9

1962

WINNER:

Bob Hope Desert Classic

Phoenix Open

Masters

Texas Open

Tournament of Champions

Colonial

Open Championship

American Golf Classic

Canada Cup (with Sam Snead)

“Why don’t you just sashay your ass back out there and play them over?”

IT WAS AS IF God said to Nicklaus, “You will have skills like no other,” then whispered to Palmer, “but they will love you more.”

Through many seasons of frosts and thaws, at times golf’s most problematic relationship included a measure of true warmth and authentic affection. But it never strayed very far from the principle on which it was founded: mutual jealousy. Arnie envied Jack’s ability; Jack envied Arnie’s lovability. Grace came easily to Palmer; golf came easily to Nicklaus.

In November of 1961, the younger man, ten years younger, turned pro. As December was running out, Nicklaus participated in an exhibition at Florida’s Country Club of Miami with Palmer, Player, and Snead, using the exercise to measure his game, stroke for stroke, against theirs. “I hit my opening drive into a lake, I was so nervous,” he said in his office, “but by the end of the round I felt like I belonged. I think Gary won. Arnold and I scored about the same, but he played better than I did and I putted better than he did. He was pulling for me to play well, which wasn’t the usual vibe Palmer gave off. But I could feel it.”

Nicklaus’s first PGA paycheck, in 1962, was for $33.33, one-third of last-place money (less a penny) in the Los Angeles Open at the inner-city municipal course Rancho Park. The winner, San Diegan Phil Rodgers—“Philamander” to Nicklaus, his old amateur cohort and roommate in the Crow’s Nest dormitory at Augusta National—later said, “And he’s been making threes ever since.”

Early in Jack’s rookie season, on the last day of the Phoenix Open, he and Palmer played their original round together as fellow pros. Nicklaus said, “I needed a birdie at eighteen to finish second to him—I was only thirteen shots behind. He had won the week before and now he was spread-eagling the field. I guess you could say I was looking a little down. I’ll never forget our walk from the seventeenth green to the eighteenth tee. ‘Relax,’ he whispered, ‘you can birdie this hole. C’mon, it’s important.’

“I did birdie it, to finish second alone and lose by just twelve. I made twenty-three hundred bucks.”

The ’62 Masters a couple of months later amounted to a do-over for Palmer. The April before, he looked certain to repeat his ’60 glory as he strode up the 18th fairway (in the company of amateur Charlie Coe) needing only a par to beat Player, the leader in the clubhouse. In fact, when Arnold shot 68 and 69 Thursday and Friday, that made six rounds in a row and 24 months since he had been out of the Masters’ lead. Augusta had become his home all right.

Steady Sunday rain bumped the final round to Monday. “Which made it kind of a strange day that got stranger,” Player said. “The only ones pulling for me that Monday were my wife and my dog.”

“Of all the things Pap tried to drum into me,” Palmer said, “the biggest was never to celebrate until the task at hand is accomplished completely. No matter the situation, think only of swinging the club, staying down through impact, and finishing the job. ‘Or you’ll be sorry,’ he said.”

With his drive at 18 safely in the fairway and a 7-iron securely in his fist, Palmer heard a friend’s voice in the gallery and walked over to the ropes. For years he wouldn’t say who it was, but it was George Low, the Scottish wit and putting specialist (early-day Dave Stockton). “Way to go,” Low said, clapping him on the back. “You’ve won it.”

“And at that moment,” Palmer said, “I lost my mind.” For the first time all day he noticed the hue of the sky and everything else around him. “Coming out of” the 7-iron, he shoved a dreaded knee-high fizzler off to the right, landing in the greenside bunker. Instead of taking a restorative moment, he took hardly any time at all to hoist his third shot too high out of the sand, sending the ball hopping across the green and bounding down a hill into the gallery. His fourth shot, with a putter, ran away in the opposite direction. Then he missed the 15-foot bogey putt that would have salvaged a place in a playoff. As the defending champion, he helped 25-year-old Player into his first green jacket.

