A contest is at its most thrilling when the combatants are well known to one another, and better yet, if there is just a little edge to their rivalry.

Think Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes monkey trial or Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in the duel for the minds and wallets of the world's digital citizens.

		"ARNIE & JACK: PALMER, NICKLAUS AND GOLF'S GREATEST RIVALRY" By Ian O'Connor Houghton Mifflin ($26)

But there may never have been a rivalry so much in the forefront of the American consciousness as the one between Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus over more than three decades of tournament golf.

And as this year's United States Golf Open ends today, it is an appropriate time to take a look at their story.

It was a rivalry forged in the fire of golf's most intense moments, first in 1960, when Palmer "charged" from the pack in the final round to win his one Open championship and Nicklaus, still an amateur, uncharacteristically displayed a lack of composure when he could have mounted a charge of his own.

More importantly, two years later when Palmer and Nicklaus battled through an 18-hole playoff at Oakmont Country Club in the heart of Palmer country, Open champion Nicklaus endured the slings and arrows of a golf crowd that was clearly behind Palmer.

Nicklaus, almost to spite the members of "Arnie's Army," took the hometown favorite down, and launched the world's greatest golf career.

This, then, is the kind of rivalry that should make for an epic tale. And there is much to recommend this retelling of the story.

The details of the first meeting of Palmer and Nicklaus on a golf course -- a 1958 exhibition in Athens, Ohio, when Nicklaus was 18 and Palmer was the reigning Masters Tournament champion -- takes us there.

The detail from Oakmont and the many other encounters between the two men, and their most peculiar obsession with one another both on and off the course, are fleshed out well, it seems.

But, something is amiss.

It starts with language. It is unlikely that a reader wants to wash his eyes out with soap after the experience. Unfortunately, that is the case here.

O'Connor seems like a teen-ager, reveling in language that is crude and in nearly all cases, gratuitous, and distracting. Palmer and Nicklaus are both heroic and human, and they have many faults worthy of examination. But they deserved better than this.

For instance, when he tells the story of how Palmer's untidy play was handing the 1962 Open at Oakmont to Nicklaus, he says, "[Palmer] looked ready to blow snot out of his ears when he stepped back to his ball ..."

There are many more crude passages, but they are not appropriate for a family newspaper. They put images in the reader's mind that have little to do with the story, but everything to do with lazy writing.

Just as damning is a small error, the kind of number that golf keeps in excruciating detail. O'Connor asserts that Palmer's final two rounds in a U.S. Open were 75 and 81, recorded at Oakmont in 1994. Palmer's final appearance was news, so powerful that when he gave his post-round press conference, he broke down in front of the assembled journalists.

They, in turn, broke journalist etiquette and gave him a standing ovation.

Only problem was that Palmer shot 77-81.

As Clarence Darrow may have said during cross examination, if you can't trust that "fact," how can you trust any of his others?