After two failed attempts to win the Presidents Cup as captain, Greg Norman will be stepping down, but pethaps not out of the arena altogether.
Greg Norman at the closing ceremoney on Sunday
The "Great White Shark, as he was known in the days when he reigned as the World No 1, said on Sunday while discussing his teams 7th loss in nine contests to the USA at Royal Melbourne, that while he would not be back as the International skipper at Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio in 2013, he would gladly join the team as an assistant should he be asked to do so.
"That's going to be totally up to the captain," said Norman whose pre-tournament suggestion that Tiger Woods had not done enough in the past two years to deserve a place in the US team, came back to haunt him when Woods clinched the 9th Presidents Cup on Sunday with the winning point while Robert Allenby, one of his controversial picks, failed to win a match
"If coming back or getting an invitation to be involved again in the future, obviously I would very much consider that, no question about it."
Norman, a larger than life character who has for many years cast a giant shadow in international golf, both on and off the course, said he would like to see changes made to the President's Cup format that would turn it into a better contest.
As it is now, this event, which puts the USA into battle with an International team made up of players from all of the world's non-European countries, takes a distinct second place to the
Ryder Cup, partly because too often it has been too one-sided, the Internationals having won only once when the event was first played at Royal Melbourne in 1998 and tied once at the Fancourt Links in South Africa.
Norman wants a change that would give the host country a firm say in the format.
He wants to see the foursomes (alternate-shot) matches reduced for this is where the Americans always clean up, having the advantage of playing this rare form of team golf every year, one of them in Ryder Cup, the other in the Presidents Cup.
Indeed, if there had been no foursomes in this year's Presidents Cup, anyone of the two teams could have won for the battle was pretty even in the fourballs and singles, the Internationals, in fact, having a slight edge here.
"We do get our cage rattled a little bit in the foursomes," Norman said. "So maybe that just gets our confidence level off. What's wrong with the host nation having the choice of the format anyway? Any golf tournament has got to be fine-tuned every year."
The USA's back-to-back winning skipper Fred Couples sportingly agreed that his American side had an advantage in the foursomes.
"We have an advantage by playing alternate shot every year. I couldn't argue with that," Couples said. "Greg's guys very rarely do it."
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