Masters of Men

PROLOGUE

Greg: and other grown men who have choked over a three-footer

'Choking is surreal to observe because it often involves a world-class performer, someone who has spent a lifetime honing his skills and touch, suddenly looking like a novice, his highly refined technique is replaced by a curious mixture of twitching and lethargy; his demeanour is overhauled with confusion; his complex motor skills, built up over thousands of hours of practice, seem to vanish into the ether.'

- Matthew Syed, Bounce:
The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice

Arnold Palmer needed only a par on the 72nd hole at Augusta National to win the 1961 Masters title. He had already struck what seemed a perfect approach shot and, briefly, Palmer suitably responded to the cheers of the crowd as he walked the final fairway to the 18th green. However, when finding his ball in a greenside bunker, everything changed for quite possibly the greatest bare-knuckled golfer in the rich history of the game. Arnie would overshoot the green from the sand. As it happened, he would eventually record a double bogey for the tournament's 72nd hole. And Arnold Palmer would hand over the green jacket to the tidiest competitor in the world, South Africa's Gary Player, by one shot.

Augusta National, more than any other golf course ever built, has encouraged a great many outstanding men to flounder on a Sunday afternoon, and helplessly find their tightly packaged golf games come undone. Some of them have been true greats of the game. Some have choked spectacularly and without much warning, some more dramatically than Arnie, whilst others have been just plain sad in their hasty demise in East Georgia.

In 1979, Ed Sneed reached the 16th with a three-shot lead, but bogeyed the hole, also dropped shots at the 17th and 18th, and handed his ticket to glory over to Fuzzy Zoeller. In the 1980 Masters, Tom Weiskopf tried five times, from the same spot, to clear the water at the 12th hole with a seven-iron, before finally holing out for a 13. In 1985, Curtis Strange had the competition in the palm of his hand, but on the two par-fives, the 13th and 15th, which offer such hope on the back nine, he twice sought the green in two shots and twice ended up in water. In 1989, Scott Hoch blew putts from four feet and three feet, on the 17th and on the second play-off hole, and allowed Nick Faldo to slip through and win the green jacket. In 2003, Jeff Maggert was the leader after 54 holes and he played exceedingly well on the final day, carding five birdies and 11 pars, but he triple-bogeyed the par-four third hole, and took eight shots on that now notorious par-three 12th, forfeiting his chance of winning a first major. In 2009, Kenny Perry needed only to par the last two holes for victory, but bogeyed each and lost his play-off to Angel Cabrera.

But nobody, absolutely nobody, has ever imploded at Augusta National as spectacularly as the Great White Shark, Australia's blond, blue-eyed, big-shouldered hero, Greg Norman, who literally fell to his knees on the 15th hole as he closed out his final round in 1996 and offered up his putter to apparently vengeful gods, as he lost a six-shot overnight lead and the Masters title to Nick Faldo, shooting a preposterous 78 on the final day to the eventual champion's 67.

In Bounce, Matthew Syed writes how a lifetime of practice allows sportsmen and women of all gifts and crafts to 'automate' their stroke-making. 'Many hours of practice have enabled him to code the stroke in implicit rather than explicit memory,' writes Syed. 'Russell Poldrack, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, has conducted a number of brain-imaging experiments to trace the transition from explicit to implicit monitoring that occurs over many hours' practice. He has discovered that the prefrontal cortex is activated when a novice is learning a skill, but that control of the stroke switches over time to areas such as the basal ganglia, which is partly responsible for touch and feel.

'This migration from the explicit to the implicit system of the brain has two advantages. First, it enables the expert player to integrate the various parts of a complex skill into one fluent whole,' continues Syed, further explaining, 'something that would be impossible at a conscious level because there are too many inter-connecting variables for the conscious mind to handle. And second, it frees up attention to focus on higher-level aspects of the skill such as tactics and strategy.' Syed asks us to understand the transition by thinking how we all initially learned the many different hand, foot and eye skills necessary to drive a car, and how these many different skills are ultimately performed by us all with perfect calm, and without any conscious control. Syed also introduces his readers to the workings of Sian Beilock, a psychologist at the University of Chicago.

