Green amateur has Moe memories

Canadian Corey Conners arrived at Augusta with some help from the legendary Moe Norman

AUGUSTA, GA.— On the day more than a decade ago that Corey Conners met Moe Norman, Conners was working on his putting on the practice green at his hometown Listowel Golf Club.

Conners, now age 23 and one of two Canadians playing in the 79th Masters beginning Thursday, was only 12 years old at the time. Golf wasn’t yet his fulltime passion. He played hockey and badminton, too. He took swimming lessons. But there were days when he could lose himself on that practice green. His father, Mike, was telling a story recently about how he would sometimes drop young Corey off at the course on a summer morning and return to pick him up some seven or eight hours later.

“I’d say, ‘What did you do today?’ He’d say, ‘I putted.’ I’d say, ‘Well, you must have done something else.’ He said, ‘Oh yeah. I got a cookie and a lemonade,’ ” Mike Conners said. “He was just focussed. Like, who wants to putt that long on a putting green? He knew what to work on.”

Even at age 12, the work was paying off. Corey had won the first tournament he entered a few years earlier. The success seemed to fuel his practice habit. “I remember I was having the best putting day of my life, just holing everything,” Conners said.

That’s when a legend of the game took notice of him. Norman is well-known to golfers; an eccentric one-off from Kitchener, he’s been called one of the best ball strikers to ever live. No less than Tiger Woods once said that only two golfers “truly owned their swings” — the great Ben Hogan and Moe Norman.

Norman had been in Listowel, about a 40-minute drive northwest of Kitchener, Ont., watching a tournament for club professionals when he saw Corey rolling putt after putt into the cup. He started talking with the kid, examining the kid’s clubs. And before long Norman beckoned Corey to his car, pulled a driver from his trunk and gifted it to him.

“He told me it would be more suited to my swing speed. It had a (more flexible) shaft,” Conners said. “He just told me, ‘Keep at it.’ I think he seemed happy to see someone working hard and having success.”

Some 11 years later, the success continues for Conners. On Thursday, he’ll become just the 29th Canadian to play at the Masters. And it will say something about the open-source nature of the game, wherein advice and encouragement is handed down happily from expert minds to willing ears, that he’ll have been touched en route by at least a couple of the Masters-playing countrymen who came before him.

Conners played a Wednesday practice round with Mike Weir, whose epochal win here in 2003 still stands as the only time a Canadian triumphed in a major. Considering Conners considers Weir one of his heroes, it was something of a dream come true to have the 44-year-old champion showing him the nuances of Augusta’s approach angles and breaks.

“He’s got a nice game, a steady game,” Weir said of Conners. “I listened to him talk with his caddy about where the pins were going to be, his strategy — there wasn’t much for me to add. He had it dialed in pretty good . . . He had a good game plan.”

Said Conners: “It can expose weakness in any part of your game, this course. So you’ve pretty much got to be sharp with everything . . . I love fast greens. Play a little more break and hit it soft. I really like them. They roll perfectly. They’re so smooth.”

Conners won a berth to the storied tournament when he finished runner-up at the U.S. Amateur last year. It’s expected he will turn pro in the wake of this week, and Conners has already tried his hand at a handful of pro events to ease the transition. And in the past couple of months he has been granted the privilege of playing a handful of practice rounds at Augusta National, where he is considered among the top contenders to win the silver medal for the low score among the seven amateurs in the field.

He said the goal, mind you, is to “just enjoy myself and have a great experience.”

“I think that’ll be pretty easy. It’s hard not to smile when you’re out here,” Conners said. “It’s an awesome place. I just hope to have fun and stay patient and hopefully play some good golf.”

It will mean a lot to Conners to play with Weir; they are slated to tee off together, in a threesome with Ben Crane of the U.S., at 8:18 a.m. on Thursday. Conners has spoken of watching Weir’s Augusta victory from his family home as an 11-yearold; he was so nervous as Weir stood over a pivotal putt that he left the room and only learned that Weir made it when he heard his father clapping.

It’s expected that nerves will be a factor on Thursday’s first tee, too. “Corey’s gut’s going to be churning,” said Herb Page, the Markham native who is head golf coach at Kent State University, where Conners graduated last year after a celebrated playing career. “But Corey Conners is a very confident, confident young man. He puts the time in.”

Certainly Norman, who played in two Masters in the 1950s, understood the importance of repetitive practice. Known for his gift for remembering and calculating numbers, Norman once estimated that he hit about 5 million golf balls during his lifetime, “not including chips and putts.”

Page said he once saw Norman put on a practice-tee exhibition in the late 1960s. “I watched him hit about 250 four woods. And after he hit about 100, the balls were landing on each other. He’d go out and pick ’em up, and all the balls would be within about 15 yards,” Page said. “Nobody believes you when you say that.”

Page has seen an obsessive streak in Conners, who shot a three-underpar 24 in Wednesday’s par-three contest. “I’ve never had a kid work harder on his short game and with his putter,” said Page. On the day Conners met Norman all those years ago, Corey couldn’t stay at the golf course as long he would have liked. After a few hours together, he informed Norman that he had to go to swimming lessons. Conners remembered Norman’s response, spoken in his trademark repetitive phrasing. He said: “There’s no money in swimming. There’s no money in swimming. Golf’s where the money is.”

Golf, too, is where Conners’ passion now resides. A few weeks after he met Norman — after he had customized the driver the legend gave him and nicknamed it Moe — he won a national championship in the 13-and-under age group using it. Young Corey wrote Norman a thank-you letter informing him of the good news, but he never heard back. A few months later, Norman died at age 75.

“I didn’t know much about him at the time, but I’ve learned a lot about him since,” said Conners of Norman. “He was unlike anybody else. He was so unique and so successful. It’s pretty cool that he’s a fellow Canadian, that he’s from near where I’m from, and that he played at the Masters.”

Come Thursday, Conners will be able to say he played at the Masters, too. Then, presumably, it’ll be back to the practice green for more diligent study of Augusta’s secrets.