NICKLAUS MILESTONES

 By Kathlene Bissell

 Jack and Barbara Nicklaus side by side for 40 years.

This year, as Jack and Barbara Nicklaus celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary, Jack plans to play in all four majors of both the PGA Tour and the Senior PGA Tour, giving him yet another shot at winning the most significant events in golf. With Barbara by his side, don’t bet against him, especially at Augusta. Her support, love, and timely advice have been his “15th club” since their accidental meeting as freshmen at Ohio State University.

Jack Nicklaus has been called the greatest golfer ever to play the game — not just by journalists, but by numerous touring pros. He has surpassed the praise of Bobby Jones who said, “He plays a game with which I am not familiar.”

Amazingly, Jack and Barbara remain down-to-earth people, living in the same Florida home since 1969, and keeping the same friends from Columbus, Ohio, from North Palm Beach, Florida, and from the Tour. They have added the kind of toys that come with ultimate success, like the Gulfstream III called Air Bear — for business — and the 80-foot Monterey Sea Bear — for fun. Yet the main concern at the Nicklaus house has been family. That means sons Michael, Gary, Jackie, Steve, and daughter Nan. Nan and Jack II and their respective spouses have presented their parents with 5 grandchildren each to date. Steve and his wife added No. 11 in September.

In 1998, ClubCorp and Golden Bear International entered into an unprecedented agreement for Nicklaus Design to create as many as three dozen golf courses. The first two projects are Nicklaus Golf Club at LionsGate in Overland Park, Kansas, near Kansas City, and the Nicklaus Golf Club at Birch River in Dahlonega, Georgia, near Atlanta. Additionally, two Bear’s Best courses have been announced for the Atlanta and Las Vegas areas. The Bear’s Best replication concept represents a collection of 18 of Jack’s favorite golf holes. Bear’s Best courses also are being planned for the Dallas and Washington, D.C., areas. Each public access course in the series will feature a different 18-hole selection, depending upon the location, climate, and terrain. (For more about the Bear’s Best, see related article, page 33.)

Jack expresses a desire to leave as a legacy the commitment to maintain golf at its highest level in the future. He says, “The golf courses I design will be here long beyond my golf game and my lifetime — and that excites me.” In the following conversation, however, Jack and Barbara are more focused on 2000, a year of many milestones for the First Couple of Golf.

Jack, it is well documented that you had high regard for Bobby Jones. Did you use his record as a measuring stick the way Tiger Woods said he has used yours?

JN: I grew up [playing at Scioto Country Club] where Jones won the Open, and that’s all I heard as a kid. I never really worried about measuring. I heard about Jones, and the majors were the important part. I never paid a whole lot of attention to numbers until I was in the press tent at the British Open in 1978 and somebody said, “Jack, that’s your 10th major. You only need three more to tie Bobby Jones.” And I said, “Huh?” It never entered my mind because I was just playing golf. So that just happened. Then all of a sudden, numbers became a focus.

If you did have a list of Bobby Jones’ titles, and that was your goal, when you got to 14, you could quit.

JN: If that was your goal — to break somebody’s record. But that wasn’t my goal.

What was or is it?

JN: I never let mediocrity be my level. I was never interested in being just part of something. If I was going to do something, I want to really be part of it. If I’m going to go fishing — a lot of people would just as soon drink 10 beers on the boat and if they catch a fish, fine. I happen not to care about drinking 10 beers. I really enjoy fishing. A lot of guys go out and play golf and they go out and hit the ball around, and that’s all they want to do and I like that. But while I was out there, it was a game I liked to win at. You want to do it to the best of your ability. That doesn’t mean that I was any more talented than somebody else. Maybe my desire to win was greater than somebody else’s.

Where does that come from — that want to win?

JN: I just didn’t enjoy finishing other than first. I don’t think anybody does. When you go out to do something, you don’t want to finish second. I mean I finished second a lot, but that was because I was trying to finish first and didn’t always get there.

Is it from your parents?

JN: My dad was a good athlete — seven letters in high school. He liked to compete, and as I grew up, no matter what we did, it was a competition. If we got out of the car, he’d race me to the theater to go to the movie. If we got to a swimming pool, he’d want to race me to the other end. Even when I was a little kid playing golf, it was, “OK, outdrive that one, and I’ll buy you a new Cadillac convertible.” I was 11, 12 years old and didn’t even know what a Cadillac convertible was. Finally, when I was 13, I outdrove him. I never heard that phrase again.

