By Anthony Harwood

As a golfing fan of a certain age I can well remember Greg Norman walking up the fairway of the 18th hole at Turnberry for his first Open Championship win.

The Australian golfer has described it as the moment he got the monkey off his back, a reference to criticism that he always got close to winning tournaments, but never lifted the trophy.

Thirty-five years on and he’s now got a different monkey on his back – that he is launching a revolution in golf that will destroy the game as we know it.

As Colin Montgomerie put it: “It’s a shame it’s come to this. We used to work well with the Asian Tour and now we’re at loggerheads because of money. It’s a problematic issue. It’s that horrible, evil word, money. The mighty dollar ruling people’s hearts and minds”.

It was for good reason that Greg Norman was nicknamed the Great White Shark in his heyday; for his mane of blond hair, Australian roots and, yes, aggressive playing style.

In case you hadn’t heard he is now spearheading an upheaval in the game that will threaten the existing tours, the Ryder Cup and possible even the majors themselves.

Using the lure of Saudi petrol millions he is persuading many of the world’s best golfers to join the Asian Tour as a precursor for joining a Riyadh-backed breakaway league.

Take the English golfer, Ian Poulter, for instance. He is being offered a staggering £22m to join the Super Golf League, but to do so would mean a lifetime ban from the PGA and European Tours, and the Ryder Cup.

Poulter has played in seven Ryder Cups and is nicknamed ‘The Postman’ because he rarely fails to deliver. The same goes for Henrik Stenson, another Ryder Cup stalwart being lured away by the Saudi millions.

If the best players start getting banned from the Ryder Cup it will render that tournament meaningless.

Over the weekend Poulter and Stenson collected £11m in appearance fees at the Saudi International in Jeddah, along with Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau, Phil Mickelson, Tommy Fleetwood and Lee Westwood.

And while the Top 100 players in the world have all been approached to take part, some have been offered £75m just to be the face of the new league.

The rival tours have hit back with increased prize money, of course, which makes Sergio Garcia’s remark that players were taking the Saudi riyal “to achieve things for our families” a bit ridiculous.

With a personal fortune of around £50m just how much money do you, your wife and child need, Sergio?

As former European Tour players committee chairman Jamie Spence put it: “What’s happening with the Saudis, I liken it to eating from a dessert trolley filled with all the cakes you could desire, and then someone comes along with another trolley filled with a chocolate cake and, even though you’re full, you still can’t resist. Well, time to decide which trolleys, guys. You can’t have both”

If you don’t read too much from players joining the Saudi project it’s because they’re busy signing non-disclosure agreements as they sit down with their agents and lawyers to weigh up the huge offers to join the breakaway league, with the ignominy that’s going to be poured over their head form the rest of us.

One person who is talking a lot, though, is Mr Norman, who is chief executive of LIV Golf Investments, a company backed by the same sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia that recently bought Newcastle United.

It’s his job to sell the project, which brings me to that other monkey on his back, namely that however much he protests that he is “growing the game of golf” he will always be labelled as the man who upset the current ecosystem of golf which has served everyone so well and made people like him fabulously wealthy.

It’s extremely disingenuous of him to say things like: ‘We’re not in this for a fight. We’re in this for the good of the game’ when plainly half the Top 100 players in the world – not necessarily the best 50 players, just the greediest 50 – are going to be creamed off into a breakaway super league.

Remember that some top players have already said they won’t be joining, like Rory McIlroy who stayed away basically saying: ‘It’s the human rights, stupid”.

The Asian Tour will kick off in Thailand in March ahead of an English-based event at St Albans in June before returning to the Middle and Far East.

The plan, of course, is to make it a global tour with events across Europe and America.

One Scottish venue said to be lined up is Turnberry, now ‘Trump Turnberry’ after being bought by the former US president in 2014.

Trump would like nothing better than to stick two fingers up to establishment at the home of golf, the Royal and Ancient, by hosting a megabucks leg of the Asian Tour, or the Super Golf League.

After all, as president he was happy to cosy up to Mohammed bin Salman, after his own intelligence agencies concluded the Saudi leader ‘most likely’ ordered the murder of the Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.

He also sold Riyadh billions of pounds worth of weapons which have been used to maim and kill civilians in Yemen for the past seven years.

Imagine The Great Grey Shark and Trump hosting a Saudi-backed rebel tour at Turnberry, one of the greatest links golf courses in the world.

What a grotesque spectacle that would be if, as result, the Oen Championship was to become a meaningless tournament because half of the world’s best players either stayed away or had been banned.

I’d like to see Mr Norman, a two time winner of the clare jug, get the monkey off his back when that happens.

Anthony Harwood is a former foreign editor of the Daily Mail