Do I want Tiger to beat my record? Of COURSE I don’t!
But golf’s greatest says Woods and McIlroy still have a chance to surpass his mark of 18 majors
THE lift doors on the third floor of the office building in North Palm Beach slide open and Jack Nicklaus ambles out. He walks past an autographed golden bear on the reception desk and a painting on the wall that depicts him standing on the Swilcan Bridge at St Andrews for the last time in 2005 when he retired from golf and let the rest of the world chase his records.
He says hello to Marlene on the front desk and pops his head into a couple of the rooms that open up off the corridor and then he wanders into his office, which is mostly a shrine to Barbara, his wife of 58and-a-half years, his five children and his 22 grandchildren. Beneath a set of golf clubs fanned out on the wall, he sinks into his favourite armchair.
I put two tape recorders on the table and make my usual explanation about getting paranoid in my old age that one won’t work. Nicklaus smiles. ‘I took two suits to the office yesterday in case I got a hole in one,’ he says. I don’t get it the first time and babble something about spilling food on suits. The greatest golfer there has ever been is one up already.
He is wearing a pink polo shirt and khaki shorts. He flew back home late last night from New York, where he had given a speech, and he has been to the gym already. He goes three times a week, he says. More than he ever did when he was a player. He sees Rory McIlroy in there most days. ‘Rory works pretty hard,’ says Nicklaus approvingly. ‘I like him a lot.’
One thing that has always been obvious about Nicklaus is that he radiates contentment. He is happy with his lot. If you’ve won 18 majors and you’re revered wherever you go, it helps, but the world is full of great sportsmen and women who feel they have never been given their due or they still have something to prove. Nicklaus is not one of them.
He will be 80 next year and he is smaller than he used to be. He has lost so many of the discs in his spine to surgery that he has shrunk from being nearly 6ft in his prime to somewhere about 5ft 8in. He used to be taller than Tom Watson. Now he looks him in the eye.
He does not rage against age like his best pal, Gary Player, though. Player looks like a 50-year-old and works out like a demon and tells you about it in great detail. Nicklaus laughs again at the thought of that. ‘Gary’s great,’ he says. ‘He’s a great guy. He just loves competition. But he doesn’t like ageing. I don’t really have a big problem with it.
‘Would I like to be more flexible? Sure. I was at the gym this morning but I haven’t walked a golf course in eight or nine years. Doctors tell me I have exercise-induced adult asthma. I don’t believe that. I think I’m getting older, that’s all, and I’m out of shape. As long as I’m looking down at the ground, that’s OK. I don’t want to be looking up for a while.’
He does not play much golf any more and when he does, he plays off 6. ‘People have a hard time believing that,’ he says, ‘but it’s part of life to move on.’ Last month, he played a fourball with his son, Gary, President Trump and Tiger Woods at The Bear’s Club, the club he founded and created 20 years ago, a few miles from his office here. ‘Tiger pipped me by 18 strokes,’ Nicklaus says. ‘He shot 64 with no effort whatsoever.’
Some golfers, McIlroy and Woods included, have taken heat for playing with Trump. Nicklaus brushes that aside. ‘I played a lot of golf with Clinton,’ he says. ‘I never played with Obama but I invited him to play. To me, it’s not about the man, it’s about the office. I’ve known Trump for more than 30 years. I like Trump. He’s a little different but I tell you one thing, he loves the United States.
‘Trump is probably the best golfer that has been in the White House. He’s about a six handicap. He’ll break 80 most of the time. He hits the ball further than I do. I played a lot of golf with Clinton, I played a lot of golf with Ford, I played a bit with HW Bush. I have not played with George W but I’m going to play with him next month. I don’t think Carter was a golfer. I never did meet Reagan, though I had a great deal of respect for him.’
Nicklaus’s days are taken up with family now and with a charity that he and Barbara set up to improve children’s healthcare. He is flying to Virginia today to watch one of his grandchildren playing for the University of North Carolina at lacrosse. The grandkids keep him busy. He was at the Hard Rock Stadium last October to watch another one, Nick O’Leary, score his first touchdown for the Miami Dolphins. Last year, in the days leading up to the Masters, his grandson Gary made a hole- in- one at the par -3 contest at Augusta. Nicklaus is heading back there tomorrow, wondering if either McIlroy or Woods, the two men he thinks have a chance of overhauling his record of major wins, can win in Georgia.
Woods, 43, whose career has been given a new lease of life by spinal fusion surgery, has been stuck on 14 majors since he won the US Open in 2008. McIlroy, who many still see as the heir to Nicklaus and Woods, had won four majors by the age of 25 but has not added to them since he won the last of those at the US PGA in 2014.
