"Hi Matt, it's Greg Norman"

Just as when you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dyin’ day, when you identify as a Shark Man – a Great White Shark Greg Norman Man – you’re a Shark Man for good.

And even when he’s backing Trump, and getting nude, and erecting statues of himself, that’s the way it’s gonna be, little darlin’.

You’re a Shark Man. It’s your job lot.

Because grow up in the 1980s watching him swagger and swashbuckle about, this great, square-shouldered, confident, thrusting, hawk-nosed UberMan, equal parts surfer, spear-fisher and world champion pants-man, and he’s winning and grinning, and winning again, and smashing the little white rock with Persimmon drivers that thocked as sweetly as Viv Richards’ SS Jumbo belting a Kookaburra out the ground at the MCG.

Oh! Sharky! My Sharky. Thrill me, big man.

I saw him at Royal Canberra once, as a boy. It was unbelievable. Whacking the ball, cutting corners. Flogging it. He was just this big, white-haired… Beast. Larger than life. A hero. Kids don’t forget that stuff. It stays with you. Moulds you. You play golf like Sharky. You dress like Sharky. And you just love the big Sharky man forever.

And thus when, in later life, he puts a statue of himself in his backyard you cut the man some slack. And you think, “I can look past that.” For it’s just Sharky being Sharky. Was not one’s favourite Prime Minister Bob Hawke verily up himself too? He was. More than a tad.

And I remain a Sharky Man. And when he rang me last year to talk Sharky for the chapter in my golf book loosely titled ‘Sharky’, I was nigh-on squealing schoolgirl on the blower with Justin Bieber. It was the same when I met Dennis Lillee (in the Kingston Hotel, with Mike Veletta, might’ve been ’93) – couldn’t speak. Shook hands like a wet fish. Afterwards I licked my hand like it was covered in hoi sin sauce.

Ha. No I didn’t.

Dennis has a statue too, although not in his backyard. (Image: Flickr/zoonabar CC BY-SA 2.0)

But when my phone rang with ‘private number’ at the very time I’d been told Greg was going to ring while on the road in Florida, I was afraid. It was like, “Oh dear sweet Dennis Lillee, no. It’s Sharky. On the phone. What am I gonna do?”

But I pressed the button and squirted out “Hello” and remembered my name, and Greg Norman said, “Hi Matt, it’s Greg Norman.”

And I thought, “Wow, he sounds exactly like Greg Norman.” And I managed to bring the vocal octaves down a notch. And thanked him and so on. And we got into it.

And we had a magnificent yarn. And he was totally good and giving and honest, and it was just like two blokes yapping about our mutual love and favourite subject: Greg Norman.

No – golf.

Well, and Greg Norman.

Both.

That’s how it was: I enjoyed talking about Greg Norman to Greg Norman, and Greg Norman enjoyed talking about Greg Norman to me. As you would. And for an hour we banged on about the adventures of Greg Norman: roller-coasters at Augusta National, precision driving at the Open Championship, drinking beer and playing cards with Arnold Palmer in the locker room at Bay Hill.

How good? Really, really, really good.

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After I’d exhausted my questions I said, throwaway line, “Thanks mate, I’m done, anything you can add?” And boom – Greg was away again. And for another 45 minutes, we yapped away into the night.

So much so that I had all these leftover quotes that I later stuck together and asked could I turn into a foreword? And Greg read it and wrote back “bloody brilliant”. And that quote got on the promos. And “Foreword by Greg Norman” got on the cover. And the gravitas flowed like fine wine.

It was quite bloody nice of him. Didn’t have to do it. Just did a cobber a solid.

Anyway, so I wrote the book and sifted through golf history, and came out the other end concluding, as a Shark Man, that Shark Man deserves to live forever in the pantheon with the great ones: with Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen and Bobby Jones, With Tiger and Gary and Arnie and Jack. With Byron Nelson, Sam Snead, and gentle Ben Hogan. And the rest of the 20 or so Legends of the great game.

But he doesn’t, really, does he, the Shark? Because status – wrongly, my opinion – is built on major championships. And that should not be the only pertinent man-marker. Else you’d assert the robotic Hale Irwin (three US Opens) or James Braid (five-times Open champion when the field was effectively he and two other guys) are better than Greg Norman (two-times Open champion). And that would be a lie. And you would go to Hell for even thinking it. You would.

Rather, my greater test of golf greatness posits that the best-of-the-best must dominate their era. You can’t compare Tiger Woods to Bobby Jones to Young Tom Morris re: how far they hit the ball or suck it back out the sand. But you can compare their effect on the game, their greater fame outside the game, their domination of it in their time. And those three mentioned were gods.

And so was Great White Shark Greg Norman.

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Oh? He’s a choker? Wash your mouth!

Okay, once or twice. Sure. But everyone is. Everyone gets tight. Everyone wants it. Jack Nicklaus got tight. Choked. He won 18 majors, sure, but he ran second or third 28 times. And he gave away a few of them by playing like poop under the pump. Fact. Ask Jack, he’ll tell you.

Arnold Palmer was holding a 7-iron in the middle of the 18th fairway at Augusta while leading the 1961 Masters, and whacked it in the sand. Then he thinned it over the back and finished with a double and gifted the jacket to Gary Player. Did Arnie choke? Too right he did. Is he one of the greats. Of course.

And so’s my man, Greg Norman.

Sharky was world No.1 for 331 weeks. Only Tiger Woods (683 weeks) has been ranked top man longer. Daylight’s third. Then Nick Faldo (97 weeks) and Rory McIlroy (95). There follows Dustin Johnson (69), Seve Ballesteros (61) and Luke Donald (56).

Tom Lehmann was world number one on April 20, 1997 until his reign was ended on April 27, 1997 by – of course, you betcha – my man the Shark Man, Greg Norman.

Yes, yes – world rankings only began in 1986. And retrospectively the likes of Jones and Hagen and Nelson, and all the rest, may have notched long numbers atop.

And, oh shit, yes – of the 520 weeks in the decade known as the 1970s, Jack Nicklaus would’ve been number one for 500 of them. Gary Player, Lee Trevino and Tom Watson may have snuck off with the top man mantle while Jack was fishing for tarpon in the azure waters off Majorca, but Jack owned the ’70s like Tutankhamun owned stuff made of golf.

Of the 40 majors in the 1970s, Nicklaus was top ten in 35 of them. He was only cut once. His record in the Masters across the decade reads: 8, T2, 1, T3, T4, 1, T3, 2, 7, 4. In any conversation of The Greatest, it begins and ends with Jack Nicklaus. As in: Jack was the best, the end.

In 1980 Jack turned 40 and finished T33 at Augusta, and scribes of the day scratched their sideburns and declared that given he hadn’t won a PGA Tour event in 1979 (the first time since he’d turned pro) the Golden Bear’s prime time was done. Within a few months he’d won the US Open and US PGA, and finished T4 at the Open Championship. And the scribes leaned back over their Olivetti X55s and typed words to the effect of: we don’t know what we’re talking about.

Our Sharky’s had his critics over the years (ha) and has reacted not unlike most of us do when criticised, and that’s to not like it. That his golf game and state of mind was being analysed and critiqued by 18-markers who’d choke in contention on their Wednesday arvo stableford comp, didn’t … I dunno. He didn’t like it. As you would not like it.

How would you like it? Say you’re a plumber and someone gives you gip about a toilet with all the expertise of having used one. You wouldn’t cop it.

And Sharky didn’t cop it.

And he remains my man.

Even in the nude.

The Trump thing, not so much.

This article was originally published on Patreon.