Where Were You in ’86?
The Masters, Revisited
By Bill Carlson
This is for all the golf fans, well, all of the sports fans — well anyone who is a fan of greatness. I watched a one-hour special on the Golf Channel the other night titled ’86. It was about Jack Nicklaus winning his sixth Masters Championship in 1986 at the age of 46, after being dismissed as a has-been who couldn’t win or even compete anymore.
This show was written and produced with an interesting premise: “Where were you when Jack won the Masters in 1986?” It follows a bunch of different people over the course of the tournament and the ensuing years: Jack, his family and friends, competitors, fans, and folks who were working the tournament that week as sportscasters, scorers, marshals, and other assorted roles.
There isn’t a lot of golf shown, either — just some of the key shots Jack made on the back nine of the final round, and some of the key mistakes made by the competitors who started the round with lower scores and finished the last round after Jack.
The Augusta National golf course, for all its beauty, is very difficult. Not because it is long, but because to win you must place each shot on each hole in a particular place to give the next shot a chance to wind up in its ideal position. It is a course that must be managed with the player’s mind much more than his muscles. To win here requires a lot of skill, a lot of hard work, and some measure of good luck. To win the Masters six times is an accomplishment that made Jack Nicklaus, in many minds, the greatest golfer ever.
I can tell you exactly where I was when I watched Jack win it in 1986: at the home of my good friends Jan Nickerson and John Graham in Wayland, MA. I had lost a very good job the previous year amidst a hostile corporate takeover and had moved back to New England from Texas. My father had died three months earlier and my mother was in a nursing facility suffering with what became terminal Alzheimer’s.
I was 44, two years younger than Jack Nicklaus, and maybe I was feeling a little washed up and sorry for myself. But after watching Jack do his particular job better than I have ever seen anyone do that particular job I realized that I shouldn’t be worrying about being “too old” and “too overqualified” to succeed in my life. So I kept plugging away at my career, working as a consultant and a contract employee.
The good luck part came a few years later when I met the woman who has been my partner and the love of my life for more than 20 years. A few years after that I found the position that was an ideal match of my abilities and the company’s needs.
’86 not only reminded me that I had watched one of the all-time great sporting events of the 20th century, but that watching Jack succeed really helped me get out of my funk. I still stink at golf — even after reading all of Nicklaus’s books. Attitude is one thing; skill, alas, quite another.
