Jack Nicklaus finished runner-up in 19 major championships, so the Golden Bear let a few big ones get away, but the Memorial Tournament founder and host avoided letting one of the biggest prizes slip the hook.
Nicklaus regaled the media June 2 with a fish story that earned him one of the most precious trophies of his career. Days before playing in the 1978 Australian Open, Nicklaus went fishing along the Great Barrier Reef with fellow golfers Ben Crenshaw, Bruce Lietzke and Jerry Pate and friends Pandel Savic and Bob Hoag.
“We fished three or four days, got a few fish,” Nicklaus said. “The last day I got over a big fish.”
Big? More like massive. Nicklaus, an avid fisherman, hooked a black marlin that weighed 1,358 pounds and took 6.5 hours to land. The fish measured longer and larger in girth than the existing world record of 1,560 pounds caught off Peru in 1953, but because the fish was out of water for 10 hours before getting weighed, it lost body weight due to dehydration.
Nicklaus recalls almost every detail of the catch, including the bait (14-pound Bonita) and 130-pound test line.
“My left knee went out in the first hour. It gave out and and I had to fight it stiff-legged,” he said.
The man vs. fish marathon took a lot out of Nicklaus (and even more out of the marlin), so much that he was a bit of a physical mess when he showed up at the golf course on Tuesday of tournament week.
“I topped my first tee shot into the bushes right in front of the tee,” he said. “And shot 74 the first round.”
Nicklaus returned to his guest house after the 74 and immediately went out to play tennis.
“I hurt my shoulder doing that,” he said, adding that he attended a party the same night with ice packs on his shoulder and a “horse medicine” anti-inflamatory in his system. “I didn’t think I was going to be able to play anymore. I got up the next morning and said, ‘I have to give it a try,’ and went out and shot 67. Then I won the tournament. It was an exciting week for me.”
Reeling in the marlin may even have been a bigger thrill than winning the tournament. Either way, the fish remains mounted in a Nicklaus guest house in Florida. The Bear’s wife, Barbara, placed a red flag on the pectoral fin so no one would suffer a neck wound running into it.
“The fish got brought back across the Pacific, and the box it was in, every place it stopped people wrote on it, ‘Great fish, Jack. Nice going. Great.’ I still have the box.”
Not all his golf trophies get that kind of royal treatment.
Jack Nicklaus one of 19 non-band members to dot ‘i’ in Script Ohio at Ohio State football
The Golden Bear is a huge Buckeyes fan − he attended Ohio State in the late 1950s − who dotted the “i” in 2006 at halftime of a game against Minnesota.
“They spelled it right and I got my footwork right,” Nicklaus said on the sideline after tipping his cap to the crowd. “That was pretty neat. I’m a pretty emotional guy, and Ohio State means a lot to me.”
Jack and Barbara, who try to attend at least one OSU home game a season, keep close tabs on how the Buckeyes are performing.
Jack Nicklaus’ long putt heard round the golf world
Nicklaus was famous for making putts he absolutely had to make to win tournaments, but his most amazing putt did not happen in a tournament. At a course opening ceremony in Harbor Shores, Michigan, in 2010, he drained a 102-foot putt after Johnny Miller claimed the only way to make the shot was by chipping it.
“There’s no chance putting it,” Miller said, to which Nicklaus responded, “Why, you (just) hit a good putt. Want me to show you how to putt it?”
Nicklaus proceeded to bury the putt and shrugged as the crowd around the green cheered.
Jack Nicklaus’ vision was to bring championship golf to Columbus
If not for Nicklaus deciding to pay back Columbus for how well it treated him while growing up, the 8,000 or so residents of Muirfield Village likely would be living elsewhere. Because there would be no Muirfield Village.
Nicklaus first conceived of Muirfield Village Golf Club in the mid-1960s, the idea being to build a first-rate course that would attract the best players in the world.
“We started out to do a tournament for the central Ohio area, to bring golf back here to a place where I was supported as a youngster, to thank them for all that they did for my life,” Nicklaus said. “And part of that was I wanted to bring first-class golf here.”
Vision-casting with fellow Upper Arlington graduate Ivor Young during off-hours at the 1966 Masters, the friends talked of bringing a Masters-type tournament to Columbus. Young, who worked in real estate, found nearly a dozen pieces of property for Nicklaus to consider.
“The first piece of property I looked at was right here,” Nicklaus said, approximating how the project began with the purchase of about 100 acres, then a second 100 and then 1,100 bought from a group in Cincinnati, which added land where holes 11, 12, 14 and 15 sit.
Given his druthers, Nicklaus would have prefered no houses encircle the course, but he needed housing to finance the golf project, so 1,200 acres of farmland and forest became a golf mecca hosting the Memorial.
Sports columnist Rob Oller can be reached at roller@dispatch.com and on X.com at @rollerCD.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: What to know about Jack Nicklaus, who has a big fish tale to tell
Reporting by Rob Oller, Columbus Dispatch / The Columbus Dispatch
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