by Andy Farrell
To Nick Price, it is ridiculous to call his friend Norman a choker because he won countless tournaments throughout his career: ‘Guys who are good players but won only two tournaments their whole careers, something stops them playing well under pressure, and whether that’s guts or that they’re afraid of success… those guys are the chokers.’ Norman never seemed afraid of success or playing in front of crowds, though, he later admitted, at the start of his professional career he went ‘from being an introvert, a shy guy, to a guy thrust into the world, and I had to adapt very quickly and teach myself to change’.
Golf, like other sports, operates at different levels, even in the professional game where there is a commercial necessity to suggest there is a big event on every week. Charles Price wrote in A Golf Story, a chronicle of Bobby Jones and the history of the Masters: ‘Tournament golf is to ordinary golf what walking a tightrope is to walking along the ground. You have to watch your step. But in tournament golf, relatively speaking, the rope is only six feet off the ground. In championship golf, they raise the rope to 60 feet. Golfers who at six feet off the ground could do handstands, pirouettes, and back flips, now find that they can’t even walk across it. National championship golf – to go as high in golf as you can go – is when they throw the net away. What’s more, you are playing under the glare of the spotlight, the whole world waiting breathlessly to see what mistakes you might make.’
Jones walked that tightrope better than anyone else but each of the big events he competed in, most of which he won, took their toll. There were only so many times he could put himself through the mental torture and he retired after winning the Grand Slam – the Open and Amateur championships of America and Britain – in 1930. He was only 28. He went on to found both Augusta National and the Masters, first played for in 1934. It started as a gathering of Jones’s friends, who happened to be the best golfers in the world, but soon became one of the most important titles in the game.
On the final day of the Masters, in line with the other major championships, the tightrope is at its highest and tautest – and there’s no net. Precision is everything. After his round, Norman identified a catalogue of shots that weren’t quite right, including those into the first four holes, and into the 9th, which was six feet shy. ‘This is a very precise golf course and when you’re trying to play precise golf, you’ve got that fine line about where you can land it. It’s easy for me to sit here and say I hit good shots into those holes and got screwed, but I hit good shots and the results weren’t what I wanted. Now, if I’d hit them two feet further, maybe it’d be different. But that didn’t happen. We can all sit back and second-guess about why I didn’t hit it two feet harder.’
Rather than talking about choking, sports psychologist John Crampton, the nephew of Bruce, wrote in golfmed.net magazine in 2006 that performers slide up and down a scale between ‘competitor’ at one end and ‘victim’ at the other. ‘Competitors are able to remain in control of their thinking, tension levels, technique and their game plan during key competitive opportunities. A “competitive opportunity” is a chance to improve your score, position in the field or potential to perform in the event. Victims have trouble converting opportunities; competitors convert a realistic share.’
Faldo was all competitor on that final day; Norman had been as well for most of the week but for a crucial four-hole stretch, from the 9th to the 12th, he was a victim. The article continued: ‘He got found out in a small number of shot-making situations that were probably a combination of shot selection, shot execution, and emotional control errors. The many offhand and poorly informed comments criticising Greg that have circulated since the tournament have really not added anything to our understanding of what being an effective competitor is about.
‘Any analysis of a competitive performance (good or bad) must consider the environment and the statistical realities of the event. Augusta National is brutal on players who make mistakes. Norman’s string of mistakes and their consequences proved just how little difference there is between 68 and 78. Without the approach on 9, the chip on 10, a putt on 11 and a full shot on 12, Norman would have waltzed home. Obviously, he played those shots, and has to live with the consequences.’
