The Prodigious Prodigy
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He shambled across the 18th green like a young grizzly bear, his pudgy face ruddy from the sun, his white cotton shirt soggy with sweat, his cream-colored cap perched precariously on the back of his close-cropped blond head. Tournament officials clustered anxiously on the apron while grey-uniformed state troopers strained to hold back the surging gallery; on all sides, TV cameras zeroed in to carry the scene to 9,000,000 home viewers across the nation. But Jack Nicklaus might have been alone on a practice green for all the emotion he displayed. Intently, impassively, he hunched over his 2-ft. putt. Daintily, deliberately, he stroked the ball toward the hole. When it plunked safely into the cup, he permitted himself a change of expression--a boyish grin and tip of his cap to the crowd. With that putt, at 22 and in his first year as a professional golfer, burly Jack Nicklaus had won the biggest golf tournament of them all: the U.S. Open.
The youngest U.S. champion in 39 years, Nicklaus has not yet finished college (he has two quarters to go at Ohio State), but he won last week's Open with a rare blend of mature skill and courage, withstanding pressures fierce enough to unnerve the most seasoned competitor. In a tense, head-to-head play-off before a hostile gallery, Nicklaus beat the world's best-known golfer, Arnold Palmer, grimly refusing to yield to a classic Palmer surge, and winning finally by the comfortable margin of three strokes, 71 to 74. To get into the playoff, Nicklaus had to defeat 148 top-ranked pros and amateurs, including Defending Open Champion Gene Littler. To beat them, he put together rounds of 72, 70, 72, 69 for a 72-hole total of 283 that tied the competitive course record* at Pennsylvania's Oakmont Country Club, one of the country's most exacting golf courses. When it was all over and he had beaten Palmer as well, Jack Nicklaus had stamped himself the No. 1 challenger for Palmer's uneasy crown--a confident, talented prodigy whose bold, intimidating game and precocious poise should keep him at the top for many years.
Make a Million. The record books are full of young flashes who blaze briefly and then fade into the pack of good but not great professional golfers. Nicklaus seems to be made of sterner stuff. Twice National Amateur champion (in 1959 and 1961), Nicklaus was, until his decision to turn pro last November, the most talked-about amateur since Bobby Jones. He played in his first U.S. Open as a fuzzy-cheeked 17-year-old. In 1960, at 20, he finished second by two strokes to Palmer, and his 72-hole score of 282 was the lowest ever shot by an amateur in the Open. That same year, in the World Amateur Team championship at Pennsylvania's Merion Golf Club, Nicklaus put together consecutive rounds of 66, 67, 68, 68 for a brilliant 269--a full 18 strokes lower than Ben Hogan's score at Merion when he won the 1950 Open. In amateur match play, he was almost unbeatable: in one season, he won 29 of the 30 matches he played. "People expected me to win," he says, "and I expected to win. If I didn't, I felt like a bum."
In his first professional tournament, the Los Angeles Open, he was a co-favorite with Palmer and Gary Player. Nicklaus tied for 50th and took home a purse of $33.33. Not until last week did he manage his first tournament victory. But he has finished in the money in all 18 tournaments he has entered, ranks third in money winnings behind Palmer and Littler, and with the 1962 pro tour only half over, he has already earned almost twice as much money ($43,198) as any other rookie in history. Bonuses, royalties and endorsements resulting from last week's U.S. Open victory could swell Nicklaus' income by $250,000--making him, at 22, one of the world's highest-paid athletes. Unless the prospect bores him, Jack can reasonably expect to have made a million by the time he is 25.
Everybody's Business. Today's pro golfer is part showman, part TV personality, part salesman, a walking Chamber of Commerce for the fastest-growing sport in the U.S. Baseball and football may still be the great spectator sports, but athletes of all ages can-and do-play golf. This year, according to the National Golf Foundation, 6,000,000 Americans will take club in hand to play more than 90 million rounds of golf on 6,718 U.S. golf courses, most of them public courses or semiprivate clubs that charge a daily fee. The rich man's game of yesterday is now everybody's $1 billion-a-year business, selling 8,000,000 golf clubs, 69 million golf balls, 700,000 golf bags and anything else, from wooden tees (10-c- a package) to electric golf carts (about $600), that a golf-mad U.S. public could possibly want.