“It was my fault, no one else’s—entirely my fault,” Palmer said, looking out his office window. “Golf is a game where you keep learning the same things, forgetting them, learning them again, forgetting them again, learning them again, forgetting them again, over and over and over. I wasn’t finished with this lesson, either.”

Billy Casper, who tied three others (including Nicklaus) for seventh place, said that night, “I think you’re destined to win or lose these things. Sure, you have to play good, but I think there’s something else, too.”

A year later, 72 holes into the ’62 Masters, Palmer, Player, and Dow Finsterwald were tied at the top with 8-under-par 280s. A 66 in the second round brought Palmer a two-stroke lead that he kept until a wretched Sunday front nine (39) appeared to knock him out of the running. He had to birdie 16 (with a chip-in) and 17 (with a 10-footer) just to shoot 75 and join an 18-hole playoff, the first three-man playoff in Masters history. “I didn’t have any zip today,” he told the writers. “Does anybody know where I can get some zip?”

Palmer wasn’t much zippier on the front side the following day. “But the back nine, I think, was just about the best of Arnie ever,” Finsterwald said. “I played terrible in the playoff [77]—I was suffering from a bad case of ‘the lefts’—but, as I said at the green jacket ceremony, I had a good ticket for watching him, and he was something to see.”

Trailing Player by three strokes at the turn, Palmer made a 25-foot putt for birdie at 10, while Gary was bogeying. “Now the game was on,” Arnold told Bob Drum later. At the par-3 12th, his old Waterloo (1959) and near Waterloo (1958), he hit an 8-iron inside four feet and cashed in another two-shot swing. Birdie at 13, birdie at 14, birdie at 16. He shot 31 coming home for a 68 to beat Player by three and join Snead and Demaret as the only men with three green jackets.

“This could have been five jackets in a row, I guess you know,” Drum sneered typically as he and Palmer passed each other entering the press barn.

Palmer whispered, “Don’t remind me.”

Looking back, Player said, “When you have a love affair with Arnold Palmer, you don’t worry about when he beat you or you beat him. You’re just so grateful to have been in his time, and to know him. One year Arnie should have won the Masters and I should have lost. The next year I should have won and he should have lost. But we don’t look at it that way. At least not most of the time. Do you judge your friends by when they beat you or you beat them? Not that Arnold and I haven’t had our moments. Moment, I should say.”

In the middle of a round once, they had a significant disagreement. “A confrontation,” Player called it, “not worth going into now, but pretty intense at the time. You know golfers. We were about to slam off in silence when he caught me by the arm. ‘Let’s go get something to eat,’ he said. We sat down together and brought it all out. We had tears in our eyes, both of us. Usually only one guy does the crying. We clasped each other’s hands with our elbows on the table like arm wrestlers. ‘I love you, my friend,’ I said. It’s too bad Jack and Arnie couldn’t have sat down like that in the early years.”

At the height of Nicklaus’s powers (four days before a tournament victory that included a 62), I drew him for a partner in a pro-am at the Ohio Kings Island Open. Ostensibly, it was a blind draw. Of course, the fix was in. He told me so before we teed off. These things are always fixed.

“Don’t tell Charlie and Burch [the organizers] that I told you,” he said, “but when you wrote this was an attractive golf course for a blind date, they thought they better try to warm you up.” With Desmond Muirhead, Jack had codesigned the Kings Island layout, his first foray into golf course architecture.

In a bathroom after nine, a fan walked up to Nicklaus at the urinal and started talking to him. Jack turned to me and said, “Welcome to life in the fishbowl.”

Walking five hours with him—just talking, not interviewing—was interesting. “Look over there,” he said, pointing out Associated Press golf writer Bob Green in the gallery. “I really respect Bob,” he said. Nicklaus knew that the majority of golf writers clung to the press tent like Tibetans to Shangri-La, as if venturing even a few feet outside the portal might oxidize them like the lady in Lost Horizon. “Bob has a deadline every minute,” Jack said, “and yet there he is, out on the golf course.”

“He comes out to smoke,” I said.

