"If I don't know it and I'm involved in the game of golf, how is Mr. Joe Public going to know it?"

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JackNicklausDeutscheBank.jpgJack Nicklaus sat down to talk about the President's Cup and as usual, offered his take on several issues along with many more enjoyable anecdotes. The entire session is worth reading, but here are some highlights.

On Rory Sabbatini and Tiger:

Q. You know the background, right?

JACK NICKLAUS: Oh, yeah. How could you miss it (laughter)?
I don't know, a lot of times, too, I'll ask Tiger, and I'm sure that Gary will ask his guys, who would you like to play? In other words, at the matches the last time, I went down and I had -- Phil said, "I'd like to play Cabrera." "Tiger, who would you like to play?" "I don't care, it doesn't make any difference to me." Freddie said, "I'd like to play Vijay." I don't know what Gary's guys did.

Those are the only two that I had a mandate if I could get them. As the selection process goes, I pick a player, Gary matches him, Gary picks a player, I match. So forth and so on, it goes back and forth.
It's like the last two times I captained prior to that, I had -- let's see, I had Tiger in Australia ask me to pick Norman for him. I got him Norman. We were in South Africa, and both Ernie and Tiger would like to play each other, so Gary and I talked and tried to figure out, can we get Tiger and Ernie to play. So that's fine.

So if Gary comes to me and says, Jack, I've got Sabbatini wants to play Tiger and Tiger says he wants to play Sabbatini, then we'll try to make that happen. But if Tiger says I don't care and I've got somebody else -- a lot of guys, they say, I want that guy. I had one guy on the other team I had five of my guys say I'd like to have him. They just want to try to beat him. I'm not going to tell you who that is.

That's sort of the way it works. If it turns out that that's a good match, it's a good match. I think frankly that probably Tiger and Vijay or Tiger and Ernie would be a better TV match, but Sabbatini has had a great year. He's played very, very well. He's had a lot of press.

And on his rivals making comments ala Sabbatini:

Q. How did you handle it? And is this atmosphere a lot different in the sense that everybody seems a little bit more sensitive, so to speak?

JACK NICKLAUS: Well, I don't know. We didn't have that much press. The only time -- I had several times, but the one that I remember a lot was -- I was still an amateur, and I was a defending champion. I had won in '59 and '60 going into St. Louis. Phil Rogers in those days, Phil just (motioning talking with hand), and he was holding court at St. Louis about -- he said, "I see in the brackets here if Nicklaus wins his first few matches, he gets to play me." Like he had a bye the first two rounds.

My dad heard it, and my dad said I heard that in conversation, Phil was really running his mouth. I said, I've got to win my first two matches. I won the first two matches, and we went out and played 12 holes and Phil was one under par and the match was over. I beat him 8 & 7.

It turned out Phil turned out to be one of my best friends. I mean, he's a wonderful guy. But in those guys Phil was just all mouth.

And Rory is a little bit going this way a little bit right now. So I think when you get that kind of a thing, a guy says, "I think I want to take care of that situation." And I think Tiger probably said he wanted to take care of that situation.

Now, did I get a little bit of that as I went along? Yeah. But I didn't pay much attention. When I was a 20-year old kid it got my dander up a little bit. I'm sure Tiger is very used to it, I don't think Tiger paid a whole lot of attention to it. He just paid attention, took care of business and went out and played very, very well, as usual.

Q. But it is an slightly extra incentive do you think?

JACK NICKLAUS: A guy doesn't miss it (smiling). You don't miss that comment. It doesn't pass by the way.

And on the FedEx Cup:

Q. We're in week two of a new playoff system. Just curious to get your take on it. Does it interest you at all?

JACK NICKLAUS: I don't understand it to be very honest with you. Tim told me it was supposed to be good for the game of golf so I went along with him (laughter). I think that the whole objective was to get the guys to play, and the first week Tiger skips. So I didn't understand that at all.

I sort of thought that the system was that when you had the Playoffs that everybody started over. But no, the Playoffs carry on.

Now, I can understand that if they didn't carry on and Tiger decided to play the first week and Phil missed the cut, they're gone.

But I would like to find out what does a guy have to do that's 100th on the Money List or 120th to win the FedExCup? What does he have to do?

Here he tried to be more upbeat about it...

