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The son of an engineer, Norman grew up in Townsville, Australia, in subtropical Queensland. The prevailing Australian ethos held that "if you don't get hit, it isn't a sport," so Norman played Australian Rules football, essentially a riot with goalposts. When he was 16 his mother, a low-handicap amateur of Finnish descent, gave him two of Nicklaus' books. The boy read them and decided to give golf a try. It soon became clear that the late starter was a prodigy. Greg's father Merv recalls that he made "phenomenal progress," shooting par within 18 months of first picking up a golf club.
Pivotal to Norman's golf development was Charlie Earp, a teaching professional who wisely sought to harness rather than change the young man's adrenal urges. He encouraged Norman to hit the ball as far as he could, arguing that once you had length you could work on control. Norman now averages 280 yds. a drive; 260 yds. is considered good for a top pro. A few years back, during a pro-celebrity tournament at Gleneagles in Scotland, a wind-aided Norman drive measured 483 yds. Under Earp's tutelage Norman began cleaning up in amateur tournaments, and at 19 he took a $28-a-week job as assistant pro at the Royal Queensland Golf Club. There, playing for large sums with local high rollers, he learned to perform under pressure.
While many of today's touring pros are the product of golf academies and genteel collegiate teams, Norman, like Ray Floyd and Lee Trevino before him, took a tougher road. "The gambling gave me a killer instinct," he asserts. With his minuscule salary, he could not afford to lose. In one match Norman was three holes behind with four holes left to play. Several hundred dollars in the red, he pressed (essentially doubling the stakes) on the 16th and then again on the 18th. Had he lost he would have had to cough up a nonexistent $1,200; instead he ended up $800 ahead. That night, after dinner, he went out and gambled and won again, pitting his extraordinary hand-eye coordination against local pool hustlers. Norman has not forgotten the match-play skills he acquired during those early years. He is a three-time winner of the Suntory World Match-Play Championship, a British tournament that provides the sole opportunity for the world's top pros to compete head to head.
Norman is legendary for his grit. In one 16-hole stretch during this year's AT&T-Pebble Beach tournament, he picked up ten shots to tie the leaders. Again, in this year's Masters he started the final day eleven shots off the pace. It was preposterous for Norman to think of winning, but Greg reasoned that if he lowered the course record by a couple of strokes he might spook the rest of the field. He shot a record-tying score of 30 on the front nine, and as late as the 15th hole was in sight of shooting an incredible 60 before he ended up with a near record round of 64.