By Tom Callahan
Photo By Getty Images, Stephen Szurlej, J.D. Cuban December 2007

"I loved it when Jack and Arnie were partners," Gary Player said. "I hated it when they got so competitive, too competitive. But I knew they were both very good men. I just waited the cold spell out."

"I think we do have a rivalry now with Tiger and Phil," said Butch Harmon back when he was Tiger's coach. (Of course, today he is Phil's.) "Part of it is that they are not the best of friends, for whatever reason. It's not like it's an ugly thing. They just aren't buddies."

It's not like it's a pretty thing. During one of Phil's paternity breaks, someone out on the practice range mused aloud, "I wonder what Mickelson's been doing all these months?"

"Breast-feeding," Tiger said.

What follows is the essence of a long-ago essay that once pertained to two and now applies to four.

At the beginning and at the end, they were pals. Palmer, 10 years older, had the easy grace, rolling shoulders and relaxed slouch of a natural athlete. He looked like a prizefighter, a middleweight. Nicklaus, when he arrived, looked like a sportswriter, an unmade bed. Palmer was delivered to America along with the first black-and-white TV sets, and there hasn't been a more telegenic figure in all of the days since. With an L&M cigarette dangling from his lip, he hoisted a country-club game onto his proletarian back, brought it to the people and made it a sport. Even more winning than his compulsion to go for broke was his inclination not to go alone. He took everyone with him that he could carry, and for a while there he was carrying the entire culture. People who didn't follow golf followed him. Nicklaus turned out to be better, but only at golf.

They met as golfers — young man and teenage boy — at a Dow Finsterwald testimonial in Ohio. "I shot 62," Palmer recalls, "and I tried to shoot 62. I wanted to impress him. I was certainly impressed by him." Before anyone else, Arnold could see what was coming.

"In 1961," Nicklaus said years later, sitting before a crowd of interviewers at Muirfield Village, "Arnie came up to me in the locker room at Firestone..."

"I want to hear this," said Palmer, seated alongside.

"He knew I was thinking of turning pro," Jack continued, "and offered to help me in any way he could. [Agent] Mark McCormack came to see me. The prospect of being in the same stable with Arnie was very appealing."

In partnership, buzzing around the world in Arnold's plane, Palmer and Nicklaus won a mountain of international loving cups before McCormack added Player for ballast, and to serve as a kind of third man in the ring. "I can think of the ginger-ale battles Jack and I had in hotel rooms," Palmer said. Nicklaus remembered "one night when we got to kicking each other's shins under the table. I don't know why. I kicked him. He kicked me. Neither would give. We ended up with the biggest damned bruises. We used to do the stupidest stuff."

Trying to pay Palmer a compliment, Nicklaus said, "Before the playoff," meaning their 18-hole playoff in 1962 at Oakmont for the U.S. Open championship, "Arnie came up to me in the locker room and asked, 'Would you like to split the prize money?' What was it, $9,000?"

"I did?" Palmer blinked, probably not as stupefied by the memory of those secret '60s compacts as by the impulse that possessed Nicklaus to bring that up in front of reporters.

"Yes, you did," Nicklaus insisted. "I took it as a gesture made to a young kid. I will never forget it. He has."

Inevitably Palmer and Nicklaus went their own ways, but they stayed connected — hyphenated — like Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney. Waking up to the old truism that "nobody loves a fat man," Nicklaus slimmed himself into a model for clothes and a mold for golfers (towheads shaped like 1-irons), and the spectators quickly forgot that they had ever rooted against him. Palmer stopped winning major championships at the callow age of 34, but 10 years breezed by before anyone noticed. For one thing, he was still in the hunt at U.S. Opens. For another, nobody wanted to notice.