Mark Frost's third venture into the world of golf history explores an until-now obscure match played on January 10, 1956, at Cypress Point Golf Club, an incomparable gem of a course on California's Monterey Peninsula. The product of a bet between Eddie Lowery, a wealthy San Francisco auto dealer, and George Coleman, an oil tycoon, the match pitted professional golf legends Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan against amateurs Ken Venturi and Harvie Ward. For 18 holes of four-ball competition on a flawless day, the amateurs matched the pros shot for shot, each competitor displaying consummate skill in a contest in which, for the players, ultimately nothing more was at stake than pride.
As compelling as is Frost's account of soaring drives and curling birdie putts, perhaps the most rewarding aspect of The Match is his exploration of the lives of the players who battled at Cypress Point that day. The biographical sketches of Nelson and Hogan will be familiar to even casual students of golf history, but Frost displays keen insight and empathy in recounting the lesser-known stories of Venturi and in particular Ward, a man who would struggle for most of his life to maintain the game's tradition of the gentleman amateur.
While the brilliant golf Frost describes more than justifies this work, its subtitle's claim that the game of golf "changed forever" that day is unabashed hyperbole. He suggests the match somehow signaled the death knell of amateur golf in the tradition of the legendary Bobby Jones and marked the moment the professional game began its ascendancy, but he offers little evidence to support that argument. On the contrary, the key elements of that evolution, namely TV and the nation's rising prosperity, already were well established and were unaffected by the result of this single golf game.
One disappointing feature of this otherwise fine book is the absence of any pictures of Cypress Point. To remedy that omission, here's a link to some wonderful photographs of that spectacular course: golfclubatlas.com/cypresspoint000161.html.
The Match spins a revealing tale whose appeal is obvious to golf fans. On a more subtle level, it can be read with pleasure by anyone looking for a deeper understanding of the way in which the striving for athletic greatness illumines character.--Harvey Freedenberg