A Subtle Bit Of History

A remarkable career began unpretentiously in 1959 among the mountains of Colorado when Jack Nicklaus met the wily veteran Charley Coe in a taut match

By Ken Bowden

It is common wisdom that match play is a better spectacle than stroke play. In the broad sense, this is probably true; in the particular, it often isn’t, as exemplified by the U. S. Amateur.

That this oldest of American championships is also the pre-eminent survivor of the original man-to-man form of golf doesn’t stop it from sometimes becoming an awful bore for everyone except the two protagonists and their immediate families and friends.

That, of course, is almost always the case when a match becomes terribly lopsided. It can also happen when the play is persistently inferior as a result of both men having exhausted themselves in playing their way to the final. Either way, everyone is wonderfully polite and sympathetic, while they stifle an urge to yawn.

Thankfully, though, there have been enough superb finals in the 80 playings of the championship by matches (it was determined by strokes, aberrationally to my mind, from 1965 through 1972) to more than offset the occasional tedium.

One of the greatest of them all, which would also become a mighty landmark in golf history, took place 30 years ago this month.

A pair of zombies shooting lights out would be as dull as watching grass grow, which is to say that in golf, as in all human conflict, the personalities and presence of the contestants is as vital as their performances. In that regard, the final match of the 1959 U. S. Amateur was, as they say, straight out of central casting.

A defending champion rightfully should receive top billing, but Charles R. Coe undoubtedly would have enjoyed this occasion even without that credential. A tall and lean Oklahoma oil broker with the looks and air of the archetypical Hollywood rendering of the Western lawman, Coe was almost certainly the finest amateur golfer in North America, and most likely the game.

At 35, the age at which the best players are said to reach their peak, and possessed of a good-looking, highly repetitive, deceptively powerful golf swing, Charley had been winning on and off at the highest levels for a dozen years. The highlights included the 1949 and the 1958 U. S. Amateurs; three winning Walker Cup appearances, including the playing Captaincy just five months previously; a strong contribution in the first World Amateur Team Championship seven months before that; and four Trans-Mississippi Amateur championships, then ranking in importance only behind the National Amateur Championship.

Perhaps the most telling measure of Coe’s capabilities, however, was his record in the Masters, which then as now claimed to assemble all the world’s finest. Coe had finished among the top 24 in six of the previous 10 tournaments, including sixth place, just four strokes behind the winner, Art Wall, the previous spring. (Two years later Coe would, of course, thrill amateurs everywhere by tying Arnold Palmer for second, one stroke behind Gary Player.)

As the cliché goes these days, Charley Coe could golf his ball.

To casual observers of the championship that year, the striking disparities in age, appearance, experience, and achievement between Coe and his fellow finalist might have made Charley seem very much the favorite. Close students of the game knew better.

Jack William Nicklaus was only 19 years and 8 months old on that September Saturday, and with his milk-fed brawn, blond crew-cut, who-cares attire, and who-says-I-can’t demeanor he appeared to have walked straight out of a B-movie as the All-American boy. That indeed he almost perfectly was, but he was something more: He was a genuine golfing prodigy, quite possibly the finest of that rare breed since the incomparable Bob Jones.

The story of how Nicklaus began is well known: of how his father, Charlie Nicklaus, a Columbus, Ohio, pharmacist, had hurt his ankle, and since he couldn’t keep up with his pals, had persuaded his 10-year-old son, Jackie, to keep him company on the golf course; how with the help of Jack Grout, a fine teacher, the youngster had fallen in love with the game, worked at it, and became very good very fast.

What may not be fully realized is just how good how fast. By the end of that first summer of golf, in 1950, interspersed as he still likes to recall with quite a bit of frog-hunting, Jackie Nicklaus’s best score around Scioto was 95. A year later, minus the frogs, it was 81, and a year after that 74, and a year after that 69. By then he was 13 years old, stood 5 foot 10, weighed 165 pounds, and owned a plus-3 handicap.

