Collapse Calls For Pity More Than Censure

God, but this was painful to watch.

A man bled to death on a golf course. Right in front of us.

The life leaked right out of Greg Norman. And if you took any pleasure at all in witnessing this, then your heart is as hard as a tombstone.

Nick Faldo won the Masters Sunday, and for the third time. But that isn’t the story. The story is Greg Norman, the most tormented soul in all of sports.

Just when you were certain that Norman had exhausted every tragic twist, had used up every possible calamitous ending, here he came with a new one. The slow, lingering collapse.

It is a wart upon us as a society that we take a cruel and heartless pleasure in mocking any player, any team, that succumbs to pressure. We revile them.

What Greg Norman did Sunday was beyond choking. Yet I cannot bring myself to write a harsh word about him. I feel only profound sympathy for him. He deserves our compassion, not our scorn.

And it needs to be on the record that Norman conducted himself with extraordinary grace and composure. He was quick to embrace Faldo after the last putt fell. He submitted, without complaint, to a long and thorough inquisition.

In fact, he seemed less stricken than the rest of us.

“It’s not the end of the world,” he said, though surely it must have felt like it.

He has accepted his lot and he is able to do so because he is convinced that he will win a Masters one day. He is convinced that good things await him. And just about the time you think this will be his ruin, you remember that every time he has finished second he has come back to finish first. There is no reason at all to think he will not rebound from this. You need a silver bullet to kill him.

In fact, I submit that he is the most resilient athlete in sports.

“I’ll get up tomorrow and get ready for more golf,” he said. “There must be a reason for all this. I think there’s something waiting for me down the line that will be good for me.”

As he sat there and talked philosophy and destiny, so calm, this thought occurred: If he were a baseball player, he would have been destroying the dugout. If he were an NBA player, he would have been assaulting a referee. But he is a golfer, and while they are not without flaws, theirs is a sport that demands self-control, and Greg Norman was demonstrating that now.

What befell him was grisly and hypnotic in a perverse way. It was as though he stood on the first tee Sunday and a man reached over and, meaning well, plucked at a loose thread on his shoulder, and very soon the whole sleeve just dropped off.

That’s what happened to Norman; he came apart in pieces. It took him only 11 holes to squander a 6-shot lead. After 16 holes, there had been a swing of 10 strokes. From now on, his will be the yardstick against which all fold-ups are compared.

But he endured it all with admirable stoicism. Indeed, the only time his emotions betrayed him were at the 15th when he nearly pitched in for an eagle. When the ball burned the lip of the cup, he flopped on his back on the grassy slope and kicked with his legs once, and then he scrambled to his feet and put back on his face of Zen.

I have witnessed almost all of Norman’s eight runner-up finishes in major golf tournaments, and this was the one time I didn’t think he would buckle.

He had played all week with a serenity that seemed almost mystical. His pre-shot routine had been slowed down drastically. He was meticulous over the ball. He seemed to have wrapped himself in a cocoon of concentration. He reminded you of a vintage Jack Nicklaus.

And there were other clues that this Masters was meant for him. Errant drives bounced out of the trees and into the fairway. Short shots that usually dribble back into the water stayed, instead, on the banks. Everything seemed to scream that his turn had come at last.

And then he let one stroke slip away and then another and another, and soon he was paralyzed over the ball. He would stand over a putt and seemed unable to draw the blade back. You knew he was through, then.

As it turned out, Faldo shot 67, which was a couple of strokes higher than even he felt he needed to shoot. If Norman had only shot par 72, he would have won by a stroke.

Faldo didn’t take any pleasure in what happened to his opponent, and that, too, is what separates golfers from other athletes. As they watched Greg Norman being turned slowly over the spit, they couldn’t help but think: There but for the grace of God go we.

When the Masters was his, Faldo was like the rest of us, torn apart by watching what Norman had to endure. Like the rest of us, Faldo was at a loss for words.

So he did a truly wonderful thing. He came to Norman and looked him in the eye and said: “I don’t know what to say. I just want to give you a hug.”

Norman said it moved him to tears.

“I know I’m a winner,” Norman said. “I lost today and I’ve lost before and I’ll lose again. But I’ve won my share, too. And I’ll win some more. I know I’m not a loser in life.”

Amen. Amen. Amen.