Over the first nine holes of the final round, Norman had only hit the green in regulation three times (and one of those was at a reachable par-five). It was actually impressive he was only two over par for the day. Compared to 1995, when he topped the PGA Tour money list and had the best stroke average, Norman hit three per cent fewer greens over the whole season, ranking him 149th rather than 82nd. So something was up with his iron-play all year. Is it choking if there is a technical flaw which happens to show up at an inconvenient time? Of course, there did not seem to be any technical issues for the first three days. ‘During the last day at Augusta, Greg’s clubface got more closed and across the line,’ Hank Haney, later Tiger Woods’s coach, told Golf Digest. ‘He always shows that tendency under pressure. I just don’t see Nick Faldo doing that in the last round of a major. His swing is so fundamentally correct. And Greg’s isn’t.’
David Leadbetter, who was Faldo’s coach and ironically the man Norman turned to later in 1996, said: ‘He gets the club a little bit too far around him going back, which creates an in-to-out downswing path. Those two factors combine to make him sweep the ball away even with short irons. It’s always been the weak point of his game. That’s why he doesn’t hit them solidly. That and he swings very hard. With Greg it’s full-out attack.’
For Peter Thomson, the five-time Open champion and Australia’s pre-eminent golfer before Norman, that was the problem. He told St John: ‘He has a faith in strength, whereas the real golfer is the opposite. The reason Hogan took about 45 waggles before he ever hit a shot was to get the lightest possible grip. Greg was trying to hang on tighter and tighter in the mistaken belief that that would get him where he wanted to go. That was his downfall. He was trying to crush the club. It’s a wonder the shaft didn’t buckle.’
Thomson added: ‘He’s never lost because he’s been afraid, which is what choking is about. That’s absolutely untrue. But he had a faith in, I think, the wrong things, like hanging on too tight and using strength.’
A measured definition of choking is provided by sports psychologist Dr Bob Rotella in Golf is Not a Game of Perfect. The man who helped Padraig Harrington and Darren Clarke to Open titles wrote: ‘A golfer chokes when he lets anger, doubt, fear or some other extraneous factor distract him before a shot. Distracted, the golfer then fails to do one or more of the things he normally does. He fails to follow his routine, particularly his mental routine. He forgets his game plan. He fails to accept his shots. Quite often under pressure, a distracting doubt or fear turns on the conscious mind. The golfer stops trusting his swing. He starts going through a checklist of errors to avoid. He gets tight and careful. When he’s tight and careful, his body must work against gravity, rhythm and flow. His muscles get spastic, his feet get stiff, and he loses his natural grace and tempo. He hits a bad shot, relative to his ability. That’s all that choking really is.’ That’s all!
Norman had noticeably slowed down his routine standing over the ball. He had tried to swing himself off his feet on the second shot at the 8th. He said afterwards: ‘I never felt tight on the golf course but I felt I lost my rhythm.’ One of the bullet points that Rotella provided at an HSBC seminar before the 2013 Open Championship summarised much of the above as: ‘Be in a state of mind where process is more important than outcome.’ Norman had lost a repeatable process and was wondering about the outcome of his shots, not his dwindling lead.
‘As the thing starts to get away from you,’ he told Jaime Diaz in a 2011 Golf Digest interview, perhaps the best analysis of that fateful afternoon, ‘I wasn’t paying attention to the shots disappearing [on the leaderboard]. I was paying attention more to, “Oh my God, I’m not hitting the ball the distance I want. Why am I doing that? Am I tight?” so I’d be thinking about my grip pressure or if my shoul
der was tense. So with my perfectionist nature, with ten holes to go at Augusta, I’m trying to go through a checklist of problems I might be servicing, instead of trying to just… aaahhhhh… calming yourself down. I should have softened my mind. “You know you’re playing great, there’s nothing wrong with your swing, you’re in position, just soften it.” Instead, I had to know why, why, why. I got fixated on that, and I redlined in my decision-making.’
Norman was not a choker in the pejorative sense of the word but he could get out of rhythm, lose tempo, forget his game plan, and start second-guessing himself with the best of them.