At 14 he toured Ohio State’s 6,400-yard Gray Course five times in 63, and scored his first hole-in-one. At 16 he won the Ohio State Open with rounds of 76-70-64-72 from a field including some very good professionals. That brought a first glimmer of national interest. He increased the wattage the following year by winning the Jaycee Junior, his first national title, then tied for 41st place in the 1958 U.S. Open, won by Tommy Bolt, and tied for 12th place three weeks later in the Rubber City Open, the predecessor to the American Golf Classic, in Akron. Back with the amateurs, he won the Trans-Miss, and lost his second-round match in the National Amateur only on the last green to Harvie Ward, who one-putted 13 of The Olympic Club’s greens and chipped in on another.

It was enough to win the hefty teenager a place on the 1959 Walker Cup team, which got him into that year’s Masters, his first. There he hit 31 of 36 greens in regulation, but he three-putted eight of them and missed the cut by one stroke, then hopped over to Pinehurst and won the North and South Amateur in a tough scrap with Gene Andrews.

While astonishing the locals with his power on the course and his assuredness off it a couple of weeks later, at Muirfield, he played superbly in the Walker Cup, contributing two points (the foursome with Ward Wettlaufer) as the United States won easily.
Looking just as good in the early rounds of the British Amateur a week later, he suddenly began spraying drivers into Royal St. George’s thigh-high sea grasses and went down to Bill Hyndman in the quarterfinal, his only head-to-head defeat of the year (and still one of his big career disappointments).

Back home, missing the cut at the U. S. Open at Winged Foot was another blow, but impressed with his professional playing partners’ ability and game-management skills – the head game for which he would later become so renowned – he followed up by playing three Tour events purely to obtain more close-up experience.

Although he didn’t excel – his 12th-place finish in the Buick Open was his best – he concluded the experience feeling a much more complete golfer in terms of being able to “play badly well,” and he employed the added confidence to defend his Trans-Miss championship successfully, a victory made extra flavorful by beating old pal and new British Amateur champion Deane Beman in the final.

Impressive as this record was, there were some on hand at the Amateur Championship of 1959 who were still ready to argue that Bob Jones’s accomplishments at the same age had been superior. But even they were in no doubt that the final was likely to be something more than a Sunday saunter for Sheriff Coe.

The Amateur was played over the East Course of the Broadmoor Golf Club, in Colorado Springs, in the foothills of the Rockies, some 70 miles south of Denver. The author Herbert Warren Wind once described its design as having “all the sparkle of a zircon,” and its elevation of 6,400 feet made it play considerably shorter that the measured 7,010 yards. Nevertheless, it did have a couple of distinctions beyond its sensational setting. As invariably is the case with mountain courses, reading the greens was extremely difficult because of all the conflicting angles that had to be calculated.

Coe’s only hiccup on his way through the top half of the draw had come in the quarterfinal, where after racking up five birdies in the first 11 holes as he built a five-hole lead, he’d lost four of them to some great golf before closing out Bill Hyndman at the 18th. Otherwise, his progress had been without stress – victories by 7 and 6, 6 and 5, 3 and 1, 4 and 3, 4 and 3, and in the 36-hole semifinal, 6 and 4 over Dudley Wysong.

Nicklaus’s climb through the bottom half of the draw had not been quite as smooth. He’d polished off his first four opponents smartly enough by 7 and 6, 2 and 1, 6 and 5, and 5 and 4, but then had needed all his skill to survive at the last hole against Dave Smith, a hard campaigner from North Carolina. Then he had to do it all over against an even tougher one in the semifinal, his North and South adversary Gene Andrews. (In the quarterfinal he had taken revenge on Dick Yost, who had beaten him in the fourth round at The Country Club two years previously, winning by 2 and 1.)

Indeed, had the youngster not holed a multi-breaking 25-foot putt for a par to halve the 35th hole, it is conceivable the history of the game might have taken a different turn.

As these two so disparate but accomplished individuals warmed up for the final, many of those on hand enjoyed a great sense of expectancy, the singular thrill of anticipation on a grand occasion. The backdrop was breathtaking, the weather wonderful. Both golfers clearly were at the crest of their form. It just had to be a classic battle.
After three holes, the question in many minds was whether it might become the classic Amateur final of them all. Nicklaus had barely missed a birdie at the first, then birdied the second and the third. He was 1 down. Coe had begun birdie-birdie-birdie.

