One of Jack Nicklaus’ first thoughts in his nearly 10,000-word press conference after winning the 1986 Masters was, “Where’s, Tom?”
Nicklaus was informed that Tom McCollister, the golf writer for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, was on deadline. Of course, it was the scribe’s preview story a week earlier that had clearly motivated Nicklaus.
Nicklaus is gone, done. He just doesn’t have the game anymore. It’s rusted from lack of use.
He’s 46, and nobody that old wins the Masters.
Nicklaus’ friend John Montgomery clipped the column and taped it onto the refrigerator door of the house where Nicklaus stayed that week.
“I kind of agreed with him, I’m afraid,” Nicklaus explained. “So the article probably didn’t make me as hot as I wanted, but I kept thinking all week, I said: done, through, washed up.”
Later in the lengthy presser, McCollister walked into the room. Nicklaus, mid-answer, noticed him and immediately said, “Hey, Tom, thanks.”
McCollister, according to Golfweek, replied, “Glad I could help.”
“You just write the same article next year and put 47 in it, will you?” Nicklaus added.
McCollister then supposedly said, “Watson wants me to write about him next year.”
The presser, which had its transcript posted in full to the Masters media hub on Monday, included a couple more jabs by Nicklaus toward the writer:
“I got out of condition from the other way last summer. I got down to 170 pounds. I shouldn’t play golf at 170 pounds. I figured that out. I didn’t have the strength to play in the U.S. Open, didn’t have the strength to play in the British Open. I missed the cuts. I don’t blame Tom for writing those kind of nasty articles. He was right.”
“By all means, but just run a copy of Tom’s article, and it’ll be fine.”
McCollister died in a car accident about a month before the 1999 Masters.
Here are some other highlights from Nicklaus’ 1986 champion’s press conference:
Recounting his birdies at Nos. 16 and 17
“As I walked off 15, I noticed there was only one person in front of me, Seve [Ballesteros]. I said, well, he’s got some golf to play yet. We’re going to go play. Then I stood on 16, and usually at 16, I play a 6-iron. It was 179 yards and there was a touch of wind in our face, and I said, Jackie, I think that’s a good solid 5-iron. Let’s put it up in the air, which is what I did, and the ball carried right behind the pin and the gallery noise started building up, and I said, oops, that’s going to be very close. And I couldn’t see it but I guess it missed the hole by about a half an inch or so. Came back and left myself kind of a nasty little 3-footer, had a little left-to-right break going up the hill, which is something I wouldn’t expect in that position to see the ball break left to right, but we read it that way, the ball broke that way.
“Then as I stood on 17 tee, I was getting up over the ball and I backed off and there was a large roar, and I didn’t know what kind of roar it was. It didn’t sound like somebody had holed something, but obviously what had happened was Ballesteros had hit his ball in the water on 15, and it was a funny sound because it wasn’t a sound of cheer, but it was a sound of cheer, you know, and it was just a loud, something happened. You couldn’t tell whether it was good or bad.
“Anyway, I backed off because obviously as soon as I hit my tee shot, everybody told me that Ballesteros had hit it in the water. Anyway, I was trying to hit it up the left side to try to get a little bit better angle into that hole, and I pulled it a little bit too much, and I left myself about 125 yards, which is normally a 9-iron, but in my state I played pitching wedge. I had to keep it underneath the branch Anyway, I hit a good little shot up there, and the ball hit and skipped up about 10, 11 feet left of the hole, and this was kind of a funny putt, Jackie and I kept looking at it, and it was like, well, is the ball going to go left or right, is it going to go left, what’s it going to do? Anyway, we ended up reading it to go about left edge of the hole and the ball broke right and turns back to the hole, and it was just absolute dead center.
“Now, at that point, I went to 9 [under]. I said walking up the 18th fairway, I said walking to the tee, I said, okay, I’m not playing 18 defensively. We’ve gotten here making birdies. Let’s don’t go screw up the 18th hole.”
On if he believed he could do it
“I felt like I could do it every morning. I haven’t been doing it, but each of the last three days, I’ve played well enough to shoot 65. But you’ve got to make some putts. I made putts.
“I don’t understand the putter. I really don’t understand the putter. I mean, I got the putter going in a condition when I should have been so nervous that I shouldn’t have been able to draw it back, I was able to draw it back where it was supposed to go. When I don’t get nervous, I don’t ever make anything. Maybe I need to get nervous every hole. I don’t know. I don’t know what it is. I’d have a hard time explaining the putter, it’s a funny thing because everything I looked at coming in, the putter blade was lined up and it looked like where it was going to go…
“Good gracious, this is a young man’s golf course. It really is. You’ve got a golf course here with greens that are glass fast. The pin placements, they put them on all the knobs. You never have a straight putt; putts are always breaking 18 inches and six feet. And it’s a hard golf course to walk. There’s a lot of emotion going on. It’s a hard tournament.
“I think it is a young man’s golf course. But it also is a golf course that experience helps you on. I was able to have experience today, kept my composure, knew the other guys would probably have trouble coming home, and as long as I kept my composure, as long as I kept making birdies, as long as I kept myself in it, I had a chance to win.”
On why he changed to the MacGregor Response ZT putter
“I started using this putter, we came out with it, MacGregor, as a test club last summer. I took it to the British Open and I didn’t really care for it. So they went back and did some work on it and came back this spring, and I putted very poorly the first two tournaments. So I decided at Hawaii to give it a try, and I didn’t three-putt a green or miss a putt inside six feet in Hawaii the first time I tried this putter. I played terrible in Hawaii, but I still was pretty good with it around the greens. I stayed with it, and the putter – what it really does, it’s got supposedly the largest moment of inertia which means it keeps the putter moving, and it doesn’t have much dispersion because of the heel-toe weight.
