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"Now Be Quiet." Jack Nicklaus has rarely been rattled since. Says his father:"Once, when he was 15, I was driving him to a tournament. I started to en courage him and tell him 'You're good enough to win this.' He told me, 'I know it. Now be quiet." At 16, Nicklaus won his first major tournament, the Ohio Open, from a full field of professionals—shooting a record first round 64 and leading all the way. Meanwhile, he was making quite a reputation for himself as an all-round athlete. "When he was in junior high," recalls his father, "he told me he wanted to play football. I told him, 'Aw, you're not fast enough.' One night he came home to dinner and casually asked if I was going to the track meet that night. I said, 'Why should I?' He said, 'Because I'm running.' " That night, competing against older boys. Jack won the 100-and 220-yd. dashes, anchored the winning 880-yd. relay team, placed second in the high jump and broad jump. Says Charlie: "He came home that night, handed me the ribbons he'd won, and said, 'Do you think I'm fast enough for football now?' "
At Upper Arlington High School, Jack was varsity baseball catcher and a four-year letterman in basketball, averaging 18 points a game during his senior year. Scholarship offers poured in from a dozen colleges. "He was talking about how much this one or that one had offered him, how good a deal he could get," says Charlie. "I told him to stop thinking about the fun and money and think about the education." Jack's choice: home-town Ohio State University—without a scholarship.
At Ohio State, Nicklaus began winning everything in sight: Walker Cup matches, England's Grand Challenge Cup, the North and South Amateur, the Trans-Mississippi, and the U.S. Amateur (at 19, he was the youngest amateur champion in 50 years). He also won himself a wife, Barbara, a child, Jack II, an insurance business, and more worries than he could shoulder. "I was trying to do three jobs at once," he says, "and I wasn't doing justice to any of them. My grades were falling off. I wasn't making as much money from insurance as I knew I could. My golf wasn't good—and I don't enjoy playing bad golf." Nicklaus decided to quit both college and the insurance business temporarily and turn pro. "I figured if I could make a good living doing what I liked best, why not?"
No More Fats. In those first few frustrating months on the pro tour, making money but not winning, Nicklaus patiently retooled his game, aiming for the kind of versatility that would allow him to play under any conditions, on any kind of course. He worked off the 25 excess pounds that had his fellow pros calling him "Ohio Fats" (in college, his nicknames were "Blob-O" and "Whaleman." He also had to learn to adjust to the nomadic life of a pro: until last week, when he decided to take a few days off and fish for trout, Jack had been home for only 17 days since January. When he wearily pulled up outside his modest, green-shuttered Cape Cod in suburban Upper Arlington, Ohio, his neighbors were ready for him: WELCOME HOME, 1962 OPEN CHAMP read a banner hanging from the roof. P.S., SOMEONE ALREADY MOWED YOUR LAWN.