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 The Daily Online Sports Magazine The Imagination of Nicklaus Jonathon Kahn SportsJones Magazine July 20, 2000 How Jack Nicklaus learned to listen to the land
Links golf – properly defined as any golf course built on sandy, unarable land linking the ocean and richer inland soil – presents a veiled, seeming blank face. This lack of an obvious road map called on Nicklaus's imagination. His intimate bond with St. Andrews was forged from how exceptionally capable he was of playing the sort of game the course called for. Unlike other Americans, Nicklaus warmed to its lack of consistency and "endless variety of mental and shotmaking challenges." Ultimately, his superhuman ability to envision and fix his mind on a specific ball flight – and not the flying right elbow, or the tremendous leg drive – represents Nicklaus's eternal mark on the way the game is played at all levels. Indeed, it is not too much to say that Jack's persuasive and repeated emphasis on the importance of vivid pre-shot pictures spawned a cottage industry: golf psychology. The indispensable works of Bob Rotella, and Harvey Penick's talk of "taking dead aim," would not resound so convincingly had Nicklaus not been continually writing about and performing his version. It's not that Nicklaus was the first to speak in these terms – his greatness was such that originality was not necessary. He was, however, this view's most important envoy. For if we ever forget how critical it was for Nicklaus to represent visualization and mental imaging, we should note that the dominant instruction book of his day – Ben Hogan's The Modern Fundamentals of Golf – contains nary a word on the psychology of shaping a shot. There are, however, some significant misperceptions about exactly what pre-shot visualization, particularly Nicklaus's rendition of it, consists of. Throughout Nicklaus's career, his mind was usually described with metaphors of strength: iron-clad, steel-trapped, single-minded. His mental game, of course, was resolute, but the extreme emphasis placed on sheer force had a tendency to portray Nicklaus, and his ability to see golf shots before hitting them, as products of a dogmatic, inflexible mind. It was as if by dint of his singular ego Nicklaus was able to dictate the terms to the golf course regardless of conditions. In this rendition, Nicklaus's powers of vision were reduced and narrowed to the moment he stood over the ball, blocking out the world, and willing the ball where he wanted it to go. My suspicion, however, is that Nicklaus's true powers of concentration and focus had everything to do with the flexibility and suppleness of his mind: his ability to imagine, invent, and envision different kinds of golf shots at one time. This way of thinking about pre-shot visualization emphasizes not staying focused over a shot already decided, but the process of arriving at that shot – a process of perceiving multiple shots and deciding which among them is the best for the situation. Nicklaus did not simply see more singly than other golfers, he also saw a great deal more than they did. His great strength was his golfing open-mindedness. Nicklaus's performance on St. Andrews' two par-fives exemplified this strength. Ironically, in neither win did he dominate #5 and #13. Especially before the advent of modern technology, the long holes on the Old Course were legitimate three-shot holes, punctuated by disastrous bunkers (the Spectacles and Hell bunkers). They demanded to be played in a variety of ways, from an assortment of angles. Both required a golfer's most acute sense of positioning. Nicklaus approached the holes carefully, with an agile mind. He did not control the holes, he improvised upon them. The result was that he walked off from #5 and #13 with pars and stayed away from disastrous big numbers. SportsJones special section on The
British Open More Golf articles Respond to this article |
ven if
Tiger Woods wins the claret jug to complete a career grand slam, the most dramatic and
enduring image from this year's British Open may well be Jack Nicklaus's good-byes from
atop the Swilican Burn bridge on the 18th hole at St. Andrews. The scene will spur an
inevitable – and deserved – rehearsal of Jack's staggering legacy of career
wins. But there are only so many times we can hear the numbers – three British Open
wins, 18 major titles, 71 career PGA Tour victories, 153 majors in a row – before the
mind numbs.