When I was in 6th grade, I couldn’t beat my mother running. He started giving me the needle, and it ended up that I went out for track in the 7th grade and ended up being the fastest kid in my class and competed very well within the area. I didn’t want to just run, I wanted to learn how to run and to be good. So it was the same thing in everything else. It’s part of my makeup, but my dad, I’m sure, had a great deal to do with it.

You seem to go at everything full bore, but I have not gotten the feeling that you are trying to beat other people.

JN: I’m not trying to beat somebody’s brains in. If I’m going to do something, I want to do it well. That’s all. Look at the yard. I don’t know if there’s a competition here or not, but I’ve just enjoyed trying to find specimens of different trees. [He points north, by the pool.] Now, that’s an African Tulip tree with the orange bloom, and that’s a hard tree to grow in this area. We have tried and tried and tried. We’ve tried to find locations for different trees and see how they would grow in different climates. And I’ve enjoyed doing that. I’ve got more than 100 varieties of palm trees. I’ve got every tree that flowers in south Florida — 20 varieties of mangoes, six varieties of avocados, 35 varieties of citrus.

I understand the vegetation as well as I understand something else. Do I plant it? No. But I work on the location here and make it as nice as I can make it. I don’t like to walk into someplace and see something mediocre.

But there’s a balance too. You see guys who are so intense when they play that it’s, “Get out of my way. It’s all my life. This is all I’m going to do.” And I don’t believe that. I’ve always had a good balance in my life with my family, with Barbara, with business, and other things — and I was just as competitive with those in each area, but I didn’t let one dominate the other. I never let anything dominate my life.

Several Tour players have said that, aside from your record, one of the things they admire about you is that you have done an admirable job in your family relationships — being there for Barbara and for your children.

JN: That’s far more important to me than my record.

Was it hard for you to make a decision to turn pro, or was it easy, or were you relieved?

JN: Whether I was a pro had nothing to do with it because I was making enough money as an amateur at that time — I was doing pretty well in the insurance business. It was a question of if I wanted to be as good as I could be at the game of golf, then the only way I could do that was to play against the best. There’s only one way to do that and that’s to play professionally. Thirty years or 40 years before that, when Jones played, that wasn’t the case, because the pros were club pros. Then all of a sudden, we had tournament players, and all they did was play tournament golf.

Barbara, were you happy with the decision?

BN: I knew whatever he did, he would do well. When we were married, we didn’t have two nickels to rub between us. But we weren’t worried. My parents [paid for] my college education. His parents [paid for] his. Never even thought about it. We were in Columbus, Ohio, and he was trying to go to school, sell insurance, and play golf. And he was not doing any of them at the level he would like because anything he goes into he goes 100 percent. Basically, when we were married, he was willing to remain amateur. I think trying to juggle three things, he realized if he wanted to be the best golfer in the world, he had to play with the best. And as an amateur, he was limited. So that’s why he turned pro, and we kind of eased into it.

We always laugh about my first tournament with [son] Jackie, at Doral [in Miami], and I’m packing to go to this tournament and my baby is not going to sleep on hotel sheets, my baby is not going to do this and that. I got off the plane in Miami with a brand new Portacrib in a box and tons of stuff. I was $85 in overweight luggage, and we didn’t have $85 to spare, and I think if Jack could have, he would have put me right back on the plane — back to Columbus. You very quickly learn that your baby can adjust.

When did you fall in love with Jack?

JN: Had to be love at first sight.

BN: We met the first weekend of our first year in college, and we dated from then until about New Year’s Eve. In two and a half months, you kind of run out of Mickey Mouse things to say.

New Year’s Eve, we had a date, and we agreed to date other people. So he went back to dating the girl he’d dated before, and I was dating a friend of his. My birthday was the end of February, and I got a card from him, a card from his parents, and a card from his sister. And I thought, “This is something.” And really, after that, we started dating again, and that was it. We had just turned 18. We were 17 when we met, and ...

JN: We got married when we were 20.

What is the story about you going to a tournament in Britain, Jack, and taking Barbara home from a date early, and then feeling so bad that you wrote her letters?

JN: The Walker Cup in 1959. I’d never written a letter, and I don’t know how many times I wrote her, and then when I got home — decided to get engaged.

BN: When he left, I was thinking I got dumped early. I still have those letters.

