Who's Who & Where's Jack?

There are two questions that anyone who has been following the pro golf scene this year has to ask himself. The first is: "Who is Frank Beard?" And the second is: "What ever happened to Jack Nicklaus?"

Twice within a month--at the Las Vegas Tournament of Champions and at last week's Houston Champions International--Frank Beard, a bespectacled 28-year-old, has sunk a sizable putt on the 72nd green to beat Arnold Palmer for the winner's check. Considering that Palmer, at 37 and with $87,073 already in his till this year, is playing the best golf of his career, those two defeats are all the more remarkable because they were engineered by a virtual unknown who turned to golf because he was a failure at basketball.

Brother of Ralph Beard, three-time All-America guard at the University of Kentucky, Frank had ideas of following in his brother's footsteps until he discovered that the market for basketball players who were never going to grow past 6 ft. and 170 Ibs. was limited. He went to the University of Florida on a golf scholarship, turned pro after graduation. In 1963, his first full season on the tour, Beard earned $17,938, and he has progressed steadily upward ever since. His official winnings so far this season are $50,993; his unflappable, mechanical game reminds some of his fellow pros of Ben Hogan. Doug Ford, for one, insists that "Frank is the most consistent player, the best swinger on the tour." Beard himself is not too sure. "I'm never going to beat Nicklaus when he's right," he says. "Jack is just too long."

Jack has not been right very often this year. Going into last week's Greater New Orleans Open, he had not won a tournament in nearly four months; he had missed the cut at the Masters, placed 34th in the Jacksonville Open, 31st in the Pensacola Open, 37th at Houston. His official earnings for the year were only $15,511. "I haven't had a whole lot of confidence," he admitted--but that was before New Orleans. In the first round at Lakewood Country Club, he belted a drive that was measured at 320 yds.; in the second he drove the green of the par-four twelfth hole--360 yds. away. Jack's first round score was a two-under-par 70; he followed that with a 68 and a 69, at week's end had moved into a tie for the lead with Canada's George Knudson.

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