20 minute read
The Sea Bear
Legendary golfer Jack Nicklaus pursues bonefish as well as birdies.
By Monte Burke
On the morning of April 13, 1986, Jack Nicklaus woke up four shots off the lead going into the final round of the Masters Tournament. Yes, the patrons, the sponsors and the tournament broadcaster (CBS) were extremely pleased that the Golden Bear was hanging around in the top ten. But no one really gave him much of a chance of actually winning the tournament. Greg Norman—at this point, not yet saddled with the numerous final round heartbreaks that would come to define his career—held the lead. Seve Ballesteros, Bernhard Langer, Nick Price, Tom Kite and Tom Watson were just some of the players ahead of Nicklaus on the leaderboard. And Nicklaus hadn’t exactly been on fire as a player going into the tournament. It had been six years since his last major championship victory, and he had won only two regular PGA Tour events during that timespan. He was 46 years old. Before the Masters, a local newspaper had described him as “washed up” and “the Olden Bear.”
But that morning, contrary to nearly all indicators, Nicklaus believed he had a chance. Steve—one of his sons—called him before he left his rental house in Augusta for the course and asked him what he thought he had to shoot that day. “I think 66 will tie and 65 will win,” Nicklaus said. Scott replied: “Exact number I had in mind. Go shoot it.”
After an indifferent front nine that left him one under on the round, Nicklaus began what would become his most legendary charge with an eagle on number 15. He birdied number 16. And then on 17, his curling putt found the bottom of the hole for another birdie just as he lifted his putter in triumph.
He ended up shooting a 30 on the back nine (-6), and finished with that desired 65. And, well, you know how the story turned out.
Speaking later, Nicklaus said it was on the back nine of that championship day when he “remembered the feeling of being in contention…the feeling of how you control your emotions and how you enjoy the moment, too.” He talked about pressure and how important it was to acknowledge it and feel it in the moment, but how it was just as important to keep it all in perspective—that, after all, it was supposed to be fun.
There was one other place in Nicklaus’ life where the competition and pressure and fun were also all rolled into one. The stakes weren’t the same, to be sure, but the emotions felt similar. And that was when he had a fly rod in his hand while stalking the flats, in pursuit of bonefish, permit and tarpon.
Jack Nicklaus, as you might suspect, showed much promise as a young golfer. He shot a 51 the first time he ever played nine holes at the age of 10. At 12, he won his first of five straight Ohio Junior Amateurs. He topped the field (which included some professionals) at the Ohio Open at age 16. He was recruited by Ohio State University to play golf even though, at the time, he believed he would likely follow in his father’s footsteps and become a pharmacist. But then, during college, he won two U.S. Amateur Opens and finished second in the U.S. Open, two shots behind Arnold Palmer. And, suddenly, there was no doubt about what exactly he would do with his life…
He would sell insurance, of course.
He changed his major from pre-pharmacy and married the former Barbara Bash. Soon enough, they had their first child on the way. Nicklaus’ plan, at that point, was to play golf as an amateur and sell insurance on the side. In late 1961, though, he changed his mind and went pro. The next year, he won his first tournament, the 1962 U.S. Open, beating Palmer in an 18hole playoff. That tournament cemented the celebrated rivalry between the two men, and propelled the game of professional golf into its modern mass television era. It also officially announced the era of the Golden Bear.
It is very hard to sum up the rest of Nicklaus’ golfing career and not sound somewhat glib. It was so great—according to many, the greatest ever—that numbers and superlatives don’t even begin to fully capture it. But it’s worth pointing out a few achievements, just for fun. His 18 career major wins, capped by the 1986 Masters, are the most ever. His three career grand slams are tied with Tiger Woods for the most ever. He’s won more Masters Tournaments (six) than any other player. His total of 73 PGA Tour victories puts him at third all time. And that competition and pressure and fun? He thrived on it. He was the sport’s ultimate closer when it mattered—in eight different majors he had the lead after 54 holes. He won them all. Oh yeah, and he also became one of the sporting world’s great businessmen on the side, selling apparel, equipment and wines, designing courses all over the world and managing his own golf tournament in Ohio. And he and Barbara, to this day, remain a philanthropic power-duo.
But let’s back up for just a second to college. At Ohio State, Nicklaus had a coach, a legendary fellow named Bob Kepler. Nicklaus, at the time, had fished a bit here and there, but never with any seriousness and never with a fly rod. Kepler—perhaps sensing that the star player on his team might take to the kinetics involved in casting a fly, or perhaps sensing that he could use a break every once in a while from the golf course, or perhaps sensing that he was so good that he didn’t need to practice as much as his teammates did—began to take Nicklaus fly fishing at his trout club in Zanesville. “He’d come up to me and say, ‘man, it is a beautiful day, too nice to play golf. We’ll get these other guys started off, and then you and I will go fishing,’” says Nicklaus. The fly fishing at the club wasn’t the most challenging in the world, Nicklaus says—stocked trout that loved wooly worms—but it was a start. “And I learned from there.”
