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While many of today's touring pros are the product of golf academies and genteel collegiate teams, Norman, like Ray Floyd and Lee Trevino before him, took a tougher road. "The gambling gave me a killer instinct," he asserts. With his minuscule salary, he could not afford to lose. In one match Norman was three holes behind with four holes left to play. Several hundred dollars in the red, he pressed (essentially doubling the stakes) on the 16th and then again on the 18th. Had he lost he would have had to cough up a nonexistent $1,200; instead...
Then there is his blazing intensity. Whenever he sets foot on a course, he says, "it's as though I am going for my first trophy." For golf's Great White Shark, each tournament is an opportunity to recapture the "indescribable feeling" of walking the last few holes while in contention to win. It is then that the crowd seems to recede as Norman's concentration grows and he falls into that state of tunnel vision the pros call "owl's eyes." Pumped with adrenaline, he is usually hitting shots breathtakingly farther toward the end of a tournament. Nicklaus likens...
...damage between 35 and 45," says he. Perhaps more important, the losses have shown that he can handle his setbacks with style, and though it kills him to lose, he asserts, "You do more good * for yourself by losing than by winning." Norman is also something of a throwback. Golf has become the province of colorless, interchangeable technicians content with the mid-six-figure incomes that come with respectable finishes. But Norman continues to take enormous gambles going for the win, and he has shown class in winning as well as losing. After coming from four strokes back...
...sport," so Norman played Australian Rules football, essentially a riot with goalposts. When he was 16 his mother, a low-handicap amateur of Finnish descent, gave him two of Nicklaus' books. The boy read them and decided to give golf a try. It soon became clear that the late starter was a prodigy. Greg's father Merv recalls that he made "phenomenal progress," shooting par within 18 months of first picking up a golf club...
Pivotal to Norman's golf development was Charlie Earp, a teaching professional who wisely sought to harness rather than change the young man's adrenal urges. He encouraged Norman to hit the ball as far as he could, arguing that once you had length you could work on control. Norman now averages 280 yds. a drive; 260 yds. is considered good for a top pro. A few years back, during a pro-celebrity tournament at Gleneagles in Scotland, a wind-aided Norman drive measured 483 yds. Under Earp's tutelage Norman began cleaning up in amateur tournaments...