Men's Journal

An Aussie in Full. Even as he was flailing on the fairway, Norman was willing himself into an unstoppable entrepreneurial force. Photo credit: John Loomis

Greg Norman was once the world’s top golfer, but he had a knack for losing the big ones. He’s found success in both business and (finally) love (hello, Chris Evert). Now, after a seven-year hiatus, he’s taking another stab at Augusta.

By Franz Lidz

Could hell hold any worse prospects than the ADT Golf Skills Challenge? This made-for-TV nonevent, golf  ’s answer to Punt, Pass & Kick tournaments, treads unevenly on the thin line between sport and trash-sport. Every December NBC clears four hours over two days to air tapes of a “competition” riddled with a compulsive awfulness that drags viewers back. Last year the 17th annual Challenge, at the Fairmont Turnberry Isle Resort in Aventura, Florida, featured pairings of four PGA Tour players and their caddies in pursuit of $800,000. Among those pros challenging themselves on an array of chip shots and closest-to-the-pin bunker blasts was Greg Norman, the Australian known as the Great White Shark. Shouldering Norman’s bag was his 23-year-old son Gregory, a full-time kiteboarder and part-time hacker.

The grand prize — $250,000 — would go to the winner of the eighth and final test, a wedge shot from 111 yards at the 18th green. Gregory’s first attempt spun back to within an inch of the cup; his dad followed by holing out. Then Rocco Mediate, the 2008 U.S. Open runner-up, provided what no doubt was the only moment of suspense in the history of the Challenge. The last of his five attempts landed on a ridge behind the front pin and, to Norman’s horror, trickled toward the hole. The ball then curled around the cup, lipped out, and backed away a few feet. Greg Norman exhaled deeply, a broad smile creasing his face. “The ball rolled slowly down and down and down to the hole, like it was destined to go in,” he later recalled. “I thought, No! Not again!”

By rights, the 54-year-old Norman should be weeping on a psychiatrist’s couch somewhere, irreparably damaged by repeated and cruel reversals in tournaments. The big ones always seemed to elude Norman, who has had enough back-nine implosions — and has been scalded by enough miracle shots — at golf’s four major competitions to cripple the confidence and resolve of any other player. “Greg’s been beaten at the majors in a lot of funny different ways,” says Mediate, whom Norman befriended after last year’s U.S. Open. “Of course, to him they probably weren’t that funny.”

In the annals of professional sports, few careers have been as confounding as Norman’s. Though he has won 91 events worldwide and spent 331 weeks as the world’s number one, the player who Jack Nicklaus once said had “virtually unlimited potential” has just two major bottle caps to his name: the 1986 and ’93 British Opens. Eight times he has stood behind the winner on grand-slam telecasts, ever so slightly out of focus, four of those times after playoffs. In ’86, Norman achieved what came to be called the Saturday Slam: He led after Saturday’s round in all four majors — yet he won just one of them. “Instead of losing his mind, Greg showed astonishing dignity and composure,” Mediate says. “He’s always been a very gracious winner, but more impressively, he’s always been a very, very gracious loser.”

“Golf is a simple game,” says Norman. “But I complicated it by turning peoples expectations on myself.”

Given that triumphs in the majors are the barometer by which golfing greatness is measured, Norman — despite his magnetism, his millions, the dynamism of his game — appears certain to be remembered as an underachiever, a crapshooter for whom risk and action were irresistible, a sublime talent who couldn’t close the deal, an endearing and enduring “nearly man” oblivious to patience and wisdom. His mantra: Attack life. His fate: to come tantalizingly close but fail, usually in melodramatic fashion.

But no one would call him washed up. For all his thrashing and flailing on the fairways, Norman had at the same time willed himself into an unstoppable entrepreneurial force. He’s become golf’s answer to Jimmy Buffett, a multifaceted business entity unto himself, putting his rugged Australian stamp on the design and creation of demanding and often jaw-droppingly beautiful courses around the world. And now, at the urging of his new bride, tennis great Chris Evert, he’s making another run at the Masters at Augusta National, the site of his biggest choke: In the 1996 tournament he squandered an ungodly six-stroke lead in the final round and lost by five, the most comprehensive collapse in golf history.

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Broad-shouldered and blindingly blond, Norman is a mixture of warmth, dry humor, and easy charm. Effectively in semiretirement, he hasn’t won a PGA Tour event since 1997. Still, he’ll be competing at the Masters in April on the strength of a third-place finish at last year’s British Open. He hasn’t played at Augusta National since 2002.

“I believe in destiny, but I have no idea what my destiny is,” Norman says. “Years ago at Augusta National, I was asked, ‘Does this place owe you one?’ I said I didn’t think that things get owed to you. You go out and play well enough to get them yourself. Of course, destiny has a way of saying no.”

Norman concedes that the intensity of his desire to win may have contributed to his devastation. On the 10th hole of the final day of the 1996 Masters, for instance, he overswung a simple uphill chip. He thinks he might have won more tournaments — certainly more majors — if he had combined a little caution and common sense with his aggression, but he’s just not built that way. “I never dwell on negatives, even when others try to do it for me,” he says, adding that “it’s just as hard to get yourself in there with a chance to win as it is to win. On the other hand, losing is the best possible discipline: how you handle it, what you gain from it.” His personal philosophy — inscribed on a plaque on his office desk — is based on Teddy Roosevelt’s assertion: that it’s better to “know the glory and the ecstasy of defeat and victory, than live forever in the twilight of never having felt either one.”

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