Jack Nicklaus’s timeless keys to playing amazing golf as you age

Golf instruction is ever-evolving, but the best advice stands the test of time. In GOLF.com’s series, “Timeless Tips,“ we’re highlighting some of the greatest advice teachers and players have dispensed in the pages of GOLF Magazine. Today we look back to our March 1995 issue for some advice from Jack Nicklaus on great golf as you age.

Father time may be undefeated, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take steps to preserve your golf game as you age.

Ask Jack Nicklaus. The Golden Bear won a majority of his major titles during his prime, but in 1986, he was able to turn back the clock at Augusta one last time for green jacket No. 6.

Nine years later, Nicklaus joined GOLF Magazine to share some of his secrets. Read below for his best tips for playing great golf as you age.

Jack’s secrets to great golf

Some senior tour candidates possibly excluded, I imagine not a whole lot of golfers look forward to becoming 50-plus players. But, as they say about every aspect of growing older, it’s better than the alternative. 

The editors at GOLF Magazine asked me to talk about what has changed in my life and golf game between my peak playing years and early 50s, with particular reference to how other new or soon-to-be seniors might benefit from my experiences. I hope something in the following inspires and helps you to be a healthy person and a fine golfer for many years to come. 

Power

As with most people as they age, the greatest change in my game as I advanced into seniorhood was a loss of power with the longer clubs. Although I’ve had spells where my distance has been acceptable, it’s been quite a few years since I’ve consistently driven the ball as far as I feel I need to, or hit my long-irons — the 1-, 2-, and 3- — as long as or, equally important, as high as in my prime.

In scoring terms, and particularly on PGA Tour courses (as opposed to the shorter ones used for the Senior Tour), this has produced fewer eagle or two-putt birdie opportunities on par fives, given me a harder time with long par fours, set up fewer birdie chances on shorter ones, and made muscling the ball out of the rough a much tougher proposition.

Mentally, the biggest downer has been knowing that, over four tournament rounds on the “junior” Tour, I just wasn’t going to get as close to the hole with 4- and 5-irons as the younger guys who were hitting 8s and 9s. That pressured my short game in general and my putting in particular.

Loss of power doesn’t happen to all players as they grow older. Dave Stockton and Bob Charles, both more successful as seniors than in their younger days, claim to be hitting the ball as far as or even farther than when they played the regular Tour. I’m pretty sure Jim Dent hasn’t lost much yardage, nor Lee Trevino when he really needs it. And I know for sure that Raymond Floyd is as long as he ever was.

What’s caused my power leakage? It’s possible that very long-hitting golfers, as I was in my prime, just naturally lose a greater percentage of yardage as they age than players who never hit the ball big distances even in their younger days. 

From a technique standpoint, the problem lies mostly in my legs. Power in golf is the product of clubhead speed squarely applied. My swing still delivers the club squarely most of the time, but not as speedily due to slower or inferior leg action. At my peak, I created tremendous leverage with my feet, legs, and hips that got the clubhead moving extremely fast through impact. As my strength diminished with the years, my swing mechanics had to be perfect for me to come close to generating that much leverage and thus that much clubhead speed.

Injuries also have been a factor. Occasionally, when I’ve been free from pain, my leg speed and lowerbody timing have both come back and I’ve hit the ball plenty long. This happened when I won last year’s seniors’ Mercedes Championship playing La Costa at the same yardage as the young guys in their event. But such spells have not been frequent enough. Most of the time since I became a senior in 1990, some part of me — hips, back, shoulders — has troubled me just sufficiently to force holding back that critical little bit.

At the time, people remarked on how well I hit the long shots in winning the Senior Open at Cherry Hills in 1993, but they were probably overlooking the elevation factor. The course was set up at around 6,900 yards, but, at more than 5,000 feet above sea level, it actually played about 300 yards shorter than that. I can usually still handle a 6,600-yard golf course just fine—in fact, I only used the driver 15 times during that championship. It’s on those sea-level 7,000-yard-plus layouts, where the young guys were routinely tearing apart the course, that my power-leakage hurts the most.

Power clubs

Ever since my power leakage began, I’ve done everything I could think of to stop it, or at least minimize and delay it. You may not care to take your quest as far as I have in terms of lifestyle and exercise (although we’ll get to those later), but you should certainly give the third area your best shot. That’s the equipment you use. 

The technology of clubs and balls has improved so dramatically over the last decade that, although you still can’t “buy a good golf game,” playing with the right equipment will definitely help you get the most out of the game you’ve got. 

I began experimenting with drivers about six years ago, not in terms of makes or cosmetics, but with shaft and head materials, shaft flexes, head configurations, and the relationship of shaft weight to head weight. As a result, although I now know for sure that no driver will fully restore my power loss, I also know and play the specifications that allow me to most easily produce my present maximum yardage. 

