By Mark Berardino
Staff Writer
Augusta Chronicle

Money can buy many things. It can buy the finest jewelry and delicacies, transportation and shelter. It can fill a man's closet with suits cut from the world's finest cloth.

It can buy a rainbow's array of outfits - red, yellow, blue and purple. Money can even buy a green jacket, if that's what you desire.

There are at least three things, though, that money can't buy. Love is one of them. Respect is another. And the third thing? Well, that would be the green jacket.

Greg Norman found himself reflecting on this very proposition early Sunday evening at the Augusta National Golf Club.

The world's top-rated golfer was 20 minutes removed from the most disappointing round of his life. Norman had just shot 78 on the final day of the 60th Masters Tournament. He had just done the unthinkable, the impossible, unfathomable.

Over the course of four gut-wrenching hours, the game's all-time tragic figure had somehow transformed a six-shot lead into a five-shot defeat. He had just taken his best chance yet at the championship he wants most ... and flushed it.

Call it a choke job. Call it galling. Call it the third Masters title for 38-year-old Nick Faldo, all technical prowess and cold British steel.

``There's a lot of things I want that money can't buy,'' Norman said. ``Nick has something that I haven't got.''

That is the green jacket, symbolic of a Masters title.

Funny, it's not particularly attractive. It certainly makes slacks selection tricky. But that simple piece of clothing sure has a way of rounding out a man's career.

Fulfillment. That seems to be the word.

After the most egregious collapse in the history of major championship golf, the world surely would have understood had Norman snapped that 7-iron over his knee, tossed the rest of his clubs in the pond at No. 16 and stomped off to his waiting jet for the short ride back to his sprawling compound in Hobe Sound, Fla.

Norman didn't do any of those things.

Instead, he kept playing. Instead, he hugged Faldo on the 18th green. Instead, he reported to the interview room, the way he had after his 51 prior second-place finishes, and delivered a performance remarkable in its depth.

He talked about his good fortune, which includes a net worth of some $60 million. He shrugged and talked about providing for his children and his children's children, about having used golf as a means to ``create something out of nothing.'' He repeatedly vowed not to dwell on yet another professional disappointment.

Don't cry for me, Norman was saying. Don't pity me, he was saying.

And then he slipped up.

``God,'' he said, glancing at the club member to his left, ``I'd love to be putting one of those green jackets on.''

He is 41 now. This was Norman's time. He failed.

If he couldn't win this year, he will never win here. This much seems obvious.

Just as obvious, though, is something else about Norman, something that lasts much longer than jewelry and delicacies, fancy transportation and lavish shelter. Something that will outlast even the finest green jacket cut from the finest cloth.

That something is class.