‘Tiger still has a chance of matching my record,’ Nicklaus says. ‘Of course he does. I don’t know what his health situation is but he’s swinging better than he has ever swung. Tiger’s got another 10 years of top-quality golf in front of him. He’s got all the time in the world to beat my record if he stays together physically.
‘My record is what it is. Do I want anybody to break it? Of course not. But I don’t want Tiger to be unable to break it because he is physically not able to do it. In 2008 when he first hurt himself and had an operation, I called him.
‘I said, “You know Tiger, I don’t want you breaking my records but I want you to be physically able to do so”, and I tried to help him with some people to talk to. I love to see him play and I’d love to see him do well and if his ability to beat my record is there and he does so then all power to him, congratulations.’
Nicklaus does not think the threat to his record is confined to Woods, though. ‘Rory has won four and he’s still a young guy,’ he says. ‘He could get on a run and win and get half-adozen pretty fast and then you’ve got a guy in his prime with 10 or 12 of them and you’ve got another guy to think about.
‘Am I surprised Rory hasn’t won a major for a few years? Well, they’re not easy to win. He’s more focused now than I have ever seen him. He might be the top pick at Augusta
‘RORY MAY BE TOP PICK AT AUGUSTA NEXT WEEK. HE’LL DO VERY WELL’
next week. Coming off the win at the Players Championship and seeing what his work ethic has been, I think he’ll do very, very well.’
Nicklaus spends a lot of time at The Bear’s Club, which is a magnet for a lot of the best young players in the world, many of whom have homes in the area. Woods is in Jupiter, McIlroy is in a nearby area called Frenchman’s Creek.
Nicklaus loves the camaraderie that the club brings him. He loves watching the best in the world out there honing their skills. And he takes great pleasure in the fact that many of them still seek him out for advice. When a man has won the US Masters six times, the US Open four times, the Open three times and the US PGA five times, no wonder they look upon him like a god.
‘I like Justin Thomas a lot and Rickie Fowler,’ he says. ‘ Dustin Johnson should never lose a tournament. He’s a freak of nature. He’s a good athlete that kills it and kills it straight. Jordan Spieth has a little bit of a slump and suddenly he’s forgotten about. There’s no reason to — he’s going to be around for a long time.
‘I watch more golf now than I ever watched. My philosophy for a long time was, “Why do I want to sit down and watch somebody I know I can beat?” I can’t beat them any more so now I watch a bit more. I began to realise how good some of these young guys were and I like running into them at The Bear’s Club.
‘It keeps me relevant. How many 79-year-olds do 22-year-old kids ask for advice. I have never imposed myself on one of them but some of them come to me quite often. It’s very flattering. It keeps me current. And relevant to what’s going on. I enjoy that. I’m delighted.’
Nicklaus thinks back over his career. He said he went to college intending to be a pharmacist like his dad but that his dad talked him out of it. ‘He wasn’t just my father, he was my best friend,’ Nicklaus says. ‘He told me I couldn’t play golf from behind a counter.’
I ask him about his happiest time in golf and he looks puzzled. ‘I won a few golf tournaments,’ he says, with the practised understatement he is fond of, ‘and I was happy with each one of them. It’s like asking who’s your favourite child.’
He mentions winning the Ohio Open as an amateur when he was 16. He mentions the excitement of playing in the Walker Cup at Muirfield and realising that meant he was one of the best 12 amateurs in the United States.
He mentions almost winning the US Open at Cherry Hills in 1960 when he was still a 20-year-old amateur but losing out to Arnold Palmer, who produced one of the greatest comebacks to win. It was the first of many great duels between two men who were the cornerstone of a golfing golden age.
He mentions his first major win at the 1962 US Open at Oakmont, where he beat Palmer in a play-off. Palmer was the crowd favourite and no one wanted the young Nicklaus to usurp him. He remembers a spectator standing in the rough with a sign saying ‘Over here, Jack,’ but he won their affection, too, in the end.
And he mentions the last major victory, too, the one that he won when he was 46 years old, when everyone thought there would be no more glory for the Golden Bear. ‘It finished with the ’86 Masters,’ he says, ‘ which was pretty special because my career was basically over then. But I found lightning in a bottle.’
But the happiest time was not any of those moments. ‘The happiest time in my life is my kids,’ he says. ‘I married Barbara and had five kids and those are my happy times. And the grandkids. That’s what’s important. The rest is not that important. Golf’s a game.’
Trump is probably the best golfer there has been in the White House. He hits the ball further than I do