The Magnificent Masters: Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, Tom Weiskopf, and the 1975 Cliffhanger at Augusta (16 page)

Like Bob Jones, Nicklaus was fortunate to be raised in a hardworking, hard-playing, upper-middle class environment. The Nicklaus clan came to the United States from Germany, and Charlie was a third-generation Columbus resident. Growing up, he had continued to work at Mebs Pharmacy, where he fell in love with pharmacy and golf. The first clubs he ever purchased were a used set from Mebs.

But as life moved forward, golf stayed behind. Charlie got his pharmacy degree and license. He married Helen Schoener in 1937, and their first child, Jack William, was born January 21, 1940. They were living the upwardly mobile American dream. Nicklaus opened his own pharmacy in 1942, and by 1960 he had four. Before Jack went off to college, the family would move around town five times until reaching the Upper Arlington home where his first Masters invitation would arrive.

Suburban Columbus provided a good life. The only major incident growing up for Jackie was a brief bout of polio when he was thirteen. It turned out to be mild, and he recovered quickly. His sister Marilyn, three years younger and the Nicklaus’s only other child, suffered a more severe case. It took two years for her to fully regain use of one of her legs.

Charlie did everything with his son and became his best friend. He passed on a burning, competitive desire tempered by respect for the game. Charlie taught him to lose graciously. Sportsmanship was important. Congratulate your opponent. Credit him. Mean it. “Charlie gave Jack the presence to learn how to behave on the golf course,” says Kaye Kessler. As a kid, Nicklaus won more than he lost, but in the semifinals of the Columbus District Amateur at age thirteen, he lost a
match and walked away. Charlie grabbed Jack and told him to walk back and shake hands. “Charlie said, ‘You ever do that again, you’re through with golf’,” adds Kessler. You’re not going to win all the time. When you lose, lose the right way.

With Nicklaus enjoying so many sports as a kid, it took two breaks to get him into golf—one of them literally.

Charlie Nicklaus regaled whomever would listen to his story of how his son began playing golf. It became referred to as “the ankle story.” His father had originally strained his right ankle while playing volleyball in 1944. Over the years, the ankle gave him more discomfort until he found out that there had been a small chip on the bone. After surgery to fuse the ankle and a few months in a cast, the doctor instructed him to get as much movement as possible. In the spring of 1950, Nicklaus decided he would rediscover golf since the family had just joined Scioto Country Club. He found he could play only a few holes at a time before needing a rest, so he decided to have his son come along, giving him a cut-down set of Hillerich & Bradsby clubs. Little Jack loved it.

SITTING AT HIS DESK
at the
Columbus Citizen-Journal
later that same spring, sportswriter Kaye Kessler received a call from Jack Grout. Just a few months earlier, Kessler had written a story on Grout, who had just been hired as the new head golf professional at Scioto in December. A native of Oklahoma, Grout had been a good player with more than a dozen top-ten finishes as a touring pro, although never an official win. He started his career in 1930 as an assistant pro under his brother at Glen Garden Golf and Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, the same club where Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson were learning the game as caddies and later as professionals. Grout moved on to Hershey Country Club in Pennsylvania, where he was an assistant to Henry Picard, the 1938 Masters champion. Now forty, Grout, tall with rimless glasses and jet black hair, was anxious to pass on his enthusiastic thoughts about the golf swing.

He wanted to let Kessler know that he was setting up a weekly, two-hour class every Friday morning for juniors. So Kessler and photographer Dick Garrett went out and took a picture of around thirty kids, mostly ages eight, nine, and ten. The picture ran, promoting the clinic without identifying any of the children.

A few months later, Grout again rang Kessler. Their first nine-hole tournament had concluded and one of the boys in the photo shot a 51 the first time ever playing nine holes. “I said, ‘You’re kidding me, I’m giving up golf’,” says Kessler. “Nine holes at Scioto, and he shoots 51?” So Kessler ventured back out to the club and wrote a little blurb about ten-year-old Jackie Nicklaus, who Grout had invited to the clinics after seeing him tag along with his father. Since then there isn’t a name that has filled the columns of that paper’s sports section more often.

