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Hey Yall.
**Here is a very good article in the USA Today about a Canadian Golfer, Moe Norman. It's ashame that the media don't print or acknowledge stories of this kind to the public while the person is still living. Someone that should be honored for the records he had made so the kids of today can aim at something other than making millions in golf. Someone brought the rights to his story which I hope will be in production soon. Should be a must see movie and a DVD buy.
Hope you enjoy it like I did.**



Golf's purest striker rarely missed a fairway
By Bruce Selcraig, special for USA TODAY
America's sports pages barely acknowledged the fatal heart attack Sept. 4, at age 75, of eccentric Canadian golfer Moe Norman - a supernaturally gifted yet cruelly misunderstood athlete. Norman was a stocky cartoon character with thick Popeye arms and wispy Einstein hair who generations of golf superstars - from Sam Snead to Lee Trevino to Vijay Singh - have said was the purest striker of a golf ball they had ever seen.
Not the farthest hitter. Not the greatest trick-shot artist or putter - putting bored him.
Just the most stupefying accurate golfer on the planet. Norman played competitive golf more than 50 years, and witnesses say he played 11 of those years - that's about 230,000 golf shots - without hitting a ball out of bounds.
A model of hand-to-eye coordination, Norman once hit 356 consecutive drives off a standard wooden golf tee without so much as disturbing it from the ground, much less breaking it. In the real world that's like saying you've never swatted at a fly and missed.
He hit everything straight. Never left. Never right. Everything perfectly arched like the cables on the Golden Gate Bridge.
When I first saw Norman give an exhibition, about 10 years ago in Florida, he began by hitting simple little pitching wedges about 90 yards. A small sunburned crowd of seniors didn't act all that impressed until they realized that the balls were landing on top of each other in a space the size of a bedspread, colliding like little neutrons when they hit. Then he did nearly the same thing with 7-irons, 4-irons and drivers. "Same shot. Same as the last," Norman chortled.
The fans started giggling with delight and disbelief, like a magician had yanked out their underwear.
Sensation was self-taught
Completely self-taught, Murray "Moe" Norman, raised in Kitchener, Ontario, swung the club like a sledgehammer, with his legs wide apart, using his sturdy forearms and wrists for clubhead speed, not the classic swing of the cookie-cutter dandies on tour. Once a physicist declared that Norman had the most scientifically sound swing in golf.
Today's greatest golfers count their career holes in one on a few fingers. Norman had 17. He also had nine double eagles and three sanctioned scores of 59, won more than 50 tournaments and set more than 30 course records.
He became a sensation on the Canadian amateur circuit, winning the amateur title twice, even as he hitchhiked to some tournaments. He shot 61 four times in 1956. His finest year as a pro was 1966, when he won five of 12 Canadian tournaments he entered, came in second five times and finished no lower than fifth. When Norman turned 50, in 1979, he torched the senior tour, winning seven consecutive Canadian PGA senior championships. One of his sanctioned 59s came at age 62.
So why have so few Americans heard of him?

That's a great article BE. I really enjoyed it, thanks for posting it.

Because of his appearance, he was shunned by the many PGA pros. There is another good article from several years ago in Golf Digest. Wish I still had it. Great reading.

He's pretty well known here in Canada. You may have seen him in some of those "Natural Golf" promos. The swing they promote is based on his, I believe.

Google him...you'll get some cool info.

David

The link below is to part of an article about Moe that appeared in the August 1996 issue of Senior Golfer magazine:

http://members.cox.net/whoof/index

I understand that a movie about Moe has been underway for a while now, it is produced/directed (not sure) by Barry Morrow the same fellow that made "Rainman" with Dustin Hoffman.

Yes . . . my avatar is a short clip of Moe Norman.

drstroud- I still have that Golf Digest from December of 1995. Great story! If you haven't read the biography of Moe Norman . . . "The Feeling of Greatness", it's an interesting read and well worth your time.

To learn more about Moe's swing from the Graves Golf Academy follow this link:
http://www.playnaturalgolf.com/