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Keegan Bradley

The conclusion to the Northern Trust Open Sunday was riveting, what with Phil Mickelson pouring in a 30-foot birdie putt on the last hole of regulation play to get into a playoff with Bill Haas, and then Keegan Bradley following up with a 13-footer to join the playoff. Haas won when he made a 40-foot birdie putt on the delicious, malicious, short par-four 10th hole at the Riviera Country Club.



Not so riveting, if understandable, was Bradley's stutter-stop, back and forth, when will it stop, pre-shot routine. I won't mention his constant spitting—well, I just did, and it is a nasty bit of business. Dustin Johnson also threw a few spitters that the telecast caught. The tension in a tournament can get so amped up that players can feel, well, gobs of anxiety. Hence Bradley's behaviours.



Bradley, 25, won last year's PGA Championship. It was impossible not to watch his labours before he actually made his swing as the Northern Trust played out. Hmm, I guess that means it was riveting. He does quite a dance before he's ready to take the club back.



Bradley walked up to the ball numerous times while preparing to play a shot. He'd look ready, and then he'd back away. Once, twice, three, four times. He drove into a fairway bunker on the par-five 17th hole and went back and forth so often that I found myself wanting to scream at the television. Enough already. But who knows what he was feeling? He just wasn't ready to hit the layup shot out of the bunker. What club to pick to get over the lip? How far from the green did he want to be after his shot?



His mind kept turning over, and over, and over. Then there's Bradley on the putting green. He'll arrange himself behind the ball and then twist his face so that he's looking at the line out of his left eye. His eye seems to bulge as he does this. It's something to do with reading a putt with the dominant eye. Mesmerizing. The guy's tough, but he sure does have an elaborate routine. Golf can do strange things to players.



Now, I hesitate to call all this obsessive-compulsive behaviour. But I don't hesitate to claim that golf does bizarre things to the human brain. I'm thinking of Ben Hogan in his latter years freezing over short putts and finding it all but impossible to trigger his stroke. I'm thinking of the many waggles Sergio Garcia used to take before he could start his backswing. He finally shortened the number of waggles he took.



Friends of mine have a different word for "waggles," or for any twitches or preliminary activities to beginning one's swing. They call these Nortons, after the hilarious "Hello Ball" sketch on The Honeymooners, the classic sitcom that ran for 39 episodes in 1955 and 1956. In this sketch, Jackie Gleason, who played the bus driver Ralph Kramden, is trying to teach Art Carney as Ed Norton how to play golf. Norton, in "addressing" the ball, hence "Hello Ball," can't help taking one waggle after another.



It was my great pal Irv Feldman, I believe, who came up with the term "Nortons" for voluminous waggling. The apt term popped out of Irv's mouth while watching our dear friend Jerome Shore, a Nortonian of some magnitude. I've played frequently with Jerome over the years, including a series of matches this winter in Florida—we compete for a book every match. Jerome, a student of the game who keeps tips on his very smart phone, has become a fair player who hits the ball out of the centre of the clubface most every shot. Perhaps he owes a debt of gratitude to the Nortons that get him ready to swing.



Most recently, we were playing with one of our buddies, a Toronto lawyer known to all as AlRak—Allan Rakowsky, that is. AlRak has an incisive legal mind, and there have been times when, I venture to say, he has wanted to clobber Jerome with a mid-iron for taking so many Nortons that we could fall asleep. But, just the other day, AlRak noticed something. As I say, he has incisive powers of observations.



"Did you see that? Shore isn't taking as many Nortons anymore," AlRak said, snapping his head when Jerome started his swing after only, oh, five or six Nortons. And he was right.



This brings us back to Bradley. Can a professional golfer, even one who owns a major championship, stay the course when he exhibits such a complex and persistent ritual that he could be the president of the Nortonian Order? We will learn more on Wednesday, when Bradley plays his opening match of the Accenture Match Play Championship against Miguel Angel Jimenez in Marana, Ariz. Jimenez might have time to smoke a couple of cigars during the match---while waiting for Bradley to hit a shot.



But I sympathize with Bradley. I own up to being a Nortonian myself when I was a teenager playing competitions. I wore glasses and had to touch the frame a half-dozen times or so before I could start my swing. There, I've admitted it. Thankfully, my particular brand of Nortons disappeared somewhere along the line.



Will Bradley's Nortons diminish in time? Or will he develop even more exaggerated Nortonian behaviour? Call his show: Hello Ball: Bradley's Ballet . No, never mind. Call them Nortons. That's what they are: Nortons.

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Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 12 books, including Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); This Round's on Me (2009); and the latest Moe & Me: Encounters with Moe Norman, Golf's Mysterious Genius (2012). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca . You can now follow him on Twitter @lornerubenstein

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