SHARK ATTACK ON THE KENT COST
It was English poet Thomas Gray who wrote, “Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife.” The odds are stacked heavily against Greg Norman uttering this line of 18th-century poetry as he searched for a place to practise ahead of the 1993 Open Championship at Royal St George’s but he shared Gray’s sentiment. The difference is that Gray was soaking in the tranquillity of a churchyard as he contemplated mortality, while Norman just needed to get away from the “white noise” to hit some golf balls off a sidehill lie.
“You get a lot of white noise at Majors,” says Norman, now 66, but 38 at the time. “People are always walking around you, talking to you and it can be very hard to concentrate on what you are there to do.”
Australia’s ‘Great White Shark’ was ranked 4th in the world, and hindsight shows he