By the end of his first year playing, Nicklaus, who supplemented the classes with a private lesson every couple of weeks, had shot 95 for 18 holes and recorded his first win in the club juvenile championship with a score of 121 for 18 holes. The next year, his best was an 81, and he had become the star pupil of the weekly classes. He was the teacher’s pet, for Grout saw something in Nicklaus he had seen in few others. The talent was present, but so was a blend of determination, commitment, and intellect. Through Nicklaus, Grout could impart the swing theories he had conjured up over the last two decades. He hammered it into Nicklaus using three main points.

The first was keeping the head still, just behind the ball. This was the center of balance, and Nicklaus learned the hard way. Grout’s assistant Larry Glosser would grab Nicklaus’s hair and hold it during the swing. He could soon hold his head still with the hardest of swings.

The second was foot work, instilling in Nicklaus that rolling the ankles was the proper way to ensure a good swing. Nicklaus led with his legs and derived much of his power from them.

The third was to make as full a shoulder turn as possible on the backswing with the widest arc. Grout wanted Nicklaus to extend those muscles while he was young and hit the ball as hard and far as
he could. To accomplish this, Nicklaus rotated his chin to the right and allowed his right elbow to move off his body. Grout saw power as an advantage and a skill that was difficult to ingrain when older. “Control can come later,” he said. This wasn’t a conventional thought at the time.

“He was so soft-spoken and so insightful,” says Kessler about Grout. “He would just tell Jack one little thing and that’s all he’d need. He had a marvelous calm about him, and I think that was infectious to Jack.”

Grout had his swing theories, but he was adaptable to students. For someone his size, Nicklaus had relatively small hands, and his father had initially instructed him to use an interlocking grip in which the pinkie on the right hand wraps around the left forefinger. Grout suggested he change to the Vardon grip in which the two fingers overlapped, but Nicklaus had problems with his hands slipping. So he stuck with the interlocking grip and never changed.

Nicklaus spent more and more time at the club. Even bad weather didn’t deter him since Grout had erected a Quonset hut. Named for its place of manufacturing in Quonset Point, Rhode Island, the moveable 16-by-36 foot hut was a prefabricated covering of lightweight, corrugated steel that the U.S. Navy designed for use in World War II. More than 150,000 were made, and the surplus was sold to the public after 1945. Nicklaus spent countless hours hitting balls from underneath it.

Grout was also a fan of Bobby Jones, but it was Nicklaus’s visits with Jones during the Masters that connected their philosophies.

“Jones said Stewart Maiden taught him how to manage and be responsible for his own game—his own actions on the golf course—so when he had problems he could correct them himself on the practice tee or during the round,” says Nicklaus.

A bell rang in Nicklaus’s head. Grout had strived to bestow him with complete knowledge of the golf swing. But he had been returning to Grout whenever something was amiss. Nicklaus figured, like
Jones, that he needed to be able to self-diagnose his flaws and fix them himself. He surmised, “It may be the biggest factor of all in shaping success or failure in the crucible of competition.”

This gave Nicklaus two advantages. First, he knew his own swing more than anyone in the game. Second, he was able to salvage rounds others couldn’t.

Grout traveled to the Masters nearly every year with Nicklaus, but never stepped foot on the practice range. He followed Jones’s maxim and let Nicklaus figure it out for himself. If he was really stuck with mechanics, Grout was available to talk it over with him, but Nicklaus would be a better golfer if he could self-diagnose his faults.

Nicklaus had also been fortunate to grow up playing a Donald Ross design that was one of the top courses in the country. When Bob Kletcke played Scioto for the first time, he immediately realized why Nicklaus learned to hit the ball so high. “They have real small greens there, and it’s quite hilly,” says Kletcke. “You had to hit the ball real high to keep it on the greens.” Right after Nicklaus began playing golf, the professionals returned to Scioto for another major championship, the 1950 PGA. Autograph book in hand, Nicklaus took in the sights and sounds of that week.

The more Nicklaus played, the better he became. By year three, his best score was 74. Then in his fourth year, it was a 69. Members now wandered down to the Quonset hut to watch the long-hitting phenom. “I liked it the best of all the sports I played because I felt I had a reasonable chance of achieving something worthwhile in it,” said Nicklaus. As his feats grew, Nicklaus’s fate was sealed by the head football coach at Ohio State himself, Woody Hayes. As a friend of the family, Hayes offered some parental advice to Charlie: “Football is a great game, but I know the talents of your son in golf. Keep him as far away from my game as you can.”

