You Don't Know Jack

Perhaps the lowest moment in your life was unwittingly dragging eight feet of toilet paper by your heel through the entire Nobel Peace Prize procession. Or maybe you accidentally served your new Amish in-laws pornographic fortune cookies. Or perhaps you sneezed a hocker into the sultan's soup. For me, it was when Jack Nicklaus's umbrella suddenly blew hideously inside out, causing me to lurch to save it, causing me to dump nearly all his golf clubs out of the bag onto the sopping turf, just as he asked me for a new ball, many of which were spilling from the bag and starting to run down a slope toward a bottomless chasm. This was not just the lowest moment of my life. It would've also been the lowest moment of a mole's life. It would've been the lowest moment of Shirley MacLaine's lives. � After all, I had convinced the greatest golfer in history that I was a real caddie who wouldn't mess up, wouldn't be a bother and, most of all, wouldn't embarrass him. Which was true, sort of. I wound up embarrassing only myself.

This moment actually surpassed in sheer agony the first time I met Nicklaus. That was 15 years earlier, the Wednesday of the 1986 Masters, the one that some people, including me, believe was the greatest Masters ever played, the one in which Nicklaus came from five down with nine to play, shot 30 on the back and won his sixth green jacket, at age 46, with his son Jackie on the bag, no less. That win is still the single largest cause of goose bumps since Freon.

It was not only my first Masters, but it was also my first golf tournament as a SPORTS ILLUSTRATED writer. I was 28, had a lump of Spam for a brain and was charged with writing the lead story, a job once filled by the great Dan Jenkins. The rumor was that Nicklaus—six years removed from his last major win—was in financial trouble. Word was that he'd overextended himself on some golf course projects and was up to his famous blond bangs in debt.

The editor said I had to ask the legend about it. I said I wasn't sure he'd be able to hear me over the knocking of my knees. Finally, on Wednesday, just as the famed man was about to walk into the famed Champions' Locker Room on the famed second floor of the famed Augusta National clubhouse, I said, timidly, "Uh, Mr. Nicklaus, can I ask you a question?" Suddenly my golf god was smiling at me and waiting for my question. And that's when I heard myself utter, "Uh, well, Mr. Nicklaus, we hear you're broke."

He stopped and stared a hole through my forehead. I really was hoping the old wooden floor beneath me would give way and suck me to a sudden and richly deserved death. Instead Nicklaus smiled, took my shoulder in his hand and said, "Now, son, where did you say you were from?"

Nicklaus gave me a very good interview that day. Said he was just overextended. Which he was. And he's still a good interview. Of all the thousands of athletes I've interviewed, Jack William Nicklaus is the most helpful, the most open and the most thoughtful. The man just never dodges a question, whether you're from 60 Minutes or the Toledo Blade.

Some players, dripping with sarcasm, call Nicklaus Carnac because he's got all the answers. I disagree. The reason that writers go to him on every subject under the sun and then quote him liberally is that Nicklaus gives such good answers, and answers every question. When Tiger Woods shot 74 on the first day of the 1997 U.S. Open at Congressional—after riding in on a monster hype machine—he refused to come into the interview tent. He just blew past a gaggle of 25 reporters as if we were a Stuckey's on 1-80. He'd been doing that a lot that year, and I finally asked Nicklaus, "Jack, did you ever do that?"

Nicklaus said something that was picked up all over the country. "Well," he said, "I just always thought if you fellas thought enough of me to wait around after my round and ask me a question, I ought to stop and answer it. I figured it was part of my job and part of yours." I noticed that Tiger never blew off the media at a major again.

So I begged Nicklaus for a caddie job. Any tournament, anywhere, anytime. But he always said no. He said, "The kids have too much fun doing it."

Nicklaus, now 63, is nuts about his four boys and one girl. He and his wife, Barbara, used to take all five of them to tournaments in their old station wagon and sleep in one room. Today, every playing father brings along a nanny, and some players who don't have kids bring one along, too, right, Tiger? The Nicklauses never had a nanny. Jack used to skip important tournaments just to watch his sons' high school football games. When he won the 1980 U.S. Open at Baltusrol, the victory dinner was at McDonald's because that's where his six-year-old, Michael, deemed it should be held.