Tony Jacklin Interview - Master of his craft

To a whole generation, of course, 'Jacko', is better known for his part in resurrecting the Ryder Cup, his inspired leadership qualities injecting such a belief in four consecutive European sides that his reign signalled the end of American dominance and the first European win on US soil in 1987. As a player, his own record in the biennial contest was equally impressive, especially given the quality of the opposition. He played in seven matches between 1967 and 1979, the highlight of which was his performance at Royal Birkdale in ’69. The newly crowned Open champion didn't lose a match all week, and, having already beaten the world’s greatest player in the Sunday morning singles 4&3, Jacklin’s encounter with Jack Nicklaus later that afternoon concluded with possibly the greatest sporting gesture of all time.

Born out of a desire to commemorate the spirit of that handshake, the two men recently codesigned The Concession, a stunning new golf course on the outskirts of Sarasota, Florida. And it was there that editor Richard Simmons took the opportunity to tee it up and shoot the breeze with one of the most engaging, thoughtful and vocal characters in the game.

Here we are on one of the best new golf courses in America, and it's a Nicklaus/Jacklin joint effort. To have your name alongside that of the game’s greatest must feel very special?
You’re dead right, and it’s a privilege to have created something so unique with the man I still regard as the world’s greatest ever player. Jack and I have been friends ever since that match at Birkdale in ’69. I guess that experience cemented it. When I first came over to play here in America I stayed in Jack’s guest house and he helped me to find my feet on the tour. So we go back a long time and have always maintained a strong friendship. We’re not in each others pockets but there’s a lot of mutual respect there, obviously.

For many, that moment on the 18th green has almost come to define your career as much as the individual victories in the two Opens.
Well, it’s right up there. And we always get reminded of it when the Ryder Cup comes around. It’s a sporting moment that transcends golf. Pure sportsmanship, which is Jack through and through. I was still on a high after winning the Open at Lytham and I was unbeaten that week at Birkdale, so it was a highlight of my life and my playing career. Because of the funny rules the American PGA had regarding selection, the ’69 match was Jack’s first appearance in the Ryder Cup, and I had already beaten him in the second- day fourballs and again 4&3 in the morning singles on Sunday. So I was in great form, but having the weight of the Ryder Cup on your shoulders coming to the last green is not really a place you want to be!

You’d have holed it though, right?
[Smiles]. Let’s just say I was preparing myself mentally to make it as Jack went about holing the four-footer he had left himself. I was confident and at the top of my game. But I’m not going to say it wasn’t a huge relief when he bent over to pick up my marker.

How did your collaboration with Jack here at The Concession come about?
The developer of this property, Kevin Daves, had been courting Jack to build a golf component for a luxury hotel here in Sarasota. But there were some issues with the land they originally looked at and Kevin told me he had found this incredible parcel a little further inland. The hotel weren’t convinced but Kevin was and there is little doubt that this is going to be something very special. I took along a photo of Jack and I on that day in 1969, told him about the significance of it all and he agreed we should go and see Jack together with the idea of a joint venture. The concept just grew. I can remember sitting bolt upright in bed one morning in 2002 and thinking ‘The Concession’ – that’s the name for our golf course. At the time I was more than happy to bow to Jack’s experience in design, but he insisted we do it together. So although it’s a Jack Nicklaus Signature course ‘in Association with’ Tony Jacklin, it was very much a joint effort. I picked him up at the airport on his site visits and we made all the major decisions together.

Did you find you shared a lot of common ideas when it came to the nature of the layout?
Mostly, yes. Neither of us wanted the greens to be too big, the premium was to be on iron play. We didn’t want the greens to be too flat, either. They had to be challenging – and they are. This whole acreage was infused with palmetto and much of it is still a conservation area. So there were certain limits to what we could do in terms of earth moving and so on. When I tell you the course was more or less built in eight months you get a picture of what an incredible piece of property this was to work on. Golf Digest ranked The Concession the No 1 private course in the US when it opened in 2006, which was a huge accolade. And in fact the whole experience – working with Jack and being so heavily involved with the day-to-day development of the property – spurned me on to getting back fully into the design business. The recession may not be playing into our hands right now, but designing golf courses is what I want to be doing for the rest of my days and we have a lot of opportunity lined up in Europe and beyond once things do turn around.

Is there a Tony Jacklin style or ‘blueprint’?
No, not really. I have no pre-conceived ideas and I don’t believe I am reinventing the wheel. I try and take every site on its merits and of course you have to listen to what the owner is looking to achieve. I’m loathe to introduce non indigenous plants, and I like to create a good variety of holes. I like a course to be challenging, but balanced, playable. I’m big on contrast, I like to see that on a golf course. I like the ‘shaggy’ natural look around bunkers, the Alister McKenzie sort of look. I still love links golf – that’s where my inspiration comes from. One of the projects on the drawing board right now is on a piece of land right next door to Nairn – to create a genuine links would be a wonderful experience. We have a couple of others in England, one in the south of France and a couple on the go in Cyprus. But these things take time – from the first meeting it can take three to five years to get the project on the ground.