When the pros play, so many people want to see how it is done that officials are talking of limiting the galleries to keep them in hand. More than 72,000 fans showed up for last week's Open--25,000 more than the old Open record. And with the swelling crowds comes big money. Ten years ago, Julius Boros took home $4,000 for winning the Open; last week Nicklaus won $15,000, plus an "unofficial" bonus of $2,500 for the playoff. Such is the excitement generated by big-money pro tournaments that publicity-minded business firms are getting into the act. Next September, at Akron's Firestone Country Club, Nicklaus, Palmer and two other golfers will perform in front of TV cameras in the most exclusive four-man tournament ever staged; the winner will get $50,000, second place will be worth $15,000, third and fourth $5,000 apiece. The sponsors: a radio-TV firm and a manufacturer of refrigerators.
Ninety Golfer. Whatever the price, Jack Nicklaus has the game to make it worthwhile. Hulking (5 ft.11 1/2 in., 202 Ibs.) and heavy-legged, he does not have the easy, fluid drive of a Sam Snead or a Gene Littler; Nicklaus' swing is pure thunder. His wide, stubby-fingered hands choke the club in an old-fashioned interlocking grip, and when he swings he looks as if he might shoot in the 90s: his arms move back stiffly, his head sometimes bobs, his right knee brutally forces his left side out of the way on the downswing, and his right elbow flies away from his body. But at the moment of impact, when all that power pours into the club head, Nicklaus hits the ball as squarely and as solidly as a golf ball can be hit. In his prime, Bobby Jones drove 240 yds.; today's big hitters have advanced the art to the point where 260-yd. drives are common. For Nicklaus, who is the longest of the accurate drivers, a booming 285 yds. is the standard. Fortnight ago, in New Jersey's Thunderbird Invitational, Nicklaus had no trouble reaching the par-five 600-yd. 18th hole at Upper Montclair Country Club with a driver and a No. 3 wood. At the Open, he hit one drive that was later paced off at 328 yds.
The only weakness he concedes is his putting, sometimes erratic on slow greens. "Arnie Palmer is a better putter than I am," says Nicklaus, "mainly because he's had ten years longer to work on it." Yet during the entire U.S. Open, Nicklaus three-putted only one green out of 90 (v. Palmer's ten), missed only one putt under 5 ft. Meticulous as an IBM computer, he spends his practice rounds pacing off and charting each course he plays, jotting down the distances on cards that he carries in his back pocket so that he will always know exactly how far he is from the pin-and what club to use. When a reporter at the Open asked him how far he had hit a certain drive, Jack consulted his charts and drawled: "Well, the hole is 462 yds. long, and I was 165 yds. from the pin. So the drive must have been exactly 297 yds."
Once he walks off the 18th green, Nicklaus is so relaxed that he could probably fall asleep at a New Year's Eve party. On the course he is a study in utter concentration-cold, phlegmatic, withdrawn. Unlike such old pros as Tommy Bolt and Sam Snead, Nicklaus has never been known to lose his temper. Unlike Arnold Palmer, who is the jovial, wisecracking Yogi Berra of golf, he often goes through an entire round without speaking a word. At Merion in 1960, Nicklaus was attempting a 20-ft. birdie putt in the rain and wind. As he addressed the ball, a gust blew his cap off. He never paused, calmly stroked the ball into the hole.
Down the Pike. In the Open last week, Nicklaus needed all the strength and single-mindedness he could muster. At its most generous, the Oakmont Country Club, with its ice-slick greens and 208 sand traps (including one that covers almost a quarter of an acre), is an unkind golf course. Tommy Armour called it "Hades" Bobby Jones once picked up in disgust at the twelfth hole. A few years ago, Gary Middlecoff plucked his ball from a trap, laid it gently on the grass--and smashed it down the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which splits the course.