WITH THESE THREE
pillars—Jones, his father, and Grout—Nicklaus burst on the national scene. After his first Masters in 1959,
he won the prestigious North & South Amateur at Pinehurst No. 2 the very next week.

Later that summer, it was on to the U.S. Amateur at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs where Nicklaus drew none other than Robert T. Jones, III in his opening match. But Bob Jones was nowhere to be seen. According to his son, once his father had discovered who he was playing, he changed his mind about coming out to Colorado to watch his offspring play only one match. Indeed, Nicklaus prevailed comfortably, 7 and 6, and kept on winning all the way to the final with Charlie Coe. After trailing in the match for most of the day, Nicklaus birdied the 36
^th
hole to win the title.

The following June, he nearly won the U.S. Open at Cherry Hills in Denver. As a twenty-year-old amateur playing the final two rounds with forty-eight-year-old Ben Hogan, who was the closest thing Nicklaus had to a hero next to Jones. By then, Hogan played only sparingly and was well past his prime. Yet there wasn’t anyone out there who controlled his swing better than Hogan. Nicklaus suddenly was in the lead by himself with six holes to play when he faced a twelve-foot birdie putt on the 13th. After running his first attempt a few feet by, Nicklaus was too nervous to ask Hogan about fixing a pitch mark between his ball and the hole. He missed the putt. After the round, Hogan, who had seen his shot at a record fifth U.S. Open drown after sucking back a wedge shot into the water while playing to a front-hole location on the 71st hole, said, “I played with a kid today who if he had a brain would’ve won.”

After the 1960 U.S. Open, Nicklaus didn’t see Hogan again until the following Masters ten months later. Hogan walked into the locker room, saw Nicklaus and said, “Hey fella. You got a game.” It was the nicest compliment Nicklaus had ever received. Just like Jones, Hogan saw something in Nicklaus that led him to befriend him—as friendly as Hogan could be. Hogan sought out Nicklaus for practice rounds from then on at the Masters. The usual game was a five dollar Nassau. “I don’t have to tell you, there are easier ways of making money,” said
Nicklaus, who enjoyed the honor of playing with Hogan. “He is the best shotmaker I’ve ever seen.”

But Nicklaus was also able to see how one of the greatest strategists plotted his way around Augusta National. “Hogan wanted to keep everything underneath the hole,” says John Mahaffey. “If you could do that and have that kind of control of your golf ball, you’d always have a chance to make birdie.”

Nicklaus won the U.S. Amateur again in 1961 and was well on his way to becoming the “next Bobby Jones.” Selling insurance and working for a slacks company, he made $24,000 in 1961. His first house cost only $22,000. The comfortable life did not satisfy Nicklaus.

“The chance to make money was not a factor in my decision to turn pro, because I already had enough money,” he said. “All I ever wanted to do was play competitive golf against the best players in the world.”

The game had changed since the 1920s and 1930s. He concluded that he couldn’t become the greatest golfer of all time as an amateur. So in November 1961, Nicklaus did something Bob Jones never did. He sent a letter to the USGA announcing he would turn professional.

MORE THAN ANYTHING
, the Jones legacy affected Nicklaus in the following way: the major championships were the highest priorities. To be the best, one must beat the best in the biggest tournaments. Everything else was a sideshow and preparatory work. The four professional majors were the Masters, the United States Open, the British Open, and the PGA Championship. Nicklaus looked at golf through these major-tinted spectacles.

“Jack made majors so much bigger than anything else,” says Johnny Miller. “It used to be that a major was a little bit bigger than say a Western Open or a L.A. Open or a Colonial. But they weren’t that much bigger. Jack made them like the majors were the only thing, then everybody really started separating the majors from everything else.”

Everything Nicklaus did, from his schedule to his practice, was designed around the majors. His affliction was “majoritis” as Miller calls it. “Jack put a premium on major championships,” says Billy Casper. “He trained himself to play in major championships.”