11

SHARK ATTACK

BEFORE HE TURNED IT OVER to his successor, Tim Finchem, last June, Deane Beman’s office at PGA Tour headquarters in Ponte Vedra was the kind of large, comfortable office you would expect to find if you were looking for the man who is arguably the most powerful person in golf.

Behind the big desk was a large, framed picture taken at dusk on a golf course. Given Beman’s position in the sport, it is probably fair to say that he could have hung just about any picture of any hole in the world—the 12th at Augusta, the 18th at Pebble Beach, the Road Hole at St. Andrews—on his wall. The picture is of the ninth at the TPC/Sawgrass.

That should surprise no one, though, because the Tournament Players Club is Beman’s creation. Pete Dye designed the golf course, but the concept, the plan, the dream was Beman’s. He wanted a home for another of his babies—the Players Championship.

When it began in 1974, it was the Tournament Players Championship and, as with the U.S. Open, British Open, and PGA, the plan was to take it around the country to top golf courses. Beman envisioned the tournament as golf’s fifth major, maybe even as a fourth major, because it certainly wouldn’t have bothered him one little bit if his tournament supplanted the PGA, run by his rivals at the other end of the state, the PGA of America, as major number four.

Beman’s problem, just as it later became Jack Nicklaus’s problem when he created the Memorial, was that you don’t create majors. For one thing, no sport can handle more than four majors in a calendar year. When Butch Buchholz created his Players Championship for tennis ten years ago, he hoped it would become that sport’s fifth major. The tournament has done just fine in spite of numerous site changes and political battles, but it is a long way from becoming a major championship.

When Beman made the deal to move the tour’s headquarters to Ponte Vedra in 1976, he decided to take his tournament there with him. The tournament was played across the street from the under-construction TPC for five years before moving permanently to the new course in 1982.

And then the screaming began. Beman had ordered Dye to deliver a difficult, different golf course, one that would be as unique in its own way as Augusta. Dye had done that, and the players went crazy. It was too hard, it was too tricky, all those big mounds—built for spectators to create “stadium” golf—were ridiculous.

Players called it everything from screwy (Tom Watson), to awful, to the Marriott Muni (John Mahaffey) in honor of the Marriott Hotel that sits a few yards behind the 13th tee. When Jerry Pate won the tournament that first year, the first thing he did after holing out on the 18th green was grab Beman and Dye and toss them into the water (he went too) in a mock show of solidarity with his fellow pros. He was joking. Sort of.

What must be understood about professional golfers is that they are creatures of habit and exactitude. You will never hear a caddy (at least one who wants to stay employed) say to a player, “You’ve got about 150 to that bunker and, oh, I’d say 175 to 180 to the hole.” No. What you hear is, “It’s 154 to the bunker, 167 to the front, and 181 to the pin, and the wind is across but helping you slightly, except that once you get above the trees it may help you more than you think.”

The TPC wasn’t exact. It was like riding a roller coaster. You hit and hoped. Golfers hate that. The first two years the tournament was played there, no one broke 280.

Time has changed a lot of things. The course has been redone over the years and it has matured, as golf courses do. It has become more predictable and the scores have gone down steadily, as has the yelling. In fact, when the players began gathering for the twenty-first version of the tournament—the thirteenth at the TPC—there was some talk that maybe the course was too easy.

“It used to be pretty brutal,” Nick Faldo said. “Now I’d just say it’s demanding, but fair.”

Tom Kite was more to the point. “If you’re trying to build a major championship, you can’t have the golf course play this easy,” he said. “The way this course is set up, you’re going to have very low scores, too low in my opinion.”

Beman had long ago given up on the notion that this was going to be a major championship. He had come to understand that the Players (it was renamed in 1988 so that when people used the term TPC, it would be only in reference to golf courses) had grown up to be a respected title, a tournament that always had a superb field on a golf course that had slowly but surely earned a good deal of respect. It was the only event run by the tour that Beman would never slap a corporate name on. The Motorola Players? No way.

The Players would not be a major, and the TPC would not be Augusta. But both would be creations about which Beman could feel proud.

This would be his last Players as commissioner and, on Tuesday night, March 22, he presided over his final player meeting. Only he really didn’t preside, Finchem did. Beman turned most of the meeting over to his deputy because he wanted to build support among the players for Finchem as his successor.

Technically, the players had no say in who the new commissioner would be. A four-man search committee that included Jay Haas and Rich Fehr, both player-directors on the policy board, would recommend a candidate to the full board. In fact, when he met with the players at a hastily called meeting on the evening of Beman’s resignation at Doral, Ferris had told them that the search would be conducted in secret, that a list of candidates wouldn’t be released. “You will know who the new commissioner is when we name him,” Ferris said.

Clearly, it wasn’t going to happen quite that way. A number of names had been floated, some legitimate, some not so legitimate. What’s more, if a lot of players had a serious problem with a candidate, they would let Haas and Fehr know. That could severely handicap anyone who wanted the job.

Like Beman, Finchem had enemies. Part of it was simply the role he played as the number two man. Often, he was the one who handed down discipline to players, and often he was the one who delivered bad news—like the Karsten Solheim settlement—at meetings. His closeness to Beman would hurt him with some players.

But not with the majority. Most of the players were quite happy with the life that Beman had created for them. They were making good money and they were well treated. The tour was prosperous, and the bottom line was, if you could play, you could become quite rich. Most players didn’t really care about the game’s politics as long as the money and the courtesy cars were there each week. When ballots were sent out to elect a new player-director to succeed Jeff Sluman (self-addressed and stamped) only 86 of 200 players bothered to vote.

Some people were always going to be unhappy. Already, Larry Rinker, a veteran tour grinder, had posted a petition in the locker room at Bay Hill demanding that the players have more input into the decision on who the new commissioner would be. Five players had signed the petition, and one of them was John Daly, who, the joke went, probably thought it was a sign-up sheet for a paid outing.

Finchem handled the meeting smoothly. Unlike in some past meetings, there were no confrontations or shouting matches. When all the business had been taken care of, Jerry Pate, the man who had pulled Beman into the water with him twelve years earlier, stood up.

“Deane,” he said, “I know there have been times when people have disagreed with you over the years, but I’d like to say that I think you’ve done a great job for all of us over the last twenty years, you’ve helped us all make a great living and I just want to say thank you and wish you all the best.”

They started to applaud as Pate was finishing and then everyone in the room stood, with two exceptions: Bob Gilder and John Inman, both players who were under contract to Ping and had been on the other side of the dispute with Solheim. Even so, it seemed petty not to give Beman his due. A lot of players who joined in the standing ovation had done battle with Beman over the years but put those feelings aside.

“What Jerry did was great and the right thing to do,” Peter Jacobsen said the next day. “Look, I was on the board and I disagreed with Deane on more than one occasion. That’s not the point. The guy worked his butt off for twenty years and this was the time to acknowledge that. Those guys who didn’t stand up, well, that just stunk.”

It didn’t take long for Tom Kite’s comments about the golf course to make their way back to the tour’s agronomists and to Fred Klauk, the TPC’s course superintendent. By the time Kite had finished talking to the media, Klauk was waiting for him outside the brand-new TPC media center.