“You are like that, aren’t you?” Nicklaus said.

He told me, “My dad and I visited the AP offices to ask them to stop calling me ‘Fat Jack,’ but they wouldn’t. At the time, Will Grimsley [the wire’s lead sportswriter] was in love with Palmer.” Characteristically, Nicklaus resolved the issue by slimming himself into a model for clothes and a mold for golfers, towheads shaped like fly rods.

I asked, “Did you ever take it out on the AP?”

“No,” he said, “but I’ve never forgotten it, either.”

The 1962 U.S. Open, where Palmer-Nicklaus broke in their hyphen, was set at Oakmont in Palmer country, 42 miles from Latrobe. Demonstrating a sense of theater, the USGA paired Arnold and Jack for the first two days. Fearing overlong rounds on what still might be the most difficult golf course in America, the blazer brigade with their armbands, briar pipes, shooting sticks, Croix de Guerres, and dandruff sent the players out in twosomes all three days, including Saturday’s double round.

“From our opening tee shots Thursday,” Nicklaus said, “the galleries were extremely loud and extremely partisan, but I didn’t notice. I was playing golf. My father told me about it afterward.” (Charlie Nicklaus was furious.) The ground actually quaked from foot stamping in greenside grandstands as Nicklaus prepared to putt. He didn’t feel the tremors. Still in his “Fat Jack” phase, he didn’t hear anyone shout “Miss it, Fat Guts!” either.

“Someone standing in the deep rough,” Player said, “held up a sign that said, ‘Hit it here, Ohio Fats!’ It was shameful.”

The truth is, when Nicklaus’s concentration was dialed up to full beam, he was only faintly aware of other people on the moor. Out of decency he had trained himself, every half hour or so (like baseball broadcaster Red Barber turning over his egg timer as a reminder to repeat the score), to acknowledge the spectators with a wink, an incredibly synthetic wink, like a love letter marked “Occupant.”

This was the essential difference between Palmer and Nicklaus. Second-timers in Palmer’s gallery imagined he recognized them and had missed them and wondered where the hell they’d been. Leaning on his club, waiting for his turn to play, he cast his eyes about for feminine inspiration. “On the golf course,” said Raymond Floyd, “all I ever saw was a mass of people. I saw, but I didn’t see. Palmer was able to focus in on everybody in the gallery individually. It wasn’t fake.”

Meanwhile, Nicklaus only pretended to see anyone. He had a Marine haircut in 1962 and a rifleman’s thousand-yard stare. He was ruthlessly thought-out, shrewdly calculated, nearly calibrated. On the golf course, in talent and in other ways, he was alone.

Jack started the tournament with three straight birdies, including a chip-in at the third hole after driving into Oakmont’s signature “Church Pews” bunker. He faltered a little then, double-bogeying the ninth, but righted himself for a 1-over-par 72, three shots and eight players (including Palmer and Player, with matching 71s) behind first-round leader Gene Littler.

“I shot sixty-eight in round two,” Palmer said (to 70 for Nicklaus), “but I seemed to be the only one [except maybe Jack] who noticed I wasn’t making anything on the greens.” He took 31 putts Friday after 35 Thursday and would need 38 in the early Saturday round (missing three tiddlers). “I was leading the tournament,” he said, “and putting like an idiot.” (“I feel like I’m putting with a wet noodle,” he said at the time.)

Beginning Saturday’s late round two strokes behind and two groups ahead of Palmer, Nicklaus three-putted the first hole to fall three shots back. But it was his first three-putt of the week, and his last. For 90 holes, Palmer would out-three-putt him either 10 to 1 (according to the USGA) or 13 to 1 (by Palmer’s own calculations). If Arnie made either of two makeable birdie putts on the 71st or 72nd hole, there wouldn’t have been an 18-hole playoff the next day.

“Before the playoff,” Nicklaus said, “Arnold came up to me in the locker room and asked, ‘Would you like to split the prize money [$15,000 for first, $8,000 for second] and play for the trophy?”