“Anyway, I’ve been decelerating on my putts for quite a few years, and even if I do decelerate a little bit, the putter will keep on going, and I get a better hit out of the putter than I did on some of them. But if I’m aggressive with the putter, I even get a better hit, and I found that short putts, it really rolls the ball well. … I haven’t been as good with my long putting with this putter, but I’ve been much better with my short putts.”
On his family’s impact
“I wasn’t really worrying about winning. I was trying to make a cut. You know, you always feel at times you go through periods where you say, well, I may never win another one again. But really – Barbara just walked in back there, and of course Barbara has been tremendously supportive and all my kids are supportive.
“If it hadn’t been for my kids, I probably wouldn’t be playing golf now. My kids, Jackie gets me out there and says, come on, we’re going to go play golf; there’s nothing wrong with your golf game that a little bit of work isn’t going to cure. Gary gets out there and says, come on, you can play, let’s go do this. Even Steve, who doesn’t play much golf, he says, you get out there and play. The kids have been very supportive with that. Even Michael now is 12 years old and he’s taken the game up. He darn near beat me the other day. We played Monday and he almost beat me. He beat Gary.”
On his diet
“I didn’t try to lose 20 pounds. I just went on the Eat to Win diet and it was about 185 maybe, and it’s like anything else, if I want to remain healthy, I’d like my blood chemistry to be right. I think your cholesterol should be right and whatever all the stuff that you go through there, your blood sugars and all the things you’re trying to do, the things that you try to keep to be healthy.
“I just went on a diet not to lose weight but more healthful. As I did that, I just lost weight. I felt good on it. The only problem was that I just kept getting skinnier and skinnier and skinnier, and finally, I said, hey, wait a minute, this is ridiculous.
“So late in the summer I just started eating – I didn’t really change my diet that much. I still eat that way. I just added a few things back in: Ice cream.”
On his coach Jack Grout’s help
“You know, Jack Grout has been just terrific. Jack Grout had open-heart surgery last fall, and he wasn’t able to work with me at the start of this year, but as he started coming back, he came back and he said, you know, I’m determined this year, we’re going out there and we’re going to solve this problem of yours, why you’re not hitting the ball well.
“My putting and short game have not been my problem. My problem has been hitting the golf ball this year. I hit the golf ball all over the world, and not so much with my driver but with my irons. My irons have been just terrible. I can’t believe how many tournaments I’ve walked up to or how many holes I’ve walked up to where I’m sitting there with an 8- or 9-iron to the green and I’m looking to figure out a way to make a birdie, and I walk off with 5. I’ve done this time after time after time this spring. It’s just maddening to play golf that way. You try to take advantage of the golf course and the golf course is taking advantage of you.
“I played Doral and finished that tournament – Doral was the second tournament. The next week I said to Jack, I am just hitting it so awful. He said, well, you didn’t score that bad. I said, come on now, I shot 77 in the first two rounds and then just limped around the next two rounds. So we started working on my game. In Florida you get a lot of wind, and I started playing more and more with my hands. He totally took my hands back out of the game and got me very quiet at the top of my swing and very quiet at the finish of my swing and very high finish and much more arms through the ball. That was a big change for me. I’ve been playing with my hands for too long, and I played most of my golf most of my life with my arms, and hands I’ve always said have been very passive in the golf swing, and I’ve got them very active and very violent at the ball.
“So I started working with trying to quiet that down, and I started hitting the ball better immediately. But I didn’t have any feel with it. I went over to New Orleans was the next tournament, and I shot 74 the first round, and I didn’t have any feel. I hit the ball better, but I didn’t have any feel with it, and then I went to TPC and I started hitting the ball better. I hit the ball a little better the first round, hit it pretty good the second round, and I started to get an idea of what I wanted to do with it. I started getting some feel with being able to take the club at the top of the backswing and all of a sudden feel where the club was and being able to say, hey, from here, I can do this with the golf ball. You get the feeling of what you’re doing with the golf ball.
“Before it’s just been mechanical, taking it back, waving it through the golf ball, not having a clue where it was going and not thinking at all through the golf swing. When I started doing that at TPC, I saw some light in what I was doing, and I started getting a feeling of being able to start to feel the – you have to play golf with feel. You don’t play with feel, you’re wasting your time because it’s just the difference in five or six yards off a golf shot is really just feel and being able to feel that club through the ball.
“I knew coming in here that I was starting to get some feel on the club. That’s why I was confident that I was starting to play better. People asked me at the beginning of the week, they kept saying, how are you playing. I say, well, I’m going to start playing better. I don’t know when because I’m starting to get some feel with what I’m doing. It started feeling better every day. But Jack Grout was the one that got me back on it. Jack Grout has been my teacher since I was 10 years old.”
Other quotes
• “I’ve said that 100 times. No, I’m not as good a player as I once was. I just said I occasionally want to be as good as I once was. Today I was.”
• “I started wearing glasses when I was about 31. I’m 20/25 in my left eye and 20/40 in my right eye since, what, ’71, which is the first time I ever got them checked.”
• “I doubt if I’ve intimidated too many people lately. I used to intimidate people, I’m sure. It is possible that that happened today with all the birdies I made, but it didn’t appear it intimidated Norman too much. He made four birdies in a row coming home. But I think Seve just obviously must have played a bad shot at 15. I don’t have any idea what he did, but he must have hit a bad shot. But some guys do – I think Seve won one, Watson would be another. Sure, the better players always have an intimidation factor.”
• “I don’t have a clue what the prize was. What was it? (He’s then told.) Was it really? I’ve now won 148 [thousand] this year. Jackie has got a good paycheck coming. Good gracious. He ought to be able to go to the British Amateur on that now.”