This Shark Devours Life

By Joseph Mark Passov
Golf Living

A shark, the marine biologists tell us, must constantly keep moving forward or it will die. If the same is true for golf's Great White Shark, Australian Greg Norman, have no worries, mate. With everything the Shark has going, he's on pace to live forever.

Greg Norman has never been a typical single-minded PGA Tour professional. While his playing record has earned him Hall of Fame status, he feels that his apres-golf endeavors will likely leave his strongest legacy. Not that Norman has hung up his spikes. Far from it. Following back surgery in March 2005, Norman rehabbed for 10 weeks without touching a club. Ever the competitor, however, the 50-year-old Norman timed his surgery so that he would be fully recovered by mid-July, in time to tee it up at the British Open at St. Andrews, where he finished a respectable one over par. But tournament golf is merely one sliver of Greg Norman's personal pie as he roars into middle age.

At 50, a relentless Norman considers the PGA Tour a warm-up act for even better things to come.

"I truly believe that my playing career was a stepping-stone to something else," remarked Norman during an interview with Golf Living in mid-June at Vellano, the new private course he's designing in Chino Hills. Indeed, Norman has so many digits in so many pies, he'd have to remove his socks and shoes to dip any more. Somehow, he's successful at all of them.

For starters, under his Great White Shark Enterprises umbrella, there is his thriving course-design business, with nearly 90 projects completed or in progress around the world. There is his Greg Norman Estates wine business. He has a turfgrass company, a clothing brand, a community-development company, a restaurant, an event management company, a yacht-building enterprise, and e-commerce company known as Shark.com. Exhausted? Norman wouldn't have it any other way.

"The way I figured it," says Norman, "is that if I played golf for 25 years, I'm still going to live another 35 or 40 years beyond that. So, I've got time to capitalize on what I developed on the golf course. All I did was sit back and identify what I love to do. And almost everything I do now has some connection to the game of golf. My clothing line, my development company, my course-design business, even my wine business, because it goes through the clubhouses, keep me connected to the game. When I think of kids of a future generation saying, 'My great-great-granddad built that golf course,' I think, Wow, that's pretty cool to have that kind of legacy."

Spending even a few minutes with Norman, you realize that his larger-than-life persona is not the product of savvy marketers, but of his relentless energy, the passion he has for everything he touches. He doesn't want to live life, he wants to devour it.

The golf side of Greg Norman is well documented. He took up the game late, at 16, and three years later won his first professional event. Nine years after he first struck a golf ball, Norman won the French Open, the World Match Play in London, and the Australian Open. It was there writers tagged him with the "Great White Shark" nickname.

Norman's on-course exploits, his shock of blond hair with a grin to match, and his Aussie charm/swagger made him golf's reigning superstar in the 1980s and into the '90s. He was possibly the longest, straightest driver in history and had a magical short game as well. Yet for all of his successes - 20 PGA Tour wins, 68 international victories, two majors, Norman will forever be branded as a somewhat tragic figure. His flameouts in big events are legendary. In Norman's case, however, he appeared snakebit as well, with lesser talents somehow managing to conjure up miracle shots to beat him on numerous occasions.

None of that seems to matter to Norman, as, ever shark-like, he continues to move forward. A typical day at his Hobe Sound, Floridahome finds him up at 4:30 a.m. He pops into his library, preps for meetings, catches up on his research, then makes it into the office around 7 or 7:30. He juggles the affairs of his various businesses and then breaks for lunch after 11 or so. The scary thing Norman admits, "I'm not a morning guy, I'm an afternoon guy."

In the early afternoon, Norman will practice hitting golf shots. "I don't play much golf, actually," echoing the classic wail from any CEO. "If I go out, I might go out on my own in the golf cart and just practice driving the golf ball on a certain hole, just to turn it over or fade it or whatever I need to do." After than is Norman's special time, 4 to 6 p.m. when he works out - six days a week when he's home, three times per week when he's on the road.

"I think every human being should set aside time for themselves at least once a week," says Norman. "If you don't give yourself your own time, then you're going to be dragged down all the time. If you want to sit back and watch TV, go ahead. It's your time. My time is when I hit the gym."

Evenings revolve around dinner at home (22-year-old daughter Morgan-Leigh is out of college and 19-year-old son Gregory is nearly out). "I have a wine cellar with something like 2,000 bottles," says Norman, "but I'm a drinker, not a collector. My wife and I love trying different wines. It's an interest we've shared for years." Normal recalls decanting his personal favorite, his own 1998 Shiraz Reserve, for friends and family at his 50th birthday in February. Suddenly he remembered the admirable 94 rating it garnered from Wine Spectator magazine and cut everyone off. "I said, I gotta keep a couple of these cases," he recalled, laughing.

So does Norman ever relax, ever unwind? "Oh, sure, absolutely," he says. "If I'm on the ocean, I love scuba diving. I love fishing. If I'm in the mountains on the ranch (in northwest Colorado), I like fly-fishing in the river. I like to hunt, I'm a bow hunter. And I like to work on the ranch - do physical work even on my time off." Then, almost incredibly, he adds, "Sometimes, I like doing nothing."

Maybe so, but it's nearly impossible to picture the Shark at rest. "I've been traveling the world 40 weeks a year since 1977 and yeah, it's nice being home. I'd like to travel 20 weeks a year, where you've still got half a year to do whatever you need to do. It's all about balancing, understanding what my capabilities are and what I want out of it. Right now, there are a lot of good things happening. I have to stay on top of it.

It doesn't sound like Greg Norman is going to stop swimming anytime soon.