Do I like the idea? Yeah, I think it's great to try to get the guys to play at the end of the year, great to have a season-ending playoff. My bet is that it'll get tweaked after this year. Like every event we have ever had the first year we have it, we'll have tweaks in it, and I think the whole objective was to get the guys to play. That was what it was, beyond the PGA Championship, and to be able to have a season-ending thing.
They end it with the TOUR Championship, so it's going to be the TOUR Championship, but it's how you get to the TOUR Championship and create more interest and so on and so forth. I commend them for that. I wish I understood what it was, and I think you guys fall into the same category trying to understand it, too.

If I were Rich Beem trying to figure out the projected 130, 124, when somebody makes birdie, par, bogey, give me a break. How does he win? I just don't know. I just don't know that. And frankly if I don't know it and I'm involved in the game of golf, how is Mr. Joe Public going to know it? That's the problem.

To get the public interested, they've got to understand what's going on. Very simple when you play a football game and you're in the Playoffs, you're a wildcard team and you're playing the division leader, you win, you go on. You lose, you go home. We don't exactly have that here. So I don't really -- I think they'll tweak it someplace.

And my question...

 Q. Can you talk then in general about kind of the interest in short par 4s we're seeing at a lot of tournament venues and if that's maybe impacting your philosophy at all?

JACK NICKLAUS: My favorite holes are short par 4s. I think they're the most fun to design, and I think they're the most fun to play.

I think if you look at Muirfield Village, I think the players love the 14th hole at Muirfield Village, and that's a nasty little hole. It can be a nice hole, too. I mean, it can be a nasty little hole if you play it wrong. And I'm sure there are some other holes throughout the year on the TOUR that you'll find. Royal Montreal has one hole where we'll play the tee up and the tee back. I don't remember what number it is.

I was up there as I said in June, went around the golf course on a rainy day and we went around as fast as we could go because we were freezing to death. It's totally different than when I played there in the '70s, so I don't remember much about the actual holes.

And a really strange question...

Q. I just wonder if you've seen any of Tiger's designs yet, and if you have seen them what your opinion on them might be?

JACK NICKLAUS: I don't think Tiger has any designs yet.

Q. He has the course in Dubai that --

JACK NICKLAUS: He's got a contract. I don't know that he's got a golf course.

Q. He has laid out some of the holes already for it. I don't know if you've seen them at all?

JACK NICKLAUS: No, I'm not going to Dubai to see his golf course (laughter). He'll go through the same process as the rest of it if he is truly interested in design and learn the business.

And my favorite exchanged, started by Doug Ferguson...

Q. What's the last golf course you did for your ego?

JACK NICKLAUS: For my ego? Oh, gosh. I don't really know, but I would say probably -- I mean, I didn't even do the Bear's Club for my ego. I had a membership there that I thought was going to be a fairly elderly membership. I would have done that course a lot more difficult if it was for my ego. I would have made it a lot stronger and a lot different, but I didn't do that. It's still plenty tough enough.

But for my ego, oh, probably back to -- probably Castle Pines maybe, back in that area, early '80s because Jack Vickers really wanted a very difficult golf course. Jack Vickers keeps changing it and making it tougher. Of course you guys aren't going there anymore, but he'll have events there again. I'd say it's been 25 years since I've really done one for my ego. I've been involved with other people's ego, but that's okay.

"You look at Bobby Jones and that brand is worth more now than when he was alive"

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MK-AK356A_NICKj_20070610175049.jpgThanks to reader John for this Robert Frank-Wall Street Journal story on Jack Nicklaus, uh, expanding the brand for $145 million and just a tiny part of his sou...stake in the empire...

The golf icon is selling a substantial minority stake in his company to New York real-estate mogul Howard Milstein to expand the Nicklaus empire around the world, extending its reach in golf course-designs, clothing, equipment and real-estate.

Under terms of the deal, expected to be announced today, Mr. Milstein will pay $145 million for the stake in the newly formed Nicklaus Cos. LLC -- which includes Mr. Nicklaus's business ventures, such as course design, licensing of his name, and golf clubs. Mr. Nicklaus will remain CEO and chairman, and the Nicklaus family will retain control.
Loved this... 
In the design group, which accounts for at least half of the company's profits, the company plans to step up the growth overseas, where demand for golf courses is skyrocketing. While there are 31,000 courses in the world, 19,000 of them are in the U.S, with most of the new demand coming from abroad, according to Mr. Milstein and Mr. Nicklaus.

