Short description
O'Connor explores the heated professional and personal battle between Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus in fascinating, intimate, and revelatory detail. Drawing on unique access to both players, O'Connor illuminates the golf greats' extreme differences and sprawling influences.
Long description
Alternating from the golf course to the boardroom, the first account of the fifty-year duel that helped push golf to the heights and popularity it enjoys today. Surprisingly, one of sport's most contentious, complex, and defining clashes played itself out not in the ring or at the scrimmage line but on the genteel green fairways of this country's finest courses. Arnie and Jack. Palmer and Nicklaus. Their decades-long rivalry propelled each to the status of American icon and helped transform a gentleman's game into a major American sport with a dedicated following. Ian O'Connor explores the heated professional and personal battle between Palmer and Nicklaus in fascinating, intimate, and revelatory detail. Drawing on unique access to both players and having conducted more than 200 new interviews with everyone from family to fellow players to business associates right down to the caddies and clubhouse attendants, O'Connor illuminates their extreme differences and sprawling influences through mini-dramas, such as the 1962 U.S. Open, their years of alternating major victories like cards in a deck, their early involvement with marketing and a small agency called IMG, and their intense competition for golf course designs. By the end of this page-turning narrative that spans fifty remarkable years, we see that in the end each wanted what the other had: Arnold had the adoring fans but wanted the trophies. Jack had the trophies but wanted the love.We also learn that despite being bitter rivals they were also dear friends.
Review
O'Connor's book is great because it reminds you how much fun and how ferocious golf used to be.