Interviewed by Today’s Golfer in 1997, sports psychologist Dennis Vardy said: ‘One of the things that happened was that Norman was probably putting too much pressure on himself. It strikes me he is a very self-conscious individual, the sort of guy who likes people to like him, and that he felt he would let all these people down if he failed to win. This may be his weakness.’ On the plane home to Florida that night, Norman hugged his friends and family and said: ‘I’m sorry I let you all down today.’ Later he spent a long time on the beach with his wife, Laura, churning it all over in his mind.
Vardy added: ‘Some people perceive him as a great loser but that’s because he gets himself into position to win so often. The more opportunities a man has for success, then the more, relatively, he will fail. It’s nonsense to even talk about nerve or lack of it.’
Bill Elliott wrote in Golf World in September 1996: ‘Winning most certainly is not everything, no matter what the tabloids scream each day. Not trying is a sporting sin, not succeeding is merely human. The thing I most like about Greg Norman is that he will never stop trying. This, I insist, is the mark of a truly exceptional champion as well as a balanced human being.’
A lot of people realised they liked Norman quite a lot after the worst of his Masters disasters. Not, perhaps, while he was dropping five strokes in four holes, going bogey, bogey, bogey, double bogey from the 9th to the 12th, but for how he handled himself in defeat, fronting up at another lengthy press conference at close of play. It was almost as if it was Norman’s job to cheer everyone else up after a distressing day all round. ‘It made riveting yet strangely painful theatre, rather like watching a cat play with a mouse before the kill,’ wrote John Huggan in Golf Digest, ‘although Norman made himself a whole slew of fans with his admirable display of sportsmanship in the immediate aftermath of what must have been a traumatic experience.’
Norman played in the Heritage Classic at Hilton Head the following week and there, on the course and on his boat Aussie Rules moored in the harbour in the evenings, he found players going out of their way to commiserate and say how much they admired the way he had conducted himself at Augusta. Jealousy of Norman was not unknown on the PGA Tour. Only a few weeks earlier, Brad Faxon had told Sports Illustrated: ‘He’s got that great look, the black clothes, the black hat, the blond hair. And players say, “Yeah, he’s got all that money, so it’s easy to go at every flag.” But it’s going at every flag that made him the money in the first place! All the helicopters and jets – that pisses guys off, too. They think he’s big-timing ’em. But if he didn’t buy the helicopters and the jets, they’d call him cheap.’ Suddenly, Norman found he had rather more friends on tour than he had previously thought.
And then there were the messages that flooded in from all over the world. Former President George Bush wrote: ‘You did more for the game of golf in defeat than you have done in victory. You deserved the victory, but in losing you showed us all something great about character. I know it hurt, but you are and always will be a winner, a true champion.’
From Scott and Sally Hoch: ‘Been there, done that! We know what you are going through. Greg, keep your chin up. You will wear that green jacket one day.’
Jackson Stephens, the chairman of Augusta National, wrote: ‘It takes a person with a great deal of equanimity to be the same on the three days you led the tournament and on the fourth day when you didn’t. Your conduct and attitude will serve to improve not only your image but also reflect admirably on the game of golf.’
Most of the messages were in a similar vein, whether coming from those within golf or just members of the public. Norman found the messages from children particularly moving. David Tiffenberg, from St Petersburg, Florida, wrote: ‘My name is David and I am ten years old. I have been playing golf since I was four years old. I hate, hate, hate to lose, but if I won every tournament I would quit golf tomorrow. We can’t always have our heart’s desire, but failing can make us stronger. You are the best golfer in the whole world. Be happy and know that there are a million kids like me who love and respect you.’
Inevitably, at Hilton Head, there was a heckler who, on the 18th tee on the Saturday, shouted: ‘Why’d you choke last week? You cost me a lot of money.’ Tony Navarro, Norman’s caddie, wrestled the man to the ground. The spectator told a marshal: ‘You saw that, didn’t you? That’s assault and battery, I’m going to sue Greg Norman.’ The marshal replied: ‘All I saw was a drunk redneck being obnoxious to a golfer.’ The man was led away by police and charged with disorderly conduct.
