The Match

September 10, 2007
In 1956, millionaires Eddie Lowery and George Coleman made an off-the-cuff bet on a golf match and inadvertently set up one of the sport's most climactic duels; “this one casual game has become the sport's great suburban legend.” Frost (The Greatest Game Ever Played
) diligently covers the two pros slightly past their prime, Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson, who squared off against two top amateurs, Harvie Ward and Ken Venturi. It happened “in the last hours of Hogan's playing career, and ten years after Byron had left the stage,” but at the near pinnacle of the amateurs', whose personalities couldn't have been more diametrically opposed (Venturi the classic up-and-comer, and Ward the inveterate playboy who performed hungover on two hours' sleep). The match itself, scrupulously teased out by Frost for maximum drama, is less interesting than the people involved and the historical backdrop. The match happened near the sport's great cusp, as it transitioned from something for amateurs to a professional career, from a pastime for wastrel aristocrats and entertainers (and Bing Crosby, with his annual booze-soaked Clambake charity matches) to a mainstream suburban obsession. Frost has a penchant toward the florid, but as he writes, “Because he was Ben Hogan, and it was just past twilight, and his like would never pass this way again,” he captures an elusive magic in this improbable matchup and what it meant for those who played and witnessed it.

Starred review from October 15, 2007
In the era of Tiger Woods and multimillion-dollar tournament purses, its hard to believe that, as late as the 1950s, golf remained essentially an amateurs game.That changed dramatically with the arrival of Arnold Palmer on the pro tour, but Frost, author of the superb Greatest Game Ever Played (2002), about Francis Quimets victory in the 1913 U.S. Open, has dredged from the depths of golf history a pre-Palmer watershed moment, an informal challenge match played in 1956 at Cypress Point on the Monterey Peninsula between the two greatest amateurs of the day, Ken Venturi and Harvey Ward, and two iconic professionals, Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson. The match was arranged by Eddie Lowery, a San Francisco used-car salesman who employed both Venturi and Ward (Lowery, as Quimets pint-sized, 10-year-old caddie, was one of the stars of Greatest Game). Layering his narrative with fascinating backstory on the principal players and on the evolution of golf in America in the first half of the twentieth century, Frost tells the gripping, shot-by-shot story of the incredible match, giving costar billing to the marvelous Cypress Point setting. What makes this account so fresh and so exciting for golf fans is thatunlike any other re-creation of a great moment in sports historyFrost tells a story that, being virtually unknown, carries with it genuine suspense as to the outcome. Going well beyond the simple question of who will win, however, Frost makes us see this spur-of-the-moment match for what it was: the last hurrah of amateur golf. And, best of all, he captures one of those fleeting moments in sports when competing athletes reach a kind of transcendent perfection simultaneously. Superb narrative nonfiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)