Jack Nicklaus needs no calendar to tell that he’s well into an athlete’s old age. He has another, less technical, measure - a measure that confronts him every time he steps onto a golf course and sees a long carry over water.

I don’t know how far in yards I used to hit it, Nicklaus mused in his office recently. I just know that I used to be able to hit the ball as far as I needed to when I needed to do it. If I needed to carry something, I just figured out how to do it and went ahead and did it. Today, I have to go around it.

Old age arrives in many ways. For some people, it comes the first time the cashier at the theater sells them tickets with the senior citizen’s discount - without being asked. For others, it’s the first gray hair, or arthritis. For Jack Nicklaus, old age is having to hit lay-up shots.

And old age is confronting the prospect of playing in your last full season of major championships. He knows that most of the golf world expects that the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach will be his last hurrah in the national championship, ending a record run that began in 1957. He knows that most people anticipate he will shoot something like 79-78 and make his exit Friday afternoon, drawing one of the great sentimental ovations in golf history as he walks down the 18th, then yielding the stage to younger men.

He is realistic enough to know most people might be right. This probably is my last Open, he says. Then he smiles the small, faint smile of a man who has confounded most people more than once. Probably, he says again.

It’s a hedging word, that probably. Probe a little, and it’s not hard to discover that Nicklaus wants more than a ceremonial farewell to the Open. Within that 60-year-old body still lives the soul of a younger man whose pride was a match for his skills.

I’ve never wanted to be around golf just to play, he says. I want to find out whether I can win, or at least put myself in a position to win. If I can play well enough to have a chance, that would be fantastic.

I’d love to do that.

So that’s the Nicklaus goal for the U.S. Open of 2000. He wants to compete again, to excel. Testing the Limits of His Talent

Several factors besides pride prompted Nicklaus to undertake a final investigation of the limits of his talent in the major championships of 2000. For one, the United States Golf Association simultaneously extended him several exemptions to the Open, for 1998, 1999 and 2000. The exemptions rather pointedly stopped then, and Nicklaus has said he will not ask for any more.

For another, 2000 is a nice round number, especially if you were born, as Nicklaus was, in 1940. Birthdays that end in zero are special milestones. They seem to inspire both transitions and efforts to defy time.

Finally, the Open, like the other majors this year, was scheduled for a course that meant something special to Nicklaus. He fell in love with Pebble Beach the first time he saw it and still regards it as the premier championship course in the world. He won two major championships there and came painfully close to a third. He’s worked on the layout as an architect, helping the resort’s owners tweak the bunkering and designing a new fifth hole along the seaside cliffs when land for it became available in 1995.

If this is going to be my last Open, I couldn’t ask for a better place to play it, he says.

Every acre of ground at Pebble is laden with memories for Nicklaus, most of them pleasant. Over there’s the approach shot to the green at number eight, over the foam-flecked, blue Pacific. He’s called it his favorite approach shot in the world. From there he can catch, through the gnarled, wind-bent pine trees, a glimpse of the 12th green, where he closed out Dudley Wysong in the final of the 1961 U.S. Amateur. On the 17th tee he can remember the 1-iron that clinched the 1972 Open. It was a shot that started badly. He remembers taking the club too far inside, with the face closed, a backswing likely to produce a pull-hook. But such were his skills in those years that he was able to make an adjustment in mid-stroke, holding his hands back long enough to put the clubface squarely on the ball, producing a low, boring shot into the wind that smacked against the flag stick and nearly fell in the cup.

After more than 300 competitive rounds at Pebble Beach, he knows the course intimately. Listen to him describe the strategy involved in the 18th hole. Most golfers would probably think that, the farther the flag gets from the tee and the closer it is to the ocean (i.e, a back-left pin position), the less intelligent it is to go for the green in two. We might be tempted by a pin that is front right, requiring a slightly shorter shot and less exposure to the ocean. Nicklaus’ thinking is just the opposite:

When they put the pin front right, if you go for it and miss, you’re likely to be in the bunker. From there, you don’t have any place to pitch the ball on. You can still make 5, but you’re not going to make 4. If the pin is back left and you miss it short right, you’ve got the whole green to pitch onto.

