Boxed In: Who is the golf g.o.a.t. – Jack Nicklaus or Tiger Woods?

Last Sunday, golf legends Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson were joined by football legends Tom Brady and Peyton Manning for a competitive round of golf for charity. While golf is on the mind, today’s Boxed In tries to tackle the golf g.o.a.t. debate once and for all. Zach Schwartz is joined by Scott Pianowski and Jay Busbee to pit the Tiger vs. the Golden Bear. Who is the greatest golfer of all time? Is it the game-changing Woods and his 15 major championships or is it the legend Jack Nicklaus and his potentially-insurmountable 18 majors? Watch or listen to Boxed In every Monday, Wednesday and Friday on Yahoo Sports, YouTube or on your podcast provider of choice. Subscribe: https://apple.co/39UC09o https://spoti.fi/3aVpV56

Video Transcript

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ZACH SCHWARTZ: Welcome. This is "Boxed In." We've got a special golf edition this week of who the real GOAT of golf is.

I'm Zach Schwartz. I'm on a show called "Dunk Bait." This is a little bit outside of my purview, so I'll be the judge this week and presiding over this court.

The two gentlemen arguing their cases, we have Scott Pianowski, who hosts the Yahoo fantasy-baseball podcast, and Jay Busbee here. Gentlemen, how are you doing? Who will you be arguing the cases of? You know, let's hear it.

JAY BUSBEE: All right, I'm going to start. Tom Brady is the GOAT in every sport, even golf.

ZACH SCHWARTZ: Oh no.

JAY BUSBEE: [LAUGHS]

ZACH SCHWARTZ: Oh no.

JAY BUSBEE: No, I am leading off with Jack Nicklaus, the Golden Bear. Now I have-- I'm going to spoil Scott's here, but you're probably going to guess his point of view is Tiger Woods. I have written in depth about Jack and Tiger. I've analyzed them. I've interviewed them. And I keep coming back to one point in my discussion of who might be the GOAT.

They're 1 and they're 1A, but I keep going back to one point, and that is that Jack Nicklaus never had a Tiger Woods poster on his wall when he was growing up. Jack Nicklaus blazed the trail. Tiger Woods followed it. I am sure that Scott will debate me, but I'm going to leave it there for right now. Jack Nicklaus was there first.

SCOTT PIANOWSKI: Yeah, there is no denying that if you want to go who was the older player or who had the earliest debut, you know, Nicklaus. If you want to argue that Mickey Mantle is better than Mike Trout, you can do that too.

But sports are about evolution, OK, bigger, faster, stronger. And Tiger had to beat a deeper field, a more international field. And because of Nicklaus, a lot more people were playing golf, and by the time Tiger came around, just-- it was like the difference between playing in a poker game with 20 people and a poker game with a hundred people. There were just so many more people interested in golf.

You know, Tiger made people get in shape. Tiger made people approach the game like a serious sport, not like something that pot-bellied men would do on a leisurely afternoon. So the tour that Tiger had to beat I feel like was a lot deeper.

Now people are going to say, well, you know, Jack beat all these great players. You had a bunch of majors. Again, because the pool was smaller, it wasn't that hard to win a bunch of majors. Tiger had to beat a much more competitive field.

JAY BUSBEE: Yeah, I would take that point of view, and I would point out that in terms of Tiger's rivals, OK, he had three main rivals. He had Ernie Els. He had VJ Singh. He had Phil Mickelson. And we could put off Rory McIlroy and Brooks Koepka. As a later generation. None of those guys won more than five majors.

Jack, on the other hand, he had to face down Gary Player, Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino, Tom Watson, guys who, granted, longer careers than some of these that we're still talking about. But on the whole, it may be a smaller field but much better players in that smaller field.

SCOTT PIANOWSKI: Again, I think they look tangentially better because there weren't as many good players around. The game wasn't anywhere near as international.

