SOUTHWORDS

I find it hard to believe that it’s been 40 years since Jack and I won the Masters. God bless him, he’s gotten old. Jack has shrunk over the decades. He blames, at least in part, his cascading vertebra on the cortisone shots he received in his back to relieve pain when he was a teenage golfer. At the Father and Son Challenge in 2020, Gary Player joked that he never thought he’d out-drive Jack, “and I never thought I’d be taller than him either.”

Jack and I didn’t get off to the best of starts. It was the 1979 Colgate Hall of Fame Classic on Pinehurst’s No. 2 course. I was a relative newcomer to golf. Jack had already made a favorable impression on the game. (If you think 15 majors is good.) I met him on Maniac Hill, where he was warming up. I was there to take as many swing sequences as players would allow for Golf World magazine, where I was the associate editor — a title that conveyed with it cameras and lenses, something I was beyond ill-prepared for. I introduced myself and asked Jack if he would mind if I took a swing sequence of him. He rather politely agreed, being a good friend of my editor in chief, Dick Taylor. Whenever Dick traveled to Palm Beach, he bunked in with the Nicklauses.

The sequence camera was — and I suppose still is if, God forbid, you can find one — called a Hulcher. It was a rattletrap box of whirling, grinding widgets, invented by an otherwise perfectly harmless little man of the same name to photograph rockets taking off for the Department of Defense. While it may have been useful for Wernher von Braun, it was a curse to any golf photographer who ever touched one, with the exception of World Golf Hall of Fame photographer Leonard Kamsler, who had mysteriously managed to tame his personal Hulcher the way Siegfried and Roy tamed white tigers.

Jack never pulled a club back until he was absolutely, positively, unconditionally ready to hit the ball. He could stand motionless over a putt longer than any human being who ever lived. His full shots weren’t much different. When I got ready to take Jack’s swing sequence, he was addressing the ball. I began running the camera, sending 35mm film screaming through the beast at 40 or 60 frames per second, I can’t remember which, making a noise not dissimilar to a Navy destroyer raising anchor. The film came in 100 foot rolls and I’d run about 80 of it through the camera when I stopped.

The motionless Nicklaus turned his head and stared at me. “I thought you were going to take a sequence,” he said.

“I thought you were going to swing,” I replied.

Not quite a year later, I had the chance to take Jack’s picture again, this time on the 18th green of Baltusrol Golf Club as he won his fourth U.S. Open. They hung the message “Jack Is Back” on the big leaderboard. As thousands rushed the green, Jack threw up his hands like a London traffic cop, stopping the hordes in their tracks. Isao Aoki had yet to putt out. Lost in the crowd, I climbed the tree at the back of the green, a vantage point that — given my limited photojournalistic capabilities — didn’t yield much better pictures than the ones I’d gotten that day on Maniac Hill.

By 1986, through sheer repetition, I’d improved. Most of my photos were functionally usable. Jack, on the other hand, had gone in the opposite direction. His return in 1980 lasted through the PGA Championship at Oak Hill Country Club, which gave every appearance of being the final major he would win, leaving his total at 17. Then came that Sunday in Augusta.

As Jack was charging on the back nine and Seve Ballesteros was collapsing, I found myself funneled to the right of the 16th green, trapped behind half the population of Georgia. Unable to squeeze in to take a photo, I became a spectator, too. For comparison purposes only, I once attended one of Bo Schembechler’s postgame interviews conducted in a tiny room with a single bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, off the same concrete tunnel the University of Michigan marching band used to exit the stadium, jammed shoulder to shoulder, playing “Hail to the Victors” at incalculable decibel levels. I promise you, the noise the crowd made in the valley at Augusta National that day as Jack walked from the 16th green to the 17th tee was far, far louder — so loud his eyes welled with tears as he walked up 17. Mine, too.

The echo of those cheers still rattles my bones, even if they are 40 years older.