How Greg Norman's Epic Masters Choke Saved the Clintons

They Would Not Allow The 1996 Campaign to be Greg Normanized

With the Masters Golf Tournament in the news this weekend, I thought it a useful time to recall the role Australian golfer Greg Norman played in saving Bill Clinton’s presidency.

In the Republican friendly world of the PGA, Norman was Bill Clinton’s one good friend. In fact, in 1997, Clinton took a knee-wrecking, late night spill at Norman’s home in Australia. The fall was suspicious enough that Ken Starr investigated to see whether Monica Lewinsky was involved. Whatever did happen that night, Norman covered for his friend. Hillary played along as well.

Unwittingly, Norman did his best service for the Clintons at the 1996 Masters. On April 14 of that year, the final round of the tournament, Norman appeared to be in total control. He had a six stroke lead on his nearest pursuers, and many reporters were writing their “Norman wins” stories before he had even teed off. They should have waited. Norman shot a disastrous 78 that day and lost the tournament by five strokes.

From a distance, Clinton watched in shock. This was the biggest choke in the history of the tournament. “Yes,” Clinton would tell press aide, Mike McCurry, “that’s going to be the new theme for the campaign, that we’re not going to allow ourselves to be Greg Normanized.”

Bill Clinton was horrified in a way few around him could understand. “We could have a major crisis go bad on us,” he fretted constantly. Clinton knew something his staff did not: the mysterious death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown death had spared him just such a crisis. Brown had threatened to blow the whistle on the Clintons’ fund raising in China before his USAF plane inexplicably crashed in Croatia on April 3, 1996. Brown received a hero’s burial the day before the Masters started.

“Greg Norman,” Clinton would repeat to his staff. “Greg Norman.” Adviser Dick Morris, who likely did know about the close call with Brown, reinforced Clinton’s anxiety. He did not shy from telling him that despite his lead in the polls, Clinton had “a soft underbelly,” namely that the majority of the voters did not particularly trust or respect him especially on military matters. Morris worried that a terrorist act could expose that underbelly in the months leading up to the November election.

On the night of July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 747 carrying 230 passengers to Paris from JFK in New York, blew up inexplicably—there is that word again, “inexplicably”—off the coast of Long Island. So charged was the atmosphere following the plane’s destruction that Clinton’s terrorist czar Ricjard Clarke called this moment in history, “The Almost War, 1996.”

This was exactly the kind of crisis the president feared most. He and Hillary had spent the last eighteen months scrambling out of the crater left by the disastrous 1994 mid-term elections. Now with a lead in the polls seemingly as solid as Norman’s at the Masters, Clinton would leave nothing to chance. “We could have a major crisis go bad on us,” he worried. “Greg Norman,” he reminded his staff over and over. “Greg Norman.”

To protect his lead in the polls Clinton would do whatever it took. The first step was to silence all talk of missiles. With the Olympics starting in Atlanta in two days, a missile threat could have shut down air traffic on the East Coast. Greg Norman. Working through his DoJ, Clinton brought in the FBI, and they finessed the evidence to make it seem as through a bomb destroyed the plane, a less frightening scenario. Greg Norman.

Finally, with the help of the CIA—the CIA?—the White House shifted the cause to some unspecified mechanical failure, a scenario that they kicked around until after the November election and never did quite resolve.

Greg Norman, Greg Norman, Greg Norman.