201: Nick Price | Perseverance Paid Off

Today you are in for a special treat. In one of my favorite interviews of all time, I bring on Nick Price: 3-time major winner, World Golf Hall of Fame Member, 18-time winner on the PGA Tour, and one of the most personable athletes in the game.

We had the chance to talk on a lot of different things, from the progression of his career as a golfer who had the opportunity to not only meet his golf idols but beat them in the majors, to what advice he would give to junior golfers and his thoughts on the modern game.

We also touch on his role is as the first professional player to serve on the USGA Executive Committee and what inputs he has been able to give to expand their mission of growing the game of golf. This interview was such a special honor and is especially timely given the fact that Nick won the championship in 1992, his first major ever, when it was last hosted here at Bellerive in St. Louis.

Nick Price’s Background

• Price’s family moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where he began playing golf at age eight. At age 17 he traveled to the United States and won the Junior World tournament in San Diego, California. Price spent the next year (1975) playing on the South African and European tours as an amateur. He served two years in the Rhodesian air force as a pilot and then rejoined the European Tour as a professional in 1977.
• He joined the Professional Golfers’ Association of America(PGA) Tour full-time in 1983 and showed great promise, winning the World Series of Golf that year by four strokes over Jack Nicklaus. In the years that followed, Price was hailed by his peers as one of the best, and most likable, golfers on the tour.
• In 1991, Price won two PGA events, the Byron NelsonClassic, and the Canadian Open. The following year he finished first at the PGA Championship, which began an incredible 24-month run in which he won 16 times and finished in the top 10 in 37 of 59 tournaments. The 15th win came in July 1994 at the Open Championship, where Price avenged his 1982 heartbreak by sinking a spectacular 18-meter (60-foot) putt for an eagle on the second-to-last hole, a shot that clinched his victory. Then, in August at the PGA Championship, he shot an 11-under-par 269 to win and become the seventh golfer to capture back-to-back majors. Less than a month later he won the Bell Canadian Open.
• Price also designed golf courses and golfing apparel. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2003.

Highlights from this Episode

• We kick off the interview talking about how he stays active and fit in his retirement and the benefits he is seeing in his game on the golf course, as well as his take on the transition on what guys are doing off the course these days in terms of how they train to stay ahead of their competitors.
• Nick talks about what golfers were his idols as he grew up in the game of golf, like Jack Nicklaus and Simon Hobday and his thoughts on whether technology and the subsequent over-analysis that comes with it is helping or hindering the modern amateur and professional player.
• He takes us back to his first games and his first victories: What that was like, and what the road to the top looked like for him. We hear his first-hand accounts of some of his best and worst games and what was going through his head.
• While we gear up for the PGA Championship in St. Louis this year, we talk about 1992 when he won at Bellerive: his memories of the tournament and his time in St. Louis.
• What his role as a USGA Executive Committee member entails and how he feels he is consulting and changing the game on the administrative side (aside he didn’t think he would see the game from.)

Parting Questions:

Caddy Shack or Happy Gilmore?  Caddy Shack

What would be your walk-up song? You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet by Bachman Turner Overdrive

If you could play 18 holes with anyone, who would it be and where would you play?
My dad at St. Andrews

What do you want your legacy to be?  That perseverance paid off. You don’t have to be out of reach to the public to have that killer instinct.

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