Canada's savant of the fairways

Death of Moe Norman: Bruce Selcraig looks back on the life of a golfing legend whose unorthodox but amazingly accurate swing dazzled the professionals for 50 years.

America's sports pages barely acknowledged the fatal heart attack on September 4th of 75-year-old Canadian golf legend Moe Norman, a supernaturally gifted, but troubled and child-like soul who for a half-century struck millions of golf balls with such unnatural accuracy that he developed a near cult following in several countries.

Whenever I tell my Moe Norman stories to golf buddies, they usually react with an amused, disbelieving silence.

Who would believe a comical, Popeye-like guy who said he once played 11 consecutive years of casual and competitive golf without hitting a ball out of bounds? Who but some links-style Paul Bunyan would say he used the same tee for 356 drives without so much as disturbing it from the ground, much less breaking it?

Yet, there are witnesses.

The golf cognoscenti compared his talents to those of Sam Snead and Ben Hogan, but the sceptics justifiably ask, if this Moe character from Kitchener, Ontario, actually shot three sanctioned 59s, 17 holes-in-one, nine double-eagles, won over 50 tournaments and set over 30 course records, why haven't we heard of him? Therein lies one of sport's great cruelties.

"I don't know of any player, ever," Lee Trevino once said, "who could strike a golf ball like Moe Norman. If he had just had some kind of . . . handler, someone to handle his affairs, everyone would know his name today."

Snead and Ken Venturi said he was the game's purest ball-striker, and modern stars such as Vijay Singh, Mike Weir and Fred Couples agreed.

But Moe was so deathly afraid of stress and strangers, the very sort of pressures that tournament officials, the media and his peers would bring, that he washed-out of two Masters appearances in the 1950s and was basically humiliated from the PGA Tour.

Once, after winning a tournament in Canada, he was so afraid of the trophy presentation that he hid beside a creek until it was over. He would playfully give free balls away to children in parking lots, yet would often snap angrily at adults who asked for autographs or swing tips.

Nothing could quite prepare a reporter for a visit to Planet Moe. He often drank 24 Cokes a day (with the missing teeth to prove it), never had a phone or credit card in his life, never rode an escalator or had a date, hid thousands of dollars in his Cadillac's trunk and wore three watches on his left arm, all set to the same time. He thrived on the familiar, and demanded routine. He would often go to the same restaurant for months and insist on being served by the same waitress.

Many observers and friends feel certain he was autistic, or had an obsessive-compulsive disorder, but he was never tested, and always resisted seeing doctors until his recent heart problems. When the movie Rainman came out, starring Dustin Hoffman as an autistic middle-aged man, nearly all who knew him said, "That's Moe." (One of the film's screenwriters later bought the movie rights to Moe's life story.)

I first met Moe a decade ago on the driving range of a resort outside Orlando - he always spent winters in Florida - where he was giving one of his occasional demonstrations for Natural Golf, at that time a fledgling company that modelled its unconventional theories after Moe's wide-legged, sledgehammer swing. (Think of a circus carny driving a tent-spike sideways, with the forearms and shaft of the golf club on a single axis, driven by a whip-like cock of the wrists, not the classic, flowing shoulder and hip-turns of the modern golfer.)

Moe was always easy to spot. Pudgy and sunburned, with wispy greying Einstein hair, forever in black, long-sleeved shirts regardless of the season, sweaters that looked like hotel carpet, lime green or cranberry slacks.

I spotted him aimlessly poking a ball by himself on the putting green. I waited for him to see me first, then gently put out my hand.

"Hi, I'm Bru . . ."

"I'm Moe. Moe from Canada," he blurted in a sing-song reflex, dropping his eyes to his shoes and walking in the opposite direction. "It's cold in Canada, ooooooh cold. Not here, noooooo. Florida's warm. Nooooo. Florida's warm."

All I could do was smile. I was hooked.

I learned from his twin sister, Marie Kelly, that when he was five Moe had been run over by a car in a winter sledding accident. She said the right rear tire rolled over Moe's head. He later seemed fine, but his family could never have afforded treatment, and his personality slowly became more peculiar as an adolescent.

Later in life he clearly was aware of autism and its symptoms, though I never heard him discuss it. In his car, which was filled with decades of news clippings about himself and dozens of motivational tapes, he once carried an article about autism that discussed the term "idiot savant". Moe had crossed out the word idiot.