Inevitably things slowed down after that – but not very much. Both golfers kept driving long and straight, Nicklaus with the huge high fades that would become so much a part of his game, Coe with lower-flying draws that scuttled right up to and sometimes past his obviously physically much stronger opponent. The rest of their games had been comparably impressive as they played the morning round in 69 and par 71, with Coe holding a two-hole lead at lunch.

Exciting as the morning thrust and parry had been, the afternoon round made it seem tame. Here it is through the 17th hole in capsule:

Opening hole, first Coe mistake of the day, hooked drive; Nicklaus wins with par: One down.

Second hole, halved in pars.

Third, 573 yards, par 5, Nicklaus birdies, Coe pars, match even.

Fourth and fifth, halved in pars.

Sixth, Coe fires an approach to five feet, holes the birdie putt; Nicklaus pars. One down again.

Seven and eight, halved in pars.

Ninth, 531 yards, par 5, halved in birdies; Coe still 1 up at the turn.

Tenth and 11th, halved in pars.

Twelfth, second Coe slip of the day, three-putts from 25 feet; match even.

Thirteenth, halved in pars.

Fourteenth, another untypical Coe miscue, missing the green with a relatively easy approach; Nicklaus pars and goes ahead for the first time.

Fifteenth and 16th, halved in pars.

Seventeenth, 613 yards, par 5, Nicklaus hooks tee shot even worse than in his semifinal, hits gallery-control stake with over-ambitious recovery attempt; Coe wins hole with par; match even with one to play.

The 18th hole at Broadmoor in those days – things were moved around a few years later – was a 430-yard par 4 with the fairway canting from left to right, then doglegging sharply right about 275 yards out. A drive let go a little too much right would generally kick down into rough, while a shot pulled or hooked left risked diving into a small pond about halfway between the tee and the green.

Holding the honor, Coe drove with a 3-wood and hit his ball into perfect position, leaving only a short-iron approach. Nicklaus played his 3-wood also, and he too hit a perfect shot, his ball finishing about three yards beyond Coe’s. They would turn out to be three very important yards.

Because the hole was cut only about 20 feet from the back of the long, upsloping, very firm green, choosing the right club for the approach was quite a challenge. Coe finally selected his 8-iron, and he appeared to make an excellent stroke with it, flying the ball dead on line with the flagstick. The shot was a little too long, however, landing almost hole high, taking a big bounce, then rolling through the back fringe and down a three-foot bank into some light rough.

Nicklaus, of course, just as he should have done, watched all this very carefully, then immediately reached for the 9-iron. With it he hit a replica of his opponent’s shot except on a slightly smaller scale. The ball landed about a third of the way into the green, took a big bounce, then a couple of small ones, and pulled up eight feet short of the cup.

Since the youngster had been stroking his putts so well all week, Coe had to assume he would make this one. That meant he must hole his pitch or lose the match. He took his time assessing the shot, then played a delicate little lob up and over the bank with his sand wedge. The ball came rolling slowly down the slope right on line, and a friend of the Nicklauses watching Jack as the ball inched closer and closer swears that from the expression on the young man’s face, like everyone else he was sure it would trickle all the way into the hole. A half-turn more and it surely would have.

Now came one of those harmless little gaffes made by even the most experienced of players under extreme pressure. Coe walked over and started to pick up his ball, then realized that Nicklaus had not formally conceded the putt (in fact, he’d hardly had time), and immediately mentioned it to Jack. He was told to forget it; that the putt obviously was good.

Nicklaus would recall later how that little off-beat break in the flow of play somehow eased the tension in him. He was now eight feet away from becoming National Amateur Champion. He studied the putt carefully, decided it broke a couple of inches from left to right, lined it up that way, hit it solidly, and a moment later watched it fall cleanly into the center of the hole.

The first of the titles that would make Jack Nicklaus the greatest golfer of his time was in hand.