By Melanie Hauser
GolfWeb contributor

AUGUSTA, Ga. -- It's hard to think about the Masters and not think about him.

That steely stare. That passion. The charisma as he stalks the fairways. The way his game mirrors him -- every shot, every drop of life was right out there teetering on the edge.

He's larger than life; the kind of hero who spits into the wind. The kind of player who steps to the tee daring the field and the course to beat him. The kind of guy you didn't hope, but rather you knew had a closet full of green jackets in his future.

Instead, Greg Norman's made a career of letting this place tear out his heart.

Look carefully as you walk the back nine and you'll see the trail of tears he's left behind him in his first 18 Masters. There's the shot that didn't get to the top tier at the ninth green. The tee shot he blocked right at 18. The ripples in the water at the 13th and the 16th.

No one, save Jack Nicklaus, is so linked to a course. Yet Nicklaus, absent from his first Masters in 40 years, has six green jackets. Norman has none.

We've always wondered if he got in his own way, if he wanted to win here too much. We let him take our emotions to new highs in 1996, when he went into the final round and couldn't lose. We cried with him when he fell further apart with every shot that Sunday afternoon.

We figured that was it; that Norman was out of chances; that he couldn't win here for losing. That this one might just be the one that put him way over the edge.

But you know what? It didn't.

What happened to Norman that afternoon was ugly. And what's happened since that third round in 1996 hasn't been too pretty either -- he's 23-over-par at Augusta National on his last five rounds with that fall from grace and two missed cuts.

In a way, that, coupled with his shoulder surgery last year, has given Norman a new perspective and us a new reason to pull for him.

OK. So he's 44 and the clock is ticking. Jack won here in 1986 at 46, but that was … well, Jack. The chances of Norman winning a jacket now are, quite honestly, slipping away. His clock is ticking -- or should we say chiming with the resonance of Big Ben.

Norman will be trying to shake Augusta demons.(AP)

But count him out? Never.

Norman finally has this jacket thing in perspective. He has life right there too. You know, weekends with the kids, soccer games, stuff the rest of us do. It's no longer life or death out there, but you can bet he'll still play like it.

Yes, he still wants to win this tournament, and he deserves to. He just refuses to make it the most urgent thing in his life -- something he did for nearly two decades. He refuses to want this thing too much -- like he did for 18 years.

"I'm a forceful, hard-driven individual within myself,'' Norman said. "If I wasn't that way, would I be sitting here today? Maybe not. Just everybody's got a different makeup.

"I'm a triple-A personality. I might be a quadruple-A personality. And, in that, I've found the right equation to get myself to where I want to be. Sometimes that can be a little detrimental to you and sometimes it can be a great asset.

"In the situation, with the Masters, when you want something as much as you want it, sometimes you get it, sometimes you don't. But if I never get this golf tournament, there wouldn't be a golf tournament on this planet that I can say I've enjoyed more than this one.

"I've taken a lot of great things out of the Masters. If I stopped here with my last tournament and didn't win it, I'd say the Masters had a great stamp on my life and how my life turned out.''

If it ends here -- and it won't -- Norman will go down as Michael Jordan who couldn't close the deal. He's been pure magic for 60-something holes and disaster down the stretch. But he has been there. He's finished second three times and third twice. He's been in the top five twice more.

Could he win here? Sure. Especially with this new balance of his. Golf isn't everything. It's fun. It's important. It's a challenge. But it's not the only thing.

You'd like to think that was the only thing standing between Norman and a green jacket. And maybe it is. But not this year.

Norman is hitting the ball better than ever before with that new 24-year-old shoulder of his, but that's hardly enough. No one but Nicklaus knows this course as well, but that's not enough either.

The disappointment of 1996 must still smolder.(Allsport)

The fact of this 1999 matter is Norman is coming off a week-long bout with the stomach flu and his game isn't razor sharp like it was in 1993, or 1994, or even 1996. He can't stand on the first tee and wonder who'll finish second. He doesn't have that overwhelming confidence -- don't call it arrogance. He's not in that zone.

He can see it all right, but it belongs to David Duval right now. It belonged to him once upon a time and, knowing Norman, there's still that quadruple-A drive to get it back.

"There's not a barrier in your mind," he said of those days when he was in that zone. "There's not a bit of emotional restraint, whether positive or negative. It's just free-wheel. It's not free-wheel when you go out and blast away, but it's free-wheeling because you feel so relaxed and things go in slow motion and it just lays out in front of you. Before you even get to the ball, you see the shot you want to hit, and you head for the tee. When you're not in sync, you get to the ball and you think what am I going to do?"

Norman's at the latter stage right now -- a far cry from those 337 weeks he spent as the No. 1 player in the world. Yet it could be for the best. Being fortysomething isn't all that bad these days. Majors aren't major feats, but rather common place -- even for players who have gone 0-for-majors in the past. And Norman has won two British Opens.

Finally, Norman is at peace with himself. He hasn't lost the drive, just the urgency. He sees that going with the flow isn't half bad; that mixing that with that edge of his might just work.

He knows it's a matter of time before he wins. He just doesn't want to Force it -- like he has so many times here. He's happy where he is; happy where he's headed. You can hear it in his voice. You can see it. You can believe it.

Someone asked him if he had a magic wand what would he change? Perhaps trade that closing 78 in 1996 for a 68?

"I'd change nothing,'' he said. "That's a great reflection on the way my life is right now. I just want things to keep going the way they are."

Editor's note: The award-winning writer Melanie Hauser is a regular contributor to GolfWeb.

Searching for that green jacket.