I’m fortunate to be able to obtain and continually update this knowledge with the help of the experts at my own equipment company. Unless you’re ready to undertake the daunting task of tracking, sifting, and comprehending the huge range of options Open to you in club technology, you should find and work with a golf professional who is also an expert clubfitter.

Here to assist him and you both is the bottom line of my discoveries. 

If you suffer from skeletal, muscular, or arthritic-type difficulties, graphite shafts will help by reducing the shock of impact. If you want your tee balls and longest fairway shots to “penetrate” and roll, with minimum curvature, deliberate or otherwise, go for metal wood heads. If you want those shots to “carry” and land softly, and to be “‘workable” in terms of drawing and fading, go for wooden wood heads. 

I’ve played much of my tournament golf in recent years with a graphite-shafted metal-headed driver and a steel-shafted wooden-headed 3-wood that I’ve used since I was 18 years old. For accomplished senior amateur players, this could be the ideal combination.

Accuracy clubs

Because my approach-shot capabilities with the medium-irons haven’t changed much, and my short-iron play has actually improved, I’m still using essentially the same iron-club specs that I have for most of my career. However, I’m sure the day will come when I might want to go to slightly softer or longer shafts, or to graphite instead of steel, or to a little lighter swing weight. Those are factors you and your clubfitting expert need to consider, using the specs you’ve settled on for the driver and fairway woods as a guide. 

I never would have believed even 20 years ago that there would come a time when I would leave out a long iron in favor of a fairway wood, but I’ve done that with a 5- or a 7-wood a number of times since becoming a senior. Accordingly, when I see almost as many woods as irons in an over-50 amateur’s bag, I don’t assume, as I once might have, that he isn’t too good a player, but simply that he’s got a lot of sense. Take a peek in the bags on the Senior Tour if you still feel shamed by forsaking long-irons for well-lofted woods and extra wedges.

Offsetting power leaks

As the years inevitably cost a recreational golfer distance, it seems to me that he has two options. One is to accept an even higher handicap along with higher and higher levels of frustration. The other is to wholly or partially make up for the loss through improvement in some other area of the game.

I haven’t been as competitive as I would like these past few seasons, but I would have been even less so without the improvement in my short game that was forced on me by the power leakage. 

The truth is that, at my best, I never really needed much of a short game. By hitting the ball very long and pretty straight off the tee, I needed relatively short clubs for most approach shots. That helped me hit a high proportion of greens in regulation or, thanks to my long-iron skills, better than regulation on par fives. I was also strong enough to be able to get the ball somewhere on the green from most of the rough I encountered. 

As shorter tee shots led to missing more greens, simply being called upon to play more pitches, chips, and bunker shots produced an improvement in those areas. Then, the longer I lived with the probability that 300- yard drives were the exception rather than the rule, the harder I had to discipline myself to include the full range of recovery techniques in my practice sessions.

Like most golfers, I’d always found banging out big shots more fun than working on the little ones. A couple of years ago it became clear that I either had to sharpen my short game or quit tournament play entirely. The upshot was that I’m better around the greens today than any other time in my career. That’s particularly true of my pitching from about 90 yards in with the wedges, my biggest weakness during my peak years.

If you’re leaking yards but fighting to stay competitive at your own level of the game, there’s definitely a lesson for you here.

Exercise

The biggest change in my life since my peak years is the amount of exercising I do. Until I began to jog occasionally in my early 40s, I did no exercise at all from my high school days on, other than that involved in playing and practicing golf.

By my late 40s, it was clear that muscular problems in my back, hips, and legs would end my golf career entirely without radical action to alleviate them — on top of which I was looking at back surgery for disc deformities. Over the Thanksgiving holiday of 1988, this led me to an anatomical functionalist by the name of Pete Egoscue, since when hardly a day has passed without me doing the workouts he prescribes. Since the middle of last year, ve supplemented that regimen with regular strengthening and limbering routines under the supervision of Pete Draovitch, a personal trainer recommended to me by Greg Norman.

The Egoscue exercises are mainly of a stretching nature. Sometimes I do them for as little as 10 minutes, and sometimes for an hour or. more. Adding in the Draovitch routines raises my workout time to upwards of two hours. There’s no doubt in my mind that I would have had to quit tournament golf some years ago without Pete Egoscue’s regimens and my dedication to them. I also believe the program I’m now enjoying with Pete Draovitch is critical to me becoming competitive again.

In addition to these formalized workouts, I always walk the golf course, facilitating that when forced to put the clubs on a cart by asking a playing companion to do the driving.

As with my improved eating habits, exercising heavily has become as much a part of feeling good about myself as a contributor to my golf game. Everyone’s metabolic rate decreases with age, which I’m told by people who should know is why so many older folks don’t feel as good as they’d like. If only because exercise fights off and slows down that process, I don’t see myself cutting back on it very much, even if I quit playing tournament golf.

Will exercise help your game? Well, good golf demands strength and elasticity in many parts of the body, but it’s particularly important in the legs. I don’t know any way a senior can keep his legs in shape without using them a lot.