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11-12-09
BOOKS
Young Jackie Nicklaus was still a chubby-faced 18 when he first teed it up with Arnold Palmer, then 29 and in the prime of his golfing life. It was the kid, and The King.
And each had something to prove. Invited to Athens CC in Ohio to join a group that also included Dow Finsterwald, Nicklaus, who never suffered doubts about his ability, muscled his first drive 356 yards. “My God,” said Palmer, who over-swung and duck-hooked his own drive in a futile effort to keep up, “no man hits it that far.” But no way would he let the kid beat The King.
Before the day was over he had torched the course for a masterly 62, easily besting Nicklaus’ 68.
That day a rivalry was born. And it was, writes sportswriter Ian O’Connor in his terrific examination of these friends and foes, the game’s greatest rivalry, one waged by two men with prodigious talents, drive and egos to match and who, O’Connor writes, “went after each other with the same snot-busting fury that defined the clashes between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.”
One had the fans and wanted the trophies, another had the trophies but longed to have his rival’s fans. They came to golf a decade apart, one a dashing, charismatic figure from a working class background wanting above all to please a demanding, tough-love father, the other a child of some privilege but more flesh than flash and doomed at first to suffer the stings and arrows of Arnie’s Army.
If Palmer was Jack Kennedy, O’Connor writes, Nicklaus was Richard Nixon. Palmer’s fawning crowds, said Gary Player, “treated him like a dog,” hurling fat jokes and insults at Nicklaus to such a level that once Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes, of all peacemakers, had to stop an irate Charlie Nicklaus from going after his son’s hecklers. “All of us hated Jack Nicklaus,” Palmer’s own sister said later. “We thought he was another of those spoiled little rich kids,
and he was.”
Off the course, accommodations were reached. Palmer set Nicklaus up with business opportunities, flew him and his wife Barbara, who was in fact good friends with Winnie Palmer, to tournaments and played as teammates at international events. Eventually a complicated friendship developed, but in those years of on-course battles their desire to beat the other was a raging fire.
“He wanted what I had,” Nicklaus said not long ago, analyzing their rivalry, “and I wanted what he had. And we both wanted to be both. Absolutely.”
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