And if we go by moments-- and I know this is a little bit misleading because Tiger's grown up in the ESPN era and the social-media era. But I don't even have to, like, do any research on this. I think about Tiger destroying the Masters in 1997, crushing Pebble Beach in 2000, the Tiger slam, hugging his caddie, Stevie Williams, after his father died when Tiger won the British Open, winning the US Open in 2008 on one leg, all those families-- the family scene after winning the Masters last year and then, you know, the receiving line of all the players.

You don't even have to do research for a Tiger piece. They're all indelible moments in your mind. And the funny thing is other than the 1986 Masters, most of the Jack Nicklaus things I remember are things that he lost-- you know, Watson chipping in at Pebble Beach in '82 or the Duel in the Sun in '77.

I feel like Tiger has left more of an imprint on the game-- and again, that's unfair because he grew up in a time where everything is recorded now. It's basically "The Truman Show" for all athletes. But I feel like Tiger changed-- you know, Jack certainly started all of this, but I feel like Tiger just exponentially changed the way golf is covered, how much money is in golf, how much interest is in golf.

I think Jack got the most out of every golf fan. Their experience was heightened because of Jack Nicklaus. I think Tiger took people that weren't even golf fans and made them golf fans.

JAY BUSBEE: I'm going to take your argument there and I'm going to give you fashion, OK? I'm going to hand that right over to you. Tiger looks better on a golf course in his Nike gear than Jack Nicklaus ever did.

You mentioned the 1986 Masters. We can put a picture of that up. Jack's wearing a yellow shirt, plaid pants. He looks like your grandmother's couch, OK? There's no way around that. There's no way around that. He's got that little bit of that belly. He doesn't have the abs and the pecs like Tiger does. I'm going to give you all of that.

But here's the thing. Jack-- you correctly pointed this out, that we didn't see-- we don't see it that much, but Jack was a badass. Jack was a badass of the kind that Tiger would respect.

And I'm going to take you back to 1962. I'm assuming that none of us were around for this, so I'm going to go walk us through it. Age 22, US Open at Oakmont. Young kid named Jack Nicklaus is playing Arnold Palmer in Arnold Palmer's home territory, in Pennsylvania. And he goes and in his first US Open there against Palmer, Palmer comes up and suggests, hey, let's split the pot-- the pot of ticket earnings and of ticket revenue.

Jack says no thanks, I'm going to take it all. He goes out and he beats Palmer in front of a completely partisan Arnold Palmer crowd. It's like trying to beat Michael Jordan one on one at the United Center. It just doesn't happen. He did this at age 22. He had the confidence and the ability to do that.

And if that had happened now, if someone did that to Tiger right now, they'd be a legend. But it happened before there was a "Sports Center" or any way to remember it.

SCOTT PIANOWSKI: You make a great point that when Jack came into professional golf, he was not the person everyone was rooting for. I mean, he was kind of the bad guy because people loved Palmer so much, whereas Tiger was immediately just beloved by golf people, by golf media, by golf fans, and he brought a bunch of new fans to the game. So that's-- Jack had to overcome that. Tiger didn't have to overcome that.

But what Tiger did have to overcome-- and Jack was obviously a decorated amateur, and a lot was expected of Jack when he went pro. But Tiger was expected to be this revolutionary person, revolutionary golfer. He had this huge deal with Nike. His parents, specifically his father, Earl Woods, had put a tremendous amount of pressure on him. His agents, Hughes Norton at the time, had just said, you know, Tiger was just going to basically stomp on all these other players.

There was so much pressure on Tiger, and I think-- again, Jack was, you know-- he came into golf, and people expected a lot. Not that any of us were around to see it, but we've read the stories. We've done the research on that.

But how many times does somebody come into athletics with the amount of hype that a Tiger Woods came in with and then actually meet it or exceed it? I mean, we're talking like five or six athletes in the history of sports have ever done that. I think LeBron James did it. I think Wayne Gretzky did it. You could argue Jack did it, but I don't know if anybody had as much pressure as Tiger Woods did when he first teed up a golf ball in 1996. He was supposed to be the end of the world, and he ended up being the end of the world and all the way back.

