1986 Open Championship - Sharkive - Sharkwatch

The Norman Conquest, as it was all too predictably dubbed on all sides, was above all a triumph over course and conditions; a triumph which owed a great deal to a refreshing and determinedly positive attitude.

As Greg Norman pointedly noted, he was not exactly without experience of winds in his native Queensland, aside altogether from his years on the European Tour. Yet the cold and damp of much of Open Championship week was a further alien dimension for one reared in Australia and now living in Florida. That was one reason why, in the sanctuary of the last afternoon, one remembered the first morning when Norman was out in the worst of the weather. The four-over-par 74 he wrested from the hostile elements was at once a signal that he would not lightly accept that this was not to be his year and the highest opening round by an eventual winner since Gary Player at Carnoustie in 1968.

One recalled, too, the Saturday evening when, with almost all the field in, Norman found himself having to play the last three holes into the teeth of an idly stinging, windswept rain. He could have lost the Open then and there, but he laughed in the face of the storm. His eye fell on a lone and portly scribe, drenched to the skin despite his waterproofs. "You have to be mad to be out here," he called, good-humouredly. Despite his own increasingly unpropitious circumstances, Norman also found amusement in the plight of Graham Simmers, the R&A official with the match. Taking duty to heroic lengths. Simmers weathered the storm simply in sodden blazer and flannels. (Some years ago, an American professional had refused to accept a ruling from no less a personage than John Salvesen, because Salvesen was not visibly clad in the familiar blazer and rosette).

It was painful and next-to-impossible to see ahead into the biting, horizontal rain and England's Gordon J. Brand was to exclaim afterwards, "How Greg and I hit the fairway at the seventeenth I'll never know."

Using a driver for his second, not least to hold it down in the wind, Norman found, disturbingly, that he had to alter his habitual proshot ritual wherein, initially, he has only his right hand on the club as he shapes to the shot. No matter how strenuously he and his caddie, the invaluable Pete Bender, towelled the grip, it was wet again by the time he placed his left hand on the club. Accordingly, he settled into his address with both hands on the club, resolutely refusing to allow the artificial change in routine to throw him.

At the conclusion of that penultimate round, Norman, wet, cold and with his lead shrivelled to but one stroke, came to the press tent. He asked ruefully if the interview could be kept relatively short. He spoke cheerfully, if graphically, of the ordeal of those finishing holes. A journalist more used to the tennis firmament marvelled anew. "These golfers," he muttered, "are a different breed."

None the less, for all his philosophical acceptance that the weather was integral to the storied lore of the Open, Norman was not slow to declare that he would much prefer to see the Open with two starting points, to give to all more nearly the same conditions. But, of course, apart from other considerations, only Birkdale and Muirfield of the Open Championship links in Britain lend themselves to such a suggestion, with the tenth tee suitably adjacent to the clubhouse.

A few years ago on the European Tour, an informal poll of some of the more celebrated caddies gave the vote for the longest, straightest driver unhesitatingly to Norman- Even so, Norman not only belonged vehemently among those who held that, especially for a wind-blown links, the fairways at Turnberry were too narrow but also he took colourful exception to the billowing, impenetrable rough,

Over in America, Norman observed, everyone sued everyone and there were mornings when there were more law suits in the air than golf balls. When, in Los Angeles, a burglar could tumble downstairs and successfully sue the occupant of the house he was rifling, might not a golfer who broke a wrist or tore a tendon endeavouring to get out of unreasonably high rough "have legal redress against the establishment?" Volenti non fit injuria, as they say in the caddie shed. In other words, no injustice is done to a person by an act to which he consents.

In fact, Craig Stadler was to damage tendons in his left wrist at the fourteenth in the first round so badly that he played no further part in the championship after an opening twelveover-par 82. "I damned near broke my wrist in the rough," the Walrus bristled, "and I doubt if I moved the ball an inch!"

However, as Michael Bonallack, Secretary of the R&A, had drily commented, when Norman's views on possible law suits were relayed to him, "We don't compel the players to have to go at the ball out of heavy rough any more than out of a bush." Still, the suspicion lingered that Bonallack might have been moved to steal a surreptitious look at the R&A's insurance cover.

With regard to the rough, Bonallack never ceased to insist that it was more a circumstance of the weather than the outcome of deliberate sadistic planning. In support of that contention, Bob Jamieson, professional at Turnberry for the past quarter of a century, explained that in January, February and March, they had had rainfall of fifty-four inches which was the highest since 1947. Spring had been late and when the weather suddenly turned hot, the growth had been dramatic. In contrast, the sparse, wispy rough of the 1977 Open, which rendered the width of the fairways largely irrelevant, had originated in the comparative droughts of 1975 and 1976.

Jack Nicklaus maintained that the rough at Muirfield in 1966 had been worse, that being the year when Doug Sanders at first refused to leave the clubhouse on the grounds that "there could be Apaches out there" and subsequently announced magnanimously that if they would just give him "the hay and lost ball concession," they could keep the prize money. But at Muirfield in 1966, said Nicklaus, you could weigh the percentages and choose your shot, which he did not consider to be the case at Tumberry in 1986.