As tailored for last week's Open, Oakmonth's string-bean fairways had been tightened to only 30 yds. in width on some holes, and the enormous greens had been shaved until only one-eighth inch of grass remained. Par had been lowered from 72 to 71, so tough that only 19 sub-par rounds were shot during the entire tournament. The lead skipped around as though the golfers were playing hot potato: Gene Littler, the first-day leader with a sparkling 69, sank rapidly to a tie for seventh, and five players held the lead at one point or another on the final day. In the end, though, only Palmer and Nicklaus remained, deadlocked at 283, just one under par.
Visions of Grandeur. In the next day's playoff, everything seemed to favor Palmer. He had grown up in Latrobe, Pa., just 40 miles from Oakmont's rolling fairways, and he had played the course "at least 200 times" before. Winner of 33 tournaments, including the 1960 U.S. Open and last year's British Open, golf's reigning king was having his best year. With $60,331 already in the bank, he was--and still is--a good bet to smash his alltime money-winning record of $75,262, set in 1960. Having won his third Masters title in April, he now had visions of a one-year "grand slam," winning all four of pro golf's major championships--Masters, U.S. Open, British Open and Professional Golfers' Association. Nobody, not Hagen or Hogan or Snead or Sarazen, had ever accomplished that before. "I want to win this one more than any tournament I've ever played," said Palmer on the eve of the Nicklaus play-off-but he was frankly worried. "I'd rather it was anybody but that big, strong, happy dude," he said.
By tee-time at 1 :45 p.m., 10,000 keyed-up golf fans were strewn around the 6,894-yd. course. Wise ones invested in cardboard periscopes; wiser ones bought two, used Scotch tape to build periscopes on periscopes. All of them, it seemed, were for Palmer, the home-town hero. "Attaboy, Arnie!" cried the fans. "Go get him, Arnie, baby!" Some suggestions were even more pointed: "Needle him, Arnie." "Walk around while he's putting, Arnie."
Nicklaus acted as if he had cotton in his ears. He had played with Palmer during the first two rounds of the tournament, and he was used to Arnie's Army. As a matter of fact, the bigger Palmer's gallery, the better stolid Jack Nicklaus liked it. "Arnie always draws the big gallery wherever he goes," he said. "And a big gallery around the green is the biggest advantage a player can have. If you miss the green, you know the ball isn't going very far. The people just can't step out of the way fast enough. I don't mind a carom shot."
"He Plays Too Slow." On the very first hole, a downhill, 455-yd. par-four, Palmer pushed his drive into the rough, knocked his No. 6-iron approach over the green, overshot the pin by 15 ft. with a chip shot, two-putted for a weak bogey five. Playing near-flawless golf at a deliberate, almost indolent pace ("He plays too slow," said Palmer, "and I told him so"), Nicklaus made his par and took a one-stroke lead that he never relinquished. At the fourth hole, when Nicklaus hooked his tee shot into 6-in. rough. Palmer managed for the first time to outdrive the hefty Ohioan--and it was on that 544-yd. par-five hole that Nicklaus hit his best shot of the day. Forced to play a "safe" No. 3 iron from the clawing rough, Nicklaus faced an almost impossible third shot: a monstrous trap blocked his approach to the pin, set into the narrow neck of the pear-shaped green, 100 yds. away. Choosing a wedge from his bag, Nicklaus lofted the ball in a high arc over the trap, dropped it onto the green, just 6 ft. from the pin. He coolly sank the putt for a birdie four, went ahead in the match by two strokes.
After eight holes, grimacing, shaking his head, cursing his "crooked" putting. Palmer trailed Nicklaus by four strokes, and hundreds of his rooters streamed dejectedly toward the air-conditioned clubhouse bar. But at that moment, when his cause seemed most hopeless, Palmer's cold putter turned hot. Plagued all tournament long by putts that simply would not drop-including one eight-footer that hung stubbornly on the rim while he waited for 3 1/2 minutes--Palmer now could not miss. He birdied the ninth and eleventh holes, holed another birdie on the twelfth, and sliced Nicklaus' margin to a single stroke. Scoreboards flashed the news, and fans flocked back to watch Palmer stage another of those whirlwind rallies that have made him the most exciting golfer of his time.
