Dan Jenkins: The Greatest Masters

Nicklaus walks in his birdie putt on the 17th hole Sunday.

When it was all over, including the shouting, Nicklaus sat in front of the 300 writers and explained the meaning of winning the Masters in "the December of my career." He said he never heard the crowds roar so loudly. "There were only three other times that compared," he said. "The 1972 British Open at Muirfield when I lost to Trevino, the 1978 British Open when I won at St. Andrews and the 1980 U.S. Open I won at Baltusrol. It brought tears to my eyes.

"I'm not as good as I was 10 or 15 years ago," he went on to say. "I don't play as much competitive golf as I used to, but there are still some weeks when I'm as good as I ever was."

There was nothing to recommend Nicklaus going into the week. He hadn't won a major in five years. He hadn't won a minor in almost two years. He had missed three cuts this year. His best finish of 1986 was a tie for 39th in Hawaii. It was even whispered on the clubhouse veranda that he was having business difficulties. But there was one thing nobody at Augusta noticed, except for Jack and maybe his caddie. Next to Ballesteros, Jack had played the best golf of the week tee to green. All he had to do was make some putts.

As usual, Jack gave credit to a short-game lesson he got from his son. This time it was Jackie who passed along a tip from Chi Chi Rodriguez to "take the hands out of the swing, firm up the left side and move more aggressively through the ball." (You may recall back in 1980, he was trying to put the hands into the swing, soften up the left side and move more passively through the ball.)

But the credit really belonged to that outrageous putter he used to hole all those putts. Jack has putted with an old George Low flange in almost every major he won. The last time he deviated and won was in the 1967 U.S. Open at Baltusrol, with a putter named "White Fang." Now he's using a putter he helped design at MacGregor, something on the order of an oversized Ping. What do we call this one? Fat Fang? Or how about, the Pregnant Ping? And what, God help us, will it do to the putting strokes across the country?

As for the rest of the year, Jack said he'll be playing a limited schedule: the Memorial, the U.S. Open, Canadian Open, British Open, PGA, the International and the World Series. "I'm not going to retire, guys," he said. "I'm not smart enough to do that."

Nicklaus' incredible feat in this Masters underscored the fact that there's something about the second weekend in April that's quite impossible to change. The golfing year starts in Augusta, Ga. You feel it every year. They can play the Tournament of Champions in January, and they can claim all kinds of privileges for the Tournament Players Championship in Ponte Vedra, Fla., in March, but it's the second weekend in April when true excitement and elegance kick in, when the golfing establishment assaults the veranda, when the world media congregates and when the players themselves know they're in the big time. At Augusta, there are no junk-food franchises sponsoring the marshals, no take-out restaurants catering to the press, and the only logo to be seen on everything from a visor to a paper clip is that of the Augusta National.

The Masters is a sell-out annually, and even the scalpers mind their manners. Outside the club property, across the street from Magnolia Drive, a man was selling Masters hats this year. Someone had been told to go see him for a ticket. "I'm not selling tickets," the proprietor of the hat stand said. "I'm selling hats."

Strangely, the hats for sale had what looked like Masters tickets pinned to them.

"How much is a hat?" said an interested buyer to the man in the hat stand.

"Eight hundred and fifty dollars."

In the Augusta National golf shop, the articles with Masters logos virtually fly out of the room--the jackets, caps, towels, ashtrays, shirts, coasters, etc.

Very early in the week, a souvenir hunter wandered over to the jewelry and glassware counter, interested in pendants, money clips, paperweights.

"I'd like to have one of those Masters paperweights," he said to the lady behind the counter.

"Sir, I'm sorry," the lady said. "A Japanese gentleman was just here and bought the only 60 we ordered."

As most Masters junkies know, the Augusta National does not have a pro-am or a clinic, but it does have the Par-3 Tournament on Wednesday, a chance for everyone in the select field to gather some crystal they may not be able to collect during the tournament proper. The Par-3 is more like a picnic than a competition, but the crowds are enormous. No winner of the Par-3 has ever gone ahead to capture the Masters, and Gary Koch was no exception this time.

For most, the high point of this year's Par-3 was noticing a group of spectators in Bob Tway's gallery wearing shirts that said: "Tway's Twoops." The sighting of these people together with the fact that PGA Tour Commissioner Deane Beman was the only establishment person missing from the Augusta veranda said something, in a curious way, about where the sport has come in America since the days of "Arnie's Army," or even "Lee's Fleas." How could the commissioner not have been present at what is undeniably golf's foremost social occasion? And is "Tway's Twoops" the tenor of the humor we can expect from the future of the PGA Tour? What Beman missed, of course, was one of golf's most epic occasions.