Klauk is not a confrontational man and neither is Kite, but there was very definitely a disagreement here. Klauk, acting under orders from his bosses at the tour, had to create a golf course that was challenging for the pros one week a year but playable for amateurs the other fifty-one. The TPC was, after all, a very profitable cash cow for the tour.

Kite really didn’t want to hear it. All he knew was that the golf course was playing like one of the desert courses in Palm Springs and that didn’t seem right to him. He and Klauk talked for forty minutes before finally agreeing to disagree. When a couple of reporters asked Kite what he and Klauk had been discussing—as if they didn’t know—Kite said it was between the two of them and that he had really said enough for one day.

“Kite in the Middle of Controversy” is not a headline seen often during Kite’s twenty-three years on tour. It is man-bites-dog stuff. But then Kite is someone whose image has never been a true reflection of the man.

To most people who follow golf, Kite is the ultimate overachiever, the pasty-faced little guy who has to swing out of his shoes just to keep up with the big boys, but somehow has managed to compete all these years just by putting in hours and hours and hours on the range.

As with any cliché, there is some truth to be found. Kite is only 5 feet 8, he does weigh only 155 pounds, and he does usually look as if he’s spent the last twenty-three years in a cave. And he does work very hard. But the notion that he has won nineteen tournaments, more than $9 million in prize money, and the 1992 U.S. Open just by spending a lot of time on the range is ludicrous.

Kite was a natural when he first began to play as a five-year-old, he was a star throughout his junior career, and he was a star at the University of Texas, where he and Ben Crenshaw tied for the NCAA title in 1972. He was rookie of the year on tour in 1973 and has twice won the Vardon Trophy for low scoring average and twice been the leading money winner. One doesn’t do all of that just by working hard.

“I think a lot of it gets back to appearance,” Kite said. “I don’t look like someone who should be a star. I’m not tall, I wear thick glasses, I’m kind of pasty-faced, and I don’t hit the ball nine miles. People looked at someone like Tom Weiskopf and they saw a person who looked like a star. He was tall and good-looking, he had a good-looking swing, and everyone expected great things of him. The fact is, Tom had a good career. But because he didn’t win more than he did, a lot of people labeled him an underachiever. I’ve been labeled an overachiever. Probably, we both have achieved pretty close to what our ability has allowed us to achieve.”

There is no doubt that people look at Greg Norman, six feet one, with broad shoulders and flowing white-blond hair, and see a star. Years ago, the same comparison was true of Palmer and Nicklaus; one movie-star handsome, the other nicknamed “Ohio Fats” until he lost weight in his thirties. Nick Faldo looks like a movie star: Harrison Ford. Colin Montgomerie does too: Mrs. Doubtfire. But in 1994, Montgomerie was a better player.

If Kite has a secret, it is the Kite family competitiveness. His dad, Tom Sr., who worked for the Internal Revenue Service for thirty-five years, didn’t take up golf until he was an adult. When he first started playing, his friends laughed at him because he simply couldn’t keep up with them. For the next couple of years, Tom Kite Sr. got himself out of bed at sunrise and sneaked off to the golf course before work. A few years after taking up the game, he was a two-handicap and was consistently beating his no-longer-laughing buddies.

“Family trait,” Tom Kite Jr. says. “My grandfather was the same way.”

Given that, it is not surprising that once he discovered he had talent for the game, Tom Kite Sr.’s only son became addicted to it. The golf course became his playground, and he and his friends spent all their afterschool hours and all their summertime hours there. When he was eleven, Tom went to his first pro tournament, the old Dallas Open. By the time he got home that first day, he knew this was what he wanted to do for a living.

“I loved everything about it,” he said. “Of course a lot of kids announce what they want to be at eleven and then change their minds fifteen times, so my parents didn’t take it all that seriously.”

Maybe not, but when they moved to Austin two years later they took Tom, by then a single-digit handicap, to Austin Country Club and put him in the hands of Harvey Penick. If you lived anywhere near Penick and didn’t go to him for lessons, you were missing out. Everyone connected with golf knew who Penick was back then. But it wasn’t until he came out with The Little Red Book in 1991 at the age of eighty-nine that he became a nationally known figure.

By then, Kite had gone on to Texas and stardom on the tour. But there was one giant void in his record: no major titles. Kite had become the PGA Tour’s all-time leading money winner in 1988, but he still hadn’t won one of the four majors. He had been close, agonizingly close, on numerous occasions, but had never closed the deal. He had worn the best-player-never-to-have-won-a-major yoke for so long that it almost seemed as if he had been born with it tied around his neck.

Publicly, Kite bore the burden with a kind of resigned shrug of the shoulders. Yes, he said, he wanted to win a major. No, he insisted, it didn’t keep him awake at night. Yes, he thought people made too big a deal of it, but what the heck, that’s the way life is.

Inside, he burned. The inside of Tom Kite is a lot different from the outside. Peter Jacobsen does imitations of most of the tour’s stars and has had Kite in his repertoire for years. Jacobsen puts on a panama hat, pastes a wide grin on his face, and waves happily at the crowd. Then he hits a good shot and awkwardly shakes his fist and smiles some more.

Kite is a hail-fellow-well-met, always polite, always trying to make sure he says the right thing and doesn’t offend anybody. But, as with any great player, Kite has a mean streak, an edge that isn’t seen often but can spring up in the heat of the moment.

During the Ryder Cup, his good friend Davis Love was shocked when Kite, thinking that Seve Ballesteros and José María Olazabal were being given a drop they didn’t deserve, went ballistic. “All of a sudden he started running over to where they were dropping, screaming, ‘No, you can’t do that, that isn’t right!’ ” Love remembered. “I never heard Tom curse like that in my life. He was calling these guys every name in the book, his face was red as a beet, I mean he was mad.” Love paused. “I was standing there thinking, I’d hate to be one of his kids and have to come home and tell him I cracked up the car.”

Kite will never start throwing clubs around a golf course or get caught cursing with a boom mike around. But he will walk off to the side of a tee and quietly dress himself down for a mistake or, if he thinks his longtime caddy, Mike Carrick, has made a mistake, dress him down.

“Mike’s been with me thirteen years,” Kite said. “Which is definitive proof that he is a very patient man.”

The questions about his lack of a major title haunted Kite. He even became snappish occasionally when the subject came up, which it inevitably did, especially during major weeks. “That all should have ended in 1989,” he said. “But I gave the golf tournament away.”

The golf tournament in question was the U.S. Open at Oak Hill. Kite had a three-shot lead early in the final round and looked to be in complete command until he triple-bogeyed the fifth hole and then went completely off the deep end, shooting a horrific 78 to finish in a tie for ninth place, five shots behind the winner, Curtis Strange.

Kite was devastated. He felt he had failed, let everyone who cared about him down, and wondered—briefly, he says—if perhaps he just wasn’t meant to win a major. He knew he had given the golf tournament away. If someone had shot 65 the last day to go past him, that would have been disappointing but not in the same way. To shoot 78 with a major title in sight was not the way Kite wanted to be remembered.

