[Wayne_Kozun]

If you count the Ams then Tiger is one closer to Jack with 17 majors vs. Jack's 20.  One thing to consider is that golf is even much more of a global game now than it was 35 years agor when Jack was in his prime.  That would make it harder to dominate the game - until Seve came along at the end of Jack's career there were very few Europeans of top calibre.  There are far more today although you can argue that none have ever reached Seve's level.

[Chuck Brown]

Jim.

I think the players Jack beat - Palmer, Player, Watson, Casper, Miller,Trevino -  (and lost to) - were tougher to beat than Mickelson, Els Ogilvy, Goosen  but it is an unanswerable question really.
I do think the throwaway line that ' the players are better now' is very open to debate because I think the equipment makes players look so much better.
Most can drive like Norman did because if the modern ball and club versus balata and persimmon and Mickelson need 64 degrees to hit shots Seve was hitting with a 56 degree club.
Only truly great long iron players had that big high shot from 220 yards - Snead, Nicklaus, Weiskopf, Norman, Woods - but now everybody has it because of the hybrid.
The ball is clearly much easier to play with - especially for us in Australia and Britain where the first big balls we played with in the late 70s and early 80s were terrible in high winds.

I am not sure whether you saw Frank Hannigan's very interesting perepective on Geoff Shackelford's site but he gave the edge to Nicklaus with the driver,fairway woods but argued Tiger was better from 120 yards and in  - which is quite obvious.
I think the one equipment factor no one talks about is just how much better wedges are now.
It was somewhere between very difficult and impossible to find one sand club or wedge that looked or played anywhere  near as well as any one of a hundred wedges you can find in any pro shop in the world.

Nicklaus was awesome obviously and the question is whether he would have raised his game to beat Tiger more often than his rivals do now.
I think there is only one answer to that question.

I hope that makes some sense!!

With regard to "Nicklaus and equipment," one thing that needs to be said is that the ball that Jack played with through most of his best years was the MacGregor Tourney.  And the Tourney was a remarkably crappy ball, by any standards.  Most importantly, even by the standards of that era, the Tourney was a rotten ball, but it was part of Nicklaus' Macgregor contract.  Macgregor made some of the best clubs in the history of the game, but also some of the worst balls.

When Phil Mickelson made the very widely-misinterpreted comment that Tiger Woods played with "inferior" equipment (a poor choice of words to describe Woods' decidedly "retro" equipment featuring forged blades with loft and length specs that were more typical of 1965 than 2005), he didn't mean "poor quality" equipment.  But the balls that Jack Nicklaus played with, and won with, really were poor quality.  Mickelson could have rightly said that Nicklaus won with inferior equipment.

[Matt_Ward]

Wayne:

Fair enough.

You give me your top five foreign players that Tiger deals with now and I'll be sure to list the top five from Jack's. Gary Player is one of them -- how about the likes of Tony Jacklin, Bruce Crampton, etc, etc.

Despite all the foreign players you see today -- few of them (where's Adam Scott been in a major, etc, etc) you rarely see them breaking ground down the stretch of a big one thus far.

One last thing -- Wayne the US Amateur is no longer a major and really stopped being one with the conclusion of World War II. For many, the Am wins for Bob Jones can count as such but not for the likes of Nicklaus and Woods. For what it's worth -- Dan Jenkins would agree with you since he says US and British Am wins can county provided you have a professional major in tow.

[Mike_Clayton]

Chuck.

With regard to the Macgregor ball see the Jack Newton interview in Golf Digest - last month I think.
Nicklaus gave him a dozen ball at The Open in 1975 and Jack (Newton) said they were unbelievably good - and not the normal Macgregor ball.
As Jack tells the story Weiskopf (who was also a Macgregor player) asked where he got the balls and said ' I can't even get those balls!'

[Chuck Brown]

Chuck.

With regard to the Macgregor ball see the Jack Newton interview in Golf Digest - last month I think.
Nicklaus gave him a dozen ball at The Open in 1975 and Jack (Newton) said they were unbelievably good - and not the normal Macgregor ball.
As Jack tells the story Weiskopf (who was also a Macgregor player) asked where he got the balls and said ' I can't even get those balls!'

Mike, I remember seeing that several weeks ago, and had frankly forgotten about it until you just mentioned it.  I actually caddied for Jack in 1973, and the Tourneys that he used were regular Tourneys.  We put them all through a roundness guage in those days, and I remember that none of them flunked.  But I only did a half-dozen balls.  And, Jack gave me one to keep, along with his Star-Grip glove.

I have a theory about Jack Newton's story.  It is this; Newton is not lying, and the story happened the way he said.  But it was probably reflective of one particular new ball that Macgregor brought out in the spring of '75, and that Nicklaus was the first to get those prototype balls, at Augusta.  Macgregor probably distributed more protos to more pros immediately thereafter.  I refuse to believe that for the length and breadth of the Nicklaus/Weiskopf eras at Macgregor, Nicklaus was given a secret ball that on one else knew about, or was permitted to have.  As we all know, Macgregor simply gave up on the golf ball business in about -what- 1978? '79? '80?

[JohnV]

Even if Jack was getting the same balls as all the other players isn't it possible that Macgregor was hand selected his to make sure they were top quality?  As Chuck said, none of them flunked the roundness test.  If that were a normal collection of balls in those days I'm sure some would have flunked otherwise why were they checking?

[Wayne_Kozun]

Wayne:

Fair enough.

You give me your top five foreign players that Tiger deals with now and I'll be sure to list the top five from Jack's. Gary Player is one of them -- how about the likes of Tony Jacklin, Bruce Crampton, etc, etc.
 ...
One last thing -- Wayne the US Amateur is no longer a major and really stopped being one with the conclusion of World War II.

Gary Player was a great player, arguably the best non-US player of the post WWII era but after that it was much weaker.  Certainly Els, Singh, Goosen, Garcia, Harrington, etc. are better than the non-American players in the Nicklaus era with the exception of Player.

But the foreign players are much more numerous than a few decades ago.  Currently 6 of the top 10 and 14 of the top 20 are not American.  I don't think they had the rankings when Jack was in his prime but I doubt that a majority of the best players in the game were not American at that time.

I agree that the US Am shouldn't be counted as a major but some folks do, and I was just pointing out that this brings Tiger closer to Jack as Tiger has 3 US Ams vs. Jack's 2.  I thought I read somewhere once that Jack counts the US Ams and says that he has 20 majors.

[Chuck Brown]

Even if Jack was getting the same balls as all the other players isn't it possible that Macgregor was hand selected his to make sure they were top quality?  As Chuck said, none of them flunked the roundness test.  If that were a normal collection of balls in those days I'm sure some would have flunked otherwise why were they checking?

I don't think so, John.  Most balls passed.  And I only did the balls he needed to play with that day.  He had three dozen in the bag!  Every once in a while, you might come across the odd sleeve where two or three of the balls got caught in the roundness gauge, but most balls passed.  (You could sure knock them out of round pretty quickly, though!)  Everybody could utilize a roundness gauge, so that was no big deal.  And there's no way on earth that I know of to 'hand select' golf balls.

[Jim Nugent]

Chuck, in what event did you caddy for Jack?  Any memories or stories you can tell us? 

I think caddying for Jack Nicklaus would have been incredibly cool. 

[TEPaul]

I have no idea what Macgregor did for their tournament players but my dad worked for Spalding in the 1950s and maybe into the early 60s and he said the balls for all their tournament players including their fairly large contingent of LPGA players were hand-picked and tested (roundness) in Chicopee, Mass before being distributed to the players. He said quality control in both balls and equipment could be a bit iffy sometimes.

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