His learning curve was shortened by a fortuitous meeting. Right after he turned pro, Nicklaus ran into his rival and friend, Gary Player, who happened to be working for the Shakespeare Company at the time, which made both golf clubs and fishing rods. Player introduced Nicklaus to a man named Ben Hardesty, who was in charge of the new shaft division. Though Hardesty was then making and selling golf club shafts, his real passion was fishing rods and fishing the flats. He and Nicklaus became instant friends.
It was Hardesty who took the young Nicklaus—then still in his early twenties—on his first flats fishing trip, to Turneffe Atoll in Belize. “I got my first bonefish there,” says Nicklaus.
“It was maybe a pound. I had a mount made, which I still have somewhere.”
Hardesty then took Nicklaus to the Keys and one of his favorite spots in the backcountry off of Big Pine Key. “One day I was with him and some permit were crossing the flat and the wind was blowing 25 and Ben just cast his fly line 100 feet, and I was like, ‘really?’’ says Nicklaus. Hardesty would teach Nicklaus how to double haul and, soon enough, Nicklaus could also cast the entire fly line. (“I have a bad shoulder now and can only cast two-thirds of it,” says the 83-year-old.) And, with some haste, Nicklaus became smitten with another sport.
In those early years, he still occasionally did some fishing with conventional tackle. One year on the Deschutes River in Oregon, he hooked a giant steelhead on a lure. It took him down through some rapids before coming undone. While still licking his wounds, Nicklaus saw that someone downriver had landed a big fish. He wandered down for a look. “The fish had a fresh cut on its gill plate, where I’d had him hooked,” he says. The Nicklaus-hooked but-lost fish ended up weighing 24-pounds, 6-ounces, at the time the biggest steelhead ever caught on the river.
Whenever Nicklaus traveled to Australia for the country’s Open tournament, the Aussie media tycoon, Kerry Packer, would set up a fishing trip for him and a few of his fellow players. One year, Packer sent the group—which included Ben Crenshaw, Bruce Lietzke and Jerry Pate—to the Great Barrier Reef to fish before the tournament began. While on the boat with Pate, Nicklaus hooked a massive black marlin at five in the afternoon and fought it to what appeared to be a standstill. Pate would later tell Golf Digest that at 9 PM—while Nicklaus was still fighting the fish—he ate a sandwich and then went back to the boat’s sleeping quarters for a nap. When he woke up one-and-a-half hours later, Nicklaus was still trying to get the upper hand on the fish. After a nearly sixand-a-half hour battle, Nicklaus finally landed the 1,358-pounder, which, he says, is still the biggest black marlin, by measurement, ever caught. (He mounted this one, too. Needless to say, it takes up a bit more space than the bonefish.)
Nicklaus was so sore after the fight with the marlin that he nearly withdrew from the Australian Open. In the end, he decided to stay in it, struggled through a rough first round, and then won it by six strokes.
As Nicklaus got older, he gravitated almost solely to fly fishing. The sport took him around the world. He fished for silver salmon in Alaska. (“Chuck-and-duck,” he says. “Not my favorite, but you catch a lot of fish.”) He targeted Atlantic salmon in Russia and on the Restigouche River in Quebec (he was a member of the Ristigouche Salmon Club for a dozen years). He caught tiger fish in South Africa. He traveled to Tierra del Fuego with his sons to try for the region’s famous sea-run browns, (“Not real productive, but fun,” he says), and fished north of there, near Bariloche, for trout.
One of his favorite spots was the South Island of New Zealand. He first fished there one year before the Australian Open when Kerry Packer sent Crenshaw, Lietzke, Pate and him to Cedar Lodge. There, Nicklaus was paired with the famous Kiwi guide, Dick Fraser. The duo helicoptered to a river deep in the wilderness, and then hiked up it to a crystal-clear pool. “Fraser said, ‘Jack, there are four fish in there, each behind a rock,’” says Nicklaus. “After I caught three of them, Fraser turned to me and said, ‘not bad sighting for a guy with one eye, eh?’”
Nine years later, Nicklaus made it back to Cedar Lodge and was once again paired with Fraser. “We took a helicopter and started up the same river and arrived at the same pool and spotted three fish,” says Nicklaus. “After I caught them, I turned to Dick and said, ‘For God’s sake, how have you guided all of these years with just one eye?’ And he turned to me and smiled and said, ‘Oh, you bought that joke, eh?’”
