Golf: Masters great still leaving his mark

The morning sun still creeps through the tall, elegant pines, winking enticingly as it warms to its task.

The riot of colour to be seen each day from the dogwood trees and the azaleas still brings audible sighs from those fortunate few human beings able to peruse such a heavenly vista on earth.

Thus, in one sense, time stands still, especially here amid the unique beauty of Augusta National, arguably the world's greatest golf course but undeniably its most charismatic.

Yet in another way, time waits for no man. It is 25 years this week since the great Jack Nicklaus did what no man had ever done before him at Augusta - he won a 6th Masters title and with it reached a tally of 18 major championship victories.

It wasn't so much the statistic that put Nicklaus on another pedestal that day; rather, the manner of his triumph which somehow encapsulated the great glory of his career. Who could ever forget that April Sunday afternoon in 1986 when a Broadway play, with all its sinuous twists and turns in the plot, was transported south from New York City all the way down to the deep south, to the fairways and greens of Augusta?

For what else was it that Nicklaus produced that memorable afternoon? Drama? It flowed through Augusta like the wicked wind, destroyer of so many players' dreams down the years.

Phenomenal scoring? Nicklaus went round the last nine holes, which was about as easy as a stroll through the minefields of Vietnam, in just 30 strokes. So the man who had started the last round in ninth place, four shots off the lead, came surging through to seize the famous green jacket.

The human element? Nicklaus was 46 when he did it. He hadn't won a major championship for five years, was without any tour victory for two. Yet the 65 he shot that day, remains as much a part of Masters folklore as the dogwoods and azaleas.

The human mind, still the world's greatest photographic invention, recalls it in a trice. Leaping, urging, cajoling a putt to travel the required last metre or two to reach the hole, Nicklaus stands there on one green, his putter raised in the air like the magician his wand. Truly, Jack Nicklaus made magic that day and no-one who admires and respects this sport will ever forget it.

Nicklaus played in an era whose great combatants are now fast declining. Leave the phenomenal Gary Player out of this - he will be nearer 80 than 70 this November when he turns 76, yet still he looks fitter than most 30 or 40 year-olds. But Arnold Palmer will be 82 in September, Jack Nicklaus is now 71.

Except in the case of Player, soft, flabby skin has replaced lean, taut muscles. In most sports, we would sense angst at the decline of these former icons of the game with all the values and standards which they epitomised and which were concomitant of that time.

Yet golf is a fortunate game. In cricket, international captains cheat and players 'throw' matches. In professional soccer, louts paid hundreds of thousands of pounds a week, spit, snarl and swear in front of impressionable youngsters who have, alas, in too many cases aped the gross behaviour of their idols.

Top class rugby is still occasionally disfigured by head-butts, stamps on prone bodies and such like. But then there is golf.

And whatever happens at Augusta National this week, whoever feels the famous green jacket slipped onto his shoulders as the sun slips between the watching pine trees on Sunday evening, I can promise you absolutely one thing.

Twelve months from now, you won't open your morning paper and read that the 2011 Masters was a fix. As the drama unfolds on Sunday afternoon, there will be no fist fights or foul language. The winner will win and the losers gracefully accept their fate.

It may be 25 years since Nicklaus's famous act here, but in that sense time has stood still. The values that underpinned golf in Jack Nicklaus's day, indeed in decades before such as when the immortal Bobby Jones played, remain securely in place.

That, you might consider in these times, is as much a marvel as Augusta itself.leavin