Mr. Nicklaus has courses under way or planned in India, Korea, China, Russia, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Greece, Croatia and Turkey. Mr. Nicklaus, who logged more than 600 hours on his Gulfstream jet last year, this summer will travel to Kazakhstan to plan a course.

"We're getting the lion's share of the work for golf courses getting built," he said.

Hey, at least he didn't say something like "we're getting the bear's share." Though he would have scored major brand enhancement points.

While most of Mr. Nicklaus's designs lack the high aesthetic reputation of courses created by likes of Tom Fazio, Tom Doak and the team of Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore, they are well-regarded and Mr. Nicklaus is deeply involved in about half of those his company produces. Those are known as Jack Nicklaus Signature courses and carry a premium design fee, typically between $2.5 and $5 million. Work on the other Nicklaus golf courses is carried out by veteran designers at Jack Nicklaus Design.

When do you think the first grandchild will debut his own signature design?

The Nicklaus name on any course significantly increases its worth to developers, because it allows them to sell the accompanying real estate or resort properties at a higher price. Under the traditional business model, Mr. Nicklaus got only the design fee and in some cases also a small cut of the developments' profits.

Working with the Mr. Milstein, however, the company expects to finance and develop more of its own real-estate. "We can help the Nicklaus companies capture more of those opportunities," Mr. Milstein says.

Didn't try this one before already, with not such great results?

Twice Mr. Nicklaus has suffered serious setbacks. In the mid-1980s, his company, Golden Bear Golf Inc., overextended itself into areas such as oil and insurance, forcing Mr. Nicklaus to negotiate personal loans with banks to bail out the business. Then, in 1998, after Golden Bear went public, two executives were fired after the division they headed misrepresented more than $20 million in losses. The company had to restate its prior-year earnings, its market value sank and it went private again.

That answers that.
All four of Mr. Nicklaus's sons and his son-in-law work for his company. Mr. Nicklaus says his goal is to scale back his involvement in the courses, and build a company and brand that will outlast him.

"You look at Bobby Jones and that brand is worth more now than when he was alive," Mr. Nicklaus says.

You know I was going through my favorite Bobby Jones quotes the other day and stumbled on this one:

On the golf course, a man be the dogged victim of inexorable fate, be struck down by an appalling stroke of tragedy, become the hero of unbelievable melodrama, or the clown in a sidesplitting comedy--any of these with in a few hours, and all without having to bury a corpse or repair a tangled personality, but always at the risk of burnishing equity in his brand. 

"If they want to learn the business, they've got to pay their dues and go and work under some other people."

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Thanks to reader Tom for this Lewine Mair piece on Jack Nicklaus criticizing player architects for mailing in designs. Oy vey...Jack. You can't have your son-in-law designing courses under your name and go on rants like this!

The ball, fine. But come on, this?

Mair writes:

Jack Nicklaus has let the cat out of the bag. In an interview for CNN, to appear on Saturday, Nicklaus confirms that there are top golfers who have lent their names to courses which they have never clapped eyes on.

Nicklaus does not include Tiger Woods, whose first design project is under way in Dubai. Though he begins by saying: "Tiger doesn't know anything about designing golf courses at the moment", he makes it clear that when Woods lends his name to a project, "you know it's going to be good".

It is more the general trend of tour players assuming the role of designers with which Nicklaus is so uncomfortable. "There's a lot of fellas out here who know how to play the game, but they don't really understand a golf course," he says. "If they want to learn the business, they've got to pay their dues and go and work under some other people. That way, they'll not only be able to use their name to produce a facility, but they'll produce a facility they're proud of.

"What you don't want," he continues, "is to have people saying, 'This is a Joe Jones' course' when Joe Jones was probably never there."
Nicklaus is interviewed on CNN International's Living Golf on Saturday at 6:30pm.

 

Furrow Specs

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Craig Dolch in the Palm Beach Post offers this on Jack Nicklaus's bunker furrowing plans for this week's Memorial:

This year, though, the tines on the rakes won't be spread as far apart as last year — they'll be 13/4 inches this year as opposed to 21/2 inches in 2006 — but the effect will be the same.

"All I want them to say is, 'That's a place I don't want to be,' " Nicklaus said Friday at his North Palm Beach offices. "I don't care about penalizing the guy. I'm trying to force him to play the strategy of the golf course by not wanting to be in a bunker. Guys aim for bunkers because it's an easy shot."