As Nicklaus had predicted, by the last afternoon there were many places where the rough was much less punitive because it had been flattened by the passage of the galleries but, in long years of watching, I have never seen the club twist so often in the hands of seasoned professionals, the ball coming out at weirdly contorted angles even from the like of golfers of the calibre of Raymond Floyd and Seve Ballesteros.

Not even a final round of 64 softened the view of Ballesteros. "It is a good course," he reiterated, "but it was set up too severely. I hate to see the R&A following the USGA in the way they prepare a course for an Open. Over there, the fairways are softer and easier to hold, the weather mostly more predictable and consistent. The golf this past week has not been what the people came to see."

The spectacle of which Ballesteros complained had included a first day on which not one of the one hundred and fifty-three players broke the par of 70 and on which the cumulative score added up to no fewer than 1,251 over par. By the end of the second round, it had all been too much for the five amateurs, none of whom escaped the guillotine. Thus the silver medal which goes to the leading amateur after seventy-two holes found no recipient.

The 1977 champion, Tom Watson, who from tbp first had pointed out that the way the fair ways curved compounded what he saw as the folly of making them so narrow, promised to put his views on paper in a letter to the R&A. He was as good as his word, Bonallack brandishing that letter on the morning after the championship at the R&A press conference.

In his four-page epistle, Watson was critical of the change in speed on the greens from the practice days. But again, Bonallack pointed to the part played by nature. The recent heat wave, followed by rain at the weekend, followed by the cold of much of the championship, had meant that even a greenkeeper with the skill and savvy of Turnberry's George Brown could not wholly control their pace, no matter when he cut or didn't cut, how he raised or lowered the blades.

At that same conference, Alistair Low, Chairman of the Championship Committee, conceded that the fairways had possibly been too narrow, some of them at least. There were other areas, too, where they would know better next time, notably the controversial and elusive ninth fairway, which he thought would have to be built up on the right for, as Low and Bonallack agreed, from the present wonderfully picturesque tee, the hole no longer plays as the architect, Mackenzie Ross, originally conceived.

The Ailsa course in its 1986 championship guise was far removed what most would have seen as Greg Norman's natural habitat, and the way he coped illustrated the greater patience which now more often tempers his natural aggression and confidence. "When I first saw Turnberry," he was to recall, "the deep rough, and those narrow, angled fairways, I thought, 'Oh my God.' But then I told myself to accept the fact that this was going to be a bogey week, that everyone was going to have them and that what would matter was not allowing a bogey to multiply into a double or triple."

Way back, when Norman won the Martini at Rosemount in 1977 in what was only his second tournament in Britain, he took the club back a little on the outside and then dropped it on the inside, but now his swing is very much more on the line from start to finish. His short game, and in particular his ability to manufacture shots, is greatly improved, the use he makes of his knees seemingly giving him a much softer feel. At Turnberry his putting also generally went well, the stance open as he likes to have it, the ball addressed off the toe of his blade putter in a manner reminiscent in that respect of Bobby Locke.

On the last afternoon, one never really doubted that Norman was going to win from the moment he holed his bunker shot at the third. Some have wanted to make much of the fact that those in closest pursuit at Turnberry proved incapable of sustaining any real challenge on the last round, and so Norman was never under any great pressure. That, though, was hardly his fault, and if the great names were not hard on his heels, the fact remains that they were mostly in the field and he had already left them far in his wake.

Norman's win at Turnberry in succession to Sandy Lyie at Royal St. George's the previous year and Seve Ballesteros at St. Andrews in 1984 meant that no American had won the title since Tom Watson at Royal Birkdale in 1983. That minor statistic paled by comparison with the fact that whereas in 1977 at Turnberry eleven of the players who finished in the top twelve were Americans, this time there were only two, namely, Gary Koch, who was sixth equal, and Fuzzy Zoeller who was joint eighth.

Gary Player had advised the R&A to take no notice of the cry-babies, and both Mark McCormack and Jack Nicklaus had referred to American players as pampered. Norman, for his part, told how he had urged the stream of players emerging on the U.S. tour from college golf scholarships to play Europe, Asia and elsewhere in the world, so that they might learn to play all the shots in a variety of conditions rather than simply target golf on immaculately conditioned courses.

It would be premature to read too much into the eclipse of the Americans at Turnberry and certainly Muirfield in 1987 is likely to be much more to their taste. Nevertheless, it was interesting if nothing more that it proved the prelude to the victory on American soil of Great Britain and Ireland in the Curtis Cup which meant that of the four main Trans-Atlantic trophies, the Walker Cup, the Ryder Cup, the Curtis Cup and the PGA Cup, the Walker Cup alone now is in American hands.

In spite of the improvement of golf worldwide, a strong American presence in the Open Championship is still deemed essential, which is why the R&A have to be careful that they never so Americanise their courses as to invalidate the old saw that no champion is complete until he has proved that he can win on either side of the Atlantic.

Writers Renton Laidlaw Norman Mair Alister Nicol Donald Steel Michael Willams Mark Watson	Photographers Lawrence Levy Brian Morgan
	Editor Bev Norwood