ZACH SCHWARTZ: Gentlemen, I want to ask head to head just as far-- you know, you both made incredible cases for both so far. But head to head, we have them in their primes. Also, please tell me what you define as their prime, if you could. Kind of like because, you know, people always talk about that Miami Heat LeBron was probably peak of his powers. 72-win Jordan, probably peak of his powers. If you could tell me, you know, year that they would be in their prime and head to head who would win and why they would win, I'd love to hear that.

SCOTT PIANOWSKI: 2000-2001 for Tiger. I mean, that that's when the Tiger slam occurs. It got to the point where if you want to bet on Tiger, it was he's going to win the tournament or he's not going to win the tournament, and a lot of times you'd have to spot odds to bet on Tiger. That's how dominant he was.

So, you know, as great as Jack Nicklaus was, he never won four majors in a row. Man, that's an awfully strong mark in Tiger's favor.

JAY BUSBEE: Yeah, that is a mark against Nicklaus if you look at in terms of strict numbers, but I came up with a few other ones here that are worth noting. In the 1970s, the entire decade of the 1970s in all 40 majors Jack finished outside the top 10 only 5 times-- 5 times out of 40 majors. That's astounding. Tiger was out of the top 10 in the 2000s 15 times. Now, granted, some of that was because of injury. But still, Jack had a more reliable run there in the 1970s than Tiger did in the 2000s.

And in terms of the longevity of their career, if we look outside of just that 2000-2001 or the early 1970s period, Jack's prime, which I defined loosely as having two top-fives in a major in one year, ran from about 1961 to 1982, 22 seasons. Tiger's ran from about 1998 to 2010. You could even stretch it a little further than that, 13 to 15 seasons. So Jack had almost a decade more where he was performing at his prime and winning or at least finishing in the top five of majors on a consistent basis.

SCOTT PIANOWSKI: And also I'll give you, because golf is a gentleman's game, I'll even give you another point to your argument.

[LAUGHTER]

Jack had a much better Ryder Cup record than Tiger. I mean, it's not even close. And maybe one of the flaws of Tiger-- and I think he's working on this-- is when Tiger came into the game, he was a terminator. He wasn't there to make friends. He wasn't there to give anybody any kind of an edge. He wanted to crush your soul. He wanted to rip your heart out and trample on it.

And I think we're seeing the Woods-- my favorite Tiger Woods is not the '97 Woods or not the 2000 Woods. It's the today Woods. It's the Tiger after that last Masters win celebrating with his family. His kids got to see him play at a high level, which they had never really seen before. Of course, his mom was still there. And then he goes down, and you see him connecting with all these young players-- Justin Thomas and Brooks Koepka and Xander Schauffele who all love Tiger.

I think Tiger's finally realized-- you look at the President's Cup, a tournament I generally don't pay a lot of attention to, last December. It's just not the Ryder Cup. Nothing really is the Ryder Cup. Tiger really relished being the captain and connecting with the guys and going out and supporting his teammates. He'd never really been much of a teammate. He'd always been the solo, you know, lone gunman, so to speak.

And now I think we see Tiger kind of in his later years-- he can still win. I mean, he won the last Masters they held. He still won it. He'll probably be the favorite when they tee it up again I guess this fall.

But to me, my favorite Tiger is when he's emotional-- when he hugged Stevie at the British Open, when he broke down after winning the Masters in 2019. And now that he's in such a good place in his personal life and such a good space mentally and he has some connections on tour, nobody can deny what he's done. His legacy as a golfer has already been written. It's just a matter of whether or not he catches Jack or not.

I think he's such in a good place emotionally right now, although he doesn't have the game to win as often as he used to-- and there's going to be some courses that aren't great tracks for him right now. I think he has the chance to get to 18. I would have said two or three years ago open and shut case. He's got no chance to get to Nicklaus.