'Once [a motor skill] is de-chunked, each unit must be activated and run separately. Not only does this process slow performance,' states Beilock, 'but it also creates an opportunity for error at each transition between units that was not present in the integrated control structure.'

Choking, therefore, and alas, is a neural glitch to which every single sportsman and woman is potentially vulnerable.

'It is not the pressure in a pressure situation that distracts us into performing poorly,' Beilock further explains. 'The pressure makes us worry and want to control our actions too much. And you cannot think your way through a routine, practiced action, like making a three-foot putt. Compare it to quickly shuffling down a flight of stairs. You could do that without thought.

'But if I asked you to do it, and at the same time think about how much you bend your knee each time or what part of your foot is touching the stair, you would probably fall on your face.

'That's what happens when people choke. They try to think their way through the action.'

That first week of April in Augusta, Georgia, in 1996 was of the glorious kind, and Greg Norman had marched for three days, in complete control, half godlike, half John Wayne strutting his way down the main street of a hushed, utterly respectful town.

On the Saturday, Norman had gone head-to-head with Britain's calm, plodding champ, Faldo, and heroically increased his lead from four shots to six by the end of the 18 holes. After that, Norman relaxed a while in the semi-darkness of the first-floor locker room at Augusta National, the room reserved for the non-champions who turn up each year.

The locker room for champions is on the second floor of the clubhouse, with a sign on the door insisting 'Masters Club Room - Private'. A guard stands sentry during the week of the tournament.

The honour of entering the room is accentuated by the fact that it holds only 28 oak lockers, each with the brass name plate of a past Masters champion, and each containing the green jacket belonging to that champion. With new champions having to share lockers with some of the past winners who no longer play or who have passed, the exclusivity of the room is immediately apparent, with its distinguished, old-world charm further enhanced by the three card tables in the centre of the room, all containing bridge scorepads, and reminding everybody who enters of the club's age and history.

Norman had been last off the course that Saturday evening in 1996. The attendant had turned the lights off in the locker room for non-champions and gone home. Norman was unable to switch them back on, so he sat there.

'Your last night in this locker room!' a friend had happily informed him.

'Damn. I hope so!' Norman replied.

Then, Peter Dobereiner, the distinguished but ailing English golf writer who had always championed Norman, grabbed him by his shoulders and gushed: 'Greg, old boy. there's no way you can fuck this up now!' His rounds of 63, 69 and 71 had him at 13 under par, six ahead of Faldo and seven ahead of a 25-year-old Phil Mickelson.

Norman was famed for living his life in a larger-than-life manner, for hunting sharks, and flying air force jets. 'He stroked bull sharks sleeping in underwater caves; drove at 190 miles per hour in Lamborghini Diablos on desert highways; hugged the wall at 180 miles per hour in Roger Penske Indy cars; and ran out of oxygen eighty-eight feet below the sea and rose to the surface no faster than his own bubbles, suffering from only a mild case of the bends,' recounted Lauren St John in Shark: The Biography of Greg Norman.

Norman was also a distinguished businessman, signing off deals valued at tens of millions of dollars at a time. Very early in his career, he had taken to arriving at tournaments in his Rolls-Royce. He had 73 victories to his name on golf courses all over the world, though he had also finished second 52 times in his illustrious career. He knew what it took to win.

He also knew what had gone wrong when he nearly won!

Ten years earlier, Greg Norman also led the Masters going into the final round, when he shot a 70. He knew full well that a pushed approach shot on the 72nd hole had left him with a bogey and a missed chance of bringing Jack Nicklaus into a play-off. The evening before the final round in 1986, in the press room, Norman as the tournament leader had told everyone gathered around him to be respectful, and not just expectant.

'You still have to respect the old girl. When the pressure's on. you still have to be careful,' Norman stressed.

The first time he played Augusta National, in 1981, five years after turning pro, Norman had the honour of...