Never on a Sunday the Norman fate

FINAL ROUND: George Kimball, witness to many of Great White Shark's Sunday meltdowns, on how the hope of the Viagra generation left them deflated . . . again.

HIS OWN expectations were modest enough, but the expectations of others may not have been. By the time he teed off in the final pairing with Pádraig Harrington yesterday afternoon, the hopes and dreams of the entire Viagra generation seemed to be riding on Greg Norman's 53-year-old shoulders.

Norman had come to Birkdale a felicitously contented newly-wed, hoping for little more than a chance to play on the weekend for just the second time in five years. (He had skipped the last two British Opens, and missed the cut at Troon in 2004.)

He was ranked 635th in the world, and the most recent of his two British Open titles had come 15 years ago. It has been 10 years since he won a golf tournament of ANY description, and by his own admission he plays more tennis than golf these days.

And three holes into his final round the bookmakers who had made him 500 to 1 coming into the Open Championship appeared to have been prescient. His shaky beginning, on the other hand, struck a decidedly familiar chord with old-timers more familiar with Norman's modus operandus.

Come Sunday of a major championship, one could reasonably assume the Great White Shark would, as if on cue, turn into the Great White Sheep, and as an eyewitness to many of them, it has over the years fallen to my lot to chronicle many of these Sunday meltdowns.

In his more active playing days, Norman's proclivity for improbable misfortune often saw him compared to Joe Bfstlplk. A creation of the late cartoonist Al Capp, Bfstlplk was a perpetually-cursed character so prone to disaster he walked around with his own personal little black cloud floating above his head.

But the little black cloud that hovered above the Great White Shark more often seemed to be one of his own creation. Taken separately, the retinue of near-misses and unlikely bad breaks in major championships alone might have made Norman seem like the unluckiest man on earth, but viewed together they form a portrait of a man seemingly determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Norman's hard-luck reputation was firmly established in 1986, the year of his infamous "Saturday Slam". He was the leader going into the final round of all four major championships that year, but won only one of them - the British Open at Turnberry.

In that year's Masters he had frittered away a two-shot advantage, but was still tied for the lead when he played his second shot to the 18th green. A badly-sliced four-iron led to a bogey on the last, allowing 46 year-old Jack Nicklaus, who had begun the day in ninth place, to claim his 18th and final major title.

His final-round of 75 in that year's US Open at Shinnecock Hills took him from first to 12th place, as 43 year-old Raymond Floyd shot 66 to win the event.

And of course, there was the infamous PGA at Inverness that August. With Norman all but certain of victory, Bob Tway holed out from a greenside bunker to beat him. (As we have previously recalled in these pages, the memory frozen in time from that moment isn't watching Tway's ball disappear into the hole, but the expression on Norman;s face when it did.)

It was indeed a terribly unlucky break, but one facilitated by the fact the Shark shot 76 for the final round, 41 over the last nine holes.

He had first achieved prominence two years earlier, when he tied Fuzzy Zoeller at Winged Foot to force a play-off in the 1984 US Open. The 18-hole play-off format was, alas, lingering, as opposed to "sudden" death, and the image there remains one of Norman sportingly waving a white towel in surrender somewhere along the backside, as Fuzzy outplayed him 67-76.

Then in 1987 he tied for the Masters lead in regulation, only to be beaten on the second play-off hole when another unknown, this time Larry Mize, chipped in from 45 yards out.

In 1989 at Troon, Norman fired a phenomenal 64 in the fourth round to put him in a three-way play-off with Mark Calcavecchia and countryman Wayne Grady. On the last, Norman tempted fate by hitting driver off the tee and managed to find a bunker that was there precisely to discourage such adventuresome play.

From there, Norman tried to go for the green and instead found a greenside bunker. His third shot came flying out of the sand, sailed clear across the green and into the clubhouse grounds, coming to rest only when it struck the Troon caddiemaster Bill McKnight in the leg. After the out-of-bounds shot, Norman would have been hitting five out of the bunker had be played another ball, which he did not, instead settling for the only recorded "X" in British Open play-off history as Calcavecchia won the play-off.

Having by then lost play-offs for Masters, US, and British Open titles, Norman completed another dubious slam in 1993, when his overtime loss to Paul Azinger made him just the second man in golfing history (Craig Wood was the other) to lose in play-offs for all four major championships.

In 1995 at Shinnecock Hills, Norman took a three-shot lead into the final round of the US Open, only to be undone when Corey Pavin hit a 209-yard four-wood to five feet and birdie on the final hole. Once again one might be inclined to chalk it off to the cruel hand of fate, but only if one chose to ignore the fact on the last day Norman shot 73 to Pavin's 68.

At Augusta in 1996, Norman's loss, by five shots after leading by six, to Nick Faldo was recently adjudged among the top three sporting collapses of the 20th century. It also effectively ended the Great White Shark's run as a serious contender in major championships - at least until the past four days.

Although Norman in his prime is frequently recalled as an "underachiever", given his litany of collapses, the wonder isn't that he only won two major titles, but that he won as many as he did.