JN: You do? I’ve never seen them. I bet they are hysterical. I’ve never seen them.

BN: Those are the only letters you ever wrote me. Should I give them to her? [Barbara almost offers the writer a peek at Jack’s love letters, but the playful sparkle in her eyes reveals that the letters are for her eyes only.]

Speaking of letters, Barbara, how much correspondence do you do in a week or two?

BN: A lot, and I do enjoy it. I try to answer everybody. Jack is good at it, too. He tries. So many people are so nice. One day in the hospital [with Jack’s 1999 hip surgery], we had a huge stack of cards, and we didn’t know one person. I said, isn’t that unbelievable that people who don’t know us would take the time to send a card to say “hope you are recovering” or “get well soon.” It is really nice when that happens to you.

What’s the hardest part of being famous?

JN: I don’t think it was all that bad for us. Today, you can hardly say something without it being in newspapers. Nobody really respects anybody’s privacy anymore. In the old days, I could go out to dinner with [golf writers] Dick Taylor or Herb Wind or Jim Murray or Dave Anderson or Furman Bisher and know that the next day it wasn’t going to be in the newspaper. Today, if somebody is sitting two tables away and happens to hear half of a comment, it will. It has got to be really difficult for anybody who’s in public life.

BN: We have not looked at it that way. I think, fortunately for us, we were married and had a child before Jack turned pro. So, you know, it was kind of part of — this is the next segment.

Is it difficult to maintain friendships and meet new friends?

BN: It hasn’t been. We have really good, down-to-earth friends. We still have the same friends we had 30 years ago. Our new friends here are now old friends. Once the kids started school, we made friends with parents of their friends, and we see a lot of them. Gary Player and his wife, Vivienne. We still see them a lot. Arnie and Winnie [Palmer].

It’s interesting the three couples would get along so well.

BN: Vivienne, Winnie, and I seemed to hit it off immediately. Winnie is one of the neatest gals in the world. [Note: Winnie Palmer passed away in November 1999.]

Let’s turn to your course design work. Is the fun in creating a course or in seeing it completed?

JN: I enjoy most of the processes. I enjoy getting the routing the way I think it should work, because when I get the routing, I generally have a pretty good idea of what I think the golf course should do. I get enough good holes and balance that it allows me to do that. Once you are into construction, you are going to try to figure out the style. I have fun trying to figure out the style. I enjoy the finished work. Sometimes, how I see it in my own mind and how it turns out on the ground may be something different, so I have to work on that. I enjoy most of the processes and I like the finished product, too.

Explain the Bear’s Best and your arrangement with ClubCorp.

JN: The relationship came about in the summer of 1998, and since then we have suddenly exploded with jobs from ClubCorp.

The old style of making golf has changed. People have become more sophisticated. They want to play at a better golf course, and they don’t mind paying a couple of dollars more to play a good golf course. The daily-fee player wants the country club experience today, and they don’t mind paying for that a little bit.

That gives you a little more flexibility in the marketplace because it used to be that public golf was a $12 [green fee] golf course. [At that price] there was no way in the world ClubCorp could afford to pay me my fee, and no way they could have the quality they wanted without cutting every corner just to compete. Now you are creating your own market by finding the right location where a good product will be utilized at a certain price. And you have a little flexibility to do that, and that allows me to be involved.

The Bear’s Best is an idea that our guys and the ClubCorp guys came up with. I have some 175 golf courses. They thought there ought to be enough golf holes — 50 or 60 of my courses have been on television for tournaments — and a piece of ground where we can arrange them so people will recognize the holes when they go there.

It’s something different for me because I’ve always taken pride in that I’ve never repeated a hole. Obviously, in this concept I’m going to repeat a hole. The creativity in doing the Bear’s Best is going to be different. We will take a hole and adapt it and the strategy, and change the ground to fit it.

It could be a monster golf course.

JN: I think it’s got a good shot at it. But I have to make sure it’s not unplayable. Of course, how many times could I build the 18th at Sherwood or 7th at Lakeway or the 13th at Valhalla with stonewalls and waterfalls. Those are expensive holes. So it has to be a blend.

Revisit your thinking on designing for spectator galleries on your courses.