‘Perhaps something good did come from the whole experience,’ Norman wrote in The Way of the Shark. ‘I never would have thought I could reach out and touch people by losing a golf tournament. It was extraordinary. At a time when I might have been driven to a low point in my life, I was uplifted by the warmth of the thousands of people, most of whom I didn’t even know. All of the good wishes, the kind words, the hugs, the renewed friendships – it was all like a shining light coming out of the darkness. And that light caused me to see life in a different way. It made me realise that there is goodness in all people.’
And, by the end of the day, he had also changed his opinion of his great rival, Nick Faldo.
Camellia
Hole 10
Yards 485; Par 4
NICK FALDO stood on the 10th tee at the 60th Masters trailing Greg Norman by two strokes. But as the players walked from the 9th green, past the back of the 18th green, and arrived at the start of the back nine, it was hard to tell who was leading. Had they started level and a two-shot margin opened up, that might have felt something substantial. This was far from the case. It was Norman who had set out with the notion that the two would start the day level and on that basis, he was already four shots down. In London, Ladbrokes were now offering each player at 5-6. But as Norman wrote in The Way of the Shark: ‘Then everything started to cave in. And I do mean everything. I couldn’t hit a shot to save my life. At the same time, Nick played extremely well.’
Faldo lives for just this sort of situation. ‘It’s a perverted sort of thing,’ he told Golf World in 1991. ‘You like to put yourself under the pressure of the majors to see just how much you can take, and at times you surprise yourself with how you actually feel and how well you are coping.’ Ten years later, he told the same magazine: ‘That’s what it was all about – playing the game with that feeling inside your stomach. In that situation you have to say to yourself: “This is why you practised so hard, this is the final test.” Somehow you find a way of enjoying it when you are under the cosh.’
It might have been hard to tell, but Faldo was enjoying himself this Sunday at Augusta. Norman less so, and Faldo knew it. Ever since the 2nd tee, Faldo had noticed Norman becoming more fidgety over the ball, taking longer than usual. The regripping got worse and while Faldo, famously, rarely talked to opponents during a vital round – any round, some of them would say, although that was not entirely true – he was a master at the dialogue of body language.
He wrote in Life Swings: ‘For my part, I made a conscious effort to stand taller, walk more purposefully, to show no reaction whatsoever to any wayward shot. That is all you can do in golf. You cannot physically beat up the other guy and I would never dream of trying to psyche someone out with a patronising remark or throwaway line. But with my stride, my bearing, my expression, I wanted to remind my opponent, “Hey, I don’t
know about you, but I’m all right, mate.” ’
If Faldo was putting on an act, it was all part of the sports-person’s craft. ‘I’ve long suspected that the best players are often the best actors,’ wrote Ed Smith, the England cricketer turned author, for ESPNcricinfo in 2013. ‘They are able to project an aura of confidence even when times are hard. This confidence trick is only partly about fooling the opposition. More importantly, it is also about fooling yourself. Mental strength, Steve Waugh once told me, is about behaving the same way in everything you do at the crease, no matter how badly you are playing. The strongest competitors are better equipped at superimposing a better alternative reality that replaces the facts as everyone else perceives them. Hope, optimism, belief – call it what you will. Perhaps it is simply the ability to conjure the feeling of afternoon sunshine on your face while striding into the teeth of a winter gale.’
Starting the day six strokes behind, and having battled his way through a winter gale in recent times, Faldo was displaying a confidence he probably did not feel. He had not won a major for almost four years, had barely contended at a major in the last two years and in the last 12 months his second marriage had fallen apart while his relationship with American college student Brenna Cepelak had titillated the newspapers back home. However, at the conclusion of the 1995 Ryder Cup at Oak Hill, during which he had not been at his best, Faldo had played a vital role in Europe’s victory, withstanding immense pressure over the last few holes to beat Curtis Strange. Of the vital wedge shot to the last, his third on the par-four, he said: ‘Knees went, first time that had happened. It took me to my max.’