“A lot of people helped get me through that,” he said. “Christy, Mike, Bob [Rotella], Mr. Penick. They just kept telling me that I had to look at this as part of the learning curve, a painful part, but to understand that no matter what people said or wrote, the dream was still out there.”

Kite managed to bounce back at the end of that year to win the season-ending Nabisco Championships, which gave him the money-winning title for the second time. Unfortunately, it also sharpened the focus on his ability to play well with money on the line but not with a major on the line.

The next two years were difficult ones. He dropped out of the top-ten money winners in 1990 for only the second time in ten years and then went all the way to thirty-ninth in 1991, the lowest he had finished on a money list since his rookie year on tour. It was the first time since 1976 (when he was twenty-first) that he was out of the top twenty. He did win a tournament in each of those years, but he wasn’t the same Tom Kite, the one who seemed to be on the leader board every week.

His low moment came early in 1992 when he wasn’t invited to the Masters for the first time in fifteen years. Kite has more top-ten finishes at the Masters (ten) than any active player on tour. But, since he hadn’t won in the year between the 1991 Masters and the 1992 Masters and was not a Masters champion, he wasn’t invited.

“I understood why I wasn’t invited,” he said. “But it was disappointing. If I was a foreign-born player, they simply could have given me an invitation as a foreign player. Greg Norman hadn’t won during that year either, but because he’s foreign-born, even though he’s a member of our tour, they invited him. I can’t say that I thought that was fair.”

Kite was forty-two, an age when most players are beginning to wind down. It certainly looked as if his days on top were behind him. A couple of months later, the week before the U.S. Open, instead of practicing or playing in a tournament to get ready, he took his family to Baltimore for the World Gymnastics Championships. His daughter, Stephanie, then ten, is an avid gymnast, and the Kites built a family vacation around the gymnastics championships.

Kite did sneak away to hit balls a couple of times that week at Cave Valley, a club near Baltimore where a good friend of his, Dennis Satyshur, is the golf pro. But most of the time was spent at the Aquarium or the Inner Harbor or getting his twin boys onto the field before a baseball game at Camden Yards. No grinding. Just fun.

Kite went from there to Pebble Beach and, as usual, hung around the lead for the first three days. For a while it looked as if Gil Morgan might run away with the event, but by Saturday night the field had bunched and Kite was in a three-way tie for second, one shot off the lead.

And then the wind came up Sunday. It wasn’t just blowing or swirling, it was howling, ripping through the golf course, making it close to unplayable. Twenty of the sixty-six players in the field didn’t break 80 that day. No one broke 70. Three players broke par: Colin Montgomerie with a 70 and Jeff Sluman and Nick Price with 71s.

When Montgomerie, playing in one of the earlier groups, holed out at 18 to finish at even-par 288, Jack Nicklaus walked up to him and said, “Congratulations, I think you may have just won the U.S. Open.” The conditions were so bad that Nicklaus was convinced that none of the ten players who had started the day at even par or better would be able to beat Montgomerie’s total.

He wasn’t far wrong. The conditions became more brutal as the day wore on. When Sluman somehow got to the clubhouse at one under, that looked like a potential winner too. But Kite was having one of those “zone” days when your concentration is so good you just don’t notice anything. He knew the wind was there, but it didn’t matter. He was just playing. At the tiny seventh, a torture test in the wind, he hit his tee shot way left of the green and looked like he would be lucky to make bogey. Instead, he chipped in.

The shot was as brilliant and unlikely as Watson’s chip at 17 in 1982 and, like Watson’s shot, it turned out to be the one that won the Open. Unlike Watson, Kite still had eleven holes to play. “Look at me on the replay sometime,” he said. “All I do is smile, then go get the ball and walk to the next tee. That was the mode I was in. It was, okay, that was good, now what do I need to do next.”

He kept doing it all day, keeping the ball in play, getting it in the hole. His lead on Sluman dwindled to one for a while, but a late birdie gave him a two-shot lead walking onto 18. Three very careful shots later, his ball was on the green and Kite was walking down the fairway knowing he had finally, finally won a major. He looked up and saw Christy and his parents by the green and began to cry.

“To have the career I’ve had and to finish without ever winning a major would have been brutal,” he said. “I mean, think about it. I’m a good player. I watched a lot of guys, who, well, I didn’t think were as good as I was, win majors. And I still hadn’t won one. That was tough to take. People talk about me being the leading money winner of all time, but I guarantee you what I want to be remembered for first and foremost right now is winning the U.S. Open.”

Two days later, Christy returned home to Austin while Tom flew east to honor a commitment. At Tom’s request, Christy took the Open trophy to Harvey Penick and handed it to him. “Tom wanted you to have this,” she said. “He never would have won it without you.”

The Open victory changed Kite and it changed his life. Winning a major changes any player’s public profile, no matter how well he might have been known beforehand. TV ratings for major championships are about double what they are for week-to-week tournaments and media coverage goes up a hundredfold. Curtis Strange says that winning the Open in 1988 changed him from someone who was occasionally recognized to someone who couldn’t get through a meal in a restaurant without being interrupted for an autograph.

Kite had a similar experience. He became a major celebrity, recognized wherever he went. He was invited to play in the Skins Game for the first time, and he was amazed at the number of people who wanted to come up and congratulate him.

Unlike a lot of players who find their newfound celebrity a burden, Kite didn’t mind. He is a private person and he wasn’t going to spend a lot of time doing Letterman and Leno if he won ten U.S. Opens. But the victory was such a relief, such an unburdening, that he didn’t care if a thousand people a day came up to him and wanted to tell him where they were when he chipped in at number seven. He reveled in it, and he started 1993 playing the best golf of his career. He won back-to-back at Los Angeles and the Hope and looked like he might turn the entire tour into a mockery.

But then he hurt his back and needed disc surgery. That put him on the sideline for three months. Amazingly, he almost won his first tournament back—the Kemper Open—in early June, finishing one shot behind the winner, Grant Waite. He also played superbly in the Ryder Cup, especially in the singles, where he hammered Bernhard Langer, shooting six under par for fifteen holes to close Langer out with ease.

That made him a spectator during most of the late drama, but that was fine with Kite. When someone pointed out that he should stop winning his matches so easily so he could get some more attention, he shook his head and laughed, “The sooner I get it over with the better,” he said. “I don’t need any more attention than I’m getting.”

He finished the year eighth on the money list, remarkable for someone who had missed three months. He turned forty-four in December but didn’t seem to be anywhere close to being finished.

“I hope not,” he said. “I still feel like I have a lot more to do.”

After all, he was probably the best player in the world who had never won a Masters, a British Open, or a PGA… yet.

“Well now, isn’t this a surprise. Look at these scores. Who would have predicted it?”

Tom Kite was sitting in the interview room after playing his first round at the Players Championship. He had shot a seven-under-par 65. That was one shot off the previous course record. It was also two shots off the lead. The course record was now 63. Just as Kite had predicted, the TPC was taking a beating.

