Greg Norman
Speaking exclusively to Kingdom magazine, Greg Norman remembers one of the truly great Open Championships, when he lifted the Claret Jug at Royal St. George’s in 1993. Robin Barwick reports
Reflections with bite from golf’s great shark
It’s called a practice ground, yet on tour a lot of other activity goes on there, too: caddies swap stories, clubs are tested and fitted, agents and equipment reps circle around, coaching is given, and some interviews and autographs as well. Everyone has his own angle, his own agenda, and sometimes it can all get in the way of a golfer’s job. At Royal St. George’s, Sandwich, in July 1993, Greg Norman didn’t want a new putter or a new drill. He just needed ear plugs and blinkers.
The Australian, golf’s “Great White Shark,” was the World No. 4, and hindsight shows he was on a pathway to the top spot. He was the Open champ of 1986, in form, feeling good, expecting to win, and he didn’t want anything to get in his way.
“You get a lot of white noise at major championships,” starts Norman, now 66, but aged 38 at the time of the ’93 Open. “People are always walking around you, talking to you, and it can be very hard to concentrate on what you are there to do. It is what it is, but sometimes what you need is to get some solid, focused practice just like you can when you are at your home golf club, when you are on your own and you are zeroed in without any noise around.”
Norman wanted to make some focused swings under the close eye of coach Butch Harmon and so, along with caddie Tony Navarro, they walked off to find some solitude. Royal St. George’s, on the Kent coast in southeast England, is the southernmost Open venue and also the largest, and back in 1993 it was still possible for a golfer to find some empty practice space, around a corner and over a sand dune.
Harmon, who was fast establishing himself as the pre-eminent coach on tour at the time, remembers the day vividly.
“Greg was one of the superstars of the time, he was the man,” says Harmon, now 77. “There were a lot of distractions and too many people on the range, and Greg was getting back into some of his old habits, like a bit of a slide into the ball. I used to make him practice off a side-hill lie with the ball above his feet, which would flatten out his plane a little and make him rotate more. I suggested we find a little slope to hit some balls on but there was not that kind of a lie on the practice ground. But outside the range, on the other side of the equipment vans, I found a little slope and Greg could hit the balls over the vans and back onto the range.”
But this broke with the protocol of The Open—hitting practice balls over the trucks would not be covered by the insurance—and Norman had to fend off an agitated official from the R&A who asked him not to hit balls over the trucks.
Adds Harmon: “The R&A official walked away and I said to Greg: ‘What’s he going to do? Disqualify you?’ Greg said, ‘Who knows, but we need to hit balls here so let’s do it’.”
Recalls Norman: “We tucked ourselves away somewhere very quiet and focused on certain things for about 45 minutes. I felt so good about my game and about my ball flight. I kept looking at Butch because every shot I hit, the ball came out exactly the way I wanted it to.”
“That is absolutely true,” confirms Harmon. “Hitting off the slope helped to flatten the ball trajectory, it got the club onto the path I wanted, and literally, once we started hitting balls off that side-hill lie, Greg never missed a shot.”
“Ball flight is everything when you are playing a links golf course,” says Norman. “It’s all about how you spin the golf ball—that is the most critical part—and I just felt in control. I felt really good, no matter what the wind conditions were going to be.
“I knew what I needed to fine-tune myself and on that occasion it worked out great. You just have to be aware of what you need, and I say it a lot to players today, that sometimes you need to eliminate the white noise. I came away from that session thinking, ‘Okay, I am really in sync right now.’”
Rising to the Occasion
The 1993 Open was the one when the stars aligned in dazzling formation. The golf course had been softened by rain and with only calm breezes skipping around the links Norman carded a shining 66-68 in the first two rounds, after opening the championship with a double-bogey.
Norman shared third place with Fred Couples, the Masters champ of 1992 and World No. 5, and with Corey Pavin, who was ranked 15th in the world at the time and a regular contender in the majors, heading towards a career pinnacle with victory at the 1995 U.S. Open. One shot ahead was Germany’s Bernhard Langer, the reigning Masters champion and World No. 2, with Nick Faldo holding a one-shot lead. The Englishman was the man with a target on his back. He was World No. 1, reigning Open champ, he had won three of the previous six Opens and in the second round he shot a course record 63, nine under par, backed with zeal by the English crowd.
Pavin putted magnificently in the third round to post a 68 and claim a share of the 54-hole lead with Faldo. They made the final pair for the fourth round, with Norman and Langer both one shot back. A third round of 67 brought Zimbabwe’s Nick Price into the picture—the World No. 3 at the time—and he began the final round three shots off the lead, along with Australia’s Peter Senior. The chasing pack comprised entirely past or future major winners: Wayne Grady, Ernie Els, Couples, John Daly and Fuzzy Zoeller.
Norman was not a golfer for star-gazing on leaderboards but he knew this was unusual.
“It hit me going to the first tee on the Sunday,” he says. “I walked to the putting green, looked at the leaderboard and thought, ‘Whoa, this is the Who’s Who of golf.’ I knew I had to go out there and play really, really well because not all of those guys were going to play poorly. Probably half of those players were going to come at me hard so I knew I would have to go hard myself.
“I was excited. I was excited by the prospect of going out against those guys because I knew they wanted to beat me just as much as I wanted to beat them. That was the beautiful thing about that week.”
Pavin’s putter ran cold in the final round but Faldo, Langer and Norman went at it. It was only after Norman came within an inch of holing his approach to the 9th hole— to set-up his fourth birdie of the day—that he opened up a two-shot lead.
