Players Compete at Sherwood for $1 Million : Golf: Event on new Nicklaus-designed layout in Thousand Oaks is likely to raise $1.5 million for charity.

Jack Nicklaus recently thunked a golf ball into a 400-year-old oak tree on the 16th hole of the Sherwood Country Club course that he designed in Thousand Oaks. He claimed that the last time he played on the course, the tree was not there.

The possibilities:

A--Four hundred years elapsed between Nicklaus’ first and second rounds on the course.

B--Someone put the 400-year-old, 100-foot, 25-ton tree onto the 16th hole.

C--Nicklaus was taking flu medication and was delirious.

All three answers seem ludicrous, but B actually is correct.

Under orders from Nicklaus and course builder David Murdock, workers have transplanted nearly 1,000 giant oaks in the last year, leaving the brand-new course with the look of a centuries-old layout.

The course, which has begun offering memberships at $100,000 to a group of 375 potential members, and the surrounding 1,000 acres that include new homes priced up to $12 million, will be unveiled Tuesday when Nicklaus, Palmer, Greg Norman, Tom Kite, Curtis Strange, Lee Trevino, Raymond Floyd, Bernhard Langer and more than a dozen other top golfers begin activities related to competition for a $1-million purse in the Norman-organized Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities Invitational.

The pros will play in two-man teams next Friday, Saturday and Sunday, using an alternate-shot format the first day, best-ball Saturday and scramble Sunday.

Norman, who played the course for the first time two weeks ago, along with Nicklaus, said he expects to raise nearly $1.5 million for the McDonald’s charities. Eighty pro-am spots for Wednesday and Thursday were sold for $20,000 each, and about 2,500 six-day spectator passes have been sold at $200 each. Other revenue will come from sponsors.

Norman said that all checks from pro-am participants and from spectators buying the six-day passes have been made out directly to the Ronald McDonald fund.

“We’ve already put more than a million dollars into the charity fund, and I’ve taken extreme caution to make sure that the rest of the money is handled correctly,” Norman said. “I have no concerns at all about where the money will end up.”

The $1-million purse was donated by McDonald’s. ESPN will televise next Friday’s action, and ABC will televise the final two rounds.

The field also includes Mark O’Meara, Peter Jacobsen, Tom Weiskopf, Mark Calcavecchia, Steve Jones, Hal Sutton, Lanny Wadkins, Hale Irwin, Bruce Lietzke, John Mahaffey, Andy Bean and Chip Beck. Norman said that only Seve Ballesteros turned down an offer to play in the event, because he had another commitment.

“The whole tournament has been a very special deal for me,” said Norman, who won the 1986 British Open and also was the PGA Tour’s top money winner that year. “It was my idea, and I wanted to do something different, which explains the three different formats.”

He also praised Nicklaus, who will be his playing partner here.

“After just one look at the course, I could tell it was a typical Jack Nicklaus course,” he said. “It is a demanding course, and if you miss a shot you pay the price.”

Norman also took the opportunity to give Nicklaus, 49, a jab.

“My problem with the tournament is that I’ve got to put up with playing with an old man,” he said, smiling and glancing across the tee at the winner of 71 PGA tournaments.

Nicklaus, who has designed dozens of golf courses, said designing the 7,020-yard Sherwood layout--with Murdock’s money--was the most enjoyable.

“To be involved with a project with a quality level so high has been fun,” he said. “I’ve never seen things done at quite this level before. The golf course was pretty much here all along. I just had to find it and carve it out. This golf course looks like it’s been here forever.”

And despite clanging a few of his own shots off a few of the hundreds of transplanted oak trees, Nicklaus said he’s glad it was done.

“The concern and attention to details in building this course are unsurpassed,” he said. “Moving all those oak trees, for example. That is something that has, to my knowledge, never been done before on this scale in golf course architecture.”