"They couldn't be friggin' further apart"

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Jack Nicklaus is now using friggin' while talking about equipment and the governing bodies, this time to ESPN.com's Gene Wojciechowski:
Nicklaus said he thinks Tour commissioner Tim Finchem has done "a great job." So I tell him he's been named Golf Czar and can change anything in the sport.

"Equipment," he said. "That would be one thing I would do. I would fix the friggin' equipment."

The problem is this: The difference between what a pro can do with the latest club technology compared to what an amateur can do with it continues to grow wider. Unless golf's two ruling bodies can figure out a way to even things up (a standardized golf ball?), the pros will continue to make courses obsolete and create a bigger disconnect with the amateur players.

"The whole idea of the R&A and the USGA is to try to play the same equipment for the average golfer and the pro, and they couldn't be friggin' further apart," Nicklaus said.

"I played the members' tees. I can't play the back tees anymore"

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Does anyone know when Nicklaus made these comments? From an unbylined report from South Africa's Pretoria News:

Nicklaus played a social round at Augusta recently and came off the course disgusted with its new length.

"I played the members' tees. I can't play the back tees anymore," he told reporters. "Every tee I stood on I saw 73 to 91 yards before the back tee.

"The members tees at Augusta used to be 18 or 27 yards in front, which was a normal distance. It's so far now it is ridiculous, but every golf course is that way."

 

The Nicklaus Golf Digest Article, Vol. 5

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Finally, there were Jack's comments on Augusta National which I found interesting because last year he appeared to back off of his original assertions made during the Golf Digest Panelist Summit (and subsequently published in the April 2006 Digest).

No grey area here:

I miss the old Augusta National. Is the radically redesigned golf course a good one? Yes. Is it the golf course with the design principles that Bobby Jones and Alister Mackenzie intended? Absolutely not.

Augusta was generous off the tee, which made it great for everyday member play. But to score—to really play golf—you had to position the drive to get a good angle at the green. It was a second-shot golf course.

Now the tee shot is more restricted. Trees and new bunkering have narrowed the landing areas, making Augusta a tight course with few angles or options. I know the changes were made to provide an increased challenge for modern pros and keep them from overpowering the course, but it has taken the charm out of the Jones/Mackenzie design.

So much for any possible misinterpretation that Nicklaus thinks they are upholding the integrity of the original design.

I was disappointed that in doing the redesign, Augusta didn’t consult the five oldest multiple Masters champions who also are course designers [Palmer, Player, Nicklaus, Watson, Crenshaw]. We would have had a lot of good ideas, and we wouldn’t have clashed. We would have come to an agreement because we all have so much respect for what’s there.

Well, I don't know about the part about not clashing...but those five would be a lot better than what they've been doing! 

The Nicklaus Golf Digest Article, Vol. 4

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Some more comments of interest from his co-authored piece with Jaime Diaz:

I hope we’re not running people out of the game. As it has become an easier game to play for the pros, the trend toward more severe courses has made it harder for the amateur.

In most cases, the farther the amateur is able to hit the ball, the farther the ball goes off line. The old average drive was in the 190-yard range, but now it’s more like 210 to 220. And on many of the newer courses, off line means searching for golf balls. It’s making the game slower, and a lot less fun.
Oh and don't forget Jack, more dangerous for the townhomes on the rim. Sorry, continue...
The game is more popular than ever among avid golfers with the income and leisure to play a lot, but most people have less free time than ever. The current generation of younger parents spends a lot more time supervising their kids than previous generations, and it means they find it harder to justify a weekend round of golf. Leaving for the course at 7 in the morning and coming back at 3 in the afternoon is a hard sell for a family man. But getting back in time for lunch wouldn’t be.

That’s why we should consider the possibility of making 12 holes a standard round. It might mean breaking up 18-hole facilities into three segments of six holes. Of course it would meet resistance, but eventually it would be accepted because it would make sense in people’s lives.
And this is the best part, addressing the ridiculous attacks made against him over the years by folks who, if confronted by the greatest of them all, would never dare to question his motives and would blabber all over him about being their hero. But behind his back...he's just bitter...right!
Those who say that my comments are intended to help my course-design business are wrong. As a designer, I benefit financially from more land used, more renovations, more penal features. As for people thinking I favor a rollback in equipment because I don’t want Tiger to break my record, going back to older-style equipment would help, not hurt, Tiger because his skill level would make a bigger difference. If we took equipment back today, he might win 30 majors instead of 20.
I’m more interested in the game of golf than in my records. I did what I could do in my time, and it was the best I could do. Now I just want what’s best for the game.