"Don't Be an Idiot.""I wasn't scared," recalls Nicklaus. "I wasn't supposed to beat him anyhow, so why should I be scared? I just told myself, 'Most people get flustered when Palmer does this and start bogeying. Don't be an idiot. Remember, you've played twelve holes and you're one up-that's all that counts. Just play your own game. Palmer can bogey them too.' " On the par-three, 161-yd. 13th hole, Palmer did just that: he underclubbed himself, hit the green 40 ft. short of the pin and three-putted.
Now Nicklaus had a comfortable two-stroke cushion, and Palmer was running out of holes. Like a poker player who has caught his opponent bluffing, Nicklaus raised the ante. "I told myself not to play conservatively for any reason," says Nicklaus, "because if I did, I'd lose. So I went for birdies on every hole. I didn't make them, but neither did Arnie. By the 18th, I still had a two-stroke lead.
"I hadn't been frightened all day, but I was worried about my tee shot on 18. I pulled it about 18 in., into the rough at the left. I had an awful lie, but at least I was in bounds. I had about a 180-yd. shot to the green, but I had to clear a trap, and from my lie it was questionable. So I did the safest possible thing: I took out my wedge and played it onto the fairway short of the trap. I figured that I was 103 yds. away from the front of the green, 137 yds. from the back, and 130 yds. from the pin. 'An easy giron will get you to the front,' I said to myself. 'A hard 9 will get you over. So let's hit a nice easy one.' I hit it just right-about 130 yds., 12 ft. to the left of the cup. Then Palmer hit his pitch shot and I thought. 'Oh God. I guess I just have to expect it to go in.' But it didn't; it rolled past about 10 ft. Even then, I wasn't sure of winning. If he made his putt and I three-putted, we were going to the 19th--and even making a two-footer isn't easy when it means a national championship. But Arnie missed, and I thought. 'Well, finally, it's over.' " All that remained was the last, quick putt, and a brief handclasp from a tired, dejected and thoroughly-beaten Palmer.
Young Man's Business. The end of the Open was more than a Nicklaus triumph: it showed vividly how golf, the middle-aged man's pastime, is becoming a young man's business. Of the first seven finishers, only one--Arnold Palmer--was over 30. For the first time in 13 years, Ben Hogan, now 49 and the hero of four Opens, was not even in the field. Balding Sam Snead, 49, trying for the 21st time for the victory he has always wanted most, wound up tied for 38th. More than ever before, pro golf belonged to the prodigies--the irreverent, burr-headed youngsters to whom no course is too tough, no challenge too bold, no competitor too strong. Three of the best:
>PHIL RODGERS, 24, fifth (with $27,830) in money winnings in his first full year, is already a hard-nosed pro who considers victory his rightful due. A short, stocky exmarine. Rodgers has won two tournaments (Los Angeles Open. Tucson Open), finished among the top five in three others. He could have won the Open: at the end, he was only two strokes behind Palmer and Nicklaus--despite the fact that he had wasted five strokes in the first two rounds. On opening day, Rodgers hooked a drive into a spruce tree at Oakmont's 17th hole, used up three strokes trying unsuccessfully to get out, and took a horrendous quadruple-bogey 8. Warned Rodgers grimly: "Don't forget me. I'll be back."
> GARY PLAYER, 26, is possibly the best foreign player ever to invade the U.S. A powerful driver despite his size (5 ft. 7 in., 150 Ibs.), the swarthy South African sometimes swings so hard that he falls over backward on the tee. Player had never won an amateur tournament when he abruptly turned pro at 17, but he practiced eight hours a day, trimmed off excess weight, built up muscle by lifting weights. In 1956 he borrowed money to finance his first trip abroad. Since then he has won the Masters, the British, Australian and South African Opens, was runner-up to Tommy Bolt in the 1958 U.S. Open, to Palmer in the 1962 Masters, and was leading last week's Open by two strokes on the final day when his putting touch deserted him.
