Moe Norman, RIP

[RJ_Daley]

For the Loren Rubensteins an Tim Collins golf style writers, it seems to me that it would be a no-brainer to write a screen play about Moe.  Although, they'd have to be somewhat careful not to re-write "Rain Man" and make Moe too much like Raymond Babbitt, that Dustin Hoffman played.

[Dick Kirkpatrick]

RJ:

Moe could hit any club he picked up. Give him a couple swings with it and he would start working the ball, left, right, high or low, and he would call which one he was going to hit.

His clubs were always D-7 or 8, stiff shafted and he was always experimenting with them, different shafts, lead tape by the yard but the grip was always the same, some kind of coarse white tape that he found in Florida.

His grips were huge, I don't know how many wraps, but remember he gripped the club(with a baseball grip) in the palm of his hands and not with the fingers.

For the last few years, he was playing with more standard clubs, remember the Titleist deal, but he and Nick were always trading clubs and fooling around with them.

His favourite saying when he hit one of his crisp irons "thats purer than the water you drink"

[Paul_Daley]

Cousin Dick: that's a great idea of yours regarding a Moe Norman movie - something to tuck away for a rainy day. You've been cast down the end of the range, mit in hand, barely moving an inch.

One fascinating aspect of Moe's set-up, was the way he gripped his right hand. While seemingly unconventional, his excessively turned-under right hand was actually set smack bang "on plane." For nearly all golfers, there is some degree of manipulation - concious or unconcious - of the hands, but Moe never had to worry about this aspect.

 

[TEPaul]

Paul:

Interesting about Moe Norman's right hand on the club. A number of good teachers have said to just look at how your hands hang naturally at your side and then place them on the club about accordingly as that's the way they'll naturally return to the approximate "hitting area" in a golf swing. Any other position than how they hang naturally at your side would require some amount of specific unnatural manipulation and the thing to keep in mind is people's hands can hang at their sides very differently.

Dick:

I like that Moe remark about some of his crisp shots being 'purer than the water you drink' but that reminds me of Tallulah Bankhead's classic line "I'm as pure as the driven slush."

[ForkaB]

Moe Norman made life just a little bit better, even for those like me who only knew him by reputation.  I love all these old stories, but surely some of these must just be that, stories.  As much as I would like to believe that Moe could hit 9 out of 14 flagsticks, or hole out from the fairway 5 times in a round,  these tales strain credulity.  I doubt if a world-class marksman could hit 9 out of 14 flagsticks with a high-powered rifle from 180 yards, or a world class chipper ever hole out 5 times out of 18 from 20 yards.  Was Moe really THAT good?

[TEPaul]

Rich (the skeptic):

You're probably right about that--Moe hitting 9 of 14 flagsticks should strain a sophisticated credule such as yours. But who really knows, maybe Moe was in a hurry and simply neglected to take about 12 flags out on 2-3 foot putts.

Are some of the Moe Norman stories bogus or exaggerated? With the wealth of golf stories that have surrounded that man for that long---obviously so. But we can't forget that a lot of people, including some tour pros who heard about him and made the journey to find out for themselves (one of whom I asked about him) said you pretty much had to see him and you'd start to believe those stories.

My good friend Bill Webster from London Ontario who now lives across the field from me played a lot of golf with Moe Norman. I called him to tell him Moe died. Bill is sort of a natural skeptic like you might be and I once asked him if this reputed otherworldly ball striking ability of Moe Norman's was as true as attributed. He said it definitely was and those guys like him who used to play with him alot gave up trying to figure out how or why he could do some of the things they saw him do!

If you ask me how certain rare golfers do those things, I think there just may be something in the fact that some golfers like a Moe Norman, or a Lee Trevino, Joe Kirkpatrick, Seve Ballesteros, the Lafoon brothers, perhaps a Tiger Woods at his most imaginative or one I used to know named Billy Musselman simply learned golf outside the "fundamentals" box most of us learned to play the game in. And all of those rare golfers also have a common theme of having been almost fanatical about practicing the things they may have learned on their own along the way. Most all of them eventually arrived at the same fundamentals we all were taught but on their trips to that end they could and did things on call that are sometimes beyond even our wildest imaginations. Another common trait I think I notice in those rare golfers who do unimaginable things with the ball is an almost unquestioned ability or facility to truly believe they can do, and without fail, the things they do.