The new holder of the course record was one Gregory John Norman, also known as the Great White Shark or, when he was striding the fairways listening to the shouts from his gallery, simply, Shark.

Low rounds were nothing new for TGWS but they seemed to come more often at the end of tournaments, when Norman would come roaring out of the pack to close a nine-shot lead to two or, on occasion, to catch the leader. In 1989 at the British Open, he had shot a masterful 63 on the last day at Royal Troon to pull even with Wayne Grady and Mark Calcavecchia and force a playoff.

He then birdied the first hole of the playoff. Only that didn’t make him a winner, because the British had gone—that year—from a sudden-death playoff format to a four-hole playoff. So Norman birdied the second playoff hole. So did Calcavecchia, though, and when Norman bogeyed the third hole (number 17 on the golf course) he and Calcavecchia stood on the 18th tee dead even. Grady was two shots back.

Calcavecchia, not wanting to gamble on finding the fairway bunker that yawned on the right side, played a three-wood shot safely into the short rough on the right. Norman, living up to his macho, go-for-broke image, pulled out his driver. In the TV booth, his good friend Jack Nicklaus was stunned.

“I can’t imagine what Greg is thinking taking out a driver here,” he said as Norman stood up to the ball. “The only thing he can do by hitting a driver is bring the bunker into play, which is the one place out there he wants to avoid.”

The Shark took a mighty swing, the ball flew well past Calcavecchia’s, and landed smack in the middle of the bunker. Nicklaus sighed. “Well, what he has to do now,” he said, “is play a wedge of some kind safely onto the fairway and hope he can pitch the ball close enough from there to make par. If he goes for the green from that lie, the best he’ll do is knock it in the bunker in front of the green. If he does that, he’s in serious trouble.”

No wedge for the Shark. Another mighty swing, another groan as sand flew near the green. Nicklaus was two for two. Calcavecchia, seeing where Norman was, played a perfect five-iron shot to eight feet. Now the Shark had to come up with a miraculous bunker shot, somehow make par, and hope Calcavecchia missed.

Miracles were the man’s specialty. His bunker shot flew from the bunker in the direction of the pin. It went over the pin, over the green, over everything until it got to the base of the clubhouse wall. The Shark was out of bounds. He never finished the hole. Calcavecchia rolled in the birdie putt, and it was over. On a day when Norman had played twenty holes about as brilliantly as anyone had ever seen, the lasting memory he would leave behind would be of that 18th hole: a hacker’s X.

Later, when Norman heard what Nicklaus had said on the telecast, he was upset because his friend had second-guessed him. But Nicklaus hadn’t second-guessed anything, he had first-guessed, questioning Norman’s shot selection before the disasters had occurred.

In many ways that day at Troon was a microcosm of Norman’s career. He has had moments of untouchable brilliance, days and weeks when his golf left everyone—including his fellow players—breathless and in awe of the shotmaking he produced. And yet, he has also had moments—like the final hole at Troon—where he has left even his staunchest supporters wondering what went wrong.

He has won a staggering sixty-five tournaments around the world during his career, but only twelve of them have come on the PGA Tour, along with two British Opens. Twelve tournament victories in twelve years on tour is nothing to be ashamed of by any means, but it is certainly not a record that causes the heavens to shake, especially when one considers the fact that Norman’s good friend Nick Price has won eleven times on tour in the last three years (and a British Open) while Norman, who has played extremely well since he ended his twenty-seven-month victory drought in 1992, has won three tour events during that period, plus the 1993 British.

Nevertheless, it is Norman who has parlayed white-blond hair, the Crocodile Dundee accent and devil-may-care attitude, and a memorable nickname into millions and millions of dollars. The only players in the history of the game who have made more money than Norman (on and off the golf course) are Palmer and Nicklaus, and he may yet surpass them.

Norman is almost always spectacular, whether winning or losing. In 1986, he led all four majors after three rounds and won only the British. He has lost a playoff in each of the four majors. When he won his first British Open, at Turnberry in 1986, the victory was built around an extraordinary 63 in near-hurricane conditions on the second day. When he won his second British seven years later, he did it with a final-round 64 that swept him past Nick Faldo, Bernhard Langer, and Corey Pavin. It was an almost perfect round of golf.

Norman can be charming when he wants to be, with a wisecracking, boys-will-be-boys sense of humor. He always seems to say the right thing when the little red light is on and is every TV producer’s dream. After all, if the Shark is in the hunt on Sunday, you know you’re going to have a show one way or the other. He is so close to CBS executive producer Frank Chirkinian that Chirkinian’s own people often tease him about the relationship.

Early in 1994, when CBS was about to go on the air for a second-round USA Network cablecast at Greensboro, associate producer Lance Barrow was sitting in the producer’s chair since Chirkinian had the day off.

“Okay, everybody,” Barrow said into the earpieces of his on-and off-air crew, “when we come on the air, we’re going to pick Greg up and follow him into the clubhouse.”

There was a long silence. Finally, somebody bit. “But Lance, Greg’s not playing here.”

“Okay then,” said Barrow, who had been hoping someone would fall for his setup, “in that case, we’ll find some tape of Greg and follow him into the clubhouse that way.”

Norman takes a lot of hits in the locker room and with the media (print, that is) because of his tendency to flop at the wrong moments and because the wrong thing will occasionally sneak out of his mouth. After his fabulous last round in the 1993 British Open, he said all the right things about how thrilled he was to win against a leader board filled with great players and about how much it meant to him to win golf’s most historic tournament for a second time.

But he couldn’t resist adding, “You know, I’m not usually one to brag, but I was in awe of myself out there today.”

Among the thousands of words Norman spoke that day, those were the ones that were repeated over and over again. Unfair? Sure. But when you have made millions being a public figure, you pay a price. Intellectually, Norman understands that, but emotionally he has had trouble dealing with it at times.

“I get in trouble because I say what I’m thinking too much of the time,” he said. “I’ve been burned a few times, and there have been times when I’ve found myself getting cynical, pulling back. Then I catch myself because I don’t want to be that way. That’s just not me.”

Price says that to understand Norman you have to remember that he is Australian. “I don’t want to stereotype,” Price said, “but Australians, generally, are very outgoing and friendly, very opinionated, and usually convinced that they are 100 percent right in every opinion they have. If you think about it, that’s Greg.”

Maybe that’s why he told a friend, “I’ll bet you I marry that girl,” the first time he set eyes on his wife, Laura. He had just boarded a flight in Toledo after the 1979 U.S. Open and she was working as a flight attendant. By the end of the flight, Laura had gone into the cockpit and told the captain, “I think I’ve just fallen in love with a golfer.”

“A golfer,” said the captain, an avid fan. “Which one?”

“I think his name is Greg Norman,” she said.

“No way,” the captain answered. “There’s no golfer named Greg Norman.”

Norman loves to retell that story, even adding a kicker about watching that same pilot almost lose control of a plane on a snowy runway while Norman waited in the terminal to meet Laura several months later. “I said to him, ‘You know, I may not be a famous golfer—yet—but I could probably land a plane better than that.’ ”

And of course he did marry Laura.

