Jack and Barbara Nicklaus haven’t forgotten the day in 1966 when their 11-month-old daughter Nan suddenly started choking and struggling to breathe.
By this time, Jack, then 26, had been a wildly successful professional golfer for five years. He had already won the Masters Tournament three times and landed on the cover of Time magazine. But he was a dad first—more teddy bear than Golden Bear—and nothing could have prepared him for this. He and Barbara rushed Nan to the doctor, who urged them to take her to the hospital where they could run more tests. At the hospital, doctors found the culprit: a blue crayon that the little girl had inhaled.
Then, things went from bad to worse. The crayon broke into pieces, passed into Nan’s lung, and caused pneumonia. As doctors and nurses fought to save Nan’s life, the Nicklauses sat in the waiting room, anxious about their daughter’s fate.
“We said if we were ever in a position to do so, we would like to be able to help children,” Jack recalls.
To the relief of her parents, Nan survived. But her childhood health scare served as the inspiration for the Nicklaus Children’s Health Care Foundation (NCHCF), which the couple established in 2004. In 2015, the foundation pledged $60 million to the Miami Children’s Hospital, which changed its name to the Nicklaus Children’s Hospital (NCH) as a result of the gift. Since then, the hospital has opened a network of 20 outpatient centers extending from southern Miami-Dade to Martin County and an affiliated hospital at Jupiter Medical Center that is setting the standard for pediatric care in Palm Beach County.
“Jupiter is where we live and we wanted people to be able to see a doctor or specialist without having to travel too far,” Barbara says. “You want to get immediate attention for your child when they are sick, and so to have a comprehensive pediatric program here in Jupiter is fantastic for families in the area.”
Often called “the First Lady of Golf,” Barbara is known for steadily supporting Jack as he became the greatest golfer in history. But when Barbara wasn’t watching him play, she was pouring her heart and soul into charity work, raising millions of dollars for causes that include cancer research, families, and, of course, children.
When the Nicklauses moved to the area 51 years ago, UPS didn’t deliver packages north of Northlake Boulevard, and PGA Boulevard was going by another name. Palm Beach and its environs were an escape for winter residents, not a haven for settled young families. There wasn’t the level of need for a pediatric facility; but there is now that the region has grown and its demographics have transformed. As the area grew and Jack retired from golf in 2005, the couple decided to act on that pledge they made to each other in a hospital waiting room nearly 40 years before.
“It all sort of came together,” Barbara says.
Families used to take their ailing children to Miami for specialized treatments or complicated diagnoses. Now that NCHCF gifts have empowered Jupiter Medical Center to offer top-flight care to children in the area, there is no longer any need to go elsewhere. Barbara said a teary-eyed woman approached her in the grocery store a couple of years ago to tell her what having a pediatric hospital nearby has meant to her family, who no longer needed to trek so far back and forth for one child’s care.
Jack and Barbara recognize the importance of being able to spend time with loved ones at home, after all. They’re the parents of five kids, and have 22 grandchildren with two great-grandchildren on the way. Shortly after the pediatric hospital opened at Jupiter, Barbara said their grandson Stevie wound up in the unit.
“Someone there joked, ‘Jeez, I know you want to see how we’re handling things, but this is ridiculous,’” Barbara says.
The couple’s foundation has not only made its mark in South Florida, but around the country too. The countless stories the Nicklauses hear about children who have benefited from their help have touched them deeply.
“I think of the twins Teegan and Riley, who were born in Minnesota,” Jack said. “Riley was born perfectly healthy, but Teegan was born with one lung and half a heart. The doctor told Teegan’s mother to take her home and love her because she wouldn’t be there long.”
After a couple of months, Teegan was still alive, and Jack said her mother called pediatric hospitals around the country to see what they could do for her. None of the hospitals she called would take on Teegan’s case, Jack says, because they didn’t want a death on their record. But Dr. Redmond Burke at the Nicklaus Children’s Hospital told Teegan’s mom to bring her down to Miami.
“He told her mom that the word ‘inoperable’ was not in his vocabulary,” Jack says. “After open-heart surgery and many months in the hospital, Dr. Burke told Teegan’s mother to bring her home to grow up with her sister. She went home, and we just got a video of her learning to ride a two-wheeled bike.”
Barbara says she and Jack want to keep helping families like this, and to ensure that facilities like Jupiter Medical Center are able to grow with the needs of its surrounding community. She has also enjoyed seeing Jack transformed by this charity work, which includes visiting young patients to see how they’re doing. He admits that some of these visits move him to tears.
“We were down in Miami for a reunion for cardiac patients,” he said. “There were 20 of these kids running up to doctors and hugging their legs and telling them about how they saved their lives. You know, Barbara has supported me for 60 years of our lives, and now that we’ve started the foundation, it’s my turn to support her. I think I enjoy it as much, if not more, than she does. Watching these kids is more important to me than any four-foot putt I’ve made.”