Greg Norman has won the Majors only twice: the Open Championship in 1986 and 1993. Otherwise, mostly, his experience was bad. Take the 1996 Masters, for example. He was in the lead throughout the tournament and was ahead of Nick Faldo by six strokes as he entered the final round. However, on Sunday, he shot a 78 and lost the Green Jacket to Faldo by five strokes. It was unbelievable that even Faldo said, “I don’t know what to say,” and even earned Norman the title of biggest choker of all time.

Now, almost two decades later, someone else took the blame for his major performances. Hughes Norton was the latest guest on the Golf Journal podcast, and he started talking about his regrets while being Norman’s agent. He said, “Greg played because of a contract I got him with Spalding, which was the biggest contract at the time for clubs and balls. He was playing with a ball that was long forgotten but was called the Tour edition.”

Back then, the Spalding was known to be famous for their Flight Ball. However, the catch is this was for amateurs; the Titleist still had the best ones for pros. The Spalding wanted to have a trial and error and create a ball for pros, giving competition to their rival brand. And well, while Greg Norman, Johnny Miller, and Craig Stadler played with it, it turns out Norman was the only one who had issues. “He’d throw it into a front pin, it would spin off the green and he would say to me Hughes how do I play to a back pin. No I can’t because I have to allow this is gonna backspin”.

However, according to what Norton said on the podcast, he never listened to him and thought since the others did not have a problem, the ball must be all right. But years later, he accepts that he should have listened to his boss. “He just couldn’t play with this ball particularly in Majors with with really firm greens British Open US Open and sometimes the Masters but we we stuck with it and uh you know that’s one of the regrets that I talk about in the book,” the author of Rainmaker added.

While this was the one time his ex-agent did defend him, Hughes Norton was responsible for spreading what was one of the biggest controversies in Greg Norman’s career.

Hughes Norton blamed Greg Norman for stealing the LIV Golf idea

In his book, Norton made a lot of accusations. To begin with, he described Greg Norman as having a “consuming need to be visible and relevant.” He devoted two chapters to the 11 years he spent representing the “narcissistic” Norman, whom he accuses of appropriating Mark McCormack’s sales pitch for a second Tour and rebranding it as LIV Golf nearly 50 years later. Norton revealed that LIV Golf was never Greg Norman’s idea but the brainchild of the global sports brand IMG’s founder and former agent of Arnold Palmer, Mark McCormack.

“Mark McCormack was such a visionary, and so far ahead of his time – leaps and bounds ahead of everybody. And that’s a classic example,” he said. He went on to say that LIV Golf was thought up to 30 years before Shark brought it out as his. Norman, who was earlier a part of IMG, left the company, fired Norton, and soon launched the world tour idea in the fall of 1994. Despite Norman’s first attempt to create a world tour in 1994′ falling flat on its face, fast forward 30 years, and he has finally achieved his long-time goal thanks to funding from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.

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