> BOB NICHOLS, 26. is lucky to be alive, let alone playing championship golf: in 1952 he was nearly killed in an auto crash when the car in which he and several other teen-agers were riding went off the road at 107 m.p.h. Unconscious for 13 days, Nichols was hospitalized for 96 with a broken pelvis, a back injury, a concussion and assorted internal injuries. He recovered completely, won an athletic scholarship to Texas A. & M., turned pro in 1959. Husky (6 ft. 2 in.. 195 Ibs.) and handsome, Nichols can slam a drive as far as Nicklaus, though not with the same arrow accuracy: he once won a driving contest with measured drives of 347, 352 and 367 yds. So far this year, Nichols has earned $26.475, won two tournaments--including a play-off victory over Nicklaus in the Houston Classic. In the Open, he tied Rodgers for third.
There is nothing stereotyped about the new pros except the daring golf they play and the supreme confidence they display in their talents. "I'm playing beautifully," Gary Player announced to reporters before the start of the 1961 Masters. "I think I may win this tournament." Four days later, he did. On the first tee at the 1958 N.C.A.A. championships in Williamstown, Mass., chunky Phil Rodgers. then a University of Houston student, turned around and announced to the gallery: "I've got a hundred bucks says I'll win this thing." No one felt like betting, and Rodgers went on to win 8 and 7. To these youngsters, Arnold Palmer is no bogey man, but just another pro trying to take money out of their pockets. Says Jack Nicklaus: "Arnie's not that much better than anyone else. Everybody thinks Palmer will win, and he has come from behind often enough so that pretty soon the player facing him thinks so too. Well, maybe it's a certain cockiness in me, but I can't really admit to myself that Palmer or any other player is a better golfer than I am."
Never Again. Perhaps nobody is. In the very first round of golf that Jack Nicklaus ever shot, at ten. he scored a 51 for nine holes--and he has never done that poorly since. Recalls his father, a Columbus, Ohio, chain druggist and a onetime scratch handicapper on the golf course: "By the time Jack was twelve, I couldn't handle him any more. I remember one day I hit as good a drive as I could, maybe 260 yds. I told Jack, 'If you outhit that one, I'll buy you a Cadillac convertible.' He hit his ball 25 or 30 yds. past mine, and I never outdrove him again." (Jack never forgot the promise, settled for a Mercury convertible when he graduated from high school.) About that same time, Jack caught the eye of Jack Grout, then a pro at Columbus' Scioto Country Club. Recalls Grout: "I smoked a good one off the tee at No. 16, over the hill in the fairway. I hit onto the green with a 7-iron. Just after I started walking toward the green, a ball came whizzing by me. I looked around and I couldn't see anyone. Pretty soon, here comes little Jack, Charlie Nicklaus' son, playing all by himself. That was his drive. I knew right then this kid was something. When you're only twelve and hit the ball that far--it must have been 275 yds.--wow!" A year later, at 13. Jack shot a 69 from the back tees at Scioto--a 7,095-yd. championship course that has been the site of the Open, the P.G.A. and the Ryder Cup.
During the next eight years. Papa Nicklaus poured more than $35,000 into his prodigy son's gol---for clubs, clothes, transportation, hotels, caddy fees, etc. "It's the most wonderful money I ever spent," says Charles Nicklaus. "I figure it's like living my life all over again. I always wanted to be a champ." By the time he was 14. Jack already was a local hero in Columbus. MOVE OVER SNEAD--MAKE ROOM FOR JACKIE, read a headline in the Columbus Citizen in 1954. Sportswriters compared Jack to Bobby Jone--who had captured the Georgia Amateur at 14, gone on to the third round of the National Amateur. Even Jones showed up to watch Nicklaus play in his first U.S. Amateur at 15, and the Ohioan was so rattled by his presence that he hit a drive into the woods on one hole, skulled his approach on the next, made a total mess of a third and lost the match, i up.
