Yahoo Finance How golfer Jack Nicklaus found his brand
The best living golfer also has arguably the best personal business brand.
Jack Nicklaus, winner of a record 18 Major tournaments, nowadays spends his time designing golf courses, running the Nicklaus Children’s Health Care Foundation with his wife Barbara, and selling branded merchandise. Online and at retail stores, Nicklaus sells everything from polo shirts, hats, and belts (the items you’d expect) to wallets, dopp kits, towels, umbrellas, lemonade, wine, and even ice cream—and all of it bears the golden bear, his nickname and personal logo.
Onstage on Thursday night at the EY Strategic Growth Forum in Palm Desert, Calif., Nicklaus told interviewer Jim Nantz how he got the nickname and how it became his brand identity on and off the golf course.
“That story comes from an Australian sports writer named Don Lawrence,” Nicklaus said. “Mark McCormack [founder of sports agency IMG] went down to Australia in 1961 and [Lawrence] wrote an article about me potentially going pro, and he called me a ‘cuddly golden bear’ in the article. I was blonde, and large, so, okay.”
Lawrence, the writer, didn’t even know that the golden bear was also the mascot of Nicklaus’s high school, Upper Arlington High School in Upper Arlington, Ohio. Soon after Nicklaus joined the PGA Tour, the moniker came up again when he signed his first endorsement deal with a small sportswear company in Boston. The company’s CEO told Nicklaus they needed an emblem to put on his shirts. “So we went through all the nicknames I had in school, not very flattering ones,” Nicklaus said. “Then we came to ‘the golden bear,’ and I said ‘You know, heck, I’ve been a golden bear all my life, I might as well stay one.’ So we used that on all the shirts, the balls… everything.”
Nicklaus is often grouped with South African golfer Gary Player and the late Arnold Palmer when people talk about pro golfers succeeding in business after golf. Together, they are golf’s Big Three, and each of them had a personal brand nickname and logo: Player is “the black night” and puts a knight’s head on his apparel, while Palmer was “the king” and used a multi-colored umbrella.
Nicklaus is proud of his brand. “Most everybody who has said, ‘What’s the best emblem out there?’ That’s won the award most of the time, which is kind of nice. Whether it would win today or not, I don’t know. It still wins with me.”
Earlier in the day before his panel at the EY conference, Nicklaus sat down with Yahoo Finance editor-in-chief Andy Serwer to discuss the impact President-elect Donald Trump will have on the sport. It’s an issue that has left pro golf in a delicate spot. There’s never before been a president who owns golf courses; Trump owns 17 of them.
“I think he’s going to make a tremendous impact on the world of golf as he goes forward,” Nicklaus said. “He is a golfer. He loves the game of golf. His golf courses are all very, very good facilities.”
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Daniel Roberts is a writer at Yahoo Finance, covering sports business and technology. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite. Sportsbook is our recurring sports business video series.
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