But now, combined-- he's still in great shape. I mean, he was striping the ball in that match on Sunday. And if he's beating the GOAT, Tom Brady, I mean, maybe Tiger's just the GOAT of all sports. [LAUGHTER]

Bring on Michael Jordan and we can just settle this thing once and for all.

But I think Tiger's in such a good place mentally right now, and he's got that camaraderie on the tour that he's never really had before. I think that's going to speak well to what he does for the next five or six seasons.

JAY BUSBEE: Yeah, that's an excellent point. And if we were having this conversation in 2023, which hopefully we will be out of lockdown by then, I think that we might be having a very different and one-sided conversation. If Tiger goes on to pass jack in terms of majors-- even get closer-- I think that you'd have to give him the edge.

I think what's fascinating about the way that he is, in your eyes, so much more of an emotional or a fuller player now is because he's letting more of himself show. If there was a "Last Dance" of Tiger, right now we would have very little footage to go on unless he opened up in a way that he hasn't before. Whereas with Jack, the problem would be getting him to shut up because he does nothing but talk about himself, his game, his perspective on the sport, his views of other players. They're completely different. They're night and day in terms of how they approach the media and their own public persona.

But you're right. Tiger does seem to be taking steps more in that Jack direction. I think that's a win for golf fans everywhere.

SCOTT PIANOWSKI: Absolutely.

JAY BUSBEE: And I just argued against myself. Damn it. All right, [INAUDIBLE].

SCOTT PIANOWSKI: We're terrible at this. We're terrible at this, Jay. We're just-- I feel like I'm giving you a 15-foot putt, and then you're giving me, like, a 17-- good good.

JAY BUSBEE: We're being cordial here. This is a nice, polite debate.

ZACH SCHWARTZ: This is very nice seeing how well you guys are doing this debate. It's very cool to see that you're being so kind to each other.

I do want to bring up a bit of the stuff that happened off the course for Tiger. I just-- I am curious. It doesn't weight in my book as the judge, but I am curious if you guys think at all some of the off-the-court stuff should weight at all against his GOAT sort of status. Scott, if you want to open up as that is the man you're arguing for.

SCOTT PIANOWSKI: Sure. You know, I'm an empath, so I got to admit that it tweaks me a little bit. I was not married to Tiger Woods, so the fact that he wasn't maybe the best husband when he was married-- I mean, you know, I didn't make a vow with him. He doesn't owe me anything.

Some of the things that would get to me though-- when I heard that it was really important for Mark O'Meara to have Tiger at his World Golf Hall of Fame inauguration and Tiger didn't make it, I think that really hurt O'Meara. There's been some stories like that that have come out. I've read the unauthorized biography of Tiger Woods that was written by Armen Keteyian, and there's some really interesting stuff in there.

I think it's just a case of, look, Tiger was raised by very demanding parents, and a ton of pressure was on him, and he was expected to win and to dominate. And he was, at times, discouraged. I remember when he had the scandal and then he came back to the Masters, he was trying initially at that first Masters to be more personable, sign more autographs, show more of himself.

And I believe it was his agent, Mark Steinberg, who said, what are you doing? You know, you're here to beat people. You're not here to make friends and kind of discouraged Tiger from going that route.

I think it's taken Woods a while to get to where he's at now, but, again, I think he's in a great head space now, and I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt. And I think we're going to look back in 5, 6, 8, 10 years and think, you know, he figured it out. He got to a place where he was happy being who he was because none of us-- you know, we saw in the Jordan doc it really underscores how Michael Jordan has to be on his entire life. I mean, you can't do anything. He can't go to McDonald's. He can't go to a movie theater-- I mean, unless he buys every ticket. You know, he can't just do general stuff without people wanting a piece of him, and Tiger's had to live that same life too. And I think it's the first time he's truly been comfortable in his own skin.

