The elders at Athens Country Club in Ohio had cobbled together a big day to honor one of their own, Dow Finsterwald, and needed to fill the last slot on their VIP list.
They wanted a man and settled for a boy.
Fred Swearwingen, club president, had been struck by a sudden thought. He would call up this hotshot kid in Columbus and ask him if he would care to play 18 holes with Finsterwald, fresh off his victory in the PGA Championship, and Dow's good friend Arnold Palmer, that year's winner of the Masters.
Swearingen found a listing for Charlie Nicklaus's drugstore.
"Is your boy interested in playing with the PGA champ and the Masters champ?" Swearingen asked.
"I'm sure he is," Charlie said. "He's right here. I'll put him on."
Without blinking, Jack Nicklaus told Swearingen that he'd be happy to bring his game to the southeast corner of Ohio.
"I'll get my dad to take me," Jack said.
He was 18 years old in September 1958, and his father would drive him to his first face-to-face encounter with Palmer, who was only days removed from his 29th birthday and just months removed from his first victory at Augusta National, the one that hinted at the dawn of a new era in professional golf.
This wouldn't be the first time young Nicklaus had seen Palmer in the flesh. At the 1954 Ohio Amateur, outside Toledo, Jackie was a 14-year-old qualifier who stumbled upon a dark, solitary figure on the Sylvania Country Club driving range, raging at ball after ball in a Biblical rain.
Nicklaus didn't know the man's identity but was mesmerized.
Under cover, from about 40 yards away, Nicklaus stared at the stranger in the rain suit for 45 minutes.
Palmer was from Latrobe, in western Pennsylvania, but he was eligible for the Ohio Amateur because of his time in Cleveland, where he was a member of the U.S. Coast Guard and, of all things, a frustrated paint salesman.
He was pounding nine-irons, making them turn right to left, commanding them with a musculature that belonged to a middleweight fighter.
In his mind's eye, Nicklaus saw a relentless series of angry line drives that never rose more than six feet off the ground.
This was two days before the start of the state amateur, and Nicklaus was the only other competitor on the course. The storms wouldn't let up. Jackie was soaked, but he couldn't tear himself away from a scene that could've been cut right out of a Tiger Woods credit-card ad nearly half a century later.
There are no rainy days.
Palmer didn't even know young Nicklaus was there. Arnold was unwittingly giving the heir to his future throne a lesson in hardearned royalty. Nicklaus loved the raw commitment, the brute strength. He had never seen anyone attack a golf ball quite like that.
Finally, Jackie stepped inside the clubhouse. "Who is that guy out on the driving range?" he asked. "Man, is he strong."
){kind=link}