Weather creates the best golf tournaments, Jack Nicklaus says

The weather conditions for the third day of the 2026 Memorial Tournament have been less than ideal. After a delay lasting nearly two hours, a second line of storms again halted play at 4:36 p.m. at Muirfield Village Golf Club.

As that second line of storms was rolling into the area, tournament founder and host Jack Nicklaus told a national television audience on CBS that he’s generally in favor of weather impacting golf tournaments.

“You want the same golf course every year?” he said while sharing the broadcast space with Jim Nantz and Trevor Immelman. “If you had the same weather every year, then, you’d produce the same champion every year. We get good variety here. I always thought the weather playing a part was good.”

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It presented a new set of challenges for the golfers who made the cut. Unexpected heavy winds wreaked havoc on the 72 golfers who teed off for the June 5 second round and led to a few scores that caught Nicklaus’ attention.

While Nicklaus said he enjoys the course having a reputation for being difficult for golfers, those conditions pushed it beyond those limits.

“The golf course is a challenge, and it’s always a little bit on the edge,” he said. “(June 5) I think it got a little over the edge, and I don’t like to see it get over the edge. I don’t think it was anybody’s fault. I don’t think we expected wind like that.”

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During his playing days, Nicklaus said he would try to keep active and acclimated to the conditions whenever he would encounter a weather delay like the ones playing out June 6.

“The worst thing you can do is coming off a golf course, it’s 85 degrees, you go into a house, it’s 65 degrees,” he said. “You don’t want to do that. So if you did that, you would stay out on the porch or something. You want to keep your body temperature up. You want to be able to keep loose.”

That would often involve stretches and hitting practice balls to keep the body loose and ready to resume play once the conditions improved. Today’s golfers won’t do anything different than he did, Nicklaus said, and that also involves focusing on diet.

As the CBS broadcast headed to commercial, the commentators joked that some of the golfers might enjoy one of Muirfield’s famous milkshakes to help pass the time. Nicklaus didn’t seem to agree with that sentiment.

“You might want to eat something light,” he said.

Adam Jardy can be reached at ajardy@dispatch.com, on Bluesky at @cdadamjardy.bsky.social or on Twitter at @AdamJardy.