Moe Norman just may have been the rarest of all of that rare group of homegrown golfers. If you ever saw him swing you might understand why! I'll guarantee it was very different from any good golfer either of us ever saw before.

[Doug Sobieski]

I was lucky enough to see Moe put on an exhibition at Bay Hill in the mid-90's, and was fortunate it was the same month that he was featured on the cover of Golf Digest (for autograph purposes!). To this day, the thing that amazed me most was his ability to play "in heights" as he called it. From the same set-up position, he could hit the ball any height imaginable. With the driver, he's start out saying "10 feet, 10 feet", and hit it 10 feet off the ground DEAD SOLID. I don't know about you guys, but to hit driver that low, I've got to hit it on the bottom groove! Then he'd say "20 feet, 20 feet", and hit it twice as high. Then "40 feet, 40 feet" and "60 feet, 60 feet". All with no change in his set-up!!

Another amazing thing was, like someone else mentioned, his clubs were extraordinatily heavy, and covered with lead tape on the bottom. But at the front of the sole plate right in line with the middle of the face, the lead tape was pushed back about the size of half a quarter, where the tee would impact it. And the tee would never be knocked out of the ground.

Moe would come out to the Bay Hill Invitational almost every year on his own, and would hit some balls for some of the guys, and I'd see him periodically at the PGA Merchandise Show, always by himself. And every time, he was wearing either the same colorful Coogi sweater or ratty turtleneck regardless of the weather!!

In Moe's later years, Craig Shankland (the renowned instructor) was probably closer to Moe than anyone, and they conducted clinics together weekly at Craig's courses north of Daytona Beach.

Regards,

Doug

[John_Conley]

Everyone has their Moe stories.

For much of the early 90s Moe would wake up somewhere near Daytona Beach, drive down I-95 in his caddy, hit balls and mess around at Royal Oak in Titusville - once owned by the RCGA, drink a lot of cokes (as mentioned) and not brush his teeth, and lunch at Morrisson's buffet.  At some point he must have driven the 45 minutes back north.

He had his winter routine down pat.

For those that haven't met Moe, you need to realize that he was virtually impossible to get close to and owned a fondness for young children.  Widely covered in the aforementioned book, his social disorders left him very wary of adults and the innocense and carefree existence of little children carried more appeal to him than the responsibilities of adulthood.

He could strike a golf ball, and not much else.  One bizarre dude.

[Bob_Huntley]

As much as I would like to believe that Moe could hit 9 out of 14 flagsticks, or hole out from the fairway 5 times in a round,  these tales strain credulity.  I doubt if a world-class marksman could hit 9 out of 14 flagsticks with a high-powered rifle from 180 yards, or a world class chipper ever hole out 5 times out of 18 from 20 yards.  Was Moe really THAT good?

Rich,

If you couldn't hit a flagstick from 180 yards nine out of fourteen times with a rifle, you would have been drummed out of my regiment. Or to put it another way, I would not have cared to have you on my flank.

Bob

[RJ_Daley]

Well Dave, I am looking forward to reading the biography I ordered thanks to a link someone provided above.  Not that everything in a biography is true and factual.  

But, what if these stories are true?  What if they simply defy your boundaries of belief and either exceed your computation of odds, or your computation is flawed?  Maybe hitting those pins is less odds when performed by a certain level of skilled person than you can comprehend.  NO one said that 9 of 14 pins hit were all from 180 yards.  Maybe they were all no longer than 120 yards. It was stated that a marksman couldn't hit a flagstick 9 f 14 times with a high power rifle at 180 yards in thousands of tries.  Maybe... But, 120 yards?  hmmmm....   How does a child prodigy of 3 years old play a complete piano composition of a master with those tiny little hands and make all the cords and ranges?  Isn't that both mentally and physically improbably?  

Who really knows what a fellow like Moe even sees when he hits a ball at a tiny target?  You and I (presumably) see a field of play in greens and earthtones, with a yellow line of a flag stick, and a hole at the bottom, as a photograph of sorts.  Maybe Moe is wired differently.  Maybe he is like the "terminator" like robotic machines and he sees infrared lines and quadrants and geometric signals that cause him to strike like a rattle snake goes after a red balloon or heat differential.  Your a smart fellow and you know legal concepts from long dry passages explaining them.  Yet you can't memorize a phone book of simple names and addresses.  Yet, a fellow like Raymond Babbitt can memorize those long lists of simple facts, but maybe couldn't tell you res mensa from corpus delecti...  It is all about the tool box, I think.