And yet Norman admits that behind all the brashness and swagger and arrogance, there is still a little boy who was afraid of walking into dark rooms, who woke up in the middle of the night screaming, convinced there were snakes under his bed.

He didn’t start playing golf until he was fifteen and then it took a family move to Brisbane to get him to the golf course in the first place. His mother, Toini, was an excellent player, a three-handicapper. When Merv Norman took a job in Brisbane and moved his family there, young Greg, without his friends from home, was a little bored and a little lonely, so he went to the golf course a couple of times to caddy for his mother.

He loved it there and began to play on his own. Seeing his interest, his mother bought him two Jack Nicklaus instructional books—55 Ways to Play Golf and Golf My Way. He devoured them and set out to learn the game. Within two years, he was a scratch player. He had played team sports when he was younger but found that he loved the individual nature of golf. You succeeded or you failed. You weren’t dependent on anyone else.

At eighteen, he announced to his parents that he was abandoning his idea of joining the air force and training as a fighter pilot to pursue a career in golf instead. He played in amateur tournaments for the next couple of years before becoming an assistant pro for $28 a week. At twenty-one, he won his first tournament and $7,000. He thought he had hit the lottery. He won another tournament in Japan shortly after that and got paid in cash. “I remember sitting on a bed in this hotel room with like a zillion yen all over the room,” he said. “I thought I’d never need to work another day.”

He played the European Tour after that, working to hit the ball lower than he had hit it in Australia. He was very long back then—“John Daly long,” he says—but he knew he hit the ball too high, so he worked in Europe on hitting the ball lower in the swirling winds that often prevail on courses there. In 1982, after five years in Europe, he decided he was ready for the American Tour.

He already had his nickname by then. Early on, the Australian media had started to call him the Golden Bear Cub, because of his young Nicklaus-like length and a friendship with Nicklaus that had started when they lockered next to one another at the Australian Open in 1976. But that never caught on. In 1981, he led the Masters after two rounds and they brought him into the interview room.

Everyone wanted to know his life story and Norman was only too glad to tell it, complete with stories about going shark fishing off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The next morning, Norman picked up the newspapers and there were the headlines: “Great White Shark Leads Masters.”

A logo had been born. Norman had played in the States often enough by the time he came over full-time that he wasn’t as intimidated as he once was by all the big names. He quickly became friends with both Nicklaus and Palmer, who saw greatness in him and offered to help him in any way they could.

He lived at Bay Hill for several years before moving to the Palm Beach area near Nicklaus because, according to Norman, “Barbara Nicklaus convinced Laura that the schools were better down there.”

He made his first big splash in 1984 when he won twice and lost a playoff for the U.S. Open title to Fuzzy Zoeller. Even though Zoeller killed him in the playoff, winning by eight shots, a lot of golf fans remembered the three spectacular saves Norman made coming down the stretch on Sunday to force the playoff.

Two years later, he was the dominant player in the world. He was in position to win at all four majors. Nicklaus caught him on Sunday at the Masters, he faded at the U.S. Open, won the British, and lost the PGA in dramatic fashion when Bob Tway holed a bunker shot at 18 to beat him by a shot.

Tway’s shot was the first in a series. Eight months later, Larry Mize holed his 100-foot chip to beat Norman in a playoff at the Masters, and in 1990 Robert Gamez eagled the 18th at Bay Hill from the fairway and David Frost knocked one in from a bunker at New Orleans to turn Norman wins into Norman near-misses.

Those four shots became a part of any Norman chronicle. When people wondered why Norman hadn’t won more majors, Tway and Mize immediately came up. No doubt both shots were once-in-a-lifetime propositions. But it should be remembered that Norman had a five-shot lead on Tway with nine holes to play and shot 40 on the back nine. He had to let Tway back into the tournament for Tway to win. And, in 1986, Norman bogeyed the 18th at Augusta, first to give Nicklaus his win, then to let Mize and Seve Ballesteros get into a playoff with him.

Chokes? Perhaps. But to be fair, when a player gets into position to win as often as Norman, there are going to be times when he succeeds and times when he fails. Norman always seems to save his most spectacular failures for the moments when the most people are watching.

And, while some of his fellow pros whisper that Norman is a choker and point out—accurately—that he almost always comes up with some rationalization for his failures, his constant presence in the spotlight has made him a very wealthy man.

When a management company sits down with a corporation to sell a client, the question asked is not “How much has he won?” but “How visible is he?” That is why you can’t watch golf on television for five minutes without having John Daly’s face pop up on your screen. Daly has won three tournaments in his life, but anyone with even the mildest interest in golf knows who he is: he’s the guy who hits the ball nine miles.

And Norman was (and is) the Shark. There he was, every Sunday, smiling that killer smile for the cameras, win or lose. He didn’t always win, but he always got noticed. Corporate America loved him.

By 1990, Norman was a multimillionaire with a very good playing record, even if it didn’t match his notoriety. And then, for more than two years, his game virtually disappeared. He went from winning $1,165,000 (and the money title) in 1990 to $320,000 in 1991, a precipitous drop that landed him fifty-third on the money list.

Norman says now that he let down mentally, stopped working as hard as he had in the past, and kept trying to find something new in his swing that would “take me to another level.” He laughs when he says that and adds, “I succeeded brilliantly. I found a level about five levels down from where I’d been.”

He went from March 1990 to September 1992 without a victory. His obituary as a player was written several times during that period. The headline might have been “Golfer, 37, succumbs to too much.”

Norman wanted everything: he wanted to win all over the planet; he wanted a hand in all his business ventures; he wanted to cash in on the easy $75,000 a day that corporations were willing to pay for outings, and he wanted to be a father too.

It was all too much. By late in 1991 he was at wit’s end. Another Australian player, Steve Elkington, had been trying to get him to see his teacher, Butch Harmon, for months. When Norman went to the range one afternoon in Houston and couldn’t even come close to hitting a decent golf shot, he turned to Elkington and asked him if Harmon was anywhere to be found. Since Harmon lives in Houston, he was found easily and Norman asked him to take a look at his swing.

“No need,” Harmon said. “I’ve seen you swing. Just take out a two-iron, move a little closer to the ball, and swing as hard as you can.”

Normally, Norman takes orders about as readily as a cat in heat. But he was in such a state of shock about his game—“If I tried to hit the ball left, it went right; right it went left; straight, forget it, completely out of the question”—that he simply followed Harmon’s instructions. He stood on the practice tee drilling shots for several hours.

“I just wanted him swinging at the ball,” Harmon said. “We worked later on shortening his swing a little bit for accuracy, but the important thing was to get him taking a crack at the ball again. He wasn’t swinging like Greg Norman.”

What he had been trying to do, even though he would never admit it, was swing like Nick Faldo. Beginning with his British Open victory in 1987, Faldo had become the game’s best player, winning five majors titles—two Masters and three British Opens—in five years. Much was made of Faldo’s complete rebuilding of his swing in mid-career with David Leadbetter. The key to Faldo, or so the thinking went, was mechanics. He understood every single inch of the golf swing. Norman tried to be more mechanical. It didn’t work.

