There are always new places to go fishing. For any fisherman, there's always a new place, always a new horizon.
Jack Nicklaus
Concentration is a fine antidote to anxiety.
Golf is game of respect and sportsmanship; we have to respect its traditions and its rules.
Resolve never to quit, never to give up, no matter what the situation.
Success depends almost entirely on how effectively you learn to manage the game's two ultimate adversaries: the course and yourself.
I don't believe in luck. Not in golf, anyway. There are good bounces and bad bounces, sure, but the ball is round and so is the hole. If you find yourself in a position where you hope for luck to pull you through, you're in serious trouble.
A kid grows up a lot faster on the golf course. Golf teaches you how to behave.
The older you get the stronger the wind gets and it's always in your face.
Crises are part of life. Everybody has to face them, and it doesn't make any difference what the crisis is.
People don't want to go to the dump and have a picnic, they want to go out to a beautiful place and enjoy their day. And so I think our job is to try to take the environment, take what the good Lord has given us, and expand upon it or enhance it, without destroying it.
Sometimes the biggest problem is in your head. You've got to believe you can play a shot instead of wondering where your next bad shot is coming from.
I had polio when I was 13. I started feeling stiff, my joints ached, and over a two-week period I lost my coordination and 20 pounds.
The best way to cope with trouble is to stay out of it as much as possible.
Focus on remedies, not faults.
Confidence is the most important single factor in this game, and no matter how great your natural talent, there is only one way to obtain and sustain it: work.
He has the finest, fundamentally sound golf swing I've ever seen.
I'm a firm believer that in the theory that people only do their best at things they truly enjoy. It is difficult to excel at something you don't enjoy.
How people keep correcting us when we are young! There is always some bad habit or other they tell us we ought to get over. Yet most bad habits are tools to help us through life.
The game is meant to be fun.
Sometimes, I'm an ogre. I can be short. I'll walk into the office some days and I've gotten up on the wrong side of the bed, and everybody knows it. I'm a perfectionist. I like to be organized, and I like to get everything done today.
I like to catch fish and release them. I probably haven't killed a fish that I've caught in sport fishing for 20 years. No reason to kill it. You know, just take it and release it.
Through the years of experience I have found that air offers less resistance than dirt.
A big part of managing a golf course is managing your swing on the course. A lot of guys can go out and hit a golf ball, but they have no idea how to manage what they do with the ball. I've won as many golf tournaments hitting the ball badly as I have hitting the ball well.
Professional golf is the only sport where, if you win 20% of the time, you're the best.
I think that Pebble Beach is my favorite golf course to go to. I think Augusta is my favorite place to go play golf.
I thoroughly enjoy working with kids, whether it's The First Tee or the lesson tee with my grandkids.
I can barely turn on my computer!
When I want a long ball, I spin my hips faster.
Golfers have a tendency to be very masochistic. They like to punish themselves for some reason. A lot of them like tough courses.
If I had one golf course, from a design standpoint, one that I really love, it would probably be Pinehurst. There's a totally tree-lined golf course where trees are not a part of the strategy.
If I have a weakness, it's probably ice cream. That's where I get lax, sloppy. I'll sneak into the refrigerator at night and take two or three bites and put it back. Butter pecan. Only two or three bites, but it shows.
Did you know there's probably more golf played in Iceland than most places in the world? They play 24 hours a day in the summertime and the northern part is warmer than the southern part.
He's going to be around a long, long time, if his body holds up. That's always a concern with a lot of players because of how much they play. A lot of guys can't handle it. But it looks like he can.
But if I played well and prepared myself properly, then all I had to do was control myself and put myself in a position to win.
Why are we building golf courses? Because we enjoy being outside, bringing man and nature together.
The long irons are the nemesis of the average golfer. I'm convinced that the underlying reason for this is that he keeps hearing how hard they are to handle. They're not that difficult, truly.
Well, the biggest rival I had in my career was me.
Well, I think that Augusta is not the same golf course that I grew up on. Bobby Jones' philosophy was giving you space off the tee; if you put it in the right side of the fairway, you ended up getting the right angle to the green.
I played competitive golf all my life. Then all of a sudden, when I quit playing the game, I've got all this spare time and this energy. And certainly I wasn't ready to pack up my bags and go sit in front of the television with a shawl on.
I'd rather be two strokes ahead going into the last day than two strokes behind. Having said that, it's probably easier to win coming from behind. There is no fear in chasing. There is fear in being chased.
I think I fail a bit less than everyone else.
Whether it's pool or Ping Pong, I can't stand to have my kids beat me. Especially Ping Pong! And when they beat me, they just needle the devil out of me. That's fine. I'd rather have that than let them win a shallow victory.
I love design in general, the creativity. Whether it is golf courses, my apparel line, ads we do or our business with AriZona, design is fun.
Mostly I built golf courses the way I played golf, which was left-to-right. But I learned very rapidly that people wanted to see more than just the way I played golf and that I had to balance up what I was doing, right-to-left, left-to-right, etc.
It's hard not to play golf that's up to Jack Nicklaus standards when you are Jack Nicklaus.
I never worried about money, except that I knew that all I had to worry about was golf. As long as I could play, I was going to make money.
Golf is a better game played downhill.
The fact is, I diet every day of my life. I have to work at it. But I diet so I can pig out.
A perfectly straight shot with a big club is a fluke.
I've been fortunate over my career to make a little history on the 16th hole at Augusta National.