"It's the chair off the Titanic"

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Jack's really, really excited about the the groove rule change impacting distance gains from the ball really good stretching programs. Plugging the President's Cup with Gary Player, he was asked about adjustable equipment.

JACK NICKLAUS: I need one every day anyway, so that's all right. I need an adjustable driver. You never know what swing I'm going to bring along. I don't think either one of them mean very much, but it's -- I guess it's a start, I suppose. But it's the chair off the Titanic, I guess (laughter).

Q. Jack, this is another regulatory question. I enjoyed your comments in Golf Digest with Jaime Diaz on many subjects, but the suggestion about rolling back the ball 10 percent, which I know both of you had advocated. Jack, where would most of the opposition to doing this actually come from? And the other question is for the average player, would they -- what would be the benefit, potential benefit, of doing that?

JACK NICKLAUS: Well, there's several things. We don't have time for all of it. But one, if you take the ball and roll it back, whatever the percentage might be, you really are bringing about 17,000 or 18,000 or 19,000 golf courses in the United States that are basically obsolete to the professional, you're bringing those back into play for a possible event or something where the professionals can go play.

If you have the average golfer, now has a golf ball that is so high tech and clubs that are so high tech that they may hit the ball on the face of the golf course maybe one out of ten shots, and when they hit one out of ten shots on the face, they say, wow, look how far that goes, and they love it. But the other nine shots, because it is so high tech when they miss it, it goes much shorter than it would have if they didn't have such a high tech piece of equipment or ball. So learning how to play golf -- part of this whole thing is to bring people in the game and keep them in the game. And if you have a golf ball that you don't know whether you're going to hit it on the face or not hit it on the face and there's 50 yards of difference between a good shot and a bad shot, it's hard to learn how to play golf.

This is fun...

Back when we were playing, granted, the ball didn't go as far, the clubs didn't hit it as far, but the difference between me and the club champion in most places was 15 or 20 yards at max. I could go to any course and play an exhibition, and I'll bet Gary can say the same, we'd go to play an exhibition and the club champ was playing, in the old conditions the club champ had a chance of beating us. Today, 7,400, 7,500 yards, 7,600, that the pros have to play it from to be competitive, the club champ has got no chance. I'd love to see the game be brought together for the average golfer and the pros together.

Ah...that makes a lot of sense Jack. We can't have that! Oh you weren't done...

Now, you say what's the advantage to the average golfer? Well, the average golfer, they have the ability to always move back on the golf course, the pros don't. Likewise, they have the ability to move up on a golf course, and so do the pros. If you're playing the average golfer at 6,500 yards and it's too long for them, they can move to 6,400 or 6,300 pretty easy. I just think making a game, playing it -- I sort of liken it to the small ball and the large ball 35 years ago, whatever it was, in Britain. They took the large ball and made a condition for competition and made it the same as a U.S. ball. And after about a year or so, they left the small ball and all the conditions that the small ball had for the average golfer.

Well, after about a year or so, they found that the college players, the junior golfers, the amateur golfers, anyone who wanted to play competition were playing the large ball, and the rest of the golfers were left out by playing a golf ball that was not the same. So they actually legislated -- I think the legislature came more from the average golfer than from the pros to bring the large ball for everybody. I would rather see the same thing here. If you decided -- if we only did it for the pros and made the conditions for competition, then all of a sudden I think that would be a step in one direction, and then all of a sudden the average golfer is always going to play to want what the pro plays.

It's going to be fun when one of the companies actually sells one of these balls at a Pine Valley or Merion and it just snowballs from there. I'd hate to be a shareholder in one of the companies that doesn't adjust!

Right now all they advertise on television is, "play what the pros play." Well, they can't play it. They just don't have the clubhead speed to play it. But if we brought everything back -- we could get everything back relatively the same. If you left the golf ball for the average golfer in conditions for competition, I think the average golfer in a year would ask for the other ball and the other condition. The whole point of that whole thing is to try to bring the average golfer or the good single-digit player and the pro closer so when they're watching it on television or they're watching the game that they feel like they're watching the same game that they might have a chance to play.

