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.

1   2   3   4

Part Four

What had happened was that several well-known pros had cornered Norman in the locker room and chewed him out. They told him to stop clowning around, said he had to dress better and have his teeth fixed. It was a harrowing experience for someone who was already painfully shy and socially ill-at-ease, and Norman never went back. He doesn't like to talk about it now. When Maue told me the story, Norman looked at his feet and said quietly, "It stopped me from having fun." The conventional wisdom about Moe Norman's golf game is that he hits the ball extraordinarily well despite an extremely peculiar golf swing. "Moe's swing is not fundamentally sound," Bob Toski told me recently. "He gets away with it, I think, because by intuition and by instinct he played that way when he was young. He has great hand and eye coordination, and he has great hand and arm strength. But he doesn't have the posture of a good player, where the arms look more relaxed and hanging from the body. He has very little bend from his waist. I think he's another Lee Trevino--he's a freak. And I use the word in a complimentary sense. He learned his golf swing intuitively, he learned it by trial and error. He didn't understand the fundamentals.''

Trevino is an interesting comparison, because if you asked other pros to name the best ball-striker among active players, Trevino would get a lot of votes. Are he and Norman really freaks? Or could there possibly be an advantage to having a golf swing that doesn't look like Bob Toski's?

Similar thoughts occurred to a Chicago businessman named Jack Kuykendall. In the early '80s, Kuykendall was a middling middle-aged golfer with Walter Mittyish fantasies of making it as a pro. The senior tour was beginning to attract a lot of attention. Kuykendall's handicap was 12. At 44, he decided to devote the next six years of his life to finding out once and for all whether he had the right stuff to play for money on TV. Two years later, after many hours of hard work, Kuykendall's handicap was two strokes worse. Frustrated and discouraged, he decided the problem lay not in himself but in the golf swing. "I was convinced," he says, "that there had to be an easier way to hit a round object on the ground with a stick."

Overthrowing the modern golf swing is a major undertaking. Kuykendall peddled his system for several years without much success. Then, one day, after a clinic in Florida, Kuykendall was approached by a Canadian pro named Mark Evershed. "Mark came up to me and said, 'You're talking about Moe Norman.' I still remember my reaction. I said, 'What's a Moe Norman?'" Evershed sent Kuykendall a videotape of Norman's swing, and Kuykendall was flabbergasted. Point by point Norman's swing matched the one he had devised.

"Scientifically, what Moe does is perfect," Kuykendall says. "It's what we call an ideal mechanically advantaged golf swing. It is maximum force with least effort. It's as perfect as a human being can do. Incidentally, the second best is Lee Trevino's. Most people think of his mechanics as unorthodox, but that's only because it's not what they're used to seeing. "But Lee Trevino and Moe Norman are very, very close in their swings. If Trevino moved his right hand under the club a little more, he and Moe Norman would be identical. The closest on tour right now would be Paul Azinger. He has a single-axis right-hand grip, like Moe's, but he also has something that hurts him--a super-strong left-hand grip. Moe's left-hand grip is about as weak as you can make it. Azinger, because of his strong left hand, has to block the ball by spinning his hips to get the clubface square at impact, to keep his left hand from shutting the clubface down. If he moved his left hand to neutral and stopped spinning his hips, he would be almost unbeatable. He would be Moe Norman."

Kuykendall set out to get in touch with Norman, but had no luck for two years. Norman seldom talks to people he doesn't know. Kuykendall persevered, though, and eventually Norman agreed to meet him in Florida, where Norman was spending the winter.

"I spent an hour going through the science with Moe," Kuykendall says. "When I finished, Moe stood up and pulled some film out of his pocket and threw it on the table. He said, 'Here, take this. You can help someone with it.' It was some old black-and-white pictures, from 1966, of what he called his best swing ever. He said, 'All my life I've wondered why I can do what I can do with a golf club. And you are the first person who ever explained it to me.'"

"Mr. Uihlein told Moe that Titleist would like to shoot a video," Kuykendall told me, "so that his swing would never be lost. The Titleist booth had one of those big blocks of video monitors, and Moe said, 'Can I be on there next year? Can I be on there next year?' And Mr. Uihlein said he could."

