April 26th, 2009
Jack Nicklaus driven by pursuit of perfection
For a quarter of an hour, Jack Nicklaus has been everything you could ever hope him to be: the greatest golfer of all time, chatting away about his career, his life, the current state of the game that gave him everything, the game to which he gave even more back. And then things change: inadvertently, you catch a nerve.
So, Jack, will Tiger beat your record of 18 Major championships? There’s a pause. A room full of people immediately senses the tension: a photographer, an agent, various PR people and the TV crew packing up across on the other side of the room all turn and listen, eager to witness the reaction to this impudence.
It’s subtle at first – a brief pause, followed by a non-committal shrug and, “Time will tell.”.
It is a reply that prompts a follow-up.
Would he like to see his record broken? Would he enjoy witnessing somebody picking up his mantle, moving beyond the mark he set, a mark which once seemed unimaginably out of reach to even the most gifted?
The great man’s face clouds over, and the hitherto kindly eyes fix you with the sort of flinty glare you imagine he used to reserve for fellow competitors on the final nine of a Major championship. There’s almost a bit of genuine annoyance in there: almost, but not quite. It’s more like weary irritation, but the message is clear: Nicklaus enjoys talking frankly about almost anything under the sun, but this is one topic of conversation best avoided.
But the look is enough censure in itself, seemingly, and it gives him a second to decide that you’re not yanking his chain (as if you would dare), that you genuinely have no concept of the inner workings of the mind of a true genius of the game.
“Nobody wants their records to be broken – don’t be silly,” he says, evidently incredulous that you could even suggest such a thing, almost to the point of amusement now that the initial indignation has evaporated. “But I don’t root against Tiger. I like Tiger, and he’s a good representative for the game of golf and he’s handled himself well. If somebody’s going to break the record I’d as soon have him break it as anybody else.”
“I don’t root against Tiger. I like Tiger, and he’s a good representative for the game of golf and he’s handled himself well. If somebody’s going to break the record I’d as soon have him break it as anybody else”
The exchange tells you a huge amount about Nicklaus, who, for the moment at least, remains the greatest golfer ever to pick up a club. This is a man who won six Masters titles, four US Opens, three Opens and five US PGAs, came second in a further 19 majors and was in the top-three a staggering 46 times. In the 40 Major championships played during the 1970s, Nicklaus registered 35 top-10 finishes. What was it that made him so incredibly good?
“I don’t know,” he says, with an earnest look that seems to suggest he’d be happy to share The Secret if he understood it himself. “I never looked at myself as being that great a player while I was playing. But now I look back at my record and think, yep, that’s a pretty good record. If I try and think back to the attributes that made that happen I have hard times finding them because I look at myself and I didn’t think I was that good. I think how could I have ended up doing that?
“But maybe it’s a good attitude to think maybe you’re not very good because it makes you keep working. It makes you keep climbing the hill. I was just climbing a hill all my life trying to get to the top, but I never wanted to get to the top of it. Maybe that was why I was successful, because I never got complacent.”
Nicklaus is being interviewed a few days before the US Open that would be won in such extraordinary style by Tiger Woods, but looking at the words it’s less Tiger that springs to mind than Padraig Harrington. The Irishman’s gently unassuming manner and chirpy good nature belie the fact that he is as hard working a player and as tough a competitor as anyone out there today, and one who, like Nicklaus, just keeps on climbing the mountain.
But what kept Nicklaus climbing, long after he’d scaled all the peaks? The great champions all have their own particular brand of motivation. Harrington has spoken of the fear that drives him on; Walter Hagen more or less retired from championship golf in 1930 to concentrate on the exhibition matches which slaked his thirst for fame and fortune; and Tiger Woods famously kept a magazine article chronicling Nicklaus’s achievements at various ages on his bedroom wall when still a youngster.
For Nicklaus, however, it was all about one thing: competition. It was always about the competition rather than the game itself, so much so that he rarely plays social golf now, getting a game “perhaps once a month or so”.
“If I try and think back to the attributes that made that happen I have hard times finding them because I look at myself and I didn’t think I was that good. I think how could I have ended up doing that?”
“I miss the ability to compete,” he says. “Golf was my vehicle to competition, and I miss the competition. I love competition and I just don’t have that any more.
“My game isn’t very good any more, so when your game isn’t any good you miss your vehicle. The only competition I have any more is in golf course design, competing with a piece of ground and trying to do the best I can with that.”
Back in his day, there were plenty of things to feed that competitiveness, not least of which was his series of outstanding rivalries with the other great players of the era. Stretching from Palmer and Player in the early 1960s through Weiskopf, Miller and Watson in the ’70s, and up to Ballesteros and Norman in the 80s, Nicklaus spent 20 years going up against the greatest golf that anyone could throw at him. It’s something he feels that Tiger has missed out on, and he highlights the fact that while the likes of Ernie Els, Vijay Singh, Phil Mickelson and now Harrington all have three Majors to their name, no contemporary of Tiger’s has gone on beyond that mark to really push him.
“Everybody likes a challenge,” he says. “Any time you’ve got somebody trying to steal your thunder, you don’t want them to steal it. You just try to play better.”
Surely, though, being up against great champions makes it harder to finish the job?
“Yeah, maybe,” he says with a look that demonstrates he rather disapproves of that sort of glass half empty attitude. “But if there’s nobody there then sometimes it can be harder to win, because you can’t make yourself play. And then somebody else wins.”
It’s not just other people, though, that provided motivation for the Golden Bear. While Woods makes a concerted effort to clock up as many Majors as possible, Nicklaus always had a more specific focus: the Grand Slam. He never did it. And excepting Bobby Jones who did the amateur version in 1930, neither has anybody else, with only Tiger Woods ever holding all four trophies at once. “That’s not a Grand Slam,” Nicklaus says forcefully. “A Grand Slam is all four in a calendar year.”
For Nicklaus, a player to whom winning the game’s biggest events was second nature, the goal of taking all four Majors in a year became something of an obsession.
“I got to the stage where in years that I didn’t win the Masters, I felt like I’d blown my season already – which is ridiculous,” he says.
The closest Nicklaus came was in 1972. Having won the Masters and US Open, he came to Muirfield having cricked his neck badly in his sleep the week before, but played a great final round to get back into contention. Yet Lee Trevino chipped in to save par after running into trouble on the 71st hole, and Nicklaus finished a single, agonising shot behind. More incredibly still, he had also won the previous year’s PGA Championship and was bidding to become the first man to hold all four at once.
“If Trevino hadn’t chipped in on that shot I would’ve held all four of them,” he says. “His ball was going a mile-a-minute too. If it hadn’t hit the hole and gone in the cup he’d probably have made bogey rather than birdie and I’d have won by a shot.”
Despite what is clearly a painful memory, Nicklaus is philosophical about it. That same day’s events shocked Tony Jacklin, who was playing with Trevino, to the core - so much so that he never again contended in a Major. So perhaps Nicklaus considers himself lucky to have flown so close to the sun and got away with only singeing his wings a little?
“You know, sometimes I had a little bit of luck too,” he says. “I had a little bit of luck to win in ’70 against Doug Sanders. I mean, he missed a tiny little putt, so I had my little bit of luck too. It is what it is.”
Still, it must have been a tough one to swallow. And while you can’t exactly feel sorry for a man who was named as the No.1 athlete of the 20th century by Sports Illustrated, you can understand why he’s not looking forward to the day when somebody takes his most precious record away from him. Nor could you begrudge him that last little vestige of competitive satisfaction knowing that nobody out there is his equal. Not quite yet.