Q. Where does most of the opposition to doing that come from?

JACK NICKLAUS: Well, I wish I knew, really. I suppose there are probably -- I don't know. Could be ball manufacturers probably, but not -- I never really spoken to any ball manufacturer who has actually told me that they're against it. I've spoken to quite a few who are for it.

Hmmm...

Well, that's just a rally that needs to be killed...

Q. This question is for both you. With Tiger and Phil getting into the golf course design business, I wonder if you can tell me to what degree does being a great golfer help you become a great golf course designer?

The Nicklaus Golf Digest Article, Vol. 2

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Has there ever been a more conscise summary of what the distance issue is all about?

We have about 16,000 courses in the United States. Almost all of them are obsolete for tournament play. For them to become relevant, we need to roll back the ball about 40 yards. That or rebuild all the fairway bunkers at 300 yards. Which is what we’re doing, and it costs a fortune. Instead of changing equipment, we’re changing golf courses. It’s great for my business. I’m making a living redoing my old courses. But the game should be able to go back to the classic courses just as they are. Why should we be changing all those golf courses? It’s ridiculous.

Trying to build great courses today is more complicated than ever. I’ve decided it’s best to basically design for the enjoyment of the average golfer. That’s what works best for the owners, who are selling memberships and selling their land. I was once accused of designing courses that were too severe. A lot of that was because I was designing a lot of tournament courses.

Creating a true challenge for the best professional players for one week of golf makes it too tough for the average player who is going to play it the rest of the year. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to make the game better for more golfers is to take the driver out of the hands of the elite player. So I tighten up the landing areas for them. It’s kind of a sad compromise, but I think it’s the only solution we’ve got. 

Actually, it's not a sad compromise if we could just make driver absolutely worthless on all championship courses. Then driver sales would plummet and just maybe some of the companies would say wait a second we need to roll back the...ah forget it, what was I thinking?

The Nicklaus Golf Digest Article, Vol. 1

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nicklaus1.jpgWith the Nissan Open and the Golf Industry Show, I'm finally getting around to Jack Nicklaus's essay in the March Golf Digest.

Written with the assistance of Jaime Diaz, the piece is monumental on a number of levels. First, it is by far the most space devoted in a major golf publication to the distance issue and its impact since Nicklaus and George Peper penned similar views in Golf Magazine (circa 1998 I believe).  

What I loved most here is Nicklaus's defense of the claims that his motives are not pure. Actually there's a lot to love here, and I know our Fairhaven readers will especially enjoy this week-long look at Jack's rant.

The best golfers should be better today than the best golfers of yesterday. At the moment, I’m not sure that’s the case. I realize I’m an old fuddy-duddy, and that previous generations always say that their game was better. I guess I’d plead guilty—in part. But here’s the difference. The game in terms of equipment barely changed for 60 years. Then with the equipment revolution that began with metal clubheads in the ’80s and accelerated with dramatic ball technology in the late ’90s, the game changed radically. The best players suddenly found themselves able to hit shots more easily and consistently, as well as pull off shots they never would have tried in the past. It made the game for elite players simpler and easier.

Simpler. Very nice. Attention Ponte Vedra: that means less interesting to watch.

As a result, I don’t care as much for today’s game as I did for the one played for most of my career. I like the old game of moving the ball both ways and using strategy with angles, and hitting all the clubs in the bag.

My greatest concern, because I believe it has the most effect on the most parts of the game, is the golf ball. I’d very much like to see the U.S. Golf Association and the R&A institute at least a 10-percent rollback in the distance the golf ball travels. I know the ruling bodies are looking at limits on equipment, including possibly reducing the size of driver clubheads and eliminating square grooves, but that’s treating an effect more than a cause. The desired results from such moves could be taken care of by a rollback in the ball. In fact, there would be much less need to limit equipment innovations that help amateurs play if the ball were rolled back.

Which once again raises the question, why do Callaway, Taylor Made and Nike oppose a ball rollback?

And just to put the tournament ball talk to rest...

I don’t think a rollback should restrict an elite player’s options in customizing the golf ball he or she would play. It’s OK with me for, say, a player with a low ball flight to get some help by using a model of ball with a dimple pattern that creates a higher launch, or a guy whose angle into the ball generates an excess of spin getting a ball that spins less. In other words, I wouldn’t want to see every player having to use the same exact “tournament ball” picked out of a jar on the first tee. As long as players could keep the ball characteristics that best suit their games, I honestly believe it would take them only a few rounds to completely adjust to a rolled-back ball that doesn’t fly quite as far.