So, you know, again, you know, some of the stuff that happened in the middle of his career, I wasn't a huge fan of it. I don't want to act like he did anything wrong to me because, you know, it's not like he let me down in any way. But I think it took him a while to realize the person he wanted to be and just how to handle celebrity and fame and balance some of those things out. So I respect the person he's come to be today.

JAY BUSBEE: Yeah, what's a fascinating question is how much of that that he was-- how much of that relentless drive for victory and keeping his own double life going back in the 2000s, how much of that played into the way that he played. I mean, how much of that-- is it necessary to be that much of a bastard in order to win that much?

All you need to do is look at someone like Phil Mickelson who clearly, clearly looks like he's having a much better time every time he steps out on the golf course, and yet he's lacking some of those key wins-- that signature US Open win. It's dangerous to go and speculate that Mickelson doesn't have the killer instinct that Tiger has, but clearly someone like Mickelson has a fuller life or had a fuller life than Tiger Woods did at the time.

I think that's what makes Nicklaus so impressive is that he was able to have these lines that existed outside of golf. He had his design business. He would fish all the time. He's got 400 golf courses to his credit. He had, by all accounts, a model family life with children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. So it makes it that much more impressive that he was able to go and put all of those wins on the board while still maintaining an active life outside of golf.

But yeah, we will never solve that problem or that question of whether or not Tiger Woods was better because he was so relentlessly focused, but it is obvious that he is much more of a personable and together individual right now.

SCOTT PIANOWSKI: That's one of the most fascinating questions in sports is does Barry Bonds have to have the personality he had as a player to reach his maximum potential? Did Roger Clemens have to be wired the way he was?

And a lot of times when I think of athletes like that, I hope they have the Ted Williams arc, that maybe they're a little bit misunderstood or a little bit aloof when they're playing, but then at some point they realize, you know, people just want to love you.

People-- Ted Williams got it, OK? At one point you realize people just want to look at you and admire you and say hey, man, you were an unbelievable fighter pilot, unbelievable fisherman, and the best hitter I ever saw. Let me love you for 10 seconds. And Ted got it in the second part of his life, and I hope Barry gets there. I hope Clemens gets there. And again, I think Tiger's realizing it, that the human connections that he's going to have for the second part of his life are probably going to be a lot more fulfilling than maybe some of the golf victories that he scored.

ZACH SCHWARTZ: Gentlemen, I'm going to ask for your closing arguments here. I really appreciated that last segment. I thought you guys both kind of explained the complexities of Tiger in such a wonderful way.

Closing arguments, got to keep them tight, and we'll get to the judgment shortly thereafter. So closing arguments please. I'm going to let Jay open with the final argument.

JAY BUSBEE: All right, I'm going to break it down with just two numbers, 18, 15. Golf boils down to majors no matter what. The Patriots won 18 games in 2007, but we only remember the last one. No one knows how many regular-season games that Michael Jordan won his career. We all know that he won six rings. Jack has 18 majors. Tiger has 15. That's the ultimate measure of GOATness for right now.

SCOTT PIANOWSKI: Again, I have to say that the playing fields just weren't the same, that Tiger beat much stronger fields. His story isn't over yet. Right now, I think the odds of him winning another major is very strong, but he just-- he beat much stronger fields, and he just changed golf from kind of a niche sport to a sport that was so much more interesting to casual fans or even to non-golf-fans.

You look at the TV ratings when Tiger plays and when he doesn't play, totally night and day. You look at how much the purses have exploded. I think Jack took the baton and ran it a long way, but I think Tiger grabbed that baton and-- if Jack ran 10 miles with it, I feel like Tiger ran 50 miles with it and to the benefit of golf.

ZACH SCHWARTZ: I guess it's my turn now to make the judgment. I have to say-- so I've gotten to do these a few times more from the arguing standpoint. This is the first name as judge. Normally the person I'm on here with, we are really just mud slinging by the end. You both absolutely master class, wonderful. You didn't cut each other down. I thought you both made really great points.