By the next summer, Norman was beginning to feel better about his game. He had made a decision at the end of 1991 to rededicate himself, physically and mentally, to the sport. He looked in the mirror and saw a man who had not yet lived up to the vast potential everyone had seen in him and decided that rather than walk away, wealthy but unfulfilled, he would work harder than he ever had in his life.

He started a conditioning program that took off fifteen pounds and turned him into the closest thing to a hardbody that you were likely to see on tour. When Davis Love went to work out with him one day early in 1994, Norman picked up a medicine ball and suggested they play catch with it. Love isn’t exactly a pushover at 6-foot-4 and 180 pounds, but when Norman began throwing the ball to him, he felt completely overmatched. “It was like in those cartoons, where the guy throws you the ball and it knocks you through the wall,” Love said. “I knew Greg was in shape, but I didn’t really know just how strong he had gotten.”

Norman stayed up late less and got up early more. He forced himself to be less involved with business and he went back to the regimen of his youth, hitting balls on the range for hours and hours. Slowly, his game came back. At the British Open in July 1992, he finished in 18th place while Faldo was winning, but he walked off the 18th green after a 68 in the last round (no one shot lower that day) and announced to Harmon, “I’m back. I was making the ball talk out there today.”

Six weeks later, he won the Canadian Open, and he started 1993 by blowing the field away at Doral. “I played the best golf I think I’ve ever played and I lost by four shots,” Paul Azinger said. There was no doubt then that the Shark was back trolling.

Still, Doral ain’t Augusta, and when Norman started out with 74 at the Masters five weeks after Doral and went on to finish thirty-first, it looked like the Shark was back but up to his old card tricks—the ones where you fold under pressure. When he missed the cut at the U.S. Open it was more of the same.

It was Tom Watson who had counseled Norman to stay patient after the Tway-Mize-Gamez-Frost series of miracles. Watson hadn’t been beaten quite as dramatically or as often as Norman, but he could remember leading the U.S. Open at Winged Foot in 1974 after three rounds and shooting 79 the last day. and Larry Nelson’s 60-foot putt at the 1983 U.S. Open that had stolen a chance for back-to-back titles from him.

“You know something, Greg,” Watson said one day, “when you bite that snake’s head off, the SOB will stay dead forever.”

For Norman, who still had those memories from boyhood of snakes under his bed, the metaphor was just right. Over and over again he told himself that someday he was going to bite the damn snake’s head off and then never have to deal with the wretched thing ever again.

The snake finally died at Royal St. George’s. Norman started the tournament with a double bogey the first day but, for once, didn’t get ruffled. He played the last seventeen holes six under par and stalked Faldo through the first three rounds. He was one shot back of him and Corey Pavin starting the final round, a familiar position. The consensus that morning was that Faldo was the man to beat because he had proven in the past that he didn’t let majors get away when he had them in his sights. The snake, it seemed, never bit Faldo.

This time, the Shark did. Faldo played superbly—shooting 67. So did Bernhard Langer, who was tied with Norman one shot back starting the day. But that wasn’t good enough. Norman was in the zone all afternoon. He walked onto the first tee and decided, instead of trying to hit a fade or a draw the way he normally did, just to hit the ball as straight as he could. “The ball took off like it was on a clothesline,” he said, smiling at the memory. “After that, I just knew that nothing was going to bother me.”

He was perfect for eighteen holes, except at the 17th green when he somehow missed a one-foot putt. Even so, he still had a two-shot lead on the 18th tee. Did any of the old memories creep back into his mind? He swears no. He hit a perfect drive and a perfect four-iron to the green. No one would catch him this day, no one would hole out to steal a victory from him. He had shot 64, the lowest final round ever by the winner in British Open history. At thirty-eight, he had unwritten the obituaries. The snake was dead.

“I honestly believe this is only the beginning,” he said. “I think I can play great golf until I’m forty-five.”

He almost added the PGA title to the British, losing on the second hole of sudden death to Paul Azinger. Twice he rimmed the cup—“paint jobs,” the players call such putts because they hit the painted cup and spin out—on putts that would have ended the tournament. They hit paint but didn’t drop. Azinger won. No one called Norman a choker though. He had put that label to rest at St. George’s.

At least for a while.

When Norman began the first round at the Players, he had no idea that he was about to do something special. He had played well at Bay Hill, finishing sixth, and thought his game was rounding into shape for the Masters. Even though the Players is an important tournament, Norman saw it only as a warm-up for Augusta.

“If I’m going to be honest with myself, the thing I want to do most before I stop playing is win Augusta,” he said. “I love everything about the tournament. I love the course, the clubhouse, the way it’s set up, everything. I’ve been so close so many times that I’ll really feel as if I’ve missed something in my career if I don’t win there at least once.”

Norman was paired for the first two rounds at the Players with Tom Watson and Davis Love, a glamorous grouping. He was comfortable playing with Love. They often played practice rounds together and both worked with Butch Harmon. With Watson, it was more of a competitive thing. Watson had done a lot of the things in golf that Norman hadn’t.

There was mutual respect between the two men, but there was also a simmering rivalry. Watson was as shy and private as Norman was outgoing and gregarious. Each probably wished he could be a little more like the other, but didn’t quite understand the other’s chosen lifestyle. Norman could no more shut down and go off to spend winters in Kansas City than he could fly to the moon with a jetpack.

It was already sticky and humid when the three men teed off on the back nine at 9 o’clock in the morning, and Watson made it clear right away that he had come to play, birdieing the first two holes. There was little of the usual Thursday morning chatter. Watson and Love talked hunting, comparing guns briefly, and Norman and Love talked airplanes for a while. That was it. Like Watson, Love birdied the 11th and Norman found himself staring at a 10-foot birdie putt of his own wondering if his playing partners were both planning to shoot 60.

“It was like, ‘Whoa fellas, wait for me,’ ” he said later. “You start out Thursday morning, you’re just trying to clear cobwebs, get your footing, and post a decent score. These guys came flying out of the gate.”

Norman made that birdie putt. At their fourth hole—the 13th—Norman hit a mediocre six-iron onto the green way right of the pin. The putt was over hill and dale and seemed to take twenty minutes to reach the hole. It went in. Suddenly, Norman was energized. This day might turn out okay after all. He birdied the next three holes. Now it was Watson and Love who were wondering what was going on. When he birdied 18, Norman was out in 30 and the large gallery that had started the day with the group had doubled. Was 59 possible on this golf course?

Maybe. Norman birdied one and two, giving him seven birdies in eight holes. While they waited on the third tee for a group to clear the green, Love, who wasn’t exactly hacking it around at four under, sidled over to Watson, who had slowed down and was just one under.

“You may not have noticed this, Tom,” Love said. “But Greg’s playing pretty well.”

Watson just rolled his eyes. Norman was human the last seven holes. He made just one more birdie, but he never came close to a bogey and finished with 63. There was just one small problem: this was Ponte Vedra, not Augusta. If he could bottle the feeling he had and hang onto it for two weeks, life would be perfect.

