No stopping a man who must keep moving

INTERVIEW JACK NICKLAUS:Scotland Thursday, ireland yesterday. Today it's Saturday so it must be Moscow. Tom Humphriescatches up with a legend still busy building his legacy

YOU KNOW the story. They called him Fat Jack before they loved him and worshipped him. Then they called him the Golden Bear and cheered him to 18 majors. Neither name, though, ever quite captured his remorseless, sharklike need to keep moving.

He sits down and it is early afternoon and he has yet to have breakfast, but he has fitted two normal working days into his waking hours so far. You ask naively did he tire of the old weekly grind of his playing days, finishing a tournament on Sunday and then every Monday heading to a new town with a different course but the same old faces of the tour. Funny enough, it was too slow for him.

“A new place every week and staying there for a week? I never liked that. My life now I like. Now I’m here today to get something done and I’m on to something else tomorrow. I go do what I want to do and keep moving. I do seven or eight places in a week. I enjoy that. Meet more people, do a lot more things in a different period of time. I have no desire to slow down. Why should I?”

He has just come from Scotland. He is in Ireland for a day. He will be in Moscow by the time you read this. And then straight to Rome and then back to south Florida.

What he has to do here is talk the talk and meet the members at his latest signature course, the Killeen Castle outside Dunshaughlin in Co Meath.

Killeen Castle is as much a surprise as the restless energy of Nicklaus is. Nobody has told them about the recession. Some €300 million worth of investment. A perfect course, a castle and lots of bells and whistles.

“What they have done on the grounds here – something else. A lot of money has gone in here and the economy is not their friend right now. But there is always a place for quality and this is top quality. There are enough people who have that sort of income to devote to quality. And the economy will turn.”

The extras fascinate him, but what he loves is the land and the people. This place is the second of his “signature” courses in Ireland, and though it bears his name he makes a point of not imposing his personality too much on any piece of land where he is asked to design a course.

“I don’t know to what extent the designs express me. I like to reduce my personality, put it aside and to let the land express itself. My personality is in there.

“I would design differently from other people because my experiences of playing golf have been different and my thinking of how the game should be played is different, but when I am given a piece of property like this I look at the trees. The castle. The stone walls. The valleys. The streams. The lakes, the contours, and wonder how they can express themselves.

“I wonder how can I best show off those elements in a great course with good golf shots. So is that my personality? Possibly. But it is the personality of the land, too.”

It is a subject which grips him and fascinates him in a way which golf itself once did. He likes to create courses which ask players for the reason for each shot they play, not courses tricked out with gimmicks and “wow” moments.

He tells a story which informs his philosophy. He did a corporate outing for a company many years ago. He hit a few balls for the amateurs before they went out on to the course with 10 other professionals. And he was waiting for them all when they came back.

“And every amateur thought it was the day of their lives. The course looked great and the sun was shining and the service was great and the clubhouse was fantastic and everything was immaculate. They were happy. And the professionals were in a group and to a man they said that’s got to be the worst course we have ever played.”

Moral? The average golfer likes being with their friends, likes to enjoy the time they have, the aesthetics, the service, etc. The professional is looking for shot values, fairness, challenge, ability to play the game.

“So you try to take the beauty, the aesthetics and the shots and bring them together. That’s what we try to do. I want a reason for every shot that is hit on my courses. I like to make people think.”

And he likes the variety. The design half of his career has become a worldwide business.

Courses throw up different satisfactions and different challenges. The Old Works Golf Course in Anaconda, Montana, comes to his mind. The town had a shut-down copper smelting facility and little to look forward to except life as a ghost town.

The community got their heads together with local government, with the Environmental Protection Agency and the site’s owners, a mining company, Arco.

When eventually they decided to put a course on the site Nicklaus was presented with an environmental legacy of more than 1.5 million cubic yards of soil, slag and flue dust, all of which was contaminated with little treats like arsenic, cadmium, copper, zinc and lead.

Nicklaus got the contract because he had a vision in sympathy with the history and topography of the place. He filled the bunkers with black sland (the sand-textured slag left over from a century of furnace use in the smelter). The town was left with a world-class course which respected its history and employed its citizens.

“I created a couple of holes into the black slag hills, grassed them over. It has been loved, it has created jobs and created tourism. The things that it did for that town. Makes me feel so good.”

