The tournament host, Jack Nicklaus, conducted an interesting press conference ahead of the Memorial Tournament at the end of last month. He was asked if he regretted the absence from the field of Brooks Koepka and Cameron Smith, two reigning major champions who were excluded because they had joined LIV Golf.
“I don’t even consider those guys part of the game anymore,” he said. “I don’t mean that in a nasty way. This is a PGA Tour event and we have the best field we can possibly have for a PGA Tour event for those who are eligible to be here. The other guys made a choice of what they did and where they’ve gone and we don’t even talk about it.” He expressed those sentiments in May 2023 BC (‘Before Cave’).
Moving on from the PGA Tour’s astonishing volte-face regarding how it regarded Saudi business people wanting to get into golf, Nicklaus also pointed out that he was one of the prime movers behind the establishment of the PGA Tour, itself a breakaway from the PGA of America. Initially as an entity called the American Professional Golfers, in December 1968 it announced a 28-tournament schedule for 1969 that carried prize-money of just over $3.5 million. That was for the whole lot! Eight days ago, Viktor Hovland collected more than that for winning the 2023 Memorial alone.
Nicklaus himself, who is now 83, had started on tour in 1962. “I made money in every tournament I played in my first year,” he recalled. “I shot 64 in the last round at Pensacola to make last-place money. In those days to pick up $250, which is what we were making when we would just make the cut, you know you wanted that $250. That took care of another week or two of playing golf.” The first tournament the Golden Bear won as a professional was the one that will be taking place in Los Angeles this week: the US Open.
Talking of Nicklaus and major championships, the course he built in Ohio which hosts the Memorial Tournament is called Muirfield Village, named for the Scottish course where he won the first of his three Opens, in 1966. Nicklaus’s first autobiography, written with the assistance of the matchless Herbert Warren Wind, is called The Greatest Game of All: My Life in Golf. The description of his playing of the 71st hole of that championship provides a marvellous insight into how his mind worked under competitive pressure.
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He needed a par and a birdie to win. Muirfield’s 17th hole is a par-five, then of 528 yards. He hit a 3-iron off the tee, leaving himself 238 yards to go. What to do? “With the big ball and no wind, 238 yards – that’s easy: that’s a 1-iron,” he wrote. “Downwind with the small ball, 238 yards – that’s more difficult to figure. [The 1.68-inch ball, the ‘big’ ball, is what we use today but back then the ‘small’ ball, with a diameter of 1.62 inches, was preferred in the UK. The big ball became compulsory for use in the Open in 1974.] I settled on a 5-iron. I made my allowances more or less this way: one club less for the small ball; one and a half clubs less for the following wind; one club less for the run on the ball; and a half club less for the extra distance you get when you’re charged up and the adrenalin is flowing.”
He hit it to 16 feet, two-putted for his birdie and a short while later two-putted the final hole for a par and his sixth major championship. In LA this week, Koepka will be gunning to get to that same number.
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