You can still make 4.

That thinking presumes that, if you’re going to go for it and miss, you’re always going to miss it in the front bunker, which to Nicklaus is a key to playing the hole. If you can’t be sure you’ll miss into the front bunker, you turn it into a three-shot hole.

Unless you can play a club that you feel comfortable cutting into the wind, which I can’t anymore but occasionally could, then you play the ball back to where the tree on the right side of the green does not become a factor. And you try to leave yourself somewhere between 70 and 110 yards for your third shot, so, if you are a little bit right, you can still clear the tree.

If local knowledge alone determined the outcome of this Open, Nicklaus would be the favorite.

Nicklaus can remember disappointment as well when he surveys Pebble Beach. There’s the 17th green, where Tom Watson chipped in to snatch the 1982 Open from him. With characteristic sportsmanship, all Nicklaus will say about it is that I felt like I should’ve won another Open then. But, you know, someone just did something a little bit better.

Over the years, though, that defeat has loomed a little larger on the Nicklaus record. It would have been his fifth Open championship. He never came that close to winning an Open again.

No one has ever won five U.S. Opens. Nicklaus, Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan, and Willie Anderson are the only men to win four. That fifth Open would have been a factor that separated Nicklaus from Jones and Hogan in debates about the greatest golfer of all time.

Nicklaus just smiles, a little modestly, a little ruefully, when this point is raised. It’s not as if he’s dissatisfied to be on a level with names like Jones and Hogan. It’s not as if his career was incomplete without that fifth Open. But has he thought about it?

Well, it’s crossed my mind, yeah, he says. A pause. For about 20 years.

The Open, after all, played a critical role in delineating Nicklaus’ greatness as a golfer. He could have simply relied on his power and he would have won a bunch of Masters, a few British Opens. But he relished the challenge of disciplining his mind and his game to pass the test of a championship played on tight courses with punishing rough.

Nicklaus believes that any golfer who aspires to greatness would do the same. He has little patience with players who say their games are only suited to the Masters, say, or the British Open. If a guy says his game isn’t suited to an Open course, then he’d better change his game, he sniffs. You have to be able to adapt your game to anything. That’s what makes a great player. You have to learn to play both sides of the pond, and you have to be able to play it up in the air or down on the ground if you have to. You have to play tight fairways. That’s just learning to play golf.

The Open also defined Nicklaus’ longevity. He could have retired young and contented himself with course development work. Instead, he set a standard of durability. The Open at Pebble Beach will be his 44th in succession. Gene Sarazen and Arnold Palmer played in 31 consecutive Opens, the next best record.

And, in the last few years, the Open sadly helped delineate the ebbing of his strength. When he got into contention at a major during the 1990s, it was at the Masters, where rough was non- existent. As I lost strength, heavy rough was always the biggest problem for me, he says. U.S. Opens and PGAs became tougher for me because of that.

Rebuilding His Strength
So when Nicklaus looked at the schedule for 2000 and thought about the possibility that it might well be his last chance to play in the Open, it reinforced in his mind the necessity of rebuilding his strength. That necessity had become increasingly clear to him in the late 1990s. His left hip, after bearing the brunt of almost a half century of powerful swings, had degenerated to the point where Nicklaus couldn’t swing the way he once did. He couldn’t walk too well, either. In January of 1999, he got a couple of pieces of ceramic hammered into his hip to replace the old ball and socket. Then came weeks of rehabilitation, which caused him to miss the 1999 Masters.

Nicklaus tried to return to competitive golf later in the spring. He played in the Memorial Tournament and the U.S. Open. But his return was premature. At the Senior Players Championship, he was in such pain that he was forced to finish play riding in a cart. What I was asking my body to do, it wasn’t able to support, Nicklaus says.

So Nicklaus did something he had never done - undertook a serious weight-training program. He had been doing stretching and flexibility exercises for years trying to get more mileage out of his hip. But weights were something golfers of Nicklaus’ generation believed were best left to football players. Besides that, he was too busy. His breakdown at the Senior Players Classic forced him to rethink his attitude. I wasn’t strong enough to do what I was asking my body to do, he recounts. Age had taken that away.

