by David Owen. Originally published as a 20 page cover story in Golf Digest of 1995, believed to be the longest article the magazine devoted to a single player.

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Part Two

When you first see Moe Norman hit a golf ball you wonder, Why on earth does he swing the club that way? After you have watched him hit half a dozen 250-yard drives out of a divot, though, you begin to wonder, Why on earth don't I?

On the practice tee at Foxwood Golf Club not long ago, Norman warmed up with a pitching wedge, although "warming up" doesn't really describe any part of Norman's practice routine. The first shot was perfect, the second was identical to the first, the third to the second, and so on. Then he switched to his 4-iron. His swing--for all appearances, a nearly effortless half-swing--was the same with the 4-iron as it had been with the wedge. The shots came one after another, just three or four seconds apart. "How far you hitting those?" a spectator asked. "One-eighty," Norman said. Every shot was within a few degrees of dead straight, despite a stiff crosswind, unless he announced ahead of time that he was going to hit a draw or a fade. The divots were identical (surreally rectangular scrapes that Norman calls "bacon strips.")

Norman switched to his driver. Once again, the swing was the same. If you watched only his arms and hands, you wouldn't know that he wasn't still swinging his wedge. After hitting one ball, he would watch it a moment, then bend over and place another on the tee--and I mean place it. The tee never came out of the ground. In fact, it didn't move a millimeter.

"I hit balls, not tees," he explained. On a driving range once, he hit 131 drives in a row from the same tee without having to straighten or adjust it. In tournaments, he sometimes entertained galleries by hitting drives from the mouth of the bottle of Coke he had just been drinking.

"Oh, dear, I loved that tee," Norman said wistfully. "I had it for seven years."

Before Norman's demonstration on the practice tee, he and I had spent some time together in Foxwood's unpretentious dining room. It was there, about a month before, that he had been inducted into the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. The audience at Norman's induction was limited mostly to friends. At his request, the dinner was served family style.

As we talked, Norman held a putter and fiddled with his grip, or rolled a golf ball in his palm. He often finds it easier to be with children than with adults, and if a child is present he will sometimes pull a ball from his pocket and start an impromptu game of catch. I had been told that it might be hard to get him to talk, but that once he had started, it might be hard to get him to stop. He didn't look me in the eye at first, but gradually he seemed to relax. Bit by bit, with numerous digressions--all of them related to golf--he told me about his life.

"It's tough to do things when you're broke," he said. "Hitchhiking to tournaments, sleeping on park benches, sleeping in bunkers. I slept in bunkers all over Canada. You name it. I'd go and shoot 61 or 65, win the tournament, then hitchhike back on the highway with my TV set or whatever my first prize was, soaking wet. Couldn't afford an umbrella then. Sometimes I had to put my golf bag over my head. Nobody would come to my rescue, not back then. This was back in the early '50s. I was born in '29."

Norman grew up in a small house in a working-class neighborhood in Kitchener, an industrial city about 1 1/2 hours outside Toronto. The house was just 1 1/2 blocks from a Uniroyal Tire factory. The sky was often black, the air smelled of burning rubber. Money was very tight.

Norman's grade-school years were difficult. He had trouble getting along with other children and with other members of his family. He struggled in all subjects at school, except math, at which he was a prodigy. He also had a phenomenal memory. Today, he can recite the yardage of virtually every golf hole he has ever played, and he remembers every golf shot from every tournament that meant anything to him. He has a reputation as a deadly cribbage player because he remembers all the cards.

When Norman was a child, other children teased him mercilessly over his academic difficulties, his shyness, his big ears, his high voice, and his tendency to repeat himself. 

Norman's first golf club was a tree branch he and his older brother used to knock balls around their yard; his second was a hockey stick. At the age of 12, he began caddying at a local club called Westmount. He bought his first real golf club, an old 5-iron, from a member who let him pay it off at 10 cents a week. "Oh, I was as happy as a pig in s---," he told me. "I had a steel-shafted club." Norman was left-handed, but the member was right-handed, so he switched.

Norman practiced in his family's tiny backyard by hitting balls against a neighbor's garage. He rapidly developed a local reputation as a golf terrorist. When he would break a neighbor's window--as he did 11 times in two years, usually because he was aiming at one--he would shout, "Bull's-eye!" He built his golf game against enormous odds. The other members of his family made fun of him for playing what they viewed as an effeminate game and called him a sissy at the dinner table.

Norman told me: "My father used to say, 'Come on, play a man's game. Play hockey or baseball.' I said, 'No, Dad, I'm too light.' I was a little skinny kid then, wasn't over 130 pounds. I couldn't play any other sport and be good at it so I kept playing golf. But my father wouldn't let me bring my clubs into the house. I had to hide them under the front porch."

When he wasn't aiming at the neighbors' windows, Norman practiced in a field at a nearby public course. When I referred to this field as a driving range, Norman laughed. "Nobody had ranges then," he said. "It was only a field, maybe 200 yards long. I had to wait till there was nobody playing to hit my driver. And the grass was tall. We had to use our irons to cut the grass down to fairway height, in a little square, and hit our balls from that."

Norman carried his cherished collection of battered golf balls in an old canvas bowling bag. After he had hit them all, he would drop the bag among them and chip into it. Fear of losing his balls in the tall grass increased his desire to hit straight shots. He often hit balls until his hands were bleeding. When the blood made his grip slippery, he wiped hands on his golf towel and his pants, and kept hitting balls until it was too dark to see. When he got home, he looked as though he had spent the afternoon slaughtering chickens.

Norman assembled his swing by feel, with a few clues gleaned from photographs in newspapers and magazines, and occasional encouragement from a kindly local pro. His progress was not immediate; he didn't break 100 until he was 16. But gradually his golf game fell into place. By the time he was 19, he felt he had his swing "trapped." From that point forward, he says, "I knew I could hit a golf ball where I wanted it to go for the rest of my life."

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