“I did?” asked Palmer, sitting next to him.

“Yes, he did,” said Nicklaus firmly. “I took it as a gesture made to a young kid. I will never forget it. He obviously has.”

Pooling purses was a common but secret practice then. Finsterwald said, “Gary and I had agreed to split our winnings in that Masters playoff [as it turned out, $12,000 for second, $8,000 for third] and did, ten grand apiece.”

Jack and Arnie didn’t. However, they did consent to divide the players’ bonus share of the extra day’s gate receipts into equal portions, $2,500 each, rather than the customary winner-take-all.

That extra day was the most raucous and unsportsmanlike yet. “Arnie didn’t like that at all,” Winnie said. “He felt terrible about it for Jack. They were both embarrassed.” “It wasn’t easy for me,” Nicklaus said, “but it wasn’t easy for him, either.” “Of course,” Palmer said, “I was sorry that his father was so hurt by the fans’ behavior. But I think it might have actually worked to Jack’s benefit, especially in the playoff. Because it didn’t affect his concentration one little bit, and just knowing it was going on probably stoked his competitive fire. Nicklaus had the ability to just close himself off from everything. It’s a great attribute. He could just shut himself off and go play. I’m not sure I ever wanted to do that. And I don’t think you can just show up one week and do it. You can’t just say, ‘Oh, this is the U.S. Open, I’m going to do it now.’ Especially me.”

Anyway, their playoff wasn’t close. Jack went four-up after six holes and with an even-par score won by three, 71 to 74. It was his first PGA Tour victory and his third consecutive top-five finish in the U.S. Open. At 22, still the holder of the U.S. Amateur title, Nicklaus was a major champion. “I’ve always believed,” Palmer said, “if I could have just held him off that day, I might have been able to hold him off for a while. But not forever.”

In 1962, for the second time in three years, Palmer missed by just a single stroke in a fourth round of being live in the Grand Slam after three legs. But he wasn’t alone at the top of the game anymore.

Bundling Palmer, Player, and Nicklaus, McCormack booked them for exhibitions all around the country and the world, often with Arnold at the controls of his own plane. “Arnie, Jack, and I lived in each other’s pockets,” Player said, “like brothers, including brotherly fights. We were the fiercest competitors.”

Flying out of Seagraves, Texas, Nicklaus and Player had to hold on to each other to keep off the ceiling. They were all over the sky. “I think FAA regulations must have been a little laxer in those days,” Player said. “I can tell you, Arnie was a great one for buzzing golf courses. That was another thing that pissed off Hogan. I vividly remember Arnold banking the plane over Firestone [in Akron] when the tail seemed actually to scrape the ground. Wow.” Palmer said, “I’d have Gary crouching under his seat. ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa!’ he’d shout. I shouldn’t laugh, but it wasn’t always hard-nosed stuff, was it? We had some fun.”

“In Canada, where the three of us shared a suite,” Player said, “I got even. Arnold was on the phone with Winnie and I took a big bottle of ginger ale and shook it like this with my thumb on the top, let it go, and just drowned him. ‘Winnie,’ he said, ‘I have to call you back. I’m sopping wet.’”

When the Great Ginger Ale War was over, the three drenched combatants went to the hotel manager, “like penitent schoolboys,” Player said, offering to have the drapes cleaned or replaced. Gary said, “We told him we had not behaved in the most exemplary fashion, but he just laughed and said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’

“In Zambia, on the ride from the airport to the hotel, our driver told us he had just seen a gaboon viper, the most venomous snake in the bush, with the longest fangs. What a miserable sod that snake is. So, a few minutes later I’m standing on the hotel balcony, three stories up—and, crikey, I don’t like heights! I climbed over the railing onto a narrow ledge [Player stood up and pantomimed the scene] making my way inch by inch over to Palmer’s room. Pressing my lips to his window, crossing my eyes and doing my best impression of a gaboon viper, I went tap-tap-tap and he jumped out of his skin, falling right on his ass. Then he got a golf club and, waving it above his head, ran straight at me. I nearly went over. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Grown men.”