“You can’t really worry about peaking too soon,” Norman said. “Your job is to get your game on-song before the majors so you don’t go into them searching for something. If you do that, then it’s just a matter of having things go your way that week.”

Norman was certainly on-song. He was hitting the ball as long as he ever had and more accurately. He was putting with complete confidence, and he never seemed to miss a green. In fact, en route to the 63, he missed exactly one green, catching a greenside bunker at number seven. He blasted to four feet for the easy par.

Often, when a player shoots a spectacular first round, he will come back to the field the next day. At the Players, Lee Janzen had his best round of the year on Thursday—a 65—then came back with 75 the next day. Any golfer will tell you that the toughest round to play is the one after the great one because, no matter what you tell yourself, you are going to be disappointed when you aren’t making birdie on every hole the way you did the day before. Everything seems hard and frustration comes faster.

Norman would have had every right to be frustrated Friday. A lengthy rain delay in the morning meant the afternoon players wouldn’t get to finish their rounds before dark and would have to wake up early the next morning to finish and then come back after a break to play the third round in the afternoon.

Nothing was going to shake the Shark though. He followed the 63 with 67–67–67. By the time he was through on Sunday evening, he had shot 264—a staggering 24 under par—and Tom Kite, who finished tied for ninth, fifteen shots behind Norman, was no doubt saying, “I’m not going to say I told you so, but I told you so.”

To be fair to the golf course, Norman might have run amok anywhere in the world during this week. He made one bogey in seventy-two holes and that didn’t come until the 14th hole on Sunday when he had left the field in his wake. It is also worth noting that only two other players, Zoeller at 268 and Jeff Maggert at 271, were way under par. Hale Irwin was fourth at 276—12 under. Nonetheless, having the tournament record broken by six shots certainly lent legitimacy to Kite’s claim.

For Norman, it was another week of superlatives. The media went gaga over his performance, as usual, and even the most cynical players had to shake their heads and concede that he had put on a clinic. Then again, some of them couldn’t resist one last comment. “Great performance,” several of them said. “Let’s see how he does at Augusta.”

Even Norman had to agree that was a fair question. He was convinced, however, that he had the answer.

While Norman was making a mockery out of the final hours of the Players, the rest of the field was attempting to accomplish some less spectacular feats.

Nick Price, the defending champion, showed up sick and played sick, missing the cut by five shots. Janzen followed his uplifting 65 with three mediocre rounds and finished thirty-fifth. Paul Goydos, who had sneaked into the field on the strength of his play during the first ten weeks of the season, was in the last of the dog groups Friday afternoon and had to grind until the last hole on Saturday morning to make the cut. He did—right on the number at 144—and looked at that accomplishment as a huge bonus.

“I’m so exhausted I can’t even see,” he said. “I’ve played eight straight weeks now and I’ve made every cut. I need a break to catch my breath.”

Part of Goydos wanted to play the next week in New Orleans—he had even been asked to play in the shootout there—but he knew he couldn’t handle it. He missed his family and knew he needed two weeks off. When he had made his schedule at the start of the year, he had figured on a four-week break in late March and early April since he wasn’t in the Players, the Masters, or the Heritage Classic. New Orleans came between the Players and the Masters, but he had decided to skip that too rather than fly cross-country for one tournament.

But because he had played so well, Goydos had gotten into both the Players and the Heritage. That meant his break would be two weeks. The good news was he was playing well enough to get into top-drawer events. The bad news was he was spending more time away from home than he had planned. Without Wendy and the two kids, Goydos was lonely and he felt guilty about not being home when Courtney or Chelsea had a sore throat or an ear infection. But he knew it was part of the deal on tour.

If he wanted to know more about dealing with the loneliness, Goydos might have consulted Bruce Fleisher. Ten years earlier, Fleisher had dropped off the tour during what should have been the prime of his career. He was thirty-five, but he was totally burned out by the life, he hated leaving his four-year-old daughter, and he had never fulfilled the dreams he had brought to the tour thirteen years earlier.

“I could never really adjust to the idea of being mediocre,” he said. “I realize, intellectually, that being on the tour means you’re one of the best players in the world. But emotionally, when you go week after week finishing tenth or twentieth or fiftieth, it beats you down. I came out thinking I would set the world on fire, I think most guys do. When you figure out that isn’t going to happen, you have to adjust your thinking. I had trouble doing that.”

Fleisher had left home at seventeen to find a way to play golf for a living. He was the son of immigrant Jews, his father having escaped Austria in 1939 while he was studying to be a rabbi. According to Bruce, Herbert Fleisher never really recovered from what he saw during the Holocaust. His own father, a rabbi, was killed by the Nazis, and he and his mother fled to England. Although he eventually built a successful life for his wife and four children as an engineer, he had seen so much suffering as a boy that he never seemed to find joy as an adult.

“I remember having him up to visit and play golf a few months ago,” Fleisher said. “We played eighteen holes on a beautiful course on a perfect day. Dad never said a word until the end of the round when he looked at me and said, ‘I remember you used to hit the ball much longer.’ I just said, ‘Yeah, Dad, but now I hit it straight.’ ”

Fleisher was a phenom as a kid. Although his father kept the family moving—“always searching for the perfect job”—it was in Wilmington, Delaware, that Bruce and his older brothers discovered golf. They all caddied and played at a club called Pine Valley (not the Pine Valley). Bruce was the star. He eventually was able to parlay his golf skills into a scholarship at Furman. He lasted less than a year there before flunking out. “I hadn’t done enough work in high school to deal with real college work,” he said. “I knew what I wanted to do—play golf.”

He found a place where he could play golf and do the classwork, at Miami Dade Junior College. His game got better and better, and in 1968 he shocked the golf community by winning the U.S. Amateur, wearing the same pair of frayed dungarees through all four rounds. The runner-up that year was Vinny Giles, one of the most distinguished amateurs in the game’s history. Fleisher, at nineteen, ragged pants and all, was just a little too good for Giles and everyone else.

A year later, he turned pro, and after losing out in a playoff at his first Q-School, he made it the second year. He had just turned twenty-two, he was a newlywed, and stardom was definitely in his future. “I had a lot of game,” he said, shaking his head. “I just couldn’t quite figure out how to use it on tour.”

He wasn’t exactly a washout, but he wasn’t a star either. He struggled to keep his card through the 1970s, always having to play in Monday qualifying since he never cracked the top sixty. Those weren’t easy days, driving from one tournament to another, wondering from week to week whether he would be playing. But at least he had Wendy with him wherever he went and they had a core group of close friends who shared the trials and tribulations with them.

Then, in 1979, Wendy got pregnant. Their daughter, Jessica, was born in March 1980 on the last day of the Tournament Players Championship. Fleisher finished his round that afternoon, called home, and was told Wendy was in labor. He raced down I-95 to Miami as fast as he could and arrived shortly after Jessica was born.

She was doing fine, the doctors told him. There was some concern about Wendy, though, a problem with the anesthesia. The situation quickly went from bad to worse to near-tragic. Something had gone wrong in the delivery room, the doctors weren’t exactly sure what it was, but Wendy was very, very sick. The day after Jessica was born, she was brought into her mother’s room and laid on top of her because the consensus was that Wendy wouldn’t live through the night.

