Whatever Happened to That Fat Kid Who Used to Beat Arnie?

Jack William Nicklaus has won 19 major tournaments and 70 tour events. He has won the United States Open four times, the British Open three times, the Masters and the PGA five times each, and the U.S. Amateur twice.

It is a stupendous record. It is like breaking both Ty Cobb’s and Babe Ruth’s records at once, with Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game streak thrown in.

But to a lot of us, it is not Jack Nicklaus’ greatest achievement in life. Jack Nicklaus’ greatest achievement lay in beating Jack Nicklaus. Time after time. He was the only guy in golf who could do it.

You see, there are two Jack Nicklauses. There is the Jack Nicklaus who won the first 20 tournaments, including his first two U.S. Opens, his first three Masters, his two amateur titles and his first PGA and his first British Open.

He was a fat kid who practically waddled when he walked. He looked like a sack of pork chops going down a fairway. His clothing fit him like a tent. He burped a lot. He had this crewcut that made him look like a two-ton shaving brush. People thought he had come to paint the clubhouse or move the dining room piano when he showed up for a tournament.

The wags were ready. “Where’s Laurel, Hardy?” they wanted to know when Jack showed up on the first tee. It was a great part for Edward Arnold. There wasn’t an oyster in America safe.

The resentment on the part of the galleries was total. Arnold Palmer was America’s sweetheart at the time, and the spectacle of this out-of-shape kid turning back the All-American Army’s leader in U.S. Opens and Masters tournaments was almost more than they could bear.

The crowds didn’t bother Nicklaus. Palmer didn’t bother Nicklaus. But Nicklaus began to bother Nicklaus. That, and the criticism from a few lords of the pen whose silhouettes were hardly any daintier than his. The “This is an athlete?” barbs began to pierce even Jack’s dense hide.

That’s when Nicklaus won the biggest tournament of all. He routed that fat kid on the front nine as easily as he could beat any other careless amateur and replaced him with a golfer whose long golden locks and svelte shape made him look like a cross between Lochinvar and a male model.

It was a daring move. Golfers are just as superstitious as other athletes, and you don’t change what’s working--even if it’s runaway fat. The prevailing theory was, it could cost Nicklaus 50 yards on his drives, and he would be merely long, not unbelievable. There is a theory in golf that you hit the ball with your butt in the final analysis, and all of a sudden, Nicklaus didn’t have one.

Nicklaus, the notion went, had not only tinkered recklessly with his profile, he had tinkered fatally with his swing.

Whenever he missed a cut, or even a putt, the ravens came out. Nicklaus had melted himself into just another blond out there, trying to make the top 60 and exemption. Samson had cut his own hair. In the interest of looking better at the dance and being able to wear beltless slacks, Nicklaus had thrown away the most awesome golf game anyone had ever seen.

Nicklaus didn’t buy it. Nicklaus never went back to oysters by the dozen, prawns by the bucket or hamburgers by the ton.

He never went back to buying his clothes at awning outlets.

His golf game did not fall off with his stomach. He did go back to winning golf tournaments--50 of them since he changed shapes, not counting six Australian Opens and countless others worldwide.

Anyone can lose weight. Any dieter knows that. Other golfers did. Temporarily. Jack Nicklaus did it for life. Jack went from blond blob to Golden Bear without any noticeable structural damage to his game. In fact, the new Nicklaus went six years--105 tournaments--without missing a cut.

Fat is a par-five. Fat does not yield easily. But Nicklaus can handle par-fives. No one was to mix him up with Orson Welles or describe him as Ohio Fats ever again.

There is a whole generation that doesn’t even know that the other Nicklaus existed. A stranger peers out of photographs of that era at them, a Nicklaus with which this generation is not familiar.

The Nicklaus everybody knows flew into California the other day to check his superb Bear Creek course down on I-15 hard by Murrieta, where the Skins Game golf tournament is to be played Nov. 30-Dec. 1. Fuzzy Zoeller, Tom Watson, and Arnold Palmer are the other contestants in this unique battle where $350,000 can dangle on a single putt. Last year, $240,000 did, and Nicklaus made it.

Jack is 45 now. That is two years past the age of the oldest U.S. Open winner but three years shy of the age of Julius Boros when he won the PGA in 1968.

Nicklaus is conceding no more to age than he did to weight. “I don’t feel I’d be here now if it weren’t for taking off that weight 16 years ago,” he said. “I didn’t ruin my game, I saved it. And I’m not packing it in now. My kids won’t let me.”

Wasn’t there ever a time when he duck-hooked one in the water or left a ball in the deep rough that he questioned the advisability of changing the shape that already had won him seven majors?

“No,” Nicklaus said. “In fact, it wasn’t till this year when I went on the ‘Eat to Win’ diet, which lets you eat all the pasta and baked potatoes you want, that I felt I dropped too much weight. I dropped 20 pounds, and my golf game wasn’t good. It wasn’t the endurance, but there was something lacking, and I got back up to 190 for this year.

“Pride carries you a long way in this game. You have to feel good about yourself to last, and I couldn’t have felt good about myself indefinitely carrying that weight around.”

The Skins Game matches players who have won 169 PGA tournaments among them. But the interesting thing would be if some guy who saw the ’62 and ’67 Opens, then went away to a monastery for 17 years, came back and pointed to the foursome and said, “Say, isn’t that Arnie Palmer out there with the white hair? But tell me, who’s that skinny kid with him with the long blond hair?”