Where do you stand on the whole issue of equipment and the fact that so many great courses have been rendered obsolete by the ridiculous distances modern players hit the ball?
What’s so sad is Britain has come out of it the worst, because we have so many traditional golf courses from the late 1800s that are 6,700 yards or so, and they have nowhere to go. I’m talking about the likes of Sunningdale, the Berkshire, Walton Heath – you could reel off dozens. They just don’t have the room to expand, and so have become obsolete in terms of challenging the best players. And that’s a crying shame in my book. The modern ball has rendered these courses defenceless and yet when you stop and think about it it’s crazy that a game would let itself do that?. It’s ridiculous the distance modern players hit it now. I probably hit the ball the same distance now as I did forty years ago – I hit an 8-iron 145 yards or so, just as I did when I was in my prime. Even Nicklaus, who was a longer hitter than me off the tee, he hit an 8-iron around 145. Because the ball just wouldn’t take any more than 145 – any harder and it would spiral out of control. A seven was 155, a six 165 and so on. This obsession with distance baffles me. It’s a shame there are not more short courses, to my mind. I hosted the British Par 3 Championships last year, with holes between 87 and 150 yards, and it’s those fiddly bits that get the job done. That’s what wins golf tournaments. But there’s this obsession with distance. You hear people say ‘Have you seen Tiger smash the ball with a driver...’ That’s all they really care about. The modern game is a masquerade. It’s a false impression of what golf is about.

Continuing along that theme, I’m assuming you would feel that shot-making skills are less important today?
Sadly, yes. A lot of the skill, or the artistry, has gone out of it, I’m certain of that. The ability to create shots, to use the wind. To try and make the wind your ally. I could shape shots, but I wouldn’t try to work the ball against the wind. I’d always use the wind as an ally and let the ball go with it. That’s the art of it. To make the wind your friend. This obsession with distance and stretching courses to the limit has changed the nature of the game – for the worse in my opinion.

Has putting become too important?
Yes, I would say it has. It overshadows what I regard as the superior skills of shaping shots and flighting and working the ball. The art of playing golf. It was not like that years ago – the great ball strikers were the guys to emulate and they were the ones winning. Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, Jack, Gary Player. They were the guys you wanted to play like. Putting didn’t seem like such a big deal back then, and I’m sure that if you look at the stats you’d see that in those days averages of around 30 putts per round were decent. But don’t forget the greens were not like they are today. With new technology, grasses and maintenance, soft spikes, the greens are usually perfect and as a result putting has become, what, 60% of the game, perhaps even more at the sharp end.

Why do you think it is that no other European player has followed you in winning a US Open?
Who knows? A quirk of fate? It’s just one of those things. The Americans, through the rank and file, tend to be better putters, so that’s certainly one of the reasons why they have dominated. But looking at it from a European standpoint, there are only a few players actually capable of doing it, and a lot of those have tried to hit and run, by which I mean they played mostly in Europe or elsewhere in the world and try to pick off the US Open with a flying visit. You just can’t do that. The likelihood of doing that is very remote, although having said that Colin [Montgomerie] was unlucky a couple of years ago and Nick [Faldo] lost a playoff to Curtis Strange when in all probability he should have won the tournament in 72 holes.

Hazeltine came in for a lot of stick in 1970?
The Hazeltine I remember was a wild and remote course, and at 7,100 yards long it was a tough proposition using the gear we had in the bag then, believe me. There were a lot of doglegs, the rough was up and there were a lot of complaints from certain quarters. On walking into the press room early in the week Dave Hill was asked how he found the course and he quipped that he was ‘still looking for it’. We all remember those stories. It was just a very tough layout, and the weather conditions, with winds gusting to 40mph, compounded it all.

As the Open champion you presumably arrived with a lot of confidence?
I was hugely confident and I was playing well coming into the event. My form had been good and that week will go down as the best I ever played during a tournament, there’s no doubt about that. I got locked in to a certain putting mode following a tip from Bert Yancey’s brother, Jim, and everything just clicked. It was the simplest thing: he told me to look at the hole while making my practice stroke, and that just helped me to get a terrific feel and visualise the ball going in.