"We're trying not to do perfect anymore"

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Thanks to reader Nick for this Seth Soffian story in the News Press, where Jack Nicklaus is teetering on the edge of Phil status:

"I watch Tiger a lot, obviously," Nicklaus said. "His golf swing that week was right on the plane it should have been. He gets himself off of plane very easily, particularly when his swing gets longer. Then he can hit it anywhere.

"He's such a great iron player because he's so much under control," said Nicklaus, beginning the demonstration of various club positions on the backswing.

"His swing is not very long with his irons. He keeps it pretty much in here. Once he gets the driver back in here, that's when he gets off plane, and then he can bring it under this way or around this way."

And...

"He was on plane the whole time with the driver," said Nicklaus, throwing one last variable into the mix to consider for the year's final major championship.

"Obviously, (Hank) Haney is doing something with him that (Tiger) feels confidence with, because he's getting great confidence with his other clubs," Nicklaus said of Woods' swing coach.

"It could be he's got a bad driver, too. I don't know. If you're hitting everything else good and you're hitting your driver bad, it may be your driver, not him. I don't know."

He also had this to say about his design work, which Nick was possibly a reflection on his collaboration with Tom Doak:

Q: We heard you said the course was "too perfect."

A: Sometimes, yeah. We're trying not to do perfect anymore. We used to work really hard to get everything absolutely dead perfect. I don't think nature's too perfect. We try to bust up a few things to make them look a little irregular at times. Perfect is a description I drove my guys crazy with for about 20 years.

Jack: I Could Have Won 25

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Paul Forsyth pulls all sorts of fun stuff out of Jack Nicklaus, who was in one of his chatty moods at the Open Championship. On his 18 majors:
“Once I got past that record, I didn’t have a big push to do much else,” he says. “I didn’t know I had Tiger Woods pushing me. I would have probably worked harder and maybe won more if I had. I can’t say I prepared for every major the way I should have. I can’t say that I didn’t give away opportunities. Records were never really that important to me until it was too late to go back and go for them.

“Never in my life did I add up how many I had won. Tiger has been adding from day one. He has grown up that way, and the more he does it, the more he is reminded of it. He doesn’t know anything else.”
And...
Nicklaus is proud of his majors, but there are more important things. “To me, my record is 18 professional majors, five kids, 46 years of marriage, 19 grandkids and a successful business. I have other friends, I have enjoyed what I have done, and I have been able to smell the flowers along the way. Those are the things that are important to me, not the 18 majors. The 18 majors are not my life, they are part of it.

“If I had been really serious about building a record that nobody was going to touch, I wouldn’t have been able to do a lot of the other things I have enjoyed. I have had a very balanced life.

“I spend time with my kids, I have grown up knowing them, and if golf had been the only thing I did, that wouldn’t have happened. I could have won 20 or 25 majors, but I think I would have been a miserable person.”

The implication is that Woods, whose late father compared him to Gandhi, is not on this earth to have a good time. Should the world No 1 successfully defend his title at Royal Liverpool this afternoon, the biggest prize will not be the Claret Jug, which he has won twice already, but the fact that it will take him to within seven majors of the holy grail. From the moment he pinned the Nicklaus record on his bedroom wall, his only dream has been to achieve immortality.

“Tiger is a pretty well- balanced kid, who likes to do other things, like diving and fishing, but he is living in a fishbowl. He can’t go anywhere without people reminding him who he is and what he is here for. I never used to worry about anything like that. I could go to any restaurant and nobody bothered me. He’s like a rock star. They’re on top of him all the time. I wouldn’t trade my life for his, not for any money you want to name.”
And this is fun, considering he'll be President's Cup captain again in 2007:
“In this year’s US Open, six of the top 10 were foreign players, and so were 14 of the top 20. We have some very good players, but if you look past Tiger, Phil (Mickelson) and Jim Furyk, it’s pretty thin.”

Neither is he especially impressed with the Europeans, save for a select two or three. Nicklaus, who is captain of the US Presidents Cup team, says the world’s best players are from neither continent.

“There are more good world players than there are US and European players combined. Maybe, in the Ryder Cup, it should be the US and Europe versus the rest of the world.”