‘‘I walked to the putting green, looked at the leaderboard and thought, ‘Whoa, this the Who’s Who of golf ’’’
“Larry Bird [of Boston Celtics fame] and I have played a lot of golf together,” adds Norman, “and I always remember he said to me that if the Celtics were one point down with one second left, he always wanted the ball. I thought about that after I birdied the ninth to take a two-shot lead, as I walked to the 10th tee: “Here we are. Larry Bird. Let’s take it to the house now.”
Royal St. George’s can unnerve golfers with all the peaks and hollows of its fairways, and by testing a golfer’s confidence and course knowledge with an array of blind tee shots. Norman did his homework, attacked the course from the tee and reaped the reward.
“Once you know where to drive the golf ball, over all those blind sand dunes, your fairway becomes wider, because often you are driving across a fairway rather than straight down the middle of it,” explains Norman. “A lot of guys were laying up short of the blind doglegs, but because I was such a confident driver of the ball I was taking a line that would sometimes even go over the gallery and to the wider landing areas. I didn’t feel invincible but I just felt comfortable on the golf course.”
“Greg was an aggressive player anyway,” reflects Harmon. “That is how he played, and he drove the ball so well that week. The control of his ball flight, the shapes of his shots, he was in total control. In the final round he put
on a driving clinic and the distance control of his irons, in strong winds, was perfect. It was beautiful. Greg was as calm as I have ever seen him in the final round of a major.”
Faldo started to leave crucial putts short on the back nine, while Langer drove out of bounds—onto the neighboring Prince’s Golf Club—on the narrow 14th hole. Meanwhile Norman was in tunnel vision.
“I was so confident that nothing phased me,” he recalls. “Langer drove out of bounds but I knew how well I was driving the ball and I knew exactly my aim point. It was four miles in the distance and at that moment that was all I saw. I didn’t even think about the out of bounds, I didn’t care about it. I just got up to the tee and hit my shot. The wind was coming hard from 10 o’clock and that is dangerous when you have out of bounds on the right.”
Norman smashed it down the middle. After a short, lipped putt on 17 left Norman with his only dropped shot of the day, he launched another drive down the 18th fairway to clear the way for a two-shot victory over Faldo. Norman had saved his best until the end, shooting 64, eight under par for a total of 267 and the lowest score in Open history. Of the 14 fairways, Norman found them all. Langer said, “That was the greatest round of golf I have ever seen.”
“It was phenomenal,” adds Harmon. “Faldo took a one-shot lead into the final round and shot 67. Usually, if you take a one-shot lead into the final round of a major and shoot 67, guess what, you win. Well, on this occasion it didn’t happen that way because Greg shot 64.”
Gene Sarazen—91 at the time and the oldest living Open champion, who had himself set a low scoring record, next door at Prince’s in winning the Open of 1932 in 283 shots—was on hand to tell Norman, “It was the most awesome display of golf I have seen in 70 years.”
“That is one of the beauties of sport in general, not just golf, when the legends who have gone before you recognize what you have done, whether it is a round of golf or after any given moment,” reflects Norman. “Gene was a patriarch of the game and when a legend recognizes the quality of what you have delivered it stays with you forever. You don’t get those compliments often. You don’t go out there seeking those compliments but when you receive one it is a validation of all of your preparation, your execution, all the hard work.”
“You don’t go out there seeking it, but when a legend compliments you, it’s a validation”
Tropical Creations
Norman won’t return to Sandwich for the Open this summer, although the last time he contended in the Open was not as long ago you might imagine. At Royal Birkdale in 2008, a 53-year-old Norman stood tall while gales tormented the field, to become the oldest golfer ever to lead a major championship after 54 holes. He faded on the Sunday as Padraig Harrington successfully defended the Claret Jug, but it was a memorable swansong from the former champ, who had long since put his myriad business interests ahead of his playing career.
In business, Norman is most renowned for his golf course design work, which has seen him and his team design more than 100 golf courses in 34 countries around the world. One of Norman’s most striking creations is the Sandals Emerald Bay golf course on Great Exuma in the Bahamas, and Norman has extended his partnership with Sandals with a re-design of the Sandals Golf & Country Club course on the Cap Estate on St. Lucia, the only 18-hole layout on the tropical island.
“The St. Lucia golf course incorporates four different valleys so when the winds pick up they get funnelled from different directions and golfers need to be very aware,” says Norman, who looks forward to seeing his re-design open this year. “We changed some greens locations and fairway widths in certain areas. The beauty of the setting has been enhanced and the golf course now fits in with its natural surroundings beautifully. It is now shaped so that it is a sterner test for the better player but really it is playable for all golfers. We have worked very closely with Sandals and it has been a very exciting project.
“I am a big fan of the Caribbean islands, always have been, and it is the laid back attitude which makes St Lucia such a great spot for a vacation. The people, the culture, the lifestyle, are very welcoming.”
Come July, when hopefully island vacations will be back in full swing and crowds cheering from the ropes on championship courses, this double Open champion will be watching closely to see if his scoring record can be broken. Henrik Stenson is the only champion since 1993 to go lower than Norman’s 267—when he posted 264 to win at Royal Troon in 2016—but upon the great, mercurial links of Royal St. George’s, no-one yet has come close.
“The beauty of the setting has been enhanced and the golf course now fits in with its natural surroundings beautifully”