1993 Open Championship: Final-Round Commentary - Sharkive - Sharkwatch

We categorize our heroes and heroines on the basis on one incident, one anecdote. The single moment that defines them in our mind's eye may be unfair or inaccurate but it remains just that, the moment on which we base our feelings for that person.

Thus, Tom Kite is the man who left an uphill putt short on the 68th hole of a US Masters when to have holed it would have given him the lead. Thus, Seve Ballesteros is the man who hits his tee shots into car parks. And thus, for me, Greg Norman is the game's most gracious loser. Or was until Sunday, 18th July 1993.

It was at the Johnnie Walker World Championship in Jamaica in 1992 that the moment occurred. Norman had just missed a three-foot putt and lost a play-off to Nick Faldo. All the old ghosts were hovering: the specters of 1986 when he had led after 54 holes of all four major championships and won only one; of his driving into a bunker in the playoff for the 1989 Open; of all the other occasions when Norman had been about to win, only to lose.

Almost any golfer in the world would have wanted time to compose himself after having Faldo snatch the championship from him. No more than one minute after signing his card and shaking Faldo's hand, Norman had agreed to be interviewed by television and radio. What stoicism, I thought, at the same time as I was wondering for the umpteenth time whether such gentlemanliness in defeat was diminishing his chances of victory?

A red, raw streak of nerve was exposed briefly when Norman said to the interviewer, 'I'll talk but don't cut me, understand,' meaning he didn't want any more 'There you go again, Greg, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory' type of questions. But that was all. He had lost. It was time to face the next challenge, to hold his head up high, to find merit even in defeat.

Is this the incident by which I remember Norman? Partly, but not entirely. A few years ago I was anxious to talk to him after his wonderful round at Doral, 62 I think, on the famed and feared Blue Monster course. I tracked him down to the Far East but kept missing him as he made his way home again. Messages were left in hotels across Asia but the return calls never came.

Then one morning the telephone rang, and after I had answered it, a familiar voice said: 'This is Greg Norman. I tried you a couples of times but there was no reply.' We talked for 15 minutes about his round, his thoughts about the upcoming US Masters, about himself. He could not have been more helpful. If, as was later suggested, he was talking to me on his car telephone while driving near his home in Florida, then that increased the level of my gratitude.

The telephone incident with Norman was brought into focus a couple of years later. The then-current US Open champion was at home when my request to interview him prior to the Open was relayed to him by his management company. 'Give me your telephone number,' his manager had said. 'He is quite good about calling back. If he has time I'm sure he'll do so.'

Nothing happened for three days and then around 11.30 one morning the telephone rang. When I answered it the operator asked if mine was the number he had dialed. I said it was. 'Will you accept a reverse charge call from America?' he asked. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. A fellow journalist once received a reverse charge call from a player 15 miles away.

All this came to mind on this Sunday in July as Norman played the round of golf he has shown himself to be capable of playing many times but never to win a major championship. Was this to be Norman's Open? It was.

This time Norman proved that nice guys can be winners and that he can win by beating the best players in the world. He played 63 near-perfect strokes on this day, one missed 14-inch putt being his only blemish. No one backed off to give him the 122nd Open. No one folded. He went out and, as he has threatened to do so many times around the world, he wrestled this course into sub- mission with an awe-inspiring display of golf.

Bernhard Langer said as much, not me. As he and Norman walked up the 18th, their 72nd hole, as Norman was leading by two strokes, Langer said: 'That was the greatest golf I have ever seen in my life. You deserve to win.'

His most challenging moment might have been on the 14th tee when he watched Langer, his playing partner, drive over a fence separating Royal St George's from Prince's. A man waving a red flag indicated it was out of bounds. In the past Norman has had a tendency to block shots out to the right when under pressure.

If ever he was under pressure it was now, with the world's two best players breathing down his neck. He could have been excused if he had taken a one iron for safety from the tee and smashed his ball an enormous distance down the fairway into the prime position from which to attack the green.