As Moe grew older he developed odd behavioural quirks and a repetitive speech pattern. His oldest brother, Ron, remembers that Moe always seemed unusually anxious and that occasionally he had minor convulsions and turned pale.

Moe was tortured by the social pressure-cooker of school. "I thought everyone else was smart and I wasn't," he once said. "I felt out of place."

Desperate for acceptance, he only made enemies when he would (he thought) playfully pinch people or hug them until they turned beet red. He'd call himself Moe the Schmoe, and either be the class clown or wall himself off from others. He became known as a slow student - except in maths, a classic trait of autistic savants.

Moe astounded friends by multiplying two-digit numbers in his head almost instantly. He seemed to count loose items, say, spilled coins on the floor, not in a normal, one-by-one fashion, but all at once, as if he counted in groups or pictures.

His near-photographic memory made him unbeatable at cards, and well into his 70s he could recall the layout and yardage of every hole on every course he had played. Moe excelled at anything requiring hand-to-eye coordination, from marbles to hockey.

In the 1940s, Kitchener, Ontario, was a gritty factory town where working class teenagers had little desire, nor the money, to play what was widely viewed as the "sissy" upper-class game of golf. Moe often told the story of having to hide his clubs under his house so his disapproving father wouldn't destroy or sell them. Completely self-taught, Moe perfected his swing alone. The physicist who later founded Natural Golf, Jack Kuykendall, would one day declare Moe's swing the most efficient and scientifically sound in the game.

Golf became Moe's obsession. He skipped school so he could hit as many as 600 balls a day. At last he had found a world where it was perfectly permissible to be alone for hours, lost in the endless pursuit of perfection.

As a young teenager he played constantly at Kitchener's Rockway municipal course, sometimes three or four rounds a day in the summer. (His caddying career at a wealthy country club ended abruptly when he threw the clubs of a cheap-tipping local mogul into some trees.) At 19, Moe knew what few golfers ever know, that he could almost literally hit the ball wherever he wanted.

Dressed in garish, mismatched outfits, he became a sensation on the Canadian amateur circuit, winning the nation's amateur title twice. In 1956, he shot 61 four times, set nine course records, won 17 out of 26 amateur tournaments and played in the first of his two Masters tournaments.

He won so many Canadian amateur tournaments, where the typical prize was a TV or kitchen appliance, he began selling them.

"What do you do," Moe would joke, "with 27 toasters?"

Moe's practice of selling his amateur prizes was not uncommon in those days, but the Royal Canadian Golf Association didn't approve and effectively forced Moe to become a professional. That, however, presented the stuffy golf gods with a whole new set of problems.

Moe often enjoyed clowning with galleries by hitting his drives off Coke bottles and giant tees, or pretending to doze in the fairways if play got too slow. (Moe's entire shot routine took about three seconds, making him perhaps the world's fastest Tour-quality player.) Most fans loved the show, but some of Moe's fellow competitors did not.

As Moe became more famous, the occasional gallery jerk would mimic his rapid, high-pitched Moespeak, or make fun of his ankle-high trousers or his often terrible putting. During one tournament, when Moe was the only player all day to reach the green of a difficult par-five in two shots, he sulked and ultimately four-putted because no one in the gallery had clapped for him.

At some tournaments, the "happy-go-lucky elfin character" writer Tim O'Connor describes from Moe's amateur days was replaced with a pouting, profane brat. Totally unpredictable, Moe could be a jolly mix of Babe Ruth and Captain Kangaroo, bear-hugging friends and tossing free balls to children like candy, or a vile-tempered beast who cursed matronly women, never said thank you and embarrassed his closest friends.

His few close friends saw through even the worst behaviour. "Moe actually has an inferiority complex," said a Toronto golf pro 40 years ago. "His brashness is a defence against it."

Never was Moe's insecurity about his exceptional skill more painfully evident than in 1956, when he won the Canadian Amateur Open, thus qualifying him for one of golf's most prestigious events, the Masters.

Moe was 26-years-old and still spent his winters setting pins in a Kitchener bowling alley when the Masters invitation arrived, signed by the legendary Bobby Jones. This was Moe's big chance not only to represent his country, but to show his critics he wasn't just some freak show.

Moe shot a disappointing 75 the first day - "I was shaking like a leaf on the first tee," - and putted terribly on Augusta's treacherously slick greens. His Friday round was even worse, so he took refuge on the driving range.

After a few moments hitting balls, Moe noticed someone standing behind him.