Nicklaus fished with other golfers. Andy Bean was a frequent fishing partner, as was Johnny Miller, with whom he fished mostly on western trout rivers. He took Tom Watson on his first-ever fly fishing trop, to the Restigouche. “Tom didn’t catch anything but that was all right,” says Nicklaus. “He enjoyed it.” He once spent a day fishing beside Ted Williams, the baseball and fishing legend who could never be described as a shrinking violet, especially when it came to dispensing advice. “I wasn’t with Ted for more than ten minutes before he was giving me a golf lesson,” says Nicklaus.
His favorite people to fish with, though, are members of his family. Barbara has caught many bonefish, permit and tarpon. “A devout and talented hunter with the fly rod,” is how the guide, Alex Boehm, describes her. Says Nicklaus: “All five of my kids fish well, and we’ve started to teach the grandkids, and they fish well, too. It’s really fun to have something that you all enjoy doing with your family.” Family, Nicklaus says, is the reason he’s so invested in conservation—especially when it comes to the flats—as a board member of the Everglades Foundation and a longtime supporter of Bonefish & Tarpon Trust, where he is an Honorary Trustee. “Why in the world would I not want to protect these resources, these fish?” he says. “I want to save it for my kids, my grandkids and their kids.”
Those flats and the fish that inhabit them have long had a tight grip on Nicklaus. After his introduction to flats fishing from Hardesty, Nicklaus started to fly his plane down from Ohio to the Keys or the Bahamas whenever he had the free time. He did this throughout his playing career, even as he was in the midst of winning majors and regular Tour events and playing on Ryder Cup teams. He fished with George Hommell and Jeffrey Cardenas and Percy Darville, or fished on his own skiff (more on this in a moment). When his playing career began to wind down, he bought a mothership, named Sea Bear. “I loved fishing for bonefish and tarpon in particular,” says Nicklaus.
There was the competitive part: “He always had some sort of contest set up in the morning before we went out, some sort of teams,” says Don Ewer, the captain of the Sea Bear who guided him many days on the water. Says Nicklaus’ son, Gary: “He was always a gentleman champion as a golfer. But in fishing, well, he would push back the departure time to make sure he caught the most fish. It was his plane, so he could do it.”
There were also the nerves: “I have a friend who, every time he sees a big bonefish, he ends up wearing the line,” says Nicklaus. “I screw up, too, though not too often. But I do get nervous when I see a permit or a ten-pound bonefish.”
And there was the fun: “I enjoy having to figure out the moon phase and the tides and how the fish will react to them and where they will be,” he says. “I enjoy seeing the fish coming and learning how to stalk them and present the fly properly. It’s all a combination of hunting and fishing, and the flats have that more than any other place.”
Nicklaus certainly had all of the requisite skills for fishing the flats, and then some. Unsurprisingly, according to Ewer, his handeye coordination was otherworldly. He also had power when he needed it, another trait he carried over from the golf course. “A lot of people can fly fish,” says Ewer. “But when the wind cranks up to 20 to 25 miles per hour, a lot of people can’t. Jack could, though.”
Nicklaus places—and then works—the fly on the water like he did the golf ball on the course, says Boehm, who was a guide on the Sea Bear for nearly 20 years. “We’d go to the Green Room at the Marquesas, a little slot that was full of baby tarpon that held tight into the mangroves,” he says. “Jack would throw that fly in there with such skill, side-arming it sometimes, and then twitch it and tease those tarpon out of the mangroves and they’d hammer the fly. And you have to remember that for many years, he was using equipment that wasn’t up to today’s caliber, huge heavy reels and sometimes a fiberglass rod.”
Nicklaus says he finds many similarities between casting a fly rod and swinging a golf club. “It’s all about timing and rhythm and swinging within yourself with the club and casting within yourself with the rod. Loading a fly rod is much like loading the golf club at the top of your backswing,” he says. “And you have to make up your mind about how to approach a cast to a fish, just as you do before you make a golf shot, and then follow through with that plan with confidence.”
Maybe more impressive than his casting ability, though, is his ability to read the fish and manipulate the fly once it is in the water. “Just because you make a good cast doesn’t necessarily mean you can get the fish to eat,” says Ewer. “Time after time, Jack amazed me by how he read the fish and its body language. He’d try a retrieve, fast or slow. The fish would refuse the fly, and then he’d try something else until he got the bite.”
And perhaps the trait that rounds him out as a complete angler is his sheer determination. “First on the boat and last off, always,” says son, Gary (who is a commissioner for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission). Says Boehm: “He just never gave up.”
