SIDELINE CUT:SO THERE is life after 50, at least on the golf course. The startling return of Greg Norman to the pinnacle of world golf - at least until this evening - must have made men of a certain generation think there just might be time to climb Everest after all, or form that rock band, writes Keith Duggan.
Golf is kinder than most sports when it comes to allowing its best competitors to wring a few extra years out of their talents. Nonetheless, breezing in at 53 and showing the best players in the world how it's done takes some chutzpah.
Norman was, after all, 42 on the Sunday of his fascinating and terrible loss of nerve/luck when Nick Faldo hunted him down in Augusta 12 years ago. Back then, Norman was the epitome of glamour and vitality, sporting the blondest mop of hair since the heyday of Jon Voight and a smile like the headlights of a juggernaut. He was golf's leading man in the period just before Tiger Woods came of age and blew the field to smithereens with the force of his personality and potential, and golf was fast reduced to Woods's race to rewrite history.
Many sports stars come to define an age and Norman surely belonged to the period when Bill Clinton was a young president on the rise, when the sports world was lit by names like Michael Jordan, Pete Sampras and Eric Cantona and when Oasis were rock hooligans on the rise.
So for anyone watching the British Open, it is as if Norman literally stepped from a different time. For sure, you may sometimes see a brief glimpse of the Great White pottering along in the nether land of some competition or other, playing because he happened to have his yacht moored near the course or because he fancied meeting the Golden Bear for dinner, or whatever.
But surely we imagined his serious sporting days were behind him and he would be remembered as the strapping Aussie with the luminous smile who, for all the macho panache, was a choker.
And yet here he was, in the murk and rain of Liverpool, roaring back into the modern game and sitting top of the leaderboard late yesterday afternoon. Tiger, halfway through a career as temperate and brilliant as Norman's was wild and mesmerising to watch, was thousands of miles away, resting a blown-out knee and watching the Open on satellite. Pádraig Harrington, the defending champion, was battling a damaged hand as well as the capricious wind and hail rushing in off the Irish Sea, and overall, the leaderboard began to resemble a madly shuffled deck of cards, throwing all kinds of retrospective names into the hat and pushing the bright young things into double figures.
The most regularly quoted statistic about Norman is that in 1986 he led all four Majors after the third day's play but was victorious in only one, the British Open. Jack Nicklaus edged him out at Augusta. In the US Open, he led by one shot on the final day at Shinnecock Hills but finished 12th behind Ray Floyd. He had four strokes on the field going into the last 18 of the PGA at Inverness, where Bob Tway ended up as winner. Those names all belong to an era of golf that already seems distant and that is why the sight of Norman charging around a golf course against men half his age seems all the more thrilling and absurd.
This, after all, is a sportsman who went into the twilight accepting that, fairly or not, his public, if not his peers, regarded him as a big-time loser. There were always two views about Norman. He was somewhat flash and self-satisfied - it was after the third day of play during his second Open triumph, in 1993, he made the fatal observation, "You know, I was kind of in awe of myself out there" - and he revelled in a lifestyle that sounded both extravagant and exhausting, a multi-continental tour featuring private jets, golfing, boating, surfing and fine wines, a modern-day Jay Gatsby of the PGA circuit.
His sunny vanity and radiant sense of enjoyment pissed some people off. Yet throughout the series of cruel Major disappointments - there wasn't much he could do about the wonder chip from Larry Mize in the 1987 Masters play-off - he kept on showing up, cleaning up at the workaday tournaments and seeming to accept the gruelling losses with unfailing grace, as if they were proof the world cannot be absolutely perfect.
That laissez-faire attitude to defeats that would have crushed other men was sometimes interpreted as proof he lacked the animal need of the great champions, the demonic need for private validation through winning, winning and winning more. Norman at least appeared to shrug away the series of failures to close out tournaments from great positions, most poignantly after that disappointment against Faldo, against whom he had always enjoyed the most primal and macho of rivalries. "It's not the end of the world," he said that day.
And it wasn't. Although his profile in golf diminished over the next decade, as the game desperately sought a worthy adversary for Woods's slow march through the history books, Norman continued to treat the world as a kind of personal pleasure dome, deepening his business interests with the same offhand winning touch that made him the number one golfer on the planet for 331 weeks running.
None of that explains what he is doing leading the British Open in 2008. By his own admission, he turned up at Birkdale with precious little practice behind him and cannot really be classed as a full-time player anymore.
Irish hopes ride high going into this morning's play, not just with Graeme McDowell but Harrington's storming finish yesterday suggesting his famed resilience could yet see him make a stirring defence of the prize he won in such dramatic circumstances a year ago.
But everyone will be keeping an eye on Norman. The natural laws suggest he will fade away as the competition grows fierce today and produce the famous smile and admit he enjoyed it while it lasted. But if he is still up there on the leaderboard this evening, golf fans all over the world will be asking the same question: Just how is Norman going to blow this one? If history is anything to go by, the Shark will lose in a play-off. To David Duval.