Laughing in his office, Nicklaus said, “I can remember one night when Arnold and I got to kicking each other’s shins under the table. I don’t know why. I kicked him. He kicked me. Neither would give. We ended up with the biggest damned bruises. We used to do the stupidest stuff.”

They did some thoughtful stuff, too. “In South Africa,” Player said, “Jack and Arnie stayed with my family at our ranch—McCormack, too. Mark was afraid to go with us down a gold mine, but Arnold grabbed him at the last second and yanked him into the iron cage. They slowly lowered us eight thousand feet. I stopped laughing. To think my father worked there for forty years. It’s a dog’s life. I could tell that Jack and Arnie knew exactly what I was thinking as we went down and down. When the guide told us how many tons had to be dug to get just one ounce of gold, the two of them simultaneously tried to cover up their Rolex watches with their sleeves. I smiled, and they did, too.

“We saw the men mining the gold and then went into a room filled with gold bars. The guy giving the lecture on how they melted the gold down and poured it said, ‘These bars are very heavy. Nobody in the world can pick one up. In fact, anyone who can pick one up can have it.’ Arnold wrapped his huge hand around one bar—his pinky finger was bigger than my index finger—and lifted it straightaway. Well, this guy nearly crapped himself. ‘No, no, no,’ he said, ‘I only work here!’ ‘You used to work here,’ Arnold said. ‘Your ass is out of here now.’ But then he let him off the hook. Our laughter echoed through the caverns. That was one of the great moments of my life. Because laughter is happiness.”

McCormack paired Palmer and Player in a black-and-white TV series called Challenge Golf, pitting them against the likes of Nicklaus and Phil Rodgers. “Those matches took eight hours to film,” Player said, “and inevitably we’d have to go back and do retakes, because I was a giggler. My schoolteachers used to say, ‘If you don’t compose yourself, Mr. Player, you’ll have to leave the room.’ Arnie would look at me a certain way, and I’d start to laugh, and then he’d laugh, and the director would remind us how much money we were wasting. Arnie and I played thirty-three Challenge Golf matches, losing three of them.”

In the 1962 (Palmer), 1963 (Nicklaus), 1964 (Palmer), 1965 (Nicklaus), and 1966 (Nicklaus) Masters, Jack and Arnie monopolized the green jacket unequally. When Nicklaus became the better player but Palmer remained the more salable product, Jack quit McCormack in a huff. A pettiness developed between the two golfers (exacerbated by business clashes) that wasn’t worthy of either man. A sportswriter wearing a Golden Bear–brand golf shirt in Palmer’s presence was liable to have what Arnold called that “yellow pig” logo and the skin beneath it pinched by his strong hand. Quietly, Nicklaus had the bear redrawn into a less-ambiguous shape.

As rival golf course architects carving their initials into mountainsides, each damned the other’s creations with the faintest praise, still savaging shins under the table. Nicklaus sent his regrets to Arnold’s Bay Hill tournament in Orlando, explaining that one of his sons had a basketball game that weekend. Palmer responded that he wouldn’t be able to play in Jack’s Muirfield Village event near Columbus, either, because Riley had something going on that week. Riley was Arnie’s golden retriever.

In the 1967 U.S. Open at Baltusrol, where Palmer and Nicklaus were tied after 54 holes, Arnold shot 69 to Jack’s 65 in the final round to finish second alone. They were 1–3 at the Pebble Beach U.S. Open in 1972. On Sunday afternoon, each had 10- or 11-footers at almost the same instant, Palmer for birdie at 14, Nicklaus for par at 12. Had Arnold made and Jack missed, Palmer likely would have won. The opposite happened.

During this time, Nicklaus’s regular gun bearer was a sorrowful-looking Greek with a mushroom cloud of gray hair, Angelo Argea, whose motley mustache was an amalgam of hair and nicotine. “He never read a putt in his life,” Jack told me. “He never got a yardage in his life.” What did he do then? At just the right moment, when his boss was looking a little forlorn, Angelo would say, “Isn’t it about time for a song?” Under his breath, Jack would start to sing. “He was a con man,” Nicklaus said fondly, “but a genuine one.” And once in a while, for no particular reason, he’d say, “Fuck Arnold Palmer.”

