Player Plays It Safe and Nicklaus Cashes In : Senior Skins Game: Opportunity goes by the wayside, and Nicklaus wins $285,000 with an eagle in playoff.

A mental lapse by Gary Player helped Jack Nicklaus escape from a moonscape-like lava flow and go on to the biggest payday of his career.

“I’ve always prided myself on course management,” Player said Sunday after struggling through a three-hole playoff with Nicklaus in the Senior Skins Game.

“But this time I made a mistake. I blanked out. I don’t know what it was. I just wasn’t thinking,” said Player, who had Nicklaus on the rocks but let him get away.

“A tough way to go out,” said Player, who, along with Chi Chi Rodriguez, was shut out during this two-day event.

Nicklaus, on the other hand, turned his escape on the second playoff hole and an eagle putt of about 40 feet on the third into a $310,000 payoff, $285,000 of it coming on the 21st hole of play on the Francis H. Brown course at the Mauna Lani Resort.

“By far the biggest payday I’ve ever had,” said Nicklaus, holder of a record 18 major professional championships.

The big check compares, for example, with the $113,285 he collected as the PGA Tour’s leading money winner in 1964. It was larger, in fact, than his season total in seven of the eight years he led the tour in winnings.

Lee Trevino won $125,000 and Arnold Palmer $15,000, both from Saturday’s first nine holes.

Nicklaus pocketed all that was available Sunday on that dramatic eagle putt, but the event turned as he scrambled for par on the second extra hole, the par-five 18th.

With Palmer, Trevino and Rodriguez eliminated, it was a head-to-head struggle between Nicklaus and his old friend and golfing foe, Player.

Nicklaus, trying to stay away from a bunker on the left, hit into the lava rocks on the right.

“When he got it into the rocks,” Player said, “I thought, ‘I can win it with a (par) five,’

“And I played it for a five. That was my mistake,” he said, and shook his head. “I wasn’t thinking right.”

Player got the five he was playing for, but so did Nicklaus.

After a penalty drop from the rocks, he hit a 243-yard three-wood third shot over the lava, around a palm tree and onto the left fringe of the green, 40 feet from the hole. He two-putted for par, making a five-foot putt that had him shivering his shoulders in relief.

They went back to the tee on the par-five 10th for the third playoff hole. Both drove into the fairway and went for the green with their second shots. Player reached the front fringe with a fairway wood and Nicklaus hit a two-iron to the back left fringe.

Player missed his long putt.

As Nicklaus hit his putt, he yelled, “It’s going! It’s going!” and when it took the break and began to fall, he said, “It’s in!”

The eagle concluded a round played in ideal conditions. Six of the first 11 holes were halved with birdies, and Player had a tap-in left for a birdie when Nicklaus dropped his eagle.

“It seemed either we all made the putts, or none of us made the putts,” Nicklaus said.

Palmer, 61, played his 18 holes in six-under-par 66. He birdied three of the first four holes Sunday, yet won nothing.

Trevino also had a 66. Nicklaus was eight under for the 12 holes he played Sunday.