Golden Hours of The Golden Bear

Every year when the azalea and eucalyptus bushes begin to bloom in the citrus belt, the winter golf tour gets underway and people begin to wonder if Jack Nicklaus will reassert his dominance or if the golden hours of the Golden Bear are finally winding down.

Last weekend, for the umpteenth time, Nicklaus unfurled one of his patented closing salvos to win the Jackie Gleason Inverrary tournament and shake off the pack of young lions who have been gobbling up the early prize money.

On the final day, Nicklaus was tied for the lead coming into the back nine with playing partner Gary Player and optometrist Gil Morgan. Nicklaus proceeded to out-distance the field for the $50,000 winner's chunk with three birdies and a masterful eagle on the 15th that gave him a four stroke lead.

On the 532-yard 15th, Nicklaus got his eagle by cranking out a drive that split the wasp-waisted fairway and then hitting a 235-yard two-iron shot that landed fizzing and kicking with backspin 30 feet beyond the flagstick.

This winter Nicklaus took his time emerging from hibernation, as he missed the cut in the Hawaian Open and finished well back in the other events. The five-stroke win was the Bear's 61st PGA victory, which ties him on the all-time list with "the little colossus" Ben Hogan, behind Sam Snead.

The glorious performance also put in proper perspective the success of flash-in-the-pans like Bruce Lietzke, Tom Purtzer, former NCAA champ Curtis Strange, and Fuzzy Zoeller, who finished third at Inverrary. The latter's real name is Frank Urwin Zoeller but because of his poor penmanship, he took to signing his autograph F.U.Z. and the nickname stuck.

Nicklaus's stunning two-iron was certainly no flash-in-the-pan as Jack began grooving his swing when he turned ten under the tutelage of Jack Grout, the well-known professional then at the Scioto Country Club in Ohio. Grout in turn had been an assistant to Henry Picard, who is regarded as the finest striker of a two-iron who ever lived. The newspapers loved to refer to Picard as "the chocolate soldier" because he was the pro at the Hershey, Pennsylvania golf club.

Nicklaus, the offpsring of a clan of brawney boiler-makers who emigrated to Columbus, Ohio from Alsace-Lorraine, carded a 51 the first time he every played nine holes.

The 13-year-old Jack stood 5 ft. 10 in., weighed 165 pounds, and when he eagled the 18th hole at Scioto for a 69, it was clear that a golfing prodigy had burst on the scene. At age 20 he reached the island green on the 50-yard seventeenth at Cherry Hills with a drive and a seven-iron.

In 1959 Nicklaus won his first U.S. amateur but played mediocre in 1960 despite almost winning the Open at Cherry Hills. What stamped Nicklaus as having the stuff of one of the game's greatest champions was his play later that year in the second World Amateur Championship for the Eisenhower Cup.

This is the international tournament in which Harvard's number one golfer Alex Vik played in this fall as a member of the Norwegian team. The American entry of Nicklaus, Deane Beman, Bob Gardner, and Bill Hyndman won the event held at Merion that year with Jack shooting rounds of 66, 67, 68 and 68, a full 18 strokes ahead of Hogan's total of 287 when he won the U.S. Open in 1950.

Seventeen years later the Bear is still astounding the golfing world. Last Sunday's victory had nostalgic over-tones as Nicklaus was paired with habitually grim-countenanced and sable-clad Gary Player--the last two survivors of the "the Big Four" of the mid-'60s.

Of course, Jackie Gleason graced his own tournament. A stalwart devotee of the game, Gleason invested $8000 for a Bicentennial golf cart sporting red-white-and-blue trim, CB radio, five-inch color TV, tape deck, electrically-powered roof, and ice box.

With his typical Ralph Cramden deadpan, Gleason has been known to compare golf to a chary woman, saying "you know you're not going to wind up with anything but grief, pal, but you can't resist the impulse."

For Jack Nicklaus's peers on the pro circuit the analogy might seem an appropriate one but the Bear's game has brought him very little grief over the years. Bobby Jones supplied the definitive and oft-quoted summary of Nicklaus's game when the one golf immortal speaking of the other said: "He plays a kind of golf of which I am not familiar."