How vividly do you remember your feelings as you extended your lead day by day and realised what you might achieve?
It was the most nervous I ever was on a golf course. It just built up as the week wore on. I was OK on the first day, even though the wind was up I felt right at home. I birdied four of the first seven holes and shot 71 to lead by two. There were some big scores – Arnold shot 79, Gary 80 and Jack 81. Having been weaned on playing in the wind I just got my head down and stuck to it, and I increased my lead each round. In some respects that puts you under even more pressure. You get six or seven shots in front and you start thinking, ‘if I lose this now I’ll be known as a choker’. I remember hitting a 4-iron to four feet at the 7th on the final day and missing it – the first short putt I had missed all week. I then three-putted the 8th and so the alarm bells were about to go off. At the next I had the slice of luck you always need in a major. I over hit a 30-footer from just off the green at the 9th, the ball hit the stick square on and disappeared. That got me back on track. The pressure lifted and I actually enjoyed the last few holes.

Were the USGA as judicious in the manner they set up the course then as they are today?
The USGA always always wanted their Open to be the strongest examination paper in golf. And I still believe to this day that the US Open is the hardest tournament to win. It was built for Faldo, but he might have been just too timid, leaving the driver in the bag and putting too much pressure on his iron play. You’d have marked Monty down as a fantastic bet for a US Open, and had it not been for breaking his routine at the final hole at Winged Foot he would probably have won it. The way they set up a US Open course, you cannot afford to be crooked. Paul Casey might have a great chance, as he’s one of the game’s finest straight drivers of a ball and is obviously in some form. When you look back, it just didn’t suit someone like Seve, for example, who never hit the ball straight enough to win a US Open – and he’s one of the greatest players the world has ever seen. For all his powers of recovery there is only so much in the tank and ultimately the course wears a player down.

When it comes to watching the majors which do you enjoy the most?
Obviously I have a soft spot for both of the Opens, but links golf is still my favourite form of the game and so the Open Championship is No.1. But the weather plays such a huge part in our Open – you need the tee times to be on your side, you need the breaks. The weather doesn’t usually play such a big part in the US Open, although I suppose you could say it did for me in 1970 as the wind was brutal, and I felt very much at home. In some respects that extra challenge holds your focus, you get the bit between your teeth.

We’ll come to Tiger in a minute, but who do you rate as the player most likely to take the No. 1 spot?
Sergio Garcia, without a doubt. He can be the next world No. 1 if he gets self-assured with his putting. I still think it comes down to that, how self assured you are. I’ll tell you, as will many, this is one of the toughest courses in America and yet Paul Azinger (who’s a member and practices here) regularly shoots under 70 off the back tees. I said to his caddie, ‘Steve, what are you doing? Tiger can’t beat those scores! Why are you not doing this out on tour?’ But he goes away and he’s not self assured in a tournament, he doesn’t believe in himself enough. He missed the cut up the road at Innisbrook in the Traditions, and the course is a doddle compared to this place. Self doubt is so destructive. It sits here [taps his shoulder] and niggles in that ear, and you know it’s having the strength to deal with that – and of course the ability to putt – that determines the winners and the losers. Players these days should be less obsessed with their technique and go figure out how to make the brain work effectively. We all know the power of positive thinking. I was reading a new manuscript the other day, by the guy who wrote the book Natural Born Winners, a writer called Robert Siegar. He was here last week, came over to the house and we talked about this in some length. I wish I had the benefit of this sort of material when I needed it, in the early 1970s when I ran into Lee Trevino and some of his antics. Who knows what I might have achieved. I was reading Timothy Galwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis (before he wrote the Inner Game of Golf) in 1974/5, because that was all there really was. We didn’t have the experts around in those days to help us understand what the brain is capable of, how it digests information and how to deal with certain events that come along in sport. I was confident in my ability in my prime, and when you have that raw confidence you don't need to worry so much about the mind game. But it only takes a few knocks to threaten that confidence, self doubt creeps in and you lose the plot.

You were arguably the best in the world for three or four years from 1969 to ’73. Did you ever think like that?
No, not really. I just knew I had to beat Jack! Was he the only one you worried about? Yeah, he was really. I played with all of them. I knew what I had to do to be out there with them. And I thoroughly enjoyed being around these great players. They set the standard. Arnold, Jack, Lee Trevino, Gary Player – they were the men to beat. But I didn’t feel intimidated by them.

Who was the best you ever played with?
Ben Hogan was the best ball striker. He was just a different class.

Did you learn a lot playing with Hogan?
Yeah, I would say so. I always knew I was on the right track with my own game, but he just did it differently to everyone else. I had as much respect for him as anyone in golf. Jack was another one, the ability to use the mind and not be intimidated. Being ‘in the moment’, able to control the mind – like I say, that whole area of the game is where it’s at. Hogan’s wife told me a few years ago that when they cleared out Ben’s den after he died they found all these books to do with mental strength and the power of positive thinking. When we talk about Hogan we tend to think of him as this master technician, which of course he was, but clearly he knew the importance of the mental side of the game, he studied it, which makes sense when you consider what he went through.

