Masters Is Still a Trying Time for Greg Norman

AUGUSTA, Ga. — They still act as though they expect him to be wearing a black armband on his short-sleeved knit shirt. They keep addressing Greg Norman with a tone in their voices that verges on pity, speaking softly, sympathetically, to show how sorry they feel for the poor guy. Poor Greg.

Never won the Masters. How awful. What a bummer. Never got fitted for the ugly green polyester. Too bad. Tough luck, old bean. Hang in there, Greg, boy. Keep coming to Augusta, kid. It’ll happen, don’t you fret now. Just play your game. Keep your arm straight, your head down and your chin up.

“Does it still lurk in the back of your mind, Greg?” somebody asked, first thing Wednesday, on the eve of another tournament.

“Lurk which way?” Norman asked. “Lurk good? Or lurk bad?”

“Whichever.”

“Oh, sure,” Norman said, playing along. “It’s always going to be there. It’s always going to be there because people always mention it. Same old deal, every time.”

Poor Greg.

He understands. He is (was?) supposed to be the golfer of the age, of this generation. The new Nicklaus. Scourge of the tour. Major new talent of the majors. The new Mister Masters.

And then, all that Shark junk. Shark this. Shark that. People latch onto a nickname and won’t let go. A Golden Bear here. A Walrus there. Along comes Greg Norman, the Great White Shark. What is this, anyway--the PGA Tour or the San Diego Zoo? “Shark Attack.” “Shark Back in Hunt.” “Shark Draws First Blood.” Enough with the Shark stuff, already.

For the record, yes, Gregory John Norman of Melbourne, Australia, does want to win the Masters. Wants it as badly as anything.

“He wants to win so much,” Mark Calcavecchia said. “You can see it in his eyeballs.”

Last year’s runner-up and one of this year’s favorites, Calcavecchia suddenly feels qualified to have formed the opinion that Norman--six years his senior but hardly ready for the senior tour--is pressing. He believes that Norman has been “grinding it,” going more slowly on the golf course than ever before, bearing down on every shot, putting too much pressure on himself to play the perfect round.

Poor Greg.

Winner of 53 tournaments around the world, and now 28-year-old golfers are telling him what he is doing wrong.

“It’s easy for other people to say,” Norman began, defensively. Then he paused to weigh Calcavecchia’s words.

“Well, he very well could be right. When you know you’re playing well enough to win, but don’t win, then yes, there might be a reason for it.

“You can’t force the issue, though, in any sport. The harder you try, the worse things turn out. I think I understand my game better than Calcavecchia does. He might be right, but I don’t think so.”

Ever since that wonderful year 1986, when Norman led each of four majors after three rounds, only to lose all but one, the guy has been favored to win just about everything he enters. If somebody sponsored a Bob Charles All-Southpaw Open and dared Greg Norman to play in it left-handed, they still probably would chalk him up as co-favorite.

Thing is, Norman doesn’t win all that often on the PGA Tour.

Five times, to be precise.

Twice he has won the Kemper, once the Canadian Open, once this really ritzy Panasonic invitational in Las Vegas, and in 1988 he took the Heritage thing in South Carolina, for his only tour-stop triumph in three years. Those 48 other victories were scored abroad, the 1986 British Open among them.

Yet, what of the extenuating circumstances? What of the wrist injury last summer that cost him a couple of months? What of the miracle shots by Bob Tway at the 1986 PGA and by Larry Mize at the ’87 Masters? What of the playoff losses last year to Seve Ballesteros and Curtis Strange?

Greg Norman is always around the money, if not in it. So far this year he has entered only four events on the tour, and has placed among the top five in three of them. Norman has won $2.5 million lifetime in North America alone, tons more on other continents, and has made as much as $20 million, in one published estimation, in worldwide commercial endorsements.

Poor Greg.

And to think they still walk on eggshells around him, still wonder if he can sleep nights over worrying about his disappointments at Augusta, still ask if there is any sense of urgency in his winning the Masters sometime soon.

“Hell, I’d like to have it in the next four days,” Norman said. “Whether it’s winning a new car or catching a fish, there’s a sense of urgency whatever you’re after, if it’s something important to you. Time goes by too fast. So yeah, I’d like to get the green jacket. Once it ever got on my back, it would make things a lot easier.”

“Make what things easier?”

“Make people stop asking me: ‘Why haven’t you won the Masters?’ ” Norman said.

He arrived early, last Thursday, to putter around. Over the weekend, he watched the college basketball finals, a sport totally foreign to him, solely to follow Andrew Gaze, the Aussie who played for Seton Hall. Tuesday he awoke to driving April showers, which made the flowers bloom, but also made the greens lush and soft. That was disappointing.

“I like ‘em hard,” he said. “The harder, the better. The harder the conditions, the better.

“I wish more people would come to Australia, play down there. They’d be griping every day. We’ve got the hardest golf courses in the world. It really saddens me when people think: ‘He must have it easy down there, because he wins every week.’ If I don’t win the Masters, it’s not because the course is the toughest in the world. It’s because you’ve got the best players in the world playing against you here.”

Poor Greg.

Why hasn’t he won the Masters? The question lurks in the back of his mind.

For now, it lurks good. With luck, it will never lurk bad.