It looks like golf, feels like golf, but it isn’t golf, at least not as he knows it. Just a year after his emotional farewell at St Andrews, where they excused his failure to make the cut at The Open, dug out the tissues and hung from the windows to watch his last few shots as a professional, the sport is a whole new ball game to Jack Nicklaus.

After 44 years in which winning was all that mattered, trying only to enjoy it is not much fun. It is, as Bobby Jones said after Nicklaus won the 1965 Masters, a game with which he is not familiar.

The man whose 18 major titles and 154 consecutive appearances in major events have made his name synonymous with the sport has played only a dozen rounds since he birdied the 18th hole of the Old Course last year. That he has played “10 times more” tennis than golf during the same period tells a story. “I love golf dearly, but I miss the competition more than I miss the game,” he admits.

Nicklaus, who was pipped by Roberto De Vicenzo, of Argentina, at Royal Liverpool in 1967, was back on these shores last week, attending to business in Ireland, fulfilling his role as an ambassador for the Royal Bank of Scotland and seeing scarcely a shot hit in the championship in which he claimed an astonishing 15 consecutive top-six finishes. The first year since 1961 that he has not been paid to play has been a culture shock for the man whose major haul is the gauge by which Tiger Woods’s career is measured.

Sentiment, it seems, has got the better of big Jack, who, at 66, is not too proud to admit that his grandchildren call him “pee-paw” and are forever asking him when he will give them a game. “I’ve always played golf with the family, but it was different in the past. I used it as part of my preparation for tournaments. Even when I was just playing socially with friends, I saw it as a chance to practise. I looked on a round of golf as something I had to work hard at, as hard as I would a round of The Open. That was the only way I could enjoy it. Now I don’t have Opens or US Opens to enter, and playing that round of golf doesn’t have a whole lot of significance.

“One day it will. One day I will go back to playing golf for the sake of playing golf. I love what the game stands for, its integrity, and the self-management that it demands. I have always understood that. The problem for me is getting round to experiencing it for myself. It will take a while, but it will happen eventually.”

Nicklaus likes to joke that while most people retire from work to play golf, he has retired from golf to work. He travels more than ever, mostly to identify and develop courses for his design company, but the free time spent at his home in North Palm Beach, Florida, has presented him with a problem.

“I’m bored to tears,” he says. “My wife (Barbara) can’t wait to get rid of me. I say to myself, ‘Right, what in the hell will I do now?’ and I end up going to the refrigerator for a bowl of ice cream. That’s where the weight comes from.”

Nicklaus, three inches shorter than he was in his prime and relying on a replacement hip, pats his belly and admits he has put on 15lb in the past year. If it’s not exactly a return to the days of Fat Jack, as he was often cruelly known before he grew his hair and went on a diet in 1969, the Golden Bear is becoming a tad roly-poly around the waist. “Don’t worry, that’ll be coming off,” he promises.

Nicklaus, surely, will adapt to life after golf. He was never so obsessed by his career that all else suffered. Had it not been for his desire to find wider fulfilment, he says he would have won more than the 18 majors for which he is famous. One of the greatest clutch putters of all time, he was renowned for his concentration, but his devotion to the game was not so resolute.

As Woods continues his quest, the game’s elder statesman insists that his dream was never to win more majors than any player in history. He says it had not even crossed his mind until a reporter told him after his victory in the 1972 Masters that he had moved to within three of the 13 majors won by Jones.

“Once I got past that record, I didn’t have a big push to do much else,” he says. “I didn’t know I had Tiger Woods pushing me. I would have probably worked harder and maybe won more if I had. I can’t say I prepared for every major the way I should have. I can’t say that I didn’t give away opportunities. Records were never really that important to me until it was too late to go back and go for them.

“Never in my life did I add up how many I had won. Tiger has been adding from day one. He has grown up that way, and the more he does it, the more he is reminded of it. He doesn’t know anything else.”