Boehm remembers a day in the Marquesas when a “fantastic squall” blew in and drenched both of them. Neither had remembered their raingear. “We were both soaked and shivering,” he says. “I think most people would have gone in and called it a day. But Jack insisted we stay out and not give up. And the weather cleared and the fish started swimming. And I warmed up from poling and he warmed up from fighting tarpon.”
Nicklaus says that when he was a few years younger, he would routinely fish until after sunset, especially when he was at Bullock’s Harbor in the Berry Islands. “The outermost flat there is protected by a high ridge so the wind doesn’t get to it. It’s a grassy flat, and I used to love to fish it just after the tide had started to come in the evening with a good moon. There was just enough water and light from the moon to see the bonefish tails.”
His skill and determination led to many epic days. There were times on the west side of Andros when he’d have 25 releases in a day. One afternoon there, he hooked into a few permit, but lost them all. “We were so distraught,” says Ewer, who was guiding him that day. “We’d put in so much work.” On a whim, they decided to move around the backside of an island. And there, they ran into the same school of permit they’d been working before. “So we tried them again, and he caught one,” says Ewer. “That was such a great day.”
Nicklaus and Barbara had a two-day trip in the Marquesas with Jeffrey Cardenas when they boated 11 tarpon, and lost many more. “Barbara caught three and I got eight, and six of them were over 140 pounds,” Nicklaus says. He no longer fishes for big tarpon (“Too much work”), but loves the baby tarpon he sometimes finds off of the northern Abacos.
Nicklaus says he likes permit, and has caught five on a fly, but “if you’re going to be targeting only them, you’ll likely be pretty bored.” He’s a big fan of mutton snapper, though, and has caught seven of them on the fly. But bonefish remain his standby. “I love the bigger ones,” he says. “I’m not that fond of catching one-to-two pounders, but even those give a pretty good fight.” His biggest ever on a fly weighed just more than ten pounds, and was caught off of Ambergris Cay in the Berries.
For 20 years—beginning in his early sixties—he chased bonefish on the Sea Bear with Ewer and Boehm. The mothership (there were actually three different ones at different times) had room for three skiffs onboard. Nicklaus would usually fly into Chub Key or Great Harbour Cay in the Berry Islands to meet the boat. Both locations had runways and a comfortable place for him to work on Nicklaus Design, which happens to have built many golf courses near great water. (The Roaring Fork Club in Colorado has the river it’s named after running right through it; he designed the Par 3 course at Cheeca Lodge; and his company has a course in Eleuthera currently under construction.) Great Harbour even had a golf course so he could keep his game sharp for what was then known as the Senior PGA Tour. “Jack would walk onto the boat, change into his fishing clothes and be ready to go,” says Ewer. And they’d set sail, headed to the islands of the Berries, or to the Abacos, or to Andros or to Long Island. “We experimented and explored everywhere,” says Nicklaus. “We had a blast.” He reluctantly sold the boat a few years ago, and now does his fishing primarily out of lodges.
If Nicklaus does have one weakness on the flats, it is the little known fact that he is colorblind. Though the condition does not affect his fishing (and didn’t affect him on the golf course), it does come into play when he’s handling boats. Not being able to recognize the different shades of blue on the flats of the Bahamas or the Keys means he has a hard time recognizing changes in water depth. Thus the name of his first skiff, Prop A Day
Nicklaus initially learned the backcountry in the Keys from the legendary guide, Jim Brewer. When he believed he had a handle on it, he started to go by himself or take friends out. “I’d run to the Rabbit Keys or to Pelican Key and fish and then get stuck and grind the boat off the flat. The guys with me thought we’d never get back to the dock. I’d need a new prop every three-tofour trips,” he says. “There was a guy named Ward who ran a boatyard north of Matecumbe, and he’d always say, ‘I’ve got people working around the clock and I still can’t keep Nicklaus afloat.’ I was a mess for years down there.”
Prop A Day lasted for a long time, though, but eventually did meet her demise one day some 40 years ago when Nicklaus, headed back to the marina at Great Harbour after fishing, ran it up onto the beach, deep. The boat remains at the entrance to the harbor to this day, a monument of sorts. “It still greets people as they go to the marina,” he laughs.
But it’s all part of the fun of what amounts to six decades of fishing the flats. “Jack used to always tell me, ‘you know, I’ve worked my whole life playing golf so I could fish. Most people work their whole life to play golf,’” says Ewer. For Nicklaus, everything he’s ever done—raising a family, playing golf, running a business, fishing the flats—has always revolved around his simple mantra: “Enjoy the game of life.”
Monte Burke is The New York Times bestselling author of Saban, 4th And Goal and Sowbelly. His latest book, Lords of the Fly: Madness, Obsession, and the Hunt for the World-Record Tarpon, is available now. He is a contributing editor at Forbes and Garden & Gun
