DUBLIN, Ohio — As if there in person, Jack Nicklaus could feel the crush of fans as he watched on TV the swarming crowds close in around Phil Mickelson and Brooks Koepka 10 days ago on the 18th fairway of the PGA Championship at Kiawah Island.
“We got run over a few times. Got run over at the British Open every year, when I won at St. Andrews in 1970 and ’78,” Nicklaus said Tuesday during his annual gathering with the media before the Memorial Tournament. “I got blasted a lot, but looking back it was a really nice experience.”
Huh? The Golden Bear enjoyed getting hugged, jostled and bumped around? In some ways, yes.
“From a player’s standpoint, they might get a little scared, but it’s nice … to see people so enthusiastic.”
The scene at Kiawah escalated quickly as Koepka, nursing a surgically repaired knee, found himself in the wash of people rushing the fairway to cheer on Mickelson, who at age 50 became the oldest player to win a major championship.
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Koepka wasn’t excited about getting his knee bumped, and Mickelson sounded a bit worried, too, but Nicklaus thinks that in the long run they will come to appreciate what happened. Or at least Mickelson will.
“At Baltusrol in 1980 the galleries came right up with us and we had to fight our way through that a little bit,” Nicklaus said, recalling his U.S. Open win. “I kept worrying about getting hurt going from green to tee, with people hitting me on the shoulder saying, ‘Hey, keep it going. Way to go.’ But I look back on it and say, ‘That was really nice.’”
For that reason, Nicklaus said he would not favor clamping down too hard on crowd interaction.
“I don’t think it’s something that should be alarming, or you should do much about,” he said. “Is there going to be some idiot that’s going to do something stupid? Probably will be, but for the most part 99.9% of those people are excited to be there, thrilled to be there, to get out on the fairway and stand next to Phil playing the last hole. I don’t have an objection to it.
“We don’t want them touching players, but it’s something (fans) will remember the rest of their lives.”
But would Nicklaus want to see something similar during the Memorial?
“We don’t need it here,” he said. “We’ve got enough space on 18 that people can go anywhere without having to go out on the fairway.”
Nicklaus addressed a number of other topics, including:
Media-athlete relations.
Nicklaus has always been among the best at accomodating media, so he tread delicately on the subject of Japanese tennis star Naomi Osaka, who withdrew from the French Open on Monday, citing mental health issues caused by interaction with the media after matches.
“Anxiety? Well, if she has that and that’s, and that bothers her, I mean, then you guys should be able to, you know, accommodate her and allow her to do what she needs to do without running her through the ringer,” he said. “I mean, if she has a problem, if she really has one, you don’t know that, I don’t know that, only she knows that and her doctor probably knows it.
“So I can’t fault her, so I don’t really — one of the times I probably should keep my mouth shut a little bit because I just don’t know. I mean, open mouth insert foot? I mean, is that a fair answer to you?”
In case it wasn’t, the Bear continued: “I have always dealt with you guys that I treated you fairly, you treated me fairly. And I don’t understand some of the young people today and thinking they’re not going to get treated fairly. I mean, you always get treated fairly if you treat somebody else fairly. That’s always been our way. Maybe there’s always always a snake in the crowd somewhere who decides they want to do something, but you can’t blame everybody for one bad apple.”
And Nicklaus made clear, “I hope nobody refuses to speak here (during the Memorial).”