The Match

Filed in archive Golf Interviews on November 29, 2007

The Par 3, 15th at Cypress Point. Courtesy: caddybytes.com

Tuesday, January 10th, 1956. It's the week of bing crosby's annual Clambake, well before the days when Crosby's famous tournament was televised.

Just another Tuesday in a California winter. Not even a date especially noteworthy historically. Unless you love the game of golf.

At 10 AM that morning, January 10th, a Tuesday, arguably the four finest golfers in America at the time teed it up at Cypress Point. Two amateurs versus two professionals who just happened to be legends in the game.

What unfolded was one of the finest match play events in golf and virtually no one knew about it at the time.

Few probably know about it today. I certainly didn't until I read a new book by author Mark Frost called The Match: The Day the Game of Golf Changed Forever.

Mark Frost is no stranger to golf books, having penned The Greatest Game Ever Played about Francis Ouimet and The Grand Slam, Bobby Jones' story.

The Match is not just the story of how Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson, a couple of retired professionals, took on two young gun amateurs by the names of Ken Venturi and Harvie Ward for 18 holes; it's a story of four very different lives intertwined through golf, four men who played the rounds of their lives on one of the most fitting stages in all of golfdom - Cypress Point, that quintessential Alister MacKenzie design.

Three of those men are dead: Hogan, Nelson and Ward are gone, of course. Only Ken Venturi is left and he is not well.

Frost talked extensively with Nelson shortly before he died and relied on Venturi's excellent memory along with anecdotal and written material to weave this fascinating tale.

It's a story of golf and life and how both impacted a quartet of the finest players to ever tee it up. And it's a book you can't put down. Frost draws you into the story to the point where you become a spectator walking the fairway alongside this amazing foursome.

I can't recall reading a more compelling and riveting historical and biographical book.

So it was a great privilege to be able to interview Mark Frost the other day and discover more about the match and the players. By the way, Mark Frost also knows his way around a TV set as well. He was co-executive producer of Twin Peaks and wrote and directed episodes of Hill Street Blues. If you have ever seen The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, well, that was his story, too.

Allow a couple of minutes for the audio to download from the host server. The interview is 15 minutes in length.

Mark_Frost.mp3