The Match: The Day the Game of Golf Changed Forever by Frost Mark

Author:Frost, Mark [Frost, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781401389994
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2007-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

Back to the Sea

The four men stood on the elevated fourteenth tee box, staring out at the fairway and the blue Pacific to their right. A swarming crowd now surrounded them and lined a large portion of the fair-way ahead. Watching through field glasses from near the clubhouse above and to the left across the road, caddie master Joey Solis estimated there may have been somewhere between five and ten thousand people on the grounds at Cypress Point by now. None of the players later recalled their gallery being that large, but they were now so fiercely intent on their match, and all were so used to playing in front of big crowds, it’s a wonder they even noticed anyone was there at all.

Hogan and Nelson had hardly spoken a word to each other all day, and their silence highlighted a curious paradox: each was closer to both of their younger competitors than they were to each other and clearly would have preferred their company in any other situation, social or professional. But that hadn’t for one second stood in the way of the two old pros playing their guts out as a team representing their side of the game. Byron had come out on fire at the start of the round, four under through the first six holes, and as soon as his brilliance flickered, Ben stepped up and took over; eight under in the last ten.

Like each other or not, they were still men from the same town, the same state, the same generation, and they’d both endured the deprivations of poverty and the hardships of an impossible profession, often together, to achieve greatness and lasting fame. Circumstance had pitted them against each other, reluctant gladiators, and because they were the two best players of their time, the individually combative nature of their sport had finally driven them apart. Though they were utterly opposing personalities off the course, their characters as champions between the ropes were indistinguishable; each had been too strong, too good, too unyielding to ever give ground to the other. Although their wives remained close friends, they hadn’t played together as a twosome in a best-ball match, as near as either could remember, for nearly twenty years.

And yet on this day, with nothing more than their professional pride on the line against two great amateurs, that was more than enough to bring out the lionhearted best in them. They had once stood together in the front rank of men who, having run out of ways to put food on their tables, driven by nothing less than poverty and despair, had single-handedly turned the shabby, tumbledown professional game into a mainstream attraction and a way to craft an honest living. As they tested their hard-earned skills in the tour’s primitive, ill-attended arenas, pushing each other to the limit, they had captivated the public’s imagination and transformed their sport from a half-forgotten relic of another age into a powerhouse of postwar American culture. Both did great things and both had become great men, but their long friendship bore the burden and finally paid the price.

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