I know my tool box is missing a straight driving hammer...but I got plenty of slicing impliments.

[ForkaB]

As much as I would like to believe that Moe could hit 9 out of 14 flagsticks, or hole out from the fairway 5 times in a round,  these tales strain credulity.  I doubt if a world-class marksman could hit 9 out of 14 flagsticks with a high-powered rifle from 180 yards, or a world class chipper ever hole out 5 times out of 18 from 20 yards.  Was Moe really THAT good?

Rich,

If you couldn't hit a flagstick from 180 yards nine out of fourteen times with a rifle, you would have been drummed out of my regiment. Or to put it another way, I would not have cared to have you on my flank.

Bob

Bob

I achieved the maximum grade in non-sniper level rifle proficiency in my Army, and that involved hitting about 95% of various human sized (i.e. 2-3 foot wide) targets at 400 yards, from various shooting positions, but always in the same direction (i.e. general windage did not vary).  If the guys in your Army could hit 1" wide targets (i.e. flagsticks) at 180 yards, from various firing positions at 360 degrees, without being allowed to correct for windage, well you should be ruling the world by now.

Oh, pardon me, I forgot that you are! :

[George Pazin]

Who really cares if the stories are a little embellished? They are wonderful additions to golf lore.

Maybe now Ben will have someone to tell him he's away.

[Bob_Huntley]

Rich,

I apologize. Instead of reading your thread I scanned it and compounded the error my quoting you chapter and verse. Of course, I read "flagstick" but was thinking "flag."

You can cover my flank after all.

[Michael Moore]

Mr. Goodale -

Mr. Kirkpatrick, with 36 posts, comes on here and says that he knew Moe Norman better than almost anyone. To a Normanophile like me, that's hitting the GCA jackpot.

If he says that he saw Moe Norman hole out five times, then you should believe him.

I had a whole rant lined up, but Mr. Daley has already said it. Moe Norman's ability appears supernatural. Make of that what you will.

[Dick Kirkpatrick]

Thank You Michael Moore.
I would just love to have one of those people who have heard all the Moe stories, and come on with all kinds of statistics on here call me a liar to my face.
I would not need any help.

[ForkaB]

Mr. Kirkpatrick

I said that your (and other) stories "strained credulity" not that they were not true.  You were a lucky man to know and play with Moe Norman, who must have been "THAT good," i.e. otherworldly good.  My apologies for any offence caused to you or Mr. Moore.

[TEPaul]

"I said that your (and other) stories "strained credulity" not that they were not true."

Rich:

The Moe stories don't really "strain credulity" it's just that you have a highly under-developed credule.

Actually, I thnk the Moe Norman stories of him hitting 9 flagsticks in a single round is sort of sad. Just think about it--Moe may have hit 10,000 flagsticks with his approach shots in his career and don't you think it's really sad that a guy with that otherworldly talent was never told that it's not the flagstick you're supposed to hit in golf---it's the hole.

Just think if someone told Moe that early in his career--Moe coulda been a real contenda!

[Gerry B]

Being a Canadian - I am proud to have had Moe Norman as a fellow Canadian. There are numerous Moe Norman stories to add to the folklore -however  the Hogan "Accident" / 230 yard "who needs a putter" / and Sam Snead's " 250 yards to the bridge" stories are 10's.

I was at my club the other day - one of the elder members who is / was a pretty good player (lets assume a 8 -10 index)recalled playing in a foursome with Moe at Thornhill GC about 30 years ago. Moe spotted the other 3 players 17 shots each and won all the money - had ice in his veins.

He was one for the ages.

[John_Conley]

Just think if someone told Moe that early in his career--Moe coulda been a real contenda!

Tom:

You've never met Mo.  There is nothing anyone could have told a person with his inability to interact with other humans that would have helped.

Sam Snead told him to work on something prior to a Masters and Mo spent two days on the range resulting in bloody hands.  Snead meant he could work on it in the future, not right then.