For Australians, the story of Greg Norman's capitulation at the 1996 Masters is not one that needs retelling.

It's a sporting event that is generationally recounted, passed down from parent to child almost as myth. It's both an endearing reflection of the overall successes of one of our greatest athletes, and a cautionary tale of the inevitability of failure.

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And yet now, at a time when the wider context of Norman's life and career has never been more relevant, ESPN's esteemed 30 for 30 documentary series has exhumed that one Sunday in April at Augusta National for an international audience.

Simply titled Shark, the documentary starts at the beginning of Norman's golf career and ends with his failure to win the 1996 Masters, despite starting the final round with a six-stroke lead.

It's an enlightening look back at Norman's on-course career, delving into the personality traits that made him a somewhat resented breakout success among fellow pros — and eventually held him back from scaling the game's summit.

But as we all know, the Norman story didn't end in 1996. What is presented as a tragic summation is really only part of the wider tapestry, another piece to a fascinating puzzle that might help explain the motivations of modern golf's disrupter-in-chief.

Norman fighting from the outside

Norman is the head of LIV Golf, an organisation attempting to change the face of the professional game by hosting lucrative events in direct opposition to the PGA Tour schedule.

LIV Golf is backed by the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), which professes to be independent of the government despite being chaired by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who has been accused of green-lighting the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in Istanbul.

LIV's affiliation with the PIF and Saudi Arabia has drawn a considerable amount of criticism, with allegations of sportswashing not helped by comments from players like Phil Mickelson, who called the Saudi government "bad motherf***ers" while also pointing out their value as a bargaining chip in a financial face-off with the PGA Tour.

Norman, for his part, says his only ambition is to "grow the game". He is willing to look past the human rights abuses of the Saudi government — "every country has its cross to bear", he says — if it results in an altered golfing landscape and more opportunity for more players to make more money.

The first event on LIV Golf's calendar is less than two months away. To this point, no player has put his head above the parapet and committed to playing in it.

Many high-profile players have officially declared they will not play in the Saudi-linked events, many explicitly for moral reasons and others simply for not wanting to upset the status quo.

And still, Norman fights. His goals are at odds with the majority of players, officials and fans of the professional game, but his steadfast determination to prove the doubters wrong remains.

In short, he has become an outsider to a game that he once dominated, and that he helped mould with his skill and force of personality. And he's still searching for his way back in.

There's a moment late in Shark, after Norman has been forced to sit through highlights of his '96 meltdown and stroll the fairways of Augusta recounting his many costly mistakes, that crystallises this.

Norman is in the Augusta clubhouse looking at various memorabilia when he pauses at a menu from a previous Champions' Dinner.

"It's one of the great traditions of this place," Norman says.

"They have a Champions' Dinner, and the champion picks the menu, and then they all sign it."

Gone from his voice is the confidence and bravado that Norman is famous for. It's clear how much it hurts that he has never been to a Champions' Dinner at Augusta, and has never signed that menu.

"That's pretty cool."

A golfer scorned

And while Norman correctly points out early on that his "history there is more entrenched than some guys who have won a green jacket", how could he not feel sad and frustrated, maybe even angry, that he will forever be excluded from this illustrious part of the game?

Much of Shark focuses on this element of Norman the outsider. It highlights the bleached-blonde shockwaves he sent through professional golf in the early 1980s, which rubbed many of his opponents and colleagues the wrong way.

It also runs through the farcically long list of miraculous golfing moments he was on the wrong side of, like Larry Mize's chip in at the 1987 Masters and Bob Tway's holed bunker shot at the 1986 PGA Championship.

Back to the 1996 Masters, Norman confesses in Shark that as he dropped to his knees on the 15th hole after a near-miss chip, he cursed the "golfing gods".

Norman comes out of Shark looking graceful in his famous defeats and circumspect about his career on the whole, but the sense of frustration of what could have been is inescapable.

How much of his crusade to change the future of golf can be tied back to the pangs of regret from his past in golf, no matter how repressed those feelings are?

Regardless of the motivation, Norman is currently throwing himself at his current ventures with the same fearlessness and flair with which he played.

"You could argue if he been more tactical or more conservative, he would have won more," says Brandel Chamblee, player-turned-analyst, of Norman's playing career.

It's an observation that doubles as a warning for Norman. There is nothing conservative or nuanced about LIV Golf's plan, and if its current struggles turn into full-blown collapse, that bloody-minded, commitment to a morally misguided and entirely unpalatable proposal will be to blame.

And yet, as Chamblee asks: "But then would we be sitting here talking about Greg?"

Greg Norman is unignorable, always has been. And he may never stop rebelling against the game that gave him so much but still keeps him at arm's length.