"Now Be Quiet." Jack Nicklaus has rarely been rattled since. Says his father:"Once, when he was 15, I was driving him to a tournament. I started to en courage him and tell him 'You're good enough to win this.' He told me, 'I know it. Now be quiet." At 16, Nicklaus won his first major tournament, the Ohio Open, from a full field of professionals--shooting a record first round 64 and leading all the way. Meanwhile, he was making quite a reputation for himself as an all-round athlete. "When he was in junior high," recalls his father, "he told me he wanted to play football. I told him, 'Aw, you're not fast enough.' One night he came home to dinner and casually asked if I was going to the track meet that night. I said, 'Why should I?' He said, 'Because I'm running.' " That night, competing against older boys. Jack won the 100-and 220-yd. dashes, anchored the winning 880-yd. relay team, placed second in the high jump and broad jump. Says Charlie: "He came home that night, handed me the ribbons he'd won, and said, 'Do you think I'm fast enough for football now?' "
At Upper Arlington High School, Jack was varsity baseball catcher and a four-year letterman in basketball, averaging 18 points a game during his senior year. Scholarship offers poured in from a dozen colleges. "He was talking about how much this one or that one had offered him, how good a deal he could get," says Charlie. "I told him to stop thinking about the fun and money and think about the education." Jack's choice: home-town Ohio State University--without a scholarship.
At Ohio State, Nicklaus began winning everything in sight: Walker Cup matches, England's Grand Challenge Cup, the North and South Amateur, the Trans-Mississippi, and the U.S. Amateur (at 19, he was the youngest amateur champion in 50 years). He also won himself a wife, Barbara, a child, Jack II, an insurance business, and more worries than he could shoulder. "I was trying to do three jobs at once," he says, "and I wasn't doing justice to any of them. My grades were falling off. I wasn't making as much money from insurance as I knew I could. My golf wasn't good--and I don't enjoy playing bad golf." Nicklaus decided to quit both college and the insurance business temporarily and turn pro. "I figured if I could make a good living doing what I liked best, why not?"
No More Fats. In those first few frustrating months on the pro tour, making money but not winning, Nicklaus patiently retooled his game, aiming for the kind of versatility that would allow him to play under any conditions, on any kind of course. He worked off the 25 excess pounds that had his fellow pros calling him "Ohio Fats" (in college, his nicknames were "Blob-O" and "Whaleman." He also had to learn to adjust to the nomadic life of a pro: until last week, when he decided to take a few days off and fish for trout, Jack had been home for only 17 days since January. When he wearily pulled up outside his modest, green-shuttered Cape Cod in suburban Upper Arlington, Ohio, his neighbors were ready for him: WELCOME HOME, 1962 OPEN CHAMP read a banner hanging from the roof. P.S., SOMEONE ALREADY MOWED YOUR LAWN.
The months ahead will be busy, and the pressures to win will be greater than ever. Simon & Schuster plans to publish an instructional golf book under his byline; MacGregor and Slazengers will produce Jack Nicklaus golf clubs; Revere Sportswear will manufacture a Jack Nicklaus line of shirts and sweaters. Nicklaus has been signed for three TV golf shows, he will play a series of exhibitions (at a minimum of $2,000 each), and he is negotiating contracts for endorsements of slacks, walking shorts, sports jackets, windbreakers, shoes, cigarettes and skin bracer. Arnold Palmer, an old hand at such matters, has often complained that his extracurricular business activities leave him too little energy for playing championship-caliber golf, and youthful Jack Nicklaus is going to have to adjust to being a celebrity too. If he can, with at least a dozen good playing years ahead of him, there seems no limit to the heights he may reach. He has certainly set his goal high enough. "I want," says Jack Nicklaus, "to be the best golfer the world has ever seen."
* Set by Ben Hogan in the 1953 U.S. Open. In the three Opens that had been played at Oakmont before this year, only two golfers--Hogan and Sam Snead--had ever broken 290.
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