Will Open winner be US made?

For someone not in the hot news for a spell — not to mention that he is 82 — Jack Nicklaus is getting ample face time this week.

And why not. The British Open is upon us and Nicklaus, three-time winner, twice was named Champion Golfer of the Year, as the Brits call it, at the course where, as Jack says, any golfer who wishes to be remembered must win.

This Open championship, as the Brits call it, with the assurance that anyone who reads that will know where, coincides with another honor bestowed upon Nicklaus. He will become the third American named an honorary citizen of St. Andrews, Scotland, joining golf icon Bobby Jones, he of the 1930 Grand Slam, and founding father Benjamin Franklin. Jones said of Nicklaus one day at Augusta National early in the younger man’s career, “He plays a game with which I am not familiar.”

Just don’t look for Jack in the final round Sunday. As director Cecil B. DeMille ordered a stagehand in “Sunset Boulevard,” regarding silent star Gloria Swanson, playing Norma Desmond and on a studio tour, “Put the camera back where it belongs.”

Nicklaus will be another face in the crowd when Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm, Scottie Scheffler, Matt Fitzpatrick or someone out of left field — say, Paul Lawrie — plays the final 18 holes Sunday at the cradle of golf. Weather so disrupted the Open in 2015, its last time at the Old Course, that the Champion Golfer was not crowned until Monday, when past Masters champion Zach Johnson received the Claret Jug (everything is formal, as George M. Cohan put it in song, Over There).

Johnson, whose first major title came in 2007 at Augusta National, is an American. So were Jones, Champagne Tony Lema, Sam Snead and Jock Hutchison, other Open winners at St. Andrews, with Hutchison (1921) the first from the British colonies to win the world’s oldest tournament, dating to 1860.

For that matter, so is John Daly, the 1995 Champion Golfer, four years after the Dardanelle native shocked the sports world winning the PGA Championship as ninth alternate at Crooked Stick in Indiana.

Winning a playoff with Italian Costantino Rocca, Daly quieted any talk that his 1991 major title was a flash in the pan. Equally charismatic and controversial, Daly gripped and ripped where he could, but mostly putted, his way to a second Grand Slam title, again when least expected. At 56, he still draws a crowd wherever he plays and whatever he wears. He pledges allegiance to his home state Arkansas Razorbacks, for whom he played college golf.

McIlroy, the 2014 Open champion at Royal Liverpool, is the early favorite this week off 2022 victories in Dubai and Canada. For some time, he has needed a Masters title to complete a career Grand Slam.

At least one other American player, a two-time winner at St. Andrews, is getting maximum exposure this week. This is to be expected any time Tiger Woods, a quarter-century after his first of 15 major titles, enters a tournament these days.

At 46, born on the same day (Dec. 30) as basketball star LeBron James, Eldrick Tont Woods has long since achieved emeritus status on tour. Arguably no one — not even Nicklaus — played better golf than Woods in his prime when no one could match his length, putting artistry and sheer course smarts, the latter often carrying him on days when other things weren’t working.

The day after one of Woods’ three British titles, I hailed a man at Hot Springs Country Club (where the Arlington course was built by Scots

man Willie Park Jr., an Open champion as was father Willie Sr.) that we might be upon a golden age in golf. His game, like that of Ben Hogan in 1953, reached heroic stature in the 2008 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines in San Diego, where he beat Rocco Mediate on the first extra hole of sudden-death, following an 18-hole playoff. An ailing left knee, which knocked Woods out of further 2008 tournaments, rendered him almost immobile.

That would be Tiger’s last major title until his fifth Masters crown in 2019, putting him one behind the Augusta record held by Nicklaus. Woods’ career had been in decline because of the two factors that golf writer Dan Jenkins saw as his only drawbacks to sustained greatness — an injury and a bad marriage.

The following week’s Sports Illustrated pictured a triumphant Woods, no caption needed. A near-fatal car wreck, like that suffered in 1949 by Hogan before his greatest years in golf, has left Woods more a shell of his former self. He withdrew after three rounds of the PGA Championship in May. At last check he was 60-1 in the British books (I wouldn’t touch it).

But imagine the outcry if Woods is anywhere close to the lead on Sunday at St. Andrews, much less if he wins.