US Masters / Bill Elliott / 27 March 2008 / Leave a Comment

Bill Elliott recalls the final major win of The Golden Bear's glorious career

"Masters memories, like the corners of my mind
Misty water-coloured memories
Of the way we were..."

Barbra Streisand never has made it to Augusta National as far as I'm aware - although, bizarrely, Celine Dion has - but if the old warbler ever does swing into town then, like everyone else, she will be entranced by the scene at Augusta National.

It's only a couple of weeks now before the big show begins. For me it will be the 29th consecutive year that I've been there for this fantabulous week. And, as before, my mind will stray back sooner rather than later to the greatest Masters ever played in my lifetime.

This was the 1986 Masters, a time when checked trousers and bare-heads were still de rigeur as far as the grand, old game was concerned. It was also, as it turned out, Jack Nicklaus' finest hour. Actually, make that two hours, this being the time it took Jack to circumnavigate the back nine in an astonishing 30 shots, six under par. It was enough to secure his 18th, and final, major title and to climax a pro career that had started 25 years earlier.

Yet, had it not been for a ridiculous decision he made on the eighth hole, Nicklaus would have just been another chorus line player that day and the favourite, Seve Ballesteros, would have had his third Green Jacket. How so? Well, Jack sliced the merde out of his drive at the long eighth that afternoon and found his ball trapped in the woods. His son Stevie, working as caddie, instinctively handed the 46-year-old maestro a seven iron to chip back out to the fairway.

Jack, equally instinctively, took the club. Then he stopped, considered, looked up at the trees and asked for his five wood instead. "There's a bit of gap up there and I'm going to have a go at it. Hell, why not?" he told the small group of us lucky enough to be standing around those trees that day. It was a crucially daft play by the greatest strategist the game ever has seen but it came off, his ball spearing through the trees and on towards a distant green. It did not mean he made birdie but it did mean a confidence boosting par save and, reignited, Nicklaus strode on to create history.

Ironically, it was only last year when I chatted to Dave Musgrove - Sandy Lyle's caddie and one of Nicklaus's playing companion that day - that I discovered what had actually occurred in the woods. "When Jack came out he was laughing his head off, " says Dave. "Sandy asked him what was so funny and he said 'I was aiming at a tiny gap, missed it and went through one even smaller that I hadn't noticed'."

On such tiny slivers of good fortune are legends made. Nicklaus not only went on to pull out all those birdies his progress up the leaderboard so rattled Ballesteros that the Spaniard mishit a simple four iron approach to the 15th green into the water after being delayed by the cheers that had just greeted another Nicklaus birdie up ahead. Seve never was quite the same force, admitting a year later to me that he was now waiting for this sort of collapse to happen again.

Nicklaus, meanwhile, was never to win another major but he had signed off in the most glorious manner imaginable and his efforts meant that the MacGregor golf company that he owned sold more numbers of the Response ZT putter he had used that Masters than they ever could dare to have hoped. They had planned to sell 5000 of these in the next 12 months, instead they had orders for over 6,000 by lunchtime the following day.

Twelve years later at 58-years of age, Jack Nicklaus finished the 1998 Masters tied for sixth. "For a while out there I thought it might be '86 all over again but miracles tend to happen only once I suppose, " he grinned afterwards.

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:

Remember personal info?

Comment: