Jack Nicklaus Quotes

Dad played with me a great deal, as dads should do, and our chief sport was baseball. He bought me a hardball when I was three years old, and he used to sit in a rocker on the front porch while I sat on the grass in the yard, and we'd play catch by the hour.

I don't claim to be a particularly good father. I'm flawed, let's say. I've certainly been affected by the experience of having kids... trying to be a father, at least. It's an amazing process. It's like songwriting: it's a complete mystery to me. I don't understand it - but I've certainly written about it.

I was quite lucky: although my dad worked a lot, whenever he was free, he would play sports with me and my brother, and I can't wait to do that with my child.

You can have a kid and just be off at work all the time, and it's all mom. But, I spent a lot of time with him, so now, every time I see him, he's like, "Dada!"

My priority as a father should always remain first. My kids look to me as their example. Every decision I make and everything that I do always has to come back to the question, "Does this make me a better father?" "Will my kids benefit from this?" It's no longer just about me…but about my kids. My perspective in life has changed.

I think we all like to see ourselves as good dads, but there's also that fear, 'Oh, I don't want to be like my father,' or, 'I hope my kid doesn't turn out like me.' You know, I have those feelings too. So the key is optimism.

I spend a lot of time parenting because I'm home. A friend of mine told me that the average father sees each kid an average of twenty-two minutes a week, which I found almost unbelievable. Mine are in my hip pocket all the time. And I like it that way.

When I was a little kid at home, I thought the whole world was Jewish. For years I thought Roosevelt was Jewish. I loved him. I thought of him as my father. I'm always stunned when I find out that people like Roosevelt and Tolstoy weren't Jewish. How could I love them so much?

One of the things I've always said is that if you're given the ability to coach kids, then you're really given the ability to be a father or parent of some sort.

When a man reaches his maturity in understanding and in years, the feeling comes over him that his father was wrong to beget him.

As a kid, I loved to play centerfield. I loved to make diving catches.

I can't imagine laying a finger on my kids. I go the other way and probably because my father was so abusive.

Sometimes [people] say the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. In my case, I am pretty fortunate. [ My kids]'re pretty balanced, cool kids, going through pretty much the same thing all the other kids go through. There's nothing unique about me as a parent. I am a parent. My kids are kids. We do the best we can do. I don't think they know a lot about what I do, other than that I am in this crazy band, Mötley Crüe.

Mothers, of course, are all right. They pay a chap's bills and don't bother him. But fathers bother a chap and never pay his bills.

The message was that... fathers can go ahead and have children, but they don't have to raise the children.

My legacy to me is-when I drop dead and they're at my funeral - I want my three kids to get up and say, 'He's an awesome dad'.

My favorite thing about being a father is just seeing my kids grow and do some of the same things that I did when I was a kid, man.

Because as a father of three kids, I know how important good seeds are for providing healthy food for my family.

In all that we do in the Church, we need to provide the way, as leaders, for parents and children to have time together as families.

As we try to change, we will discover within us a fierce struggle between our loyalty to that battle-scarred victim of his own childhood, our father, and the father we want to be. We must meet our childhood father at close range: get to know him, learn to forgive him, and somehow, go beyond him.

I say to all fathers - be as good as you can be- because your sons and daughters will follow in your footsteps.

I always listen, I ask children, I even ask adults in tennis, "What are your children playing?" And most of the time it's not tennis. It's pathetic.

I get a lot of parents coming up to me, telling me they are grooming their kids to be professional athletes. I'm really against that. I think it's a great life, and yeah, you can lead them in that direction. I think a lot of parents live their lives through the kids. Because they didn't make it, they want their kids to make it. It puts a lot of undue pressure on the kids.

My father was an amazing man. The older I got, the smarter he got.

I'm lucky to have had a father [John Lennon] who paid attention.