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Golf requires grace and suppleness, but it proceeds at the sort of stately pace that maximizes the opportunity to choke. With long periods between shots, players are apt to paralyze themselves by thinking about the consequences of a series of motions that will bring a few square inches of club face into contact with a tiny ball 3 ft. away from one's hands. Norman argues counterintuitively that he needs butterflies to perform well. The trick, he says, is to channel that nervous energy into concentration, and he does this with the confidence born of hitting many thousands of practice shots.
At the highest reaches of golf the difference between winning a major or finishing second may be a vulnerability that surfaces only once every several hundred strokes. Norman remembers vividly how an awkward hillside shot on the 18th fairway during the last round of the 1986 Masters exposed a flaw in his balance during his swing. As he puts it, his stance made him "get stuck" during his swing, causing him to shoot wide of the green. Instead of putting for a routine par, which would have put him in a play-off with Jack Nicklaus, he ended up with a tournament-losing bogey.
That blown chance gnawed at Norman, and so during a sweltering week this past July, he decided to take his first golf lesson in ten years. He called in Phil Rodgers, a slouching, laconic, former touring pro. Viewing the hundreds of balls tightly clustered around various targets on the practice fairway at Florida's Loxahatchee Golf Club (only two could be said to be errant), an observer found it hard to believe there was any flaw in Norman's game. But Rodgers noticed that he was standing about half an inch too close to the ball, and that during Norman's swing his hands had to hurry to catch up. The flaws were tiny, but still serious enough so that Norman could occasionally "get stuck," costing him perhaps a stroke every four rounds, costing him perhaps the Masters in 1986.
Rodgers advised Norman on his hip movement, club movement, follow-through. At that moment Norman's world had shrunk to the precise point where the club meets the ball. The two men inspected the club face to see what the dirt pattern disclosed about the way the club was meeting the turf, and Norman, the $10 million-a-year athlete and "bear apparent" to Nicklaus, absorbed the advice with the eagerness of a novice.