“I think of Baltusrol as the place where the torch started to be passed,” Palmer said, “or the putter—‘White Fang.’ Nicklaus birdied three, four, five, and six with that thing. Do you remember White Fang?”

White Fang was a Bulls Eye putter that belonged to a friend of Deane Beman, the future commissioner. The brass blade had been painted white to minimize glare. In a putting funk for weeks leading up to the Baltusrol Open, Nicklaus was trying everybody else’s putters and for some reason just liked the look of the center-shafted one with the snowy head. Practicing with it on the Tuesday before the tournament, Jack shortened his long and languid stroke into a brisk pop. “Orchestras began to play,” he said, “and angels to sing.”

“I was at Baltusrol the other day,” I told Nicklaus quite a long time later, “and I saw White Fang. It’s on display there in a glass cabinet.”

“That’s a replica,” he said. “I have White Fang at home.”

Then he told a father’s story:

One of his boys had flung a rock through a neighbor’s window, and Jack had to go next door to apologize. He was still shaking when, looking out the kitchen window, drinking a cup of coffee and trying to calm down, he saw little Mike, his youngest, digging happily in the backyard. OK. Relax. Everything’s all right. Hmm, what’s that he’s digging with?

WHITE FANG!

The vinegar between Palmer and Nicklaus didn’t spill out publicly until the 1975 U.S. Open at Medinah in Illinois, where both were in contention. Playing as a twosome in the fourth round, each became preoccupied with the other and lost track of Lou Graham, John Mahaffey, and the rest of the field. “That happened a lot,” Nicklaus said. “When two guys spend as much time together as Arnie and I did, their competitive juices flow. They just want to whip each other.” “There were times,” Palmer said, “when Jack and I took ourselves completely out of the tournament, because he tried so hard against me and I tried so hard against him.”

In the Medinah press tent, during a rare joint postmortem, Nicklaus was bemoaning his three closing holes so pitifully that Palmer finally had enough. “Why don’t you just sashay your ass back out there,” he said, “and play them over.”

Jack looked stunned, as if he’d been slapped. Palmer tossed a muscular forearm across Nicklaus’s scalded neck, and Jack tried to smile. But the friction between them was now plain to see.

Dan Rostenkowski, the former U.S. congressman from Illinois, said, “I was shocked to see the level of discomfort between Arnie and Jack. They were like a couple of high-tension wires. I knew Arnie fairly well. We had been pro-am partners at the Kemper Open. I was like a sixteen handicap and, watching me hit balls before our round, his eyes opened wide and he said, ‘Oh boy, we’re going to do some good here!’ He called me once on the Hill. The guys in the cloakroom were thrilled. ‘It’s Arnie Palmer!’ they kept saying. ‘Arnie Palmer!’ He was about the only thing Democrats and Republicans had in common.”

The former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee was speaking on a telephone in the warden’s office at a federal correctional institution in Wisconsin, where he was serving 17 months for mail fraud.

“‘Congressman,’ Arnie said, ‘we’ve got to do something about the tax code,’” the chairman recalled. “‘What do you mean we,’ I told him. ‘We’ve got to fix it,’ he said. ‘It’s ridiculous!’ ‘I’ll fix it when you get me on the golf course and give me a free lesson.’ He laughed like a son of a gun. ‘So that’s how Washington works,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know it?’ I told him.

“It was Arnie who said to me, whenever he met a man on a golf course, he knew that man’s character by the third hole. He was so right. I followed Arnie every step of the way at Medinah. Do you remember the terrific storm that came up Saturday night, all those lightning crashes on the seventeenth hole?”

“Not really,” I said, “but I remember the lead story in Sunday’s Trib was Sam Giancana getting whacked in his basement.”

“Yeah, Tommy,” the chairman said, “maybe we better not go into that on a tie-line to a penitentiary.”

