An event held at one of the most challenging courses on the PGA Tour in Muirfield Village, the Memorial Tournament is being contested for the 50th time this week.
And Jack Nicklaus, of course, the founder, the man who located the land, designed the course with assistance from Desmond Muirhead, helped raise the money to build the track, and negotiated with the PGA Tour to secure a date, has been here through it all.
It was the spring of 1966 when the idea came to him, but in those days, there wasn’t really a PGA Tour yet, at least not in the form we know today. That wouldn’t happen for two more years.
“We started the idea of the tournament and bringing golf to Columbus in 1966 at Augusta,” Nicklaus recalled earlier this week. “So, it took us 10 years to get the golf course built, financed, and move forward.”
He credits his determination. A lesser person probably would have given up, but Jack Nicklaus has never been called a lesser anything.
Later that year, in the middle of the summer, Nicklaus would complete the career Grand Slam for the first of three times with a British Open victory at Muirfield, which he called a place where he wasn’t supposed to win.
“It was a golf course with very narrow fairways, very high rough, not typical of what Jack Nicklaus would, they thought in 1966, could win at,” he explained. “But I was so proud of that, that this place became Muirfield or Muirfield Village.”
Nicklaus, like many Midwesterners, cuts right to the chase, no fluff, just facts, and he’s quick to add that he had help from a lot of people to get to his goal.
First was the land, which he was familiar with because he and his father, Charlie, who was a pharmacist, used to hunt on the property. It wasn’t easy to buy it all.
It ultimately took six years, and after all that, there was one holdout, a house near the 10th green that remained for roughly two decades until the owners decided to sell. It was somewhere near the intersection of Kilbannon Court and Carnoustie Drive today, but in the early years, the course was just built up without concern for it.
Nicklaus knew he would need an expert in land planning, someone who knew how to create all the drawings and paperwork necessary for the powers that made development decisions in Franklin and Delaware Counties.
He contacted Desmond Muirhead, who had designed many courses on his own, including the Mission Hills Country Club course that hosted the Nabisco Dinah Shore for decades, as well as Mayacoo Lakes in West Palm Beach, Bent Tree in Dallas, The Springs in Rancho Mirage, and many others.
Now, Nicklaus wanted Memorial Day weekend for the tournament, and he had to jump through some hoops to get it.
“Joe Dey was head commissioner of the Tour, and Joe came out here and walked in the mud with me,” Nicklaus recalled. “To get the date we got, we ended up having to do two years of -- I don't know what you call it, serving -- whatever you want to call it. In Cincinnati, we had two years at Kings Island, which was the forerunner of the Memorial Tournament.”
It was actually four years, but time tends to fly the older a person gets. Let today’s Einsteins explain that one.
And so, an event was played at the Jack Nicklaus Golf Center in Mason, Ohio, northeast of Cincinnati, from 1973 to 1977. Nicklaus won the first one and donated his check to charity. With the majority of his winnings, he set up an Ohio State scholarship in his father’s name and donated the rest to the Boy Scouts. The victory was also his 50th career win and his sixth title of 1973.
In addition to extracting a favor from Nicklaus, Dey had the idea to honor people in golf because this new tournament was going to be around Memorial Day. Nicklaus loved that idea but didn’t want to be in charge of selecting an honoree.
Luckily, Dey had another idea. According to Nicklaus, Dey said something along the lines of, “I think we ought to get a group of people, of golfing statesmen, which we'll call the Captains Club, and that Captains Club will be the guiding light and take the pressure off of you and off your shoulders.”
The Captains Club would also select players to receive exemptions to the tournament.
Meanwhile, the course was being built, and it opened in 1974. The result was breathtaking, but it would be two more years before it would host a PGA Tour event.
Now, no tournament can succeed without the help of local leaders, and what the Memorial did was to pick up the work of the Columbus Pro-Am, sponsored by The Columbus Dispatch newspaper and Columbus Children’s Hospital. The Memorial continued that charitable aspect and won the support of the community. Proceeds from the tournament, which began in 1976, went to Dispatch Charities and Columbus Children’s Hospital.
