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He shambled across the 18th green like a young grizzly bear, his pudgy face ruddy from the sun, his white cotton shirt soggy with sweat, his cream-colored cap perched precariously on the back of his close-cropped blond head. Tournament officials clustered anxiously on the apron while grey-uniformed state troopers strained to hold back the surging gallery; on all sides, TV cameras zeroed in to carry the scene to 9,000,000 home viewers across the nation. But Jack Nicklaus might have been alone on a practice green for all the emotion he displayed. Intently, impassively, he hunched over his 2-ft. putt. Daintily, deliberately, he stroked the ball toward the hole. When it plunked safely into the cup, he permitted himself a change of expression—a boyish grin and tip of his cap to the crowd. With that putt, at 22 and in his first year as a professional golfer, burly Jack Nicklaus had won the biggest golf tournament of them all: the U.S. Open.
The youngest U.S. champion in 39 years, Nicklaus has not yet finished college (he has two quarters to go at Ohio State), but he won last week's Open with a rare blend of mature skill and courage, withstanding pressures fierce enough to unnerve the most seasoned competitor. In a tense, head-to-head play-off before a hostile gallery, Nicklaus beat the world's best-known golfer, Arnold Palmer, grimly refusing to yield to a classic Palmer surge, and winning finally by the comfortable margin of three strokes, 71 to 74. To get into the playoff, Nicklaus had to defeat 148 top-ranked pros and amateurs, including Defending Open Champion Gene Littler. To beat them, he put together rounds of 72, 70, 72, 69 for a 72-hole total of 283 that tied the competitive course record* at Pennsylvania's Oakmont Country Club, one of the country's most exacting golf courses. When it was all over and he had beaten Palmer as well, Jack Nicklaus had stamped himself the No. 1 challenger for Palmer's uneasy crown—a confident, talented prodigy whose bold, intimidating game and precocious poise should keep him at the top for many years.
Make a Million. The record books are full of young flashes who blaze briefly and then fade into the pack of good but not great professional golfers. Nicklaus seems to be made of sterner stuff. Twice National Amateur champion (in 1959 and 1961), Nicklaus was, until his decision to turn pro last November, the most talked-about amateur since Bobby Jones. He played in his first U.S. Open as a fuzzy-cheeked 17-year-old. In 1960, at 20, he finished second by two strokes to Palmer, and his 72-hole score of 282 was the lowest ever shot by an amateur in the Open. That same year, in the World Amateur Team championship at Pennsylvania's Merion Golf Club, Nicklaus put together consecutive rounds of 66, 67, 68, 68 for a brilliant 269—a full 18 strokes lower than Ben Hogan's score at Merion when he won the 1950 Open. In amateur match play, he was almost unbeatable: in one season, he won 29 of the 30 matches he played. "People expected me to win," he says, "and I expected to win. If I didn't, I felt like a bum."