This is really hard for me. So I, as a basketball fan, am kind of the belief that LeBron will end up being the GOAT and that LeBron kind of should be the GOAT. So coming into this, I will say I was very strongly leaning towards Tiger being the GOAT.

With that being said, I think from a perspective of right now in this current situation, Jack has to be the GOAT. The numbers are, unfortunately, skewed that way. I agree with what you said, Scott, as far as it being a little bit different of a product. He's not competing against guys that are-- you know, certain players look like, you know, Brooks Koepka.

There's no one that looked like Brooks Koepka was playing when Jack played. But unfortunately, the number of majors and the wins that-- the number of wins that Jack has is what kind of is going to give him that title as well as-- and we didn't really get to talk about this but the number of golf courses that he designed and the everlasting impact that those will have on the sport.

With that being said, I really appreciated the argument about purses and all of that. But for me, it's got to be Jack. I feel like I also owe it to history. As a young individual, I can't go in and say it's Tiger too. You know, so there's a little bit of that in here. But really appreciated the cases you guys made and thought this was wonderful.

Where can people kind of find you? What are you guys working on? What do you got to plug? if you guys want to close out with some of that stuff.

JAY BUSBEE: Well, first of all, I would strongly recommend that-- and thank you, Judge, and thank you, Scott. I would recommend that you skip right over the article that I have written for a forthcoming series in which I will argue that Tiger Woods was the GOAT.

[LAUGHTER]

It's so tough to make this argument. Scott will agree with me. It's 1 and 1A. And the way that I've always put it-- I get asked this question all the time. The way that I put it is simple. If I had one-- if there was someone with the proverbial one putt to save my life, I would go with Tiger. But one tournament win to save my life, I would go with Jack. So it's such a tough argument to break down.

I'm doing everything. Just find me on Twitter @JayBusbee, and I will probably be writing about your favorite sport before very long.

SCOTT PIANOWSKI: Yeah, you can catch me on Twitter too, @Scott_Pianowski. And as far as what I'm working on, I should have mentioned this earlier because it might have swung this argument. I hit a bunch of wedges and hybrids this morning. So I was on the range. I was grinding on my own game. I don't know that Busbee was doing anything with his. I know Busbee's made a par at Augusta, so, you know, he's got me on that.

JAY BUSBEE: Yes, two. Two pars.

SCOTT PIANOWSKI: You're ahead of me there. But yeah, I've been working on my own golf game and working on my fantasy game. So, you know, whatever it is, fantasy golf, fantasy basketball, fantasy baseball, fantasy football, I'll try to help you out. @Scott_Pianowski.

ZACH SCHWARTZ: Scott, you should have undercut him and just thrown the fact that he wrote the article or he's working on the article, really pushed him under the bus. Maybe the mudslinging could have helped a little bit there.

SCOTT PIANOWSKI: You're not a sportswriter until you contradict yourself. I do it all the time. You know, I put out these sets of rankings, and then I go into a draft and it's like, oh yeah. I have Derrick Henry ranked seven slots lower, and I'm drafting him now. That doesn't make any sense. So you're not a sportswriter until you've totally, totally contradicted yourself.

ZACH SCHWARTZ: Well, thank you guys for the time. I'm Zach Schwartz. You can find me on Twitter @ZachZachZach, C-H-C-H. This is "Boxed In." You can find it on YouTube. You can find it on Yahoo Sports. And follow us on Twitter @YahooSports and on Instagram @YahooSports.

Thank you guys for the time, and this was a pleasure being your guys' judge. You made it really, really easy to sit back. I didn't have to break it up. I didn't have to threaten anyone in here. This was lovely, so thank you guys for the time.

SCOTT PIANOWSKI: You know, Zach, when a Ryder Cup match is tied after 18, they call it a halve. You could have called this a halve and nobody would have complained.

[LAUGHTER]

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SCOTT PIANOWSKI: You know, my challenge of this-- my protest of this-- my appeal of this case will be filed by the end of the day.

[LAUGHTER]

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