Mark Frost - The Match

Monterey, California, August 1945

A fter finishing his second round of the day, a fourteen-year-old caddie wanders down to the sixteenth tee at Cypress Point Golf Club. The son of a fishing net twine salesman, he reads golf magazines while he waits for his father to finish his sales calls at the canneries in nearby Monterey before driving them back to their modest home in the Mission District of San Francisco. The young man is a loner by default, socially traumatized by merciless teenage peers because of a persistent, debilitating stutter. Since taking up golf for its solitary virtues and rigors, he has made this isolated vantage point overlooking the Pacific his favorite refuge from the harsh realities of his life. Gazing out along the stark, forbidding shoreline and across at the green of the par three sixteentha two-hundred-and-twenty-yard carry over a turbulent cove, the most spectacular golf hole in the worldKenny Venturi dreams of one day competing there against his heroes, Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan, at the games highest level.

Texas, 1927

A fifteen-year-old caddie makes the day-long trip from his home outside Fort Worth to Dallas, to watch his professional idol, the peerless Sir Walter Hagen, play in the semifinals of the Tenth Annual PGA Championship at Cedar Crest Country Club. Hagen trails by one when they reach the final hole, and the young caddie notices him squinting and shading his eyes as he lines up his shot from the eighteenth fairway, so the lad offers him his baseball cap to keep the sun from his eyes. The elegant populist Hagen, who has made an extravagant living by playing to the gallery, gallantly accepts the boys offer, makes a great show of setting the tattered cap on his luxurious, brilliantined black scalp, and drills his five iron to eight feet from the flag, then graciously returns the cap with a bow to the boy that draws sustained applause for both of them. The caddie, John Byron Nelson, Jr., is thrilled when Hagen sinks the putt for birdie, ties his match, wins it on the first extra hole, and the next day goes on to win his fourth PGA Championship in a row, and his fifth overall.

Four months later, at Glen Garden Country Club outside Fort Worth, Byron Nelson faces off against another fifteen-year-old in the finals of the clubs annual Caddie Championship. Byron, a few months older and a head taller, is the clear favorite, admired equally by the members and his peers for his native kindness and sunny good nature. The son of rural, Christian, second-generation cotton farmers, he shines with the clean, upright virtues instilled by his loving, uncomplicated upbringing. Although he barely survived a problematic birth and suffered a near fatal bout of typhoid fever at eleven, Byron has grown strong and hardy through his years of outdoor manual labor and become a gifted athlete. Blessed with great natural balance, and guided by a dog-eared copy of Harry Vardons instruction book on golf, during his three years in the Glen Garden caddie yard he has begun to develop a powerful, rhythmic, and dependable swing.

His opponent that day, a solemn, grim-faced young man, