Never mind the torrential rain that interrupted play for two days and the dangerous wind that sheared off three tall pine trees that nearly crushed a number of patrons on Friday.
No, not that kind of weird.
This kind: Greg Norman finally won a Masters.
Norman was neither in the Masters field nor even invited onto the grounds at Augusta National this week (a fact made abundantly clear on Wednesday by Masters chairman Fred Ridley) and yet he had his best Masters Sunday ever.
LIV Golf, for which Norman is face and CEO, didn’t have a tournament on its schedule this week and yet the controversial Saudi-backed tour was among the big winners at this week’s Masters in that it felt validated by the performance of its players.
Brooks Koepka owned most of the tournament until he uncharacteristically spit up the lead in the final round, falling to Jon Rahm, who won at 12-under par.
Phil Mickelson, who hadn’t done anything of consequence with his golf clubs since his historic 2021 PGA Championship victory at age 50, rediscovered his mojo, charging to a runner-up finish, shared with Koepka at 8-under par.
Mickelson, when he finished his final-round 65 Sunday, was the leader in the clubhouse until Rahm made his win official.
Even Patrick Reed flashed, finishing in fourth place at 7-under par.
Norman, who competed in 22 Masters in his playing career, finishing second three times and third three times, famously never won a green jacket.
Heartbreak and angst have defined the Norman narrative at the Masters.
Until this week, when Norman and LIV Golf were winners.
There were 18 elephants in the room at Augusta this week in the form of LIV players in the field.
Twelve of them made the cut.
One of them almost won and others were in contention.
When The Post tried to reach Norman via his LIV golf spokesperson Sunday, the response was: “Greg won’t be doing any interviews, but thanks for checking.’’
This was a rare show of restraint for Norman, who’s been prone to thump his chest when he feels he’s on top.
This was always going to be an important week for LIV Golf, which has been taking shots from all angles and needed a boost to legitimize itself.
The week began with a number of so-called experts predicting poor performances from the LIV players because of their scaled-down 48-player, 54-hole events, wondering aloud how battle-tested they’d be.
The LIV players entered the week with a collective chip on their shoulders, Cam Smith calling the theory that they wouldn’t be a factor because of lack of competition “BS.’’
Koepka’s fall from a four-shot lead at the seventh hole of the third round Sunday to a two-shot lead entering the final round to losing by four to Rahm does, however, support the argument that the lack of consequence of LIV Golf tournaments perhaps dulled the blade on Brooks’ knife.
Before Sunday, Koepka had held the 54-hole lead in five major championships and won four of them.
The Masters tacitly dissed the LIV players this week by virtually omitting them from the daily “featured groups’’ the committee chooses for its TV partners.
A total of 47 players were featured in those during the four days of competition and just five LIV players were in those groups.
If you took the “under’’ in the over/under bet on the number of times Masters officials and the tournament television partners uttered the words “LIV Golf,’’ you won in a landslide.
Yet there was Koepka, front and center all week, looking like not only the best player in the field but the best player in the world until he faltered Sunday.
There was Mickelson, who’s been scorned and painted as the villainous face of LIV and entered the week looking like a shell of himself, rediscovering his mojo.
