They always say the best golfers in the world can play with any clubs and when it comes to Jack Nicklaus, it appears he can play with clubs that have certainly seen better days.
Nicklaus won 18 majors over the course of his glittering career and was out of the game before the real improvements in technology started to influence things.
The Golden Bear was the best player of his time and alongside Tiger Woods, is widely considered the best ever.
However, when it comes to actually changing equipment to improve his game, it seems Mr Nicklaus was not a big advocate of changing for the sake of it.
In fact, speaking to CBS at The Memorial this week, he’s revealed he actually had one club for around 30 years.
Jack Nicklaus shares the golf club he never changed until it broke
A man of the experience and knowledge of Jack Nicklaus is always going to have some stories to tell and this one about his trusty 3-wood is a golden story.
Speaking to CBS at Muirfield Village this week, Nicklaus has explained the story of his 3-wood and how he simply never changed it, until he was forced to one day after breaking it.
“Well yeah. I got it when I was 18 and I had it my whole career until, and I’m not sure exactly but it was sometime late 90s when we finally started using metals. That 3-wood, it was so rounded on the leading edge. There was no way to bottom the club because you couldn’t get it off the ground anymore,” Nicklaus recalled.
“It didn’t have loft. I had it for years. I’ll never forget, it had the same grip on it from 1958 to 1981, I had the same grip. Then I played in Chicago in 1987 at Kipper Lakes. I’ll never forget, in the morning round on the 16th hole, I hit a tee shot and I tapped the club on the top of my bag, with the shaft, didn’t think much of it. I got back out there in the afternoon, second hole, I pulled the 3-wood out and the shaft was like this [bent], I’d kicked the shaft.
“So I remember sending Jackie back there and he ran back to the car, you could change your clubs in those days, and he got back to me in one hole with another 3-wood. But then I got the shaft changed and played with it another 7-8 years. It just felt good, I liked it. I never changed grips. I happen to like leather grips.”
Arnold PalmerWhen asked on the modern player changing grips all the time, Nicklaus recalled how Arnold Palmer was a regular tinkerer.
“Well when I played with Arnold, I used to play with Arnold a lot, and he would change a grip every hole, or re-grip it. He’d start winding on the grip, wind it back up again,” Nicklaus laughed.
How Jack Nicklaus thinks he’d do with modern golf clubs
It’s one of golf’s unanswerable questions really, in terms of how far would a prime Jack Nicklaus hit the modern clubs.
We can test it the other way of course, getting a Rory McIlroy or a Bryson DeChambeau to hit the older clubs.
However, we can ask the players themselves and Nicklaus himself believes he’d be right up there for distance if he used the modern tech.
“About 50 yards further”,” Nicklaus replied when asked by Good Good how much further he thinks he could hit the ball. “I think that’s the difference with the golf ball from when I played. I think the golf ball, if you ever try and take that old golf club that I used and hit today’s golf ball with it, you would hit it about 150 yards. It’s more the trampoline effect than anything else.
“The golf ball from 1930 until 1995 increased about five to seven yards because of the quality of how a manufacturer made it.
“From 1995 to 2005 until they finally put some kind of line in the sand it increased another 50 yards. That is 50 yards in 10 years.”
It would certainly be interesting to see in real time but sadly, it’s just something we’ll never know.
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