By doubling the total of his major championships, Norman saved his career, indeed perhaps jumpstarted the second phase of it. Three years earlier, after Robert Gamez had holed a full seven iron from the 72nd fairway of Bay Hill and David Frost had holed from a bunker on the 72nd hole at New Orleans, both to snatch victory from under Norman's beaky nose, Norman had explained what his philosophy was.

'I've developed the ability to blot crappy things out of my mind,' he said. 'It doesn't matter whether it's on or off the course. There is no point in stewing over them. If I hit a bad shot five minutes ago, I say, "Hey, that never happened." I've taught myself that over the years. I have always been a believer in being positive. Never have anything that is negative. That's true of life and also on the golf course. If I screw up myself I can get mad at myself. When somebody does it to you, forget about it.'

He went on to say why he was looking at the new decade with such enthusiasm. 'I look at the 1980s as a complete learning experience. I feel like I've just turned the front nine and shot about 33. I'm looking to shoot 31 or 30 on the back nine.'

For a while, though, he looked as though he would struggle to break 40. No matter that his attitude was magnificently optimistic; in private he was depressed. He was making a huge amount of money off the course but not fulfilling his enormous potential on it. 'I was thinking of concentrating on designing golf courses,' he said. 'I was as low as can be. I was ready to quit.'

Whoever said it was darkest before dawn was right. ClichŽs often are. That's why they become clichŽs. One day in 1992 Norman examined himself in the mirror. 'What do you want to do?' he asked the face that stared out at him. 'Give up the game or fight back and be the best you can be?' The answer was he wanted to regain the form he had shown in the late 80s. There and then he decided to re- dedicate himself to golf. 'I love to play golf,' he said once. 'The question of winning will be decided by my own level of commitment.'

Just as Faldo had gone to David Ledbetter in the mid-80s to help him build a swing that would withstand the unyielding pressure of the closing holes of a major championship, so Norman went to Butch Harmon to have his swing overhauled. Harmon did not just give Norman a lick of paint. 'He changed everything, 'Norman said. 'My swing, my putting, everything.

A key swing change has tightened up my swing. I had been loose before, with my body not in sync with my swing. I tightened up my body rotation with Butch. That is why I have great control of distance and flight. All the things that should work together are now working together. I've worked harder than I did when I was 21 or 22.'

Norman himself noticed the change in the Open at Muirfield in 1992, when he started to receive positive feedback. That encouraged him to work still harder. His results prior to this year's Open were nothing to write home about. They were patchy: a missed cut in the US Open and 33rd place in the US Masters to be set against a victory at Doral and second place in the Western Open, two weeks prior to Sandwich. Then he started the Open with a double-bogey 6. It was an- other occasion to be positive. Norman hitched up his trousers and got to work.

'I see myself as coming to my second decade,' he said. 'I've blown some winning positions and no doubt will do so again, but not so of- ten. I am ready to attack the 90s. I am prepared for all the toil that will be necessary to meet the goals I've set myself for major championships. I will go through it all because I love to play golf and that's my work. Scuba diving is my pleasure. I am recovering my old aggression on the course. I know the rules. I live by the sword, so I must be prepared to die by the sword. But the time to judge me is not yet. I will be 46 at the end of this decade. Judgment day for Greg Norman the golfer will come in the year 2000.'

Between now and then will Norman win a third, fourth and fifth major title? I'll hedge my bets. I will only put my wife, my car, my house and my over- draft on his doing so. The game is not so strong it can do without the most exciting golfer since Ballesteros was in his prime; the longest, straightest driver since Jack Nicklaus; the greatest money earner in golf since Arnold Palmer. Golf needs the aura that is Greg Norman as much as Norman needs the opium that is golf. Well done, Greg. Good on ya, mate. It was a long time coming, but it was worth the wait.

Writers Robert Sommers Raymond Jacobs Michael Mcdonnell Michael Williams Marino Parascenzo Alistar Nicol John Hopkins	Photographers Lawrence Levy Michael Cohen
	Editor Bev Norwood