Faldo/Norman (17 page)

Norman, who was not far from the right-hand edge of the fairway, standing with his arms crossed staring at the green, slowly turned his head to the right and looked into the crowd. Tight-lipped but seemingly more amused than irritated, Norman soon turned back and, as the green cleared, got on with playing his shot. Instead of marching after his ball, however, Norman walked into the crowd, wagging his finger in the face of one particular man and remonstrating: ‘Look, if you want to say something to me, say it in the car park afterwards when I can do something about it.’

It was an extraordinary outburst which Norman immediately regretted, but having got the anger out of his system he soon settled down and held a one-stroke lead overnight. The following day he fell down the leaderboard and said he felt ‘flat’.

A few years later, Norman and Steve Elkington, along with their pro-am partners from a charity event hosted by Peter Jacobsen in Portland, Oregon, were having a drink in a bar when four men in their twenties entered, recognised one of the group
and started up with taunts such as: ‘You’re a choker, Norman.’ The group were swift to leave but the hecklers followed them out and threw beer bottles at their car before getting in their own car and blocking the exit from the car park.

The police had been called and were swiftly on the scene. Establishing the story, the police asked Norman and his party if they wanted to press charges but mindful of not wanting to create any negative publicity for Jacobsen’s tournament, they offered the idiots the choice between apologising or a night in jail. They apologised.

There were countless references in print to Norman choking throughout his career, not least in the days following the 1996 Masters. His collapse was labelled by the
Sydney Morning Herald
as ‘one of the greatest chokes in sporting history’ and when Emirates Team New Zealand lost the 2013 America’s Cup to Oracle Team USA after leading 8-1 with eight races left, it was another excuse to put Norman into a list of sporting chokes. Later in 1996 Norman told
Golf World
: ‘A lot of nonsense is talked about “choking”. To me it means not being able to pull the club back, it means struggling to breathe. Of course, there are nerves when you are just a few holes away from a major title. Then it is very difficult. It’s like when you are a kid and you don’t want to walk into a dark room because you are not sure what is in there or if you can handle it.’

When it came to knowing if one can handle winning a major, Faldo was pretty certain about it but for Norman there were always doubts. Faldo seemed to be marching towards the light, Norman back into the dark that he feared as a child. Only in his chosen sporting arena could a frailty be so publicly exposed. It is not a great epitaph when you feature in the tail-end summation of a Malcolm Gladwell essay in the
New Yorker,
published in August 2000, entitled ‘The Art of Failure – Why some people choke and others panic’.

Describing the circumstances on the 9th hole of the final round of the 1996 Masters, Gladwell wrote: ‘Norman was next. He stood over the ball. “The one thing you guard against here is short,” the announcer said, stating the obvious. Norman swung and then froze, his club in mid-air, following the ball in flight. It was short. Norman watched, stone-faced, as the ball rolled thirty yards back down the hill, and with that error something inside of him broke.’

For the first three days, the ‘most striking aspect of Norman’s performance was his composure’, wrote Lauren St John in her 1998 biography of Norman. ‘He was as tranquil as a Zen student trimming a bonsai tree.’ But watching the final round on television, Australian golfer Wayne Grady noticed a difference in Norman, still leading by three but with his lead cut in half, saying: ‘You could see in his face then that he was in trouble.’

Faldo had regained the honour and drove off first. The 9th hole scoots downhill and turns from right to left as the terrain in the landing area slopes from left to right. At the bottom of the valley is a spectator crosswalk and then the hole juts severely uphill to a green seemingly perched up in the heavens. Faldo’s drive finished on the right side of the fairway still just on the downslope. Norman, as usual, knocked his drive past Faldo’s and found a more level lie, just short of the crosswalk. Faldo only had a wedge shot to the green from 112 yards but, with his lie, found it difficult to impart enough backspin on the ball. His approach scooted through to the back of the green.

The 9th green has upper and lower plateaus, providing all the necessary pin positions for the week, but also a third section at the front which is merely the start of the precipice that then becomes
the steep decline back down the fairway. The hole on this Masters Sunday was cut on the left of the middle tier but only just over the ‘false front’ to the green. Norman always got extreme backspin with his short irons and now, from his level lie 98 yards from the green, he needed to hit his wedge shot to the back of the middle tier so that it recoiled towards the hole but without going past it.

Instead, he pitched the ball hole high. There was a momentary pause as the backspin kicked in and the ball gained purchase on one of the most slippery Augusta greens. Then it was rolling back down the green and the fairway, on and on for what must have felt like eternity to the Australian. Both players, their caddies, all the spectators and all those watching on television knew this was a cardinal error. ‘I just mis-hit it,’ Norman admitted.

Norman now faced a chip from 30 yards short of the green that had a high tariff. He played it well, and the ball almost hit the flagstick, but it rolled on eight feet past. Faldo, meanwhile, had a putt of around 35 feet which had to go down from one tier to another. It would have been easy to rush it past the hole and then face the same fate as Norman, except having taken a stroke more, but he judged it perfectly; the ball even touched the right lip before gently stopping a foot away. He raised his hand to the tip of an imaginary cap and tapped in for a safe par. Norman’s par putt swung violently from right to left, too early to hold the right line, and finished well left of the hole. He tapped in for his third bogey of the day and an outward 38, two over par. Faldo was out in 34, two under par, and the lead had now gone from six to just two strokes.

Bruce Edwards, who caddied for Tom Watson for many years but also had a spell with Norman, told St John: ‘The reason Nick Faldo is such a wonderful player is because he doesn’t really care about being in there three feet from the hole. He’s going to put it in there where he’s not going to make bogey. He won the British
Open with 18 pars which, God bless him, is how you play the game. The 9th hole at the Masters was a typical example. He didn’t care that he was 35 feet by. He’ll take his four. “Go ahead and make your mistake. Oh, you just did.” ’

Choke, such an ugly word but perhaps appropriately so for a such a painful act – it is often harrowing to watch, let alone experience. In golf, the classic chokes come when a player is on the verge of victory but misses a tiny putt, such as Scott Hoch at the 1989 Masters or I.K. Kim at the 2012 Kraft Nabisco Championship, the first women’s major of the season. These are momentary aberrations – along with shots heading into water or the crowd on many a finishing hole. Norman was guilty of those mishaps in his time but the 1996 Masters was more of a full-length meltdown. It just was not his day.

According to Gladwell in ‘The Art of Failure’, panic and choking are opposites. ‘Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct.’ Novice pilots and scuba divers can get into trouble when a lack of experience means they have too few instincts to fall back on. Experienced performers get into trouble when they stop acting on instinct and start second-guessing themselves. Choking occurs under pressure, when trying to live up to expectations, when the big prize is on the line. ‘Choking is a central part of the drama of athletic competition,’ Gladwell wrote, ‘because the spectators have to be there – and the ability to overcome the pressure of the spectators is part of what it means to be a champion.’

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.’