Nicklaus decided to talk to a trainer named Doug Weary whose company runs the fitness center at Lost Tree Village, where the Nicklaus family lives, north of Palm Beach. Weary tested him.

He told me he could barely stand up and was having trouble walking with his hip, Weary recalls. I started taking a look and found weakness and lack of stability in the hips and legs. He’d not been doing anything for many years to maintain the strength in those areas, and, after the surgery, it got progressively worse.

Nicklaus and Weary agreed to work together. Once Nicklaus committed to the program, he committed with unswerving determination. His workouts were long, generally lasting 90 minutes. Commonly, he’d sweat through a couple of tee-shirts before he was done. He lifted weights one day and worked on his cardiovascular system and balance the next.

Jack is so driven, Weary says. We haven’t missed a day since we started. The time he puts in and how hard he works I think show you why Jack is who Jack is.

Weary found a couple of physical attributes that hint at what separated Nicklaus from normal golfers. I’ve never seen balance like his in any of the athletes I work with, Weary says. Jack also has a feel for where his body is in space. He is able to get into positions and know where his body is at. Weary and Nicklaus occasionally do a combat-style exercise on a balance beam, with Nicklaus trying to move Weary off it. He’ll knock me off balance a hundred percent of the time, where most people aren’t able to move me at all.

The Hardest Part
After six months of working with Weary, Nicklaus started to notice a difference. His normal walk returned. He felt stronger, more flexible.

I have the freedom to be able to swing in a way that I haven’t been able to swing in a long time, Nicklaus reports. I’m definitely faster and stronger through the ball. I’m considerably longer. When I miss a shot, it’s not as short.

But reconditioning his body was only the first step along the path he wanted to take. Next, he had to recondition his golf game. This entailed more than merely standing on a range or a putting green till the shots went long and straight and a lot of the 4-footers dropped. It was a matter of honing his competitive edge.

That’s the hardest part, he says. The ability to score. Putting it all together in a round of golf and a tournament is part of playing the game. And I haven’t really played the game for a while. I’d played the odd tournament - four or five on the regular tour, four or five on the Senior Tour. That’s not playing golf.

Nicklaus’ early efforts after rehabilitating were tantalizing, but inconsistent. He won some exhibition events - The Father-Son Challenge with son Gary, the Diner’s Club matches with Tom Watson. But, in actual tournament play, he was prone to following a low round with an embarrassing one. There was a 67 in the final round of the Tradition, then two rounds of par golf at the Masters. But they were followed by scores of 81 and 78 as the weather turned windy and cold. The third round marked the first time Nicklaus had ever failed to break 80 at the Masters, and he was discouraged and frustrated as he left Augusta.

There was a certain human irony in Nicklaus’ situation. For many years, the question was never whether he could hone his game to a championship level. The question was whether he wanted to. Or, rather, whether he wanted to enough to take precious time away from family and business and devote it to mundane tasks like putting practice, to the routine tour events that sharpen scoring skills. Increasingly, as Nicklaus moved through middle age, the answer was no.

Now the answer is yes. My desire is the best it’s been in quite a few years, he said. In the last half of my 40s, I didn’t have the desire, because I’d played enough of it. Now I’m trying to find time to play golf.

Could desire trump age? Nicklaus didn’t know. It was sufficient to get him into the gym, out to the range, to play more tournaments, to dream again. But could it enable him to taste, just one more time, the sweetness of competing seriously for the national championship?

I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that I can, Nicklaus says. But I am certainly going to give it every effort that I can.

And, in his heart of hearts, what did he hope to bring back from Pebble Beach?

Another small smile, perhaps an indication that, of all the abilities a great player possesses, the ability to see himself as a winner is one of the most important, and the most durable.

A trophy, Nicklaus says.

That may be a lot to hope for. But, if this is his last Open, at least Nicklaus will have the satisfaction of knowing that he obeyed the poet’s admonition. He will not go gentle.