Uihlein then told Norman that Titleist would like to pay him $5,000 a month for the rest of his life.

"Moe looked kind of funny," Kuykendall says. "He took a step backward and said, 'I've played your balls all my life. I've played your balls all my life. What do I have to do for that money?' And Mr. Uihlein said, 'You don't have to do anything. You've already done it. We just want to thank you for what you've already done.'

"Mr. Uihlein said that Moe was in the same league as Ben Hogan and Bobby Jones and that he deserved the same kind of respect. Moe didn't say anything. He just went kind of limp, and he almost went into shock. I thought he was going to pass out. By that time, the hair was standing up on my arms, and all of us who were there were about to cry. Moe and I had to go do a clinic right after that, and in the car on the way there, Moe said, 'Jack, I don't know if I can hit the ball.'"

The Titleist stipend has made a huge difference in Norman's life. He still lives in the same motel room, eats all his meals in inexpensive restaurants and keeps his clothes in the back seat of his car. But he doesn't have to worry about money anymore. Eight years ago, Norman told Gus Maue that he was worried he'd never be able to afford to get back to Florida, saying, with deep sorrow, "My days are through." Today, he can go anywhere he wants.

Even more important, Norman has finally received the kind of recognition that throughout his playing career he felt he was denied. He sometimes grumbles that his induction to the hall of fame came 20 years too late, but he is nonetheless pleased to be there. Recently, he has even begun to talk about returning to competitive golf, perhaps by playing some events on the U.S. senior tour.

Although the hall of fame induction was a great honor, most people who hear Norman's story end up feeling that a huge opportunity was missed. If circumstances had been different--if he'd had a sponsor, if he'd had a mentor, if other players had been kinder, if he had worked harder on his putting--could he have dominated the PGA Tour?

The more I think about it, though, the more I think the question misses the point. The most striking fact about Norman's competitive record is not that it falls short of Hogan's or Nelson's or anyone else's but that it exists at all, especially if Norman is disabled in anything like the way people who know him speculate that he may be.

Norman overcame gargantuan obstacles as a young man and then went public with a golf swing that provoked titters. He set out to learn how to hit a golf ball, and he worked at it until he could do it better than anyone else--maybe better than anyone else who ever lived. His succeeding required skill and courage and self-assurance on an almost inconceivable scale.

The difficulties Norman endured undoubtedly took a toll on him. "When the sun goes down," Gus Maue says, "Moe is a very, very lonely man. He goes back to his motel room and turns on the TV. He's fine during the day, because he can play golf, but at night he doesn't know what to do."

That's Maue talking, not Norman. Norman speaks freely about injustices he feels he's suffered, but he doesn't dwell on the dark side of his life. For all he's been through and all the hard times he has seen, it is not his sorrows that stand out.

Norman with a golf club in his hands looks to me like a happy man. Even back in the days when he practiced till his hands were bleeding, golf for him was a source of joy. It was that attitude, as much as anything, that got him into trouble with various authorities--as in the tournament in which he came to the final green with a three-stroke lead, intentionally putted into a bunker, and got up and down to win anyway. It was also that attitude that sustained him.

"Golf is to have fun," he told me toward the end of our conversation, repeating a theme he had brought up before. "What do you have to lose? A lousy ball, that's all. If you lose yours, grab another one out of your bag and hit it. That is what the game's about, and that is the first thing I was taught 55 years ago: have fun. Most golfers don't see the bright things. All they see is the bad things.

"But if you see the bad things, that's where your mind will take you. If you drive a car down the road and look at the sidewalk, where do you think you're going to put the car? It's the same thing on a golf course. People see only the trees and the water. But I don't. To me, they are only there as an ornament. They are there to make the course look nicer. All I see is the tee, the middle of the fairway, and the middle of the green. That's golf. I hit my 18 fairways and my 18 greens, and go on to the next day."

"Gee, Moe," I said, "it must be boring for you." "Like heck it is," Norman said. "That's fun."

1   2   3   4