Jack vs. Tiger: who is the Greatest?

Jack Nicklaus vs.Tiger Woods, who is the greatest? Two writers debate the best in sport.

(63% go for Jack)

Today, does the Golden Bear’s record make him superior to his indomitable challenger?

Jack Nicklaus
By John Hopkins

Jack William Nicklaus is unsurpassed in my view as the greatest golfer of all time. Though I retain a feeling for my personal hero Bobby Jones, and his startling performances in winning what were then the four major championships in a dizzy four-month spell in 1930.

Jack Nicklaus

Let us start with the unarguable. Nicklaus has won 18 professional major titles, more than anyone.

There is a rhythmical symmetry to his haul of the biggest prizes in golf: 6 Masters, 5 PGA’s, 4 US Opens and 3 Opens. He has won more Masters, more US Opens and more PGAs than any golfer since the Second World War.

There is also a pleasing breadth to Nicklaus’s victories in that only four other golfers have won all four of today’s major championships – Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player and Tiger Woods.

Nicklaus was at the top of his game for longer than almost anyone — his first professional major victory coming at the 1962 US Open and his last at the 1986 Masters. His dominance over his peers in this time was such that he won 18 per cent of the tournaments he entered and finished in the top ten 66.5 per cent of the time.

As said, Nicklaus won 18 professional major championships. In addition he had 19 runners-up finishes. It is possible to speculate that with a little luck he might have won another half dozen major championships.

Nicklaus thought his way around a golf course as well as anyone. He thrived on those sweaty-palm situations when his analytical mind and the cool logic enabled him to feel less uncomfortable and possibly more comfortable than anyone else. “The greatest test is to stand on the 70th tee in a major championship needing two pars and a birdie to win,” he once said.

Nicklaus rarely hit wild shots. And if he did, he was supreme at limiting the damage to his scorecard to one stroke.

There were a few longer and a few straighter drivers than Nicklaus but no one combined the two qualities of length and accuracy as he did. Nicklaus was the longest, straightest driver the game had seen.

There has been talk in Europe lately of the exceptional longevity of Lee Westwood. Now 46, Westwood recently won his 44th worldwide tournament over a span of four decades. In that time he has had 19 top-ten finishes in the four major championships, three times a runner-up. Impressive.

Nicklaus won USGA titles in five decades, had more top-ten finishes in the Masters than Westwood has had in all four majors and in the 1970s he never finished worse than eighth at Augusta.

Bobby Jones, my hero, said it right when he observed: “Jack Nicklaus played a game with which I am not familiar.”

I rest my case.

Tiger Woods
By Rick Broadbent

It was last year that sealed the deal. After years of denial, back surgeries and unsatisfying work as his own tribute act, Tiger Woods came up with arguably the greatest comeback in sport by winning the Masters. Nicklaus won it when he was older but he did not have to arrest such a savage decline to do so.

To my mind Nicklaus was a great player for longer but prime-time Tiger was the greatest. In that period from the 1999 US PGA Championship to the 2002 US Open he won seven of 11 majors. He won the US Open by 15 strokes, a record for any major. He is the only player to have held all four (modern) major titles at the same time, his fabled Tiger Slam when he was a combined 25 strokes better than the rest. He did not just beat everyone; he beat them to a pulp. And then he did not miss a cut for seven years at a record 142 PGA tournaments. Throw in another record, his 22 per cent win percentage on the PGA Tour (Nicklaus’s was 12.20) and the stats make a convincing case.

Apart from one and, admittedly, it is a big one. He is still three short of Nicklaus’s major tally of 18 wins. It would also be hard to argue with the belief that Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson, Gary Player and co constituted tougher opposition.

However, the Tiger story extends way beyond golf. He blazed a trail at the 1997 Masters and was surely the best twentysomething we have seen, but it veered off course. A year after winning the 2008 US Open on one leg he was crashing into fire hydrants and having his sleazy side dissected with voyeuristic glee. His 13-minute TV apology was overwrought schmaltz — if Disney did mea culpas — and having won four from the previous eight majors in the summer of 2008 he would have to endure 43 before he got another.

Even when America had forgiven him because, well, Dustin Johnson and Justin Thomas were a bit dull by comparison, his body failed him. Four back surgeries and five knee operations, allied to the chipping yips, led Golf Digest to opine in 2015: “Tiger Woods is totally, completely, unequivocally and utterly done.”

It was easy to believe. By his own admission he could not get out of bed, but he reinvented himself, built a new swing, caused one of the most memorable crowd scenes golf has ever seen when winning the 2018 Tour Championship at East Lake (Justin Rose won $10 million that day and nobody noticed), and then adding the Masters before tying Sam Snead’s mark of 82 PGA Tour wins last October.

Golf heroes generally inspire respect. Tiger does mania. They have a cardie, he has an aura. No other golfer has so dramatically influenced his sport, whether by forcing designers to Tiger-proof courses or prompting the Rory McIlroy generation to pick up clubs and go to the gym before making them rich via the money and interest he brought to the sport.

“In the history of our game no one has played better golf than Tiger Woods,” McIlroy said last December in reference to his slam pomp. “It sounds far-fetched but I think there is something in his DNA that is different to everyone else,” his friend Notah Begay said of his latest revival.

For brilliance and unparalleled will, plus a refusal to bow to the inevitable, the x-rays or any other player, I make him the greatest.

And he is not finished.

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