"Mind if I give you a little tip?" asked hall-of-famer Sam Snead, who many believe possessed golf's finest swing.

"Why sure," sputtered Moe, "coming from you."

Slammin' Sammy merely suggested a small swing change in the way Moe hit his long-irons, but for Moe this was like Moses coming down from the mountain.

Determined to perfect Snead's swing tip, and psychologically unable to do anything in moderation, Moe stayed on the range until dark hitting hundreds of balls. His beefy, calloused hands became raw and blistered. The next day, in excruciating pain and barely able to hold the club, Moe had to withdraw from the Masters after the ninth hole. He drove back to Kitchener humiliated.

Moe could have retreated forever into his shell, but he won the Canadian Amateur again the next year and, after turning pro, became one of Canada's dominant players. His finest year as a pro was 1966, when he won five of 12 Canadian tournaments he entered, came in second five times, finished no lower than fifth and won the CPGA scoring-average title by two-and-a-half strokes, with 69.8. When Moe turned 50, in 1979, he torched the senior circuit, winning seven consecutive Canadian PGA senior championships. One of his four sanctioned 59s came at age 62!

Yet because he never duelled with the likes of Jack Nicklaus or Arnold Palmer, he remained invisible to most American fans.

He also convinced himself that his family hated his only passion and he was estranged from them for decades. His brother Ron told me that over 35 years ago he went to see Moe play in a tournament at Westmount Country Club in Kitchener.

"Moe was standing there hitting balls - he hadn't seen me in years - and I waited until he was finished and had gone to the putting green. I thought, this is my chance, so I walked over to Moe, put my hand on his shoulder and said, 'How ya doing, brother?'

"He took one look at me and said, 'I saw you standing there. Please take your hand off my shoulder.'

"I followed him for nine holes, then told him, 'Good luck, brother. Have a good life.' That's the last I've ever seen of him. I cried all the way home."

Had it not been for a network of friends who bailed him out of countless jams and quite literally saved his life by forcing him to see a doctor, few doubt he would've ended up homeless or worse. But with constant encouragement he slowly felt more comfortable in public.

That day on the Florida driving range 10 years ago Moe started his exhibition by lofting a few short wedges about 90 yards. A small group of curious seniors seemed patiently unimpressed. "We can all do that," they must have thought. Then gradually they noticed Moe was literally landing ball after ball within inches of each other, and their faces brightened, as if discovering a movie's plot.

"Every shot same as the last," Moe chirped in his Pooh-like self-narration. "Same as the last. Here's your morning paper . . ." Moe moved to a seven-iron and smoothly launched two dozen balls that rose 150 yards on a perfectly straight ascending arc, like cables on the Golden Gate Bridge. Never left. Never right. Someone could've caught them all in a shag bag without moving their feet.

Every iron in his bag had a worn spot about the size of a nickel precisely in the sweet spot, while the rest of the club almost looked unused. Moe pulled out a 44-inch driver and started hitting dozens of balls 255 yards in the air - this was pre-titanium for Moe - on to a landing space not much larger than your kitchen.

Moe was never really a trick shot artist though he could hit balls off any surface and, decades before Tiger Woods, could walk down entire fairways bouncing the ball off the face of a wedge. (His record was 200 yards.) But his skill was so dumbfounding that when many people saw him for the first time they couldn't keep from laughing, as if a magician had just yanked out their underwear. This laughter of disbelief and delight used to almost send Moe off the course in tears, until he began to understand they meant no disrespect.

"Ooooooh, you'd laugh, too, if you hit the ball like I do," Moe later teased the crowd. "Perfectly straight. Perfectly straight. There it goes. Perfectly straight."

"How long can you do that?" a fan asked.

"Oooooh, been doing this all my life," Moe chortled. "All my life."

It is fitting that Moe died right before his beloved Canadian Open. For years the golf gods in Canada ignored Moe and his accomplishments, but eventually they thawed and he was elected to the country's golf hall of fame. Lately, the highlight of Moe's year was being welcomed on to the driving range at the Canadian Open to hit beside the greatest young players, who uniformly stood in amazement.

"Have you ever actually mishit a ball," Fred Couples once asked Moe, in jest.

Moe stopped hitting for a moment and scratched his head. "Yes," he said softly, as if confessing. "In 1962."

I hope he understood why everyone was laughing.

Bruce Selcraig is a former staff writer with Sports Illustrated. He writes for the New York Times, Washington Post and a range of magazines.