When James Nicholas has the honor of striking the first official ball off the first tee of the 2026 U.S. Open scheduled for 6:35 on Thursday morning he’ll become a footnote to local sports lore. A local guy from Scarsdale kicking off a local event here at Shinnecock Hills is an interesting if random and brief quirk. By the time the threesome behind him tees off it’ll be forgotten.
But Nicholas’ family already has a much more prominent place in New York’s athletic history.
His grandfather, for whom he was named and who died in 2006 known as “the father of sports medicine,” was the Jets’ team physician throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, including in the fall of 1964 when the team selected Joe Namath with the first pick in the 1965 AFL draft. It was Dr. Nicholas who, shortly after examining Namath’s damaged knees in the men’s room at Toots Shor’s Restaurant after the quarterback’s introductory news conference, performed the first of what would be four surgeries to repair a torn ACL and MCL.
No Nicholas? Probably no Namath, at least not the way we think of him. No Namath? Probably no Jets Super Bowl. Maybe no NFL since his victory over the Colts helped spur the merger with the AFL.
“I never would have played that well or for that long if it hadn’t been for Dr. Jim,” Namath was quoted as saying. Namath and the family still keep in touch. Namath even stopped by to deliver a pregame pep talk to one of the younger James’ hockey teams in Florida when he was a kid.
“My grandfather would always tell me stories about him,” Nicholas told Newsday. “There are a few I can’t really share but there are a lot of funny ones for sure.”
And they still have Dr. Nicholas’ Super Bowl III ring, which was passed to his son, Stephen, also an orthopedist who now works with many local pro and college athletes with a practice in Westbury, and the younger James’ father.
The James Nicholas in this Open didn’t follow in the family business, though.
“I went to Q school instead of med school,” he said of pursuing golf as a career.
He does have a bit of the showmanship and swagger of his grandfather’s most famous patient in him, however. Nicholas, 29, has made more of a name for himself — and perhaps nearly as much money — as an internet influencer who posts popular videos of his exploits on the Korn Ferry Tour, a developmental circuit of the PGA. He’s not quite Broadway Joe, but he may be YouTube James. He has a camera crew following him around this week to capture content coming soon to a screen near you.
That doesn’t mean his actual golfing is to be dismissed. He won the Long Island Open at Huntington Crescent in 2023. He qualified for last year’s Open at Oakmont and gained clout — and followers — when he posted an opening-round 69 and made the cut.
“I can compete out here with the best in the world,” he said of what he took from that experience. “I need to obviously increase the consistency with which I do that. But my good golf is good enough to win. I have the inner belief now that I can compete.”
He qualified for this, his second Open, by winning the qualifier at the Golf Club of Purchase and Century Country Club on June 8.
Of course, making the Open and actually getting here are two different things, even when you already live in the metropolitan area. Nicholas competed in the Occunet Classic in Amarillo, Texas, last weekend and planned to fly to New York through Dallas on Sunday night, but the second leg of that trip was canceled just before the first took off. He and his wife, America, got off that first plane and scrambled to drive about four hours to Albuquerque to catch another flight only to find that one canceled too.
They spent the night in New Mexico, grabbing about three hours of sleep, and on Monday evening finally got to LaGuardia through Denver. On Tuesday he woke up and drove the length of Long Island to get to Shinnecock and squeeze in a full practice round, his first time ever on the course.
“The way I see it, it’s I get to do this rather than I have to do this,” he said of the obstacles. “I mean, I get to play in the U.S. Open.”
Not only that, he gets to start it off.
Oh, he’s also a huge Knicks fan who has been known to exchange DMs with Josh Hart about their shared love of golf. So yeah, this week has been a whirlwind for him for sure.
It’s about to become even more of one as of 6:35 on Thursday morning.
Nicholas said his grandfather, besides having patients that included Namath, Pele, Marilyn Monroe and JFK — he was also the doctor who broke the news to Willis Reed that he needed to retire — was also a huge golf fan.
“The only thing he would have wanted me to be other than a doctor is a golfer,” Nicholas said. “Now, to be here at the U.S. Open, it is so special and I know he is looking down and supporting me.”
Maybe this could even be a chance to come from relative obscurity and add to the Nicholas family legacy in New York’s sports mythos? Could he go from starting the Open with the first tee shot to closing it with a winning putt?
“That’d be cool,” Nicholas said, obviously open to the very slim possibility of winning this tournament. “But let’s just start with hitting that first tee shot down the middle and go from there.”
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday’s Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
