiawah Island a year ago, was this an act of substance or a triumph of vacuity? (As Bobby Jones was meant to have said, only one thing should be in a golfer’s head: nothing.) Are the things we celebrate in sport just emptiness masquerading as solidity?
It’s possible, in the best golfing tradition, that I’m just overthinking all of this, and what we have is nothing more complicated than the mega-rich, detached from reality, behaving as if they are above all common decency and restraint. But if you admired what these golfers did, it’s hard not to be with Karrie Webb’s disappointment: someone just shot Bambi. Norman and Mickelson are, of course, far from the first heroes to betray an inner vacancy. Perhaps, when we pour out our admiration, we should remember that the inner vacancy might itself be a prerequisite for the outer heroics.
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