Masters Disasters Part 5: Norman loses the unloseable
For Greg Norman, the hits just keep on coming.
Last week, NBC Sports took a couple of players into the 18th fairway at Bay Hill to reenact the miraculous, tournament-winning shot that rookie Robert Gamez holed in 1990 to beat the Great White Shark by a stroke. Of course, nobody will soon forget that Bob Tway and Larry Mize nipped Norman with clutch shots in the closing moments at major championships, too.
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Norman is enshrined in the World Golf Hall of Fame, but his legacy is decidedly mixed in the minds of many. Two weeks ago, former PGA Tour star Paul Azinger even spotted a bumper sticker in the Tampa area that read, "Honk if you never holed a shot to beat Greg Norman."
It's perversely funny because it rings so true.
No player ever received more providential smackdowns than Sharky, who handled his multiple setbacks with class and dignity. To be fair, though, he was the sole author of his most ignominious moment.
At the 1996 Masters, exactly a decade after Jack Nicklaus had set the standard for final-round fireworks with the most stirring finish in Masters history, Norman provided the mirror-image meltdown. It was the cruel counterbalance, an anchor compared to Jack's ascendance.
Leading by six shots with one round to play, it was all over but the sliding of the trademark green jacket over his angular, square shoulders. People could at last forget that Norman had bogeyed the last hole Augusta National in 1986 to lose to the Golden Bear, or that a year later, he'd been beaten by Mize's sensational playoff chip shot in 1987.
Six shots was unassailable, insurmountable. In fact, to this day, it still equals the largest blown final-round lead at any PGA Tour-sanctioned event.
But Norman coughed it away before he completed Amen Corner, and was reeled in by Nick Faldo, who shot a sterling 67 to whack Norman by staggering 11 shots that day. Staggering is precisely the right word, too.
Three shots were gone by the time the pair, partnered in the last group, completed the eighth hole. For Norman, it was as though a concussion grenade had gone off. He had a vacant look on his face as the shots faded away, if not into trees.
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| Greg Norman needed a hug after yielding an astounding 11 shots to Nick Faldo. (Getty Images) |
Norman, the world No. 1, looked like a 10-handicapper at times, and five more strokes disappeared in a four-hole stretch from Nos. 9 to 12, giving Faldo what he'd need while cruising to his third green jacket and a five-stroke victory. The title all but settled, all that was left was to watch Norman come unspooled.
The most defining image of Norman's biggest soul-crushing loss came at the par-3 16th, when he yanked his tee shot so far left into the greenside pond that he never bothered to watch the flight of the ball as it splashed down. The crowd gasped. Viewers changed channels. It was eye-averting, must-flee TV. It was his second water ball in four holes, and for his fans, it was like waterboarding.
Officially a global punching bag -- he had blown the 54-hole lead seven times previously at majors -- Norman stopped reading sports sections for months afterward and admitted to consulting motivational mind masseuse Tony Robbins as a means of finding salvation.
When he showed up at Augusta a year later, he clearly hoped that by purging his soul yet again, the crushing collapse would finally be put to rest.
"We can all deal with flushing the toilet every now and then and getting all the crap out of your head," Norman said in 1997. "If you keep thinking about the worst round you've ever had in your life, you're going to keep playing the same [bad] round. I don't want to keep thinking about it.''
Blemishes go away, but stains persist. This episode clearly left a mark.
It's rare in sports for events to be recalled more vividly for how they are lost than how they are won, but Faldo's sixth major title was essentially overlooked. The same could not be said of Norman's round as measured by historians, because it was like trying to avert your eyes from a traffic accident.
Eleven years later, rather coldly, ESPN.com declared Norman to be the greatest choke artist of all time, a view now held by many. As an MSN story once put it, "Choking in sport is the ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of certain victory. When players or teams succumb to the intense pressure of getting over the line, slotting that final putt or scoring that vital penalty, their collapses become part of sport's rich folklore and their names forever linked with failure."
Follow this link to failure, then. That rendering was written under a photo of Norman falling down at the 1996 Masters.
Don't honk if you happen to agree.
