On the 25th anniversary of his sixth and final — and most improbable — Masters title, at age 46, Jack Nicklaus looks back with both passion and detail on golf’s where-were-you moment. He also still sees Tiger Woods coming after him and his 18 career major pro championships.
“I assume he’ll get his focus back on what he’s doing and he will probably pass my record,” Nicklaus said of the winner of 14 majors whose career is in flames from self-inflicted burns. “But then the last part I always say about it is, he’s still got to do it. He’s still got to win five more (majors) and that’s more than a career for anybody else playing.”
Nicklaus makes a good point. The idea of five major titles these days exceeds comprehension for most players. Phil Mickelson enters this 75th Masters, scheduled to begin Thursday morning, favoured for his fourth green jacket and fifth major overall and Phil’s now in his 40s and fighting arthritis. As well as he is playing — and 18 birdies in his final 36 holes at Houston last weekend for his 39th career victory is telling — he’s well into the back nine of his career.
Neither is Mickelson any kind of lock here; a dozen of golf’s outstanding young players look to crack the club of major winners and it’s only a matter of time for Rory McIlroy, Ryo Ishikawa, Nick Watney, Dustin Johnson, Luke Donald and several others to break through.
One thing about these kids, as well as Mickelson and Woods and pretty much everyone else in the field of 99 teeing it up Thursday, is that they all revere that magical Nicklaus moment in ’86. Most who were around remember watching it on TV as kids. They’ve certainly felt its impact ever since, the way Nicklaus still does after all these years. He was four shots down with four holes to play, but eagled 15, birdied 16 and 17 and heard — and recognized — the groans behind him from Seve Ballesteros’ killing 4-iron hooked into the greenfront pond at 15.
“I guess you can make a big conversation out of anything,” said Nicklaus, who was due out at 7:40 a.m. Thursday with old rival and fellow Augusta National member Arnold Palmer to hit the Masters’ ceremonial first tee shots. “But it was a long time ago and it was an exciting week for me. (Son) Jackie was on the bag. It was fun having my mother and sister here, who had not been here since 1959.
“Even more fun, I holed a few putts (on) the back nine, which made it possible that we could sit here and talk about it.”
Talk Jack can. At age 71, he can still give anyone club and yardage on every shot on his sensational back-nine 30. He recapped how he knew what his main rivals that day — Ballesteros, Tom Kite and Greg Norman — were doing. (“At a certain point in the tournament it becomes a match-play event against those on the leaderboard, so you have to know who is there to do what you’re going to try to do.”) He told how he wrestled control into his own hands, the place he felt it was the safest, by sinking that famous 12-foot birdie putt on the 17th hole, raising his putter heavenward in one of golf’s iconic images. (“So my goal and my focus then was not to worry about anybody else, because they were going to chase me now. It was: How do you play the last hole?”)
He played it in par, Norman and Kite ended a shot back and modern golf’s greatest moment was forged. A quarter-century later it stands unsurpassed.
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