From a technical point of view, what struck you the most with Hogan?
There were lots of little things you picked up on. He was just so technically perfect. Everything was so controlled. I’ve studied a lot of photographs of him recently as I’ve been working on a series of studies in marquetry. Nobody did it like Hogan. Yes, the right foot was pulled back behind the left with a driver, he rifled that ball with a real ‘crack’. He was classic. The other thing that always struck me was his weight distribution at the top of his backswing. When you watched Hogan swing (face on), it was clear he absorbed a significant amount of his weight down the inside of his left leg. You read so much these days about the importance of turning and coiling behind the ball and ‘loading’ into the right side, and yet Hogan, distinctly, had this ‘hang-back’ on the left side. I was talking about this with Doug McClelland who was over here just a few weeks ago. And I particularly remember arguing the same point with John O’Leary: the weight does not go over here [mimicking the swing, Jacklin taps his right thigh]. Hogan took some of the strain in here [touches the inside of the left leg]. A significant ration of weight stayed up the inside of the left leg as he reached the top of his backswing and then he ‘fired’ into the downswing.

Do you think Tiger will make it to Jack’s record?
I don’t know. It all depends on whether that knee is going to remain strong enough. Reconstructive surgery is a big deal. You can see in the way he is, the way he walks and the way he picks the ball from the hole that he’s carrying an injury. But he has such a strong mind nothing would surprise me. What I think is interesting is the way the game has changed in the 9 months or so he’s been away, with so many seriously talented youngsters emerging from all over the world. He [Tiger] almost has to re-assert himself again in the majors. To do that he’s going to have to get his driving back on course. For me, Tiger’s driving hurts him too much. There’s too much ‘hit’ in it. When he just swings freely and let’s the club do all the work it’s magical and the ball flies forever. It’s almost like this physical fitness thing has got to the point where he feels he has to use it and muscle the ball. Go back to 2000 and the US Open at Pebble Beach and there was a lot less of that, it was more of a swing.

There’s a whole generation of golfers out there today who are now playing that power game – one day that may be Tiger’s legacy?
True – my son Sean is one of them. But the thing is you don’t need to be bulging with muscles to play good golf. You need to be strong in the thighs and in the body core, and in the arms and wrists. But these days young golfers are like sheep. They follow the guy who’s out in the lead – and when that guy is as good as Tiger is I suppose you can understand it all.

We can’t finish without reference to the recent Ryder Cup – what did you think of the treatment Nick Faldo received in the press after Valhalla?
Obviously the press were out for him, simple as that. It’s been a long dance hasn’t it. I suppose you make your bed you lie in it. I dunno. The British press are tough, everybody knows that. I really didn’t think he did anything wrong particularly. Ultimately he just didn’t get the service from a number of the so-called top players. If he had the outcome might have been different.

Were you optimistic for Europe when you saw the singles line up?
Yeah, I was. OK, we were trailing 9-7, but I thought it lined up very well for Europe – when we saw the pairings in the SKY booth we were reasonably confident. But Anthony Kim came out with all guns blazing and never let Sergio into that first match and all of a sudden we were on the back foot. Europe didn’t win enough of those first matches to allow the players at the foot of the order to do what they might have done. Lee Westwood really didn’t come up with as many points as we’d all expected and Padraig looked like he struggled all week. There is risk in any way you put out the singles order and sometimes you just have to accept it when you get outplayed. I was with Nick [Faldo] at Wentworth two days before he made his captain’s picks and he was very comfortable with the guys he took along. If he needed vindication with regard to Ian Poulter, he certainly got it because Ian was man of the tournament. I personally was always on the fence with regards to his selection, as he has never won anything in America and, even though he has won a few times in Europe, I still wasn’t sure what he was made of. But he showed us at Valhalla and came through as a star. That guy could be the definition of being ‘self-assured’. As I said earlier, that’s what winning is all about. And that experience could well take Ian to the next level.

Jacklin on Marquetry

I've been interested in woodworking and marquetry since 1957, when I was 13 years old. Someone must have bought me a kit as a present and I just became hooked on it. I've always loved wood, the way it lives, the different grains and finishes that you can achieve and over the years I suppose I've reached a decent standard. Low single figures. Marquetry involves the inlay of various veneers, using different types, colours and finishes to create contrast and so build up an image.

When I came to America to play the Champions Tour in the early 90s I used to try and rent my own small apartment with its own kitchen so that I could come back at the end of a day and switch off. I had a travel bag with all my tools and the veneer is light and easy to transport, and I would spend my evenings doing this. Its relaxing. From start to finish, the Hogan study you can see here probably took me a week. Once it's all put together, you have to press it and then iron it, then sand it and finish it. I'm still at the experimental stage with it all. It's a bit of fun.