He tried unsuccessfully to make light of the moment. As he trudged up to the 18th green Friday, looking weary and heavy, he pointed to his ball, then to himself and mouthed to the SRO grandstand, “Me?”
The gallery laughed uneasily. Wasn’t this quite possibly the man’s last U.S. Open? Wasn’t Jack Nicklaus about to shoot 80-something and miss the cut? In perfect sunlight, foggy emotions hung on the fault line between cheers and tears.
Yes, this was Nicklaus’ ball. Yes, he had done something he hadn’t allowed himself to do for more than 20 years at Pebble Beach. He had gone for broke and hit his driver off the 18th tee. He had broken his rule and gone for the green in two. From 238 yards, he had hit a 3-wood he’ll never forget.
“I hit it right dead on the screws,” Nicklaus said, then caught himself. “We don’t have screws in metal woods.”
It seems as if Jack Nicklaus played his first Open in the days of hickory shafts. This was his 44th. Hale Irwin is second with 31. Nicklaus is 60 years old, Irwin 55.
Think about that: 44 Opens in 60 years.
No man has competed at a higher level for longer than Jack William Nicklaus. Eighteen major titles, including four Opens. No sports performer has ever given more people more reasons to applaud with awe.
But now the game he once dominated was getting even, stringing him along, teasing and tormenting this war horse. In tennis and the team sports, your body tells you when it’s time to retire. Golf you can play forever, or so the greatest player ever would like to believe.
Now Nicklaus has an artificial hip. Now he has gained back an aging chunk of his boyish Fat Jack weight. Now, on perhaps his final Open hole, his reality-checking 27th of the day, Nicklaus was battling his most fearsome foe, his pride.
Golf, the cruelest game, always seems to let you hit that one perfect shot on 18 that brings you back after you’ve vowed to quit. Nicklaus had just hit that shot. The man who has attempted more eagle putts than anyone ever had one more.
“I hit the ball today and yesterday the best I’ve hit it in four or five years,” he said later, fighting his pride. Nicklaus has said something like that after nearly every major championship the last four or five years. Once more he said he’s “close to playing really well.”
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Nicklaus locked in that laser-eyed concentration and crouched over his 40-foot putt. He wanted to snake it in, to hear the roar, to give himself a reason to return. But tears blurred his vision.
He topped the putt, which tailed off 10 feet short. He turned his hat sideways, acting like a weekend hack, unsuccessfully trying to undercut the tension. His birdie putt curled short of the cup. The par gave him an 82.
Imagine the humiliation he must have felt. Yet, with his wife and four sons waiting to help him through the night, his postround interview was a study in self-debate and denial.
He said chances are “very slim” he’d play another Open, even if he qualified by winning the U.S. Senior Open. But the more he talked about his chances of winning the Senior Open, the more he sounded like a man who still wants to compete in real Opens. He is not ready, he said, for “leisure golf” at his home course.
“If I happen to win [the Senior],” he said, “and I was playing real well and decided I wanted to play [next year’s Open at Southern Hills], I’d play.”
Then resignation regained control: “I don’t want to play if I can’t. I hit the ball [Thursday and Friday] the best I have in years and shot 155. That means I don’t have the skill around the greens anymore, I don’t have the concentration or I just don’t have the game anymore.”
Pebble Beach, which occupies one of the warmest spots in his heart, was “a fitting place to stop.”
Then: “I’m still dumb enough to think I could come here and compete in this tournament. I’ll probably go back to the locker room and kick my locker and say, `When am I going to go out and practice to get better?’ That’s stupid, but that’s the way I am.”
Nicklaus calls the Open a “total examination” of a golfer. But the tears were blurring what he saw through the microscope. He should stop. But he can’t.
“See you next year at the Open,” he said as his interview ended. His audience laughed. But deep down Jack Nicklaus hoped he wasn’t kidding.