Another Outrageous Chip - and Another Defeat for Greg Norman

12 April, 1987, US Masters, Augusta

Greg Norman first encountered Augusta National, home every April to the US Masters, in 1981. 'It was the most beautiful course on the most beautiful expanse of real estate I had ever seen. The sense of history was powerful. It was as though I were walking in the footsteps of past golfing greats.' A love affair had begun. A long hitter, aggressive in his iron play and a bold putter, the Australian was made for Augusta. He finished fourth in that debut appearance, while a bogey on the last cost him a place in a play-off for the championship in 1986, the year when he won The Open and became the first golfer to hold the lead going into the final day of each major.

In the last tournament of that sequence, Norman came to the final green of the USPGA Championship knowing that two putts would almost certainly secure him a play-off and, with his opponent Bob Tway in the greenside bunker, might even be good enough for a win. But Tway's bunker shot disappeared into the hole without even bouncing. Norman could not match him and the title went to the American.

Norman shut out the memory of what had happened eight months earlier when he and Larry Mize reached the 11th green for the second hole of their 1987 sudden-death Masters play-off. Mize had grown up near Augusta, was virtually unheard of beyond there and was left with a difficult chip to a green sloping away from him towards a pond. Norman, on the other hand, was world number one and his ball was on the putting surface. Victory and the coveted Green Jacket were within reach.

He did not look up when Mize struck his third shot. But when he heard 'a roar so loud that the noise reverberated into the ground like an earthquake', he knew that the ball was in the hole. Yet again, Norman's putt for a matching three slipped by.

His Augusta heartbreak continued. A bogey, again at the last, cost Norman a place in a Masters play-off in 1989 and, seven years later, he spectacularly self-destructed after holding a six-shot lead over Nick Faldo at the start of the final round.

He told me recently that, despite his numerous failures over the closing holes of major competitions, it was only at Augusta in 1987 that playing in a golf tournament had reduced him to tears. In golf, he said in his autobiography, he had always expected the unexpected - and yet 'nothing could be as reverberatingly bad as when Larry Mize sank that pitch shot'.