Jack Nicklaus, 1986 MastersJOE BENTON
The Masters is next week and there's no better time for readers to delve into what makes it golf's most popular tournament. Here's a look at two recently published books about the 1986 Masters that Jack Nicklaus, then 46, won. Twenty-five years have passed since then, and there's been a lot of reminiscing about the tournament. I was attending my fourth Masters, and there was so much happening as I walked the back nine that I wished I could have been about six places at once. I remember scrambling up the hill on the 18th hole because I wanted to go into the clubhouse to watch the last few holes after Nicklaus two-putted the 18th green and posted the score that would win him his sixth Masters. Other people had the same idea. We were crammed into the entrance at one door, and it felt like it took 15 minutes to get in.
The 1986 Masters: How Jack Nicklaus Roared Back to Win, John Boyette, Lyons Press, 2011 . Boyette, now the sports editor of the Augusta Chronicle, is from Aiken, S.C., a charming town just across the state line from Augusta. He didn't have press credentials in 1986, but he did get a patron's badge and followed Nicklaus for the entire final round. His impressions stayed with him; he calls the experience "a transcendent moment," and he's expressed with feeling the elements of the day that made it perhaps the greatest final round in Masters history. He includes an interview that he did with Nicklaus's wife Barbara, a nice touch to a book that's full of detail and includes a one-on-one interview that Boyette did with Nicklaus himself. My favourite chapters were the two that he wrote about the gigantic putter that Nicklaus used, a Response ZT that MacGregor Golf made. The company got 5,000 phone-in orders the day after Nicklaus went seven-under-par the last 10 holes to win, and sold 125,000 putters for the year. Nicklaus no longer has the putter, nor does he know where it is.
One for the Ages: Jack Nicklaus and the 1986 Masters, Tom Clavin, Chicago Review Press, 2011 . Clavin wrote a book about the Ryder Cup, and contributed to the New York Times for 15 years. He structures his book around each of the four rounds of the tournament, breaking off into extended and helpful digressions into the Masters' rich history. His book becomes a course in golf history, especially that of the Masters, the Augusta National Golf Club, and, of course, Nicklaus. He's done his research and conveys the history in a way that fits easily with his account of the tournament itself. The 1986 Masters was all about Nicklaus, of course, but in other important ways it was also about other players: Nick Price, for one, who followed rounds of 79 and 69 with a third-round 63, which remains the course record. Clavin provides an entertaining account of the round. He also takes the reader into how close Seve Ballesteros, Tom Kite and Greg Norman came to winning the green jacket. Clavin cites other writers extensively, and urges readers to take a look at what Herbert Warren Wind, the elegant New Yorker essayist, wrote about the 1986 Masters and others as well. I concur. Readers might spend some time with Following Through, a collection of Wind's essays. He's the master of the Masters. Clavin is wise to quote him throughout his leisurely account of a Masters that, 25 years later, remains vivid in the memories of those of us lucky enough to have been there.
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Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and, most recently, he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 11 books, including The Natural Golf Swing, with George Knudson (1988); Links: An Insider's Tour Through the World of Golf (1990); The Swing, with Nick Price (1997); The Fundamentals of Hogan, with David Leadbetter (2000); A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands (2001); Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); and his latest, This Round's on Me (2009). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca . You can now follow him on Twitter @lornerubenstein