JN: The first golf course done for galleries was Muirfield Village and the second was Glen Abbey. I called them “amphitheater” or “spectator golf.” And the [PGA] Tour came along with the word “stadium.” I felt, first of all, golf is generally played in the valley and homes are on the sides of the hills and basically you can use the same thing for people — create that same situation. Muirfield really fit through the valleys, but Glen Abbey was unique from a design standpoint because of the large number of holes that people could watch easily. I liked the idea [at Glen Abbey], and it was the first golf course I did by myself.

There’s a chance that your record as architect may equal or surpass your record as a player. Do you think about that?

JN: Not really. I love playing the game of golf and I’ve been very successful. I have a record that I’m very proud of, but I’m also very proud of what we’ve done with the golf courses and that legacy will live long beyond my lifetime. People like what I do now so that they will probably still like it 50 years from now or 100 years from now. It’s a nice, promising thing, but everybody wants to compare everybody today. That’s not important to me. I’m just trying to produce golf courses — to leave a legacy: Here’s how I think the game should be played.

You may end up as another Donald Ross.

JN: Something like that may happen. I’ve done enough golf courses that something like that is obviously going to happen. But everybody wants to compare everyone to everyone else, and I just don’t think that’s necessary.

What are you each best at?

BN: He’s good at a lot.

JN: Barbara’s good at having a lot of balls in the air and keeping them all pretty level. She’s always got a bunch of them going and always takes care of everybody. She does a good job of that. What am I best at? Staying out of Barbara’s way while she’s doing that!

Is there anything you haven’t done that you would like to do? Anything you and Jack haven’t done together that you would like to do?

BN: You know, I don’t think so. My dad was a schoolteacher. I really never traveled outside Columbus before Jack and I were married. We’ve met so many people we never thought we’d meet and been to so many places we never thought we’d go. We just really have a wonderful life. We keep thinking maybe it’s going to slow down, so we can spend a week on the boat here or do something there, but I think it gets busier. I think we’ve had a neat life. It’s been fun. We had three couples [as guests] over the weekend, whom we went to high school and college with — and we had the best time.

Jack?

JN: There are many things — but I don’t know what they are. Good gracious! If you didn’t have things you want to do, there’d be no reason to be around. I enjoy going different places, doing different things. I haven’t been a real grandfather because I’ve been all consumed with my hip and now I can start to spend some time with my grandchildren.

Is there a new career we don’t know about?

JN: I’m looking to slow down those things. I had fun the other day with George Peper [editor of Golf Magazine]. He said, “Jack, you won six Masters, five PGAs, four U.S. Opens, three British Opens and two U.S. Amateurs. What would you like to have one of?” And I told him a British Amateur, but I’m not going to get my amateur status back. It would take me 45 years to get that back!

Kathlene Bissell is the author of the recently published book, Fred Couples: Golf’s Reluctant Superstar, an authorized biography of one of the game’s most popular players. She lives in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.

ONLY THE BEST
ClubCorp and Golden Bear International announced late in 1999 the first two signature “Bear’s Best” projects, to be located northeast of Atlanta and just west of Las Vegas. Additional Bear’s Best properties will be announced in the future.

The public-access golf courses will feature replications of some of PGA legend and golf course designer Jack Nicklaus’ favorite hole designs, such as Elk River No. 6 and Muirfield Village No. 11.

“Over the past 30 years, I have had the opportunity to design nearly 200 courses and in just about every corner of the world,” says Jack Nicklaus, chairman of Golden Bear International. “There are certain holes that I have enjoyed designing and ones we hope have given golfers a lasting memory.”

The Bear’s Best courses will be designed specifically for group play, in contrast to most golf courses, which are geared toward individual tee times.

“These courses will meet a significant need for corporate entertainment and events,” says Jim Hinckley, chief operating officer of ClubCorp responsible for growing all aspects of the company’s domestic and international operations. “Being able to play on Jack’s best holes is a real bonus.”

Group play will be accommodated by the absence of numbering for holes (golfers will begin play at different places throughout each course). Electronic signage will direct individuals to their group’s location. A large catering staff will attend to food and beverage needs and multiple bag drop-off points, and parking will facilitate larger groups. Each location will feature a golf learning center for clinics.

Both Bear’s Best golf courses will be constructed in highly desirable residential developments and will serve as an amenity for residents. In Atlanta, Pulte Homes will develop Edinburgh, which will begin construction in the spring and be designed to become a 574-acre, single-family, residential golf community located in Gwinnett County. Pulte, with headquarters in Bloomfield, Michigan, is the nation’s largest homebuilder, with operations in 27 states and 41 markets.