She did live, but for four months she was never completely conscious. By the time she came home from the hospital she weighed sixty pounds. It was a year before she could walk and talk normally. The trauma all but knocked Fleisher off the tour for the next year, and when he came back it was difficult to get motivated even though Wendy and Jessica were both doing fine by then.

“I just couldn’t put my heart and soul into the game the way I had,” he said. “To succeed out here you have to go out every week and think that it’s life and death. I knew after what happened that it wasn’t. I had seen life and death, lived with it for weeks and weeks. That first year, psychologically, was brutal for both of us. Now I look at Wendy [who has recovered completely] and I see a walking miracle. But it took a long time for both of us to get to that point. It was a long, tough haul.”

In 1984, Fleisher was offered a club pro job in Florida. The money was good, he would be able to stay home, and he thought the time was right. He would have had to go back to Q-School that year if he wanted to play the next year anyway, so he decided to hop off the merry-go-round.

For most of the next six years, he stayed home. Occasionally, during the quiet summer months in Florida, he would play mini-tour events or, when he was offered a sponsor exemption, a tour event. By 1989, though, he was starting to feel itchy. Whenever he did play in a tournament, he played pretty well. Jessica was going to be ten, Wendy was back working…

“It was Wendy who pushed me to try it again,” he said. “She just knew it was something I wanted to do, that I still felt I had the game to compete out here. I finally decided, what the heck, let’s give it a shot.”

He played in some tournaments overseas in 1990 and in some Hogan Tour events, trying to get sharp for Q-School. He didn’t make it though the school, though, and had to play on sponsor exemptions in 1991. He was taking a week off in July when he got a phone call on a Wednesday afternoon from Jon Brendle, one of the tour’s rules officials. There had been some last-minute withdrawals from the New England Classic. Fleisher was on the entry list, so if he could get a flight, he could play in the tournament. Fleisher arrived late that day and, without benefit of a practice round, led the tournament after two days.

On Saturday, he shot 73 to drop back in the pack. “All I wanted to do Sunday was have a good round and make a decent check,” he said. “I wasn’t even thinking about winning. Then everything started dropping. The whole thing was almost mystical.”

When his last birdie putt dropped on 18, he had shot 64 and had a one-shot lead. Ian Baker-Finch birdied 18 to tie him, and the two men went to a sudden-death playoff. Back and forth they went, Baker-Finch missing putts that could have won for him; then Fleisher missing chances. By the time they got to the seventh playoff hole—the 11th at Pleasant Valley—dusk was starting to close in.

Fleisher hit his second shot left of the pin, about 50 feet away. Baker-Finch, 15 feet away, had the much better birdie chance. Fleisher’s putt rolled in; Baker-Finch’s rolled just right. Twenty-three years after winning the U.S. Amateur, seven years after retiring, Fleisher had won his first PGA Tour event.

In addition to being worth $180,000, the victory gave him a two-year exemption and turned him into a full-time touring pro again. Two years later, with his exemption coming to an end, he returned to Pleasant Valley and finished tied for second, behind Azinger. For the year, he earned $214,279, which kept him comfortably in the top 125 at eighty-first.

He was off to a good start in 1994, having made eight cuts in a row coming to the Players. A tie for fourteenth at the Hope and a tie for ninth at the Honda had pushed his earnings to close to $66,000, about halfway to the $130,000 most players thought would be needed to make the top 125 in ’94. His goal at the start of the year had been to make $400,000. That was a long shot, but the start was encouraging. He would be forty-six at the end of the year, and each year he kept his card put him one year closer to the magic fifty mark when he could take his game to the senior tour.

On the regular tour, Fleisher was never a long hitter and, with each passing year, it becomes tougher and tougher for him to keep up. He was ranked 176th in driving distance during 1994, his average tee shot coming up 45 yards short of John Daly’s average tee shot. That puts him at an extreme disadvantage. But on the senior tour, where the courses are considerably shorter, Fleisher would do just fine averaging 244 yards off the tee, and with his accuracy (fifth on tour in ’94) and his touch around the greens, he stands to make a good deal of money in the future.

But that is still four years away, and Fleisher would very much like to stay on tour during that time. He knows it will not be easy.

The Players is one of the richest events on tour. It has a purse of $2.5 million, more than double the payout at the average event. Making the cut is worth a minimum of $5,000 and a top-twenty finish is worth at least $30,000. Fleisher started out on Thursday with a comfortable 70, two under par. The cut looked as if it would come somewhere around even, so he had some cushion to work with on Friday.

By the time he reached his last hole of the day—the par-five ninth—the cushion was used up. He was two over for the day and even for the tournament. Fleisher was almost certain even par would make the cut, not so sure about one over. The ninth is a birdie hole, a long par-five that isn’t always reachable but should, at the very least, provide the chance to hit a wedge from close to the green to set up a short birdie putt.

Fleisher had been working with a new caddy in ’94 because Tommy Mascari, his longtime caddy, had decided he had seen enough of the road and gone home. At the ninth, he and his new caddy, Rick Wynn, took a long time deciding what club to hit. Fleisher thought he might be able to get home with a driver. He had a good lie on the fairway, and he was thinking a birdie would not only cinch the cut, but give him a leg up on the weekend. Wynn agreed.

But Fleisher pulled off the driver in mid-swing, hit the ball way left, and ended up making a bogey on the hole. He then had to sit around and wait until Saturday morning to find out officially what he had been fairly certain of unofficially on Friday: he had missed the cut by one shot.

A bogey at a par-five is one of tour golf’s greatest sins. Any six on a scorecard is considered a crime against yourself. To bogey a par-five to miss the cut is pretty close to being a capital offense.

Fleisher was devastated. He had let a potentially big payday, one that could have (with a good weekend) just about erased any doubts about the top 125, slip away. He was angry with Wynn, who he felt should have counseled him to be more cautious, given the situation.

“I made the decision, I hit the shot, I ultimately have to take the blame,” he said. “But one of the things your caddy is there for is to call you off when you have a mental lapse. I had a mental lapse there, and it was his job to say, ‘Whoa, let’s back off a little bit here. Make sure we get par and then make our move on the weekend.’ I was struggling a little bit that day and a bold play wasn’t the right play.”

Fleisher knew blaming the bogey and the missed cut on Wynn was unfair. But he couldn’t get it out of his mind. He stewed about it the next two weeks while he was at home, trying to decide whether or not to fire Wynn.

“I should have fired him after the Players,” he said. “I hadn’t been all that comfortable with him to begin with and, whether it was fair or not, I lost confidence in him after that. In my position, any distraction is going to create a problem.”

Fleisher missed three more cuts before he fired Wynn. He had now dug himself into a rut and he couldn’t seem to climb out. He made only two cuts from March through July and added only $7,705 to his earnings. Ten years after retiring, Fleisher didn’t want to retire again. He would need a strong finish if he didn’t want to find himself back at school at the age of forty-six.