It took Greg Norman his whole life to get to the US Masters champions’ dinner. As a player, he didn’t make it into golf’s most exclusive club. In the Norman style of – “Hey, of course I’m disappointed, but hell, I’m in awe of everything I’ve achieved here, don’t you dare tell me I’m disappointed!” – he never, sorry always, let the disappointment get to him.
But his revenge would come as a dish served cold. As the leader of the LIV golf rebels, Norman finally made it in spirit. Tiger Woods said the Shark’s rebel tour was the “gorilla in the room” this year. What with Tigers, Sharks, Golden Bears and gorillas, the zoo was too full for an elephant.
By all accounts, Norman was definitely there. Most of the LIV players have been treated as comrades, but Phil Mickelson has been Norman’s proxy. The friendship between the pair has been so strengthened by the LIV breakaway that the enmity for Norman within professional golf has been directed at three-time Masters winner Mickelson. Commentator and former PGA pro Brandel Chamblee, who had previously said to Mickelson, “Congratulations, you’ve been bought”, took another bite out of him when, simultaneously with the dinner, he said he had consistently sold out the traditions of golf through his career. Mickelson did get to go to the dinner (as a shadow of his former self – he appears to have spent his Saudi millions on slimming pills) but he was consigned to the cheap seats.
Tradition versus circus, legacy versus gimmickry. That is the orthodox position on the schism in golf. The Masters, the first major tournament of the year, embodies all the values golf holds dear, whereas LIV and Norman are the game’s ugly money-grubbing underbelly.
There is another way of looking at this, and nowhere could be more appropriate in its ironies than the Masters, the most successful gimmick of all.
Masters week is, for most golf spectators, the highlight of the year. The golf course is heaven on earth. The only major played at the same layout each year, the Masters creates memories: Larry Mize’s chip on the 11th green, Jack Nicklaus’ putt on the 17th, Nick Faldo’s mechanical perfection through Amen Corner … Oh no, those are just Shark memories. Woods, from 1997 through 2019, turned each hole into a stage for epic deeds. And so on. There is the tradition of the Green Jacket, the tradition of Magnolia Lane, the tradition of the honorary starters (this year Tom, Jack and Gary), the tradition even of the double-cheese elevator music in the CBS coverage that unfailingly makes my wife cry.
Jack Nicklaus during the ceremonial first tee at Augusta.Credit: AP
Of course, these traditions are as authentic as the classical columns of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello or Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room. They are American traditions, microwaved from the Wolfgang Puck cookbook of instant invention. The Masters encapsulates the American genius for manufacturing and packaging instant “tradition”.
The Masters is the least of golf’s four majors (the “major tournament” and the “grand slam” are themselves a work of the American imagination). The British Open is open to entry to literally every golfer in the world, the US Open to everyone in America and most of the world, and the PGA Championship to every professional. By contrast, the Masters is a peculiar invitational event with house rules that enable people like Mize, Fuzzy Zoeller and Mike Weir to play forever while shutting out anyone outside the world top 50 who, on their week, would have a genuine chance of winning. The Masters has the smallest field and the biggest pomp and circumstance. It’s the kind of creation that a Donald Trump would aspire to, insular and elitist and ever so classy, right down to its setting in the American south, not a blade of grass out of place in a setting surrounded by a forest of Arby’s and Wendy’s and tyre shops and tract housing.
None of this is a criticism. I am as seduced as anybody and, having attended it, can confirm my former colleague Richard Hinds’ judgment of it as, “the least disappointing event in the world of sport”.
The point is that the Masters is the last place where golf should be up on its hind legs berating LIV Golf as fake. The Masters has, in its 80 years, elevated fake to a work of art that could sit in the Louvre. It’s like reverse plastic surgery, an 80-year-old made to look like it’s a 1000-year-old.
For all his faults, Greg Norman does not deserve ostracism for trying to shake golf off its singularly high horse.Credit: Getty Images
It’s hard to imagine anyone taking themselves more seriously than Greg Norman, but by condemning him for chasing the money, the professional golf world at Augusta National has somehow managed it. By Sunday afternoon, it will be a duel between pomposity and hypocrisy in a tour funded by commercial deals with countless devils, not to mention the USA’s and the world’s continuing reliance on Saudi trade that seems permissible pretty much everywhere other than the golf course. For all his faults, Norman does not deserve ostracism for trying to shake golf off its singularly high horse.
In just two weeks’ time, LIV will stage a tournament in Adelaide. For the first time in decades, Australians will get to see a world-class field with names like Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Sergio Garcia, Louis Oosthuizen, Bubba Watson and Bryson DeChambeau alongside Mickelson, Smith and Marc Leishman (who, like the Shark, didn’t score an invite to Augusta). The Adelaide event will have its odd LIV format and bells and whistles, but it might also bring to Australia a two-week-old Masters champion. It will be worth watching not because of any claims to “meaning”, but because it will show off some incredibly talented individuals doing astonishing things with a golf ball and competing hard to win.
Pomposity is unbearable in most walks of life, but when it intrudes into sport the most appropriate response is to puke. The Masters is about a tiny group of invited men trying to get the ball into the hole. It’s not the World Bank or the United Nations. Despite the coincidence of dates, it’s not Holy Week. It’s just a game.
Norman and LIV have brought out golf’s unfortunate tendency to pretentiousness. The sacraments that the golf world has endowed itself with, in its response to LIV, are just another product of modern professional sport, another commercial strategy to connect sport with the life of the spirit.
More than ever, professional sport is contriving instant traditions, claims to “culture” and depthless memories that can be implanted like silicon chips. Its commercial exploitation of Good Friday, Anzac Day and all the rest are no less shameless than what the golf world does at the Masters.
Wearing those holy green jackets at the Masters champions’ dinner are not just the supreme golfers who have won at Augusta. Dining with them are a lot of mostly white, exclusively rich, men who have bought their way in. It’s commerce wearing the garments of an American religion. Those memories, which seem eternal, are really not as old as they look. Just ask the Shark – all those days ago, when he was so near but so far, still feel like they happened yesterday.