In the 1980 Masters, Nicklaus and Palmer were so far out of the hunt, they found themselves paired together at the back of the field. The night before, Winnie telephoned the club to check on Arnie’s tee time and came skipping into the kitchen, singing, “Guess whom you’re playing with tomorrow?”

“I’ll beat his ass,” Palmer said, and did, 69 to 73.

Not until Palmer was 60 and Nicklaus 50 would the tension start to ease. Arnold made the first move. At a senior event, the Tradition, he knocked Nicklaus over by asking him to have a look at his swing. “Can you imagine?” Jack said in his office. “Me? We’d played thirty years and that’s the first time he ever asked me.”

They began having meals together again and playing practice rounds. At Augusta in 1996, Tiger Woods’s last Masters as an amateur, the three of them went out together Wednesday morning. On the par-5 13th, Woods popped up his drive and for once was away. Nicklaus had his back turned to Tiger. Peeking over Jack’s shoulder, Palmer saw the 20-year-old pull out an iron for his second shot and whispered, “He’s laying up.”

“Oh, Arnie,” Jack said affectionately. “He’s not.”

Woods slammed a blue darter over the creek and onto the green.

“I love that story,” I told Nicklaus in his office. “I think of that as the moment Arnold realized his class had graduated.”

Jack laughed and said, “My class has graduated, too.”

Nicklaus named Palmer the honoree of his Memorial Tournament, the playing honoree, and Jack returned to Orlando that year to participate in Arnold’s tournament as well. Palmer made the cut at Muirfield Village; Nicklaus missed it at Bay Hill. “We didn’t always see eye to eye,” Jack said, “but there’s one thing I’ll always be proud of. In the important matters, when it came to the tour and the game of golf, we always stood together.”

Such as when touring players in 1968 broke away from the Professional Golfers’ Association of America, run mostly for and by club pros, to take control of their own show. They called themselves the Association of Professional Golfers at first, then the Tournament Players Division of the PGA, and finally just the PGA Tour. McCormack favored something short of the complete rupture Nicklaus advocated. Palmer argued Mark’s position for a while but ultimately sided and voted with Jack.

“We didn’t do everything perfectly,” Nicklaus said. “You try for perfection in golf, but you never get there. Not even close.”

“My nature is to compete,” Palmer said, sitting beside Jack at the Memorial press center in Dublin, Ohio. “It always has been and it always will be. Jack had nothing to do with that except he was there a lot.” He turned to Nicklaus and said, “For ten years in a row, I had a chance to win the U.S. Open. You won them, but I had a chance.”

(“At the end of the day,” Player said, “the three of us played not for money, not for trophies, not for history, but for each other.”)

“Jack and I were just different,” Palmer said. “He was always slow, but he didn’t do it because of his opponent. He did it for himself. That’s just the way he played. Me, I’m the other way. I like to move, in golf and in every other thing. I like to go fast, particularly in my plane. I got where I got—wherever that is—by doing it my way. I was maybe too aggressive in certain instances, and maybe it cost me some tournaments. Jack was maybe too conservative, and maybe it cost him a few. But you are what you are. I never mimicked anybody. That was the real me.”

Nicklaus said, “Arnold and I have had differences of opinion on some golf matters, which is only natural. When he was thirty, I was twenty, and that’s a difference. So is fifty and forty, because he went to the senior tour while I was on the regular tour. There’s not a whole lot of difference, though, between sixty and fifty or seventy and sixty. We play a lot of golf together now, and we still try to beat each other’s brains in.”

“We continue to have the needle out,” Palmer said, “but we know now that we love each other, and we always did.”

The needle was still glistening when a Canadian writer approached the two of them as the session broke up to ask Nicklaus if he would be returning to Glen Abbey for the Canadian Open, Arnold’s first professional victory, just about the only blue ribbon to elude Jack.

“Barbara says she’s going to keep sending me back there until I get it right,” Nicklaus said.

To which Palmer inquired innocently, “Are you sure she’s talking about golf?”