And there is a course they are working on right now. Another mine. Phosphate. Some 16,000 acres of nothing from which Florida wants to create a resort when the mining is done with in five years. Another challenge. The mines have littered the land with 200-foot high sand dunes.

“The imagination can go to town on that.”

To Thursday. He was in Scotland, looking at some land overlooking St Andrews. He hadn’t liked the topographical map when he saw it and told himself not to give into the ego challenge of building a course in St Andrews just for the sake of it. But he fell in love with what he saw high above the old university town. “Hopefully,” he says.

And today Moscow. He turned down the chance to build the first course in Russia back in 1984. “I didn’t want the communist regime to use it as a propaganda thing, so we held off. The same in South Africa, we waited till Mandela came in. Then I wanted to be part of that. Anyway, when the curtain came down I wanted to start doing things in Russia. The game was hardly played there at all.

“Oleg Deripaska, probably the richest guy in Russia, was the first guy who came to us, I did a course for him. It’s a really nice course. Don’t know if anybody will see it. I have got one with Abramovich.

“And then the mayor of Moscow has come to us, Yury Luzhkov, and he wants to build 15 municipal courses in Moscow so the youth can learn how to play the game. We won’t do all 15, but we will do three or four and bring in the architects to produce good golfing facilities. That is progressive. Very exciting. That keeps me going.”

One imagines a man with his drive to be constantly looking over his shoulder thinking about his legacy, wondering when will Tiger Woods overhaul his record of major wins, but he has moved on.

Tiger he approves of and admires.

“Terrific. A nice guy. He handles himself well. He understands that the game is looking to him for leadership. He handles that well, very well. The guys like him, his fellow professionals.”

His only concern is for the game, that in this era is lacks a rivalry which drives the narrative of tournaments.

“I think the game lacks that. They keep trying to make a rivalry. I had Arnold (Palmer) and Gary (Player). I had Trevino and I had Watson. Those guys performed. They were guys who won a lot of majors.”

In this he is perfectly correct. Palmer won seven, Player nine, Trevino six, Watson eight. In that context to have hewn 18 majors out of a career seems even more monumental. Nicklaus is unfussed.

“Everybody thinks their generation was the greatest and had the best times. My guys are all grandparents now and the guys out there today, they have just as good a time as we had and play just as good a game. Everybody’s time comes to an end.

“Would I like to still be playing? Sure, I love competition. But I played golf more for competition than for the game. I mean I liked the game, but competition was what I loved and golf was my vehicle for being competitive.

“For me, I lost that vehicle to competition when I got to a certain age, so the golf ceased to be fun for me when I couldn’t compete. I don’t play much now. Once a month maybe.”

When Nicklaus played the professionals played so they could go make a living when they were off the course, doing some ads, making some endorsements. His best year ever earned him $300,000 from playing.

“And by the time you keep your house and keep yourself in basically your second house which is on the road and have a caddy and travel for the year, you get through most of that pretty quick.”

His pension fund from the tour was less than $200,000 when he got done.

“$178,000 I think. Arnold, myself and Gary around the same, well Gary has more because he played a lot of senior golf. We just didn’t have a programme in place. There are a lot of guys from our age bracket who got done playing golf and had nothing.

“Us few guys made enough outside to be comfortable, but since I gave up my Screen Actors Guild pension is twice as much as my tour pension. That’s just from doing a few commercials. There were maybe 15 guys making a living when I played. Now 150 or so make a living. That’s good.”

Not playing doesn’t bother him. He finds his competition elsewhere.

“I fish quite a bit. Look out for nice places where I can work and fish. I like any kind of fly fishing. I do a lot of trout fishing and salmon fishing. I like salt water fishing. I shallow water fish, sight-fishing for bonefish, tarpon. It’s like a combination of hunting and fishing. I enjoy that. The fish don’t know that I’m an old man of 69 who can’t play golf anymore! The fish just sees the pretty little flies.”

He plays tennis but says his expectations of the game and himself aren’t very high when he hits the court. Essentially, his competition now is the land.

“It’s derived from the ground. I find a piece of ground and want to leave something long beyond my golf game and my own lifetime that will be the best they can put on that piece of ground. I really enjoy that.”

Sixty-nine and still driven. He picks at his lunch of chicken and shoves it away. Next thing? What now? Moving, moving, moving.

A golden man from a golden time.