One of the early Captains Club members was Augusta National’s co-founder, Cliff Roberts, who gave Nicklaus a huge compliment when he said, after 10 seasons of The Memorial, “You've got an opportunity to do here in 10 years what it's taken us 40 to do at Augusta.”
He offered to share what they had learned.
“My books are open to you,” Roberts told Nicklaus. “Whatever you want to know and whatever we can do to help you, it's open.”
The first playing of the Memorial Tournament was in 1976, beginning on May 27th, 50 years to the day that Nicklaus met with media this year.
In the first few tournaments, the greens at Muirfield Village were frighteningly fast. They were so fast that on the fifth hole, a par-5 with a creek crossing the fairway about halfway up the hole, it was nearly impossible for golfers to hold the green with a long second shot.
If they were able to do that somehow, or even if they made it a three-shot hole, it was not unusual for the ball to roll off the green after a first putt.
“The early years, we didn't know,” Nicklaus explained. “Ed Etchells was our superintendent. I remember, was it '79 that Watson won? Is that correct? (He asked the PGA Tour experts in the media center, and it is correct). And that's the year that Ed was more about making sure that nobody could play the golf course and had the greens get as fast -- he got the greens over 17 on Sunday.”
Other greens were also lightning speed, but the slope of the fifth was incredible, and it was nearly impossible to putt.
In the first year, Roger Maltbie, wearing some incredible patchwork madras pants, won in a playoff over Hale Irwin. The next year, Nicklaus won his own tournament in a Monday finish.
“I have always felt that that was probably the most difficult tournament that I had ever won, hardest because of what I did as it relates to the tournament,” Nicklaus recalled. “I was out picking up papers all the time, stuffing them in -- I don't remember who was caddying for me, probably Angelo was probably caddying for me at the time. I don't know.
"Stuffing them in his pockets and checking stakes in the ground, and if I saw something here, I wrote it down, and Barbara would come in with her checklist at night, I saw this out there, and that. So, we would go through that, try to get it fixed the next day.”
As far as memorable play on any of the holes, Nicklaus called out the short par-4 14th. But it didn’t happen during the tournament.
“I think 14 is a really challenging hole, it's an easy hole, it's a dangerous hole, it's a pretty hole. It's got all the elements there that you could want,” he said, adding that he had made three eagles on it. “I don't know any other hole that I've holed three shots from off the green to make twos anywhere in the world.”
While Nicklaus has had many memorable moments at Muirfield Village, this year will special for another reason, and that’s because the tournament honoree is Barbara Nicklaus.
Nicklaus’ son, Gary, came to him with the idea, and they then got Charlie Meecham, a member of the Captains Club and former LPGA Commissioner, involved. Meecham canvassed the Captains, except for Barbara, and it was unanimous. When her name came up, they said the tribute was long overdue.
“From day one, she's been the guiding light for good common sense and good judgment, and the Tour wives have all, you know, looked up to Barbara and where she's gone and what she's done. The people that have come into this tournament, many, many have come here because of Barbara,” Nicklaus noted.
There have been previous female honorees, with Patty Berg being the first in 1988 and Babe Zaharias the second in 1991. But they were all either excellent professionals or exceptional amateurs.
But this year, for the first time, after 50 years of the tournament, the Captains Club selected a non-golf professional, a non-golf amateur, a non-golf administrator, as the honoree.
In their selection of Barbara Nicklaus, they are recognizing the lifetime achievements of someone who has made significant personal contributions to communities, children, and families through her charitable endeavors and with the power of her personality, as well as her caring nature.
Before this week, Barbara Nicklaus had already received the initial First Lady in Golf award from the PGA of America, the USGA's Bob Jones Award, the PGA of America's Distinguished Service Award, and so on and so on.
So, while Jack may get most of the attention at the Memorial (or anywhere in the golf world, for that matter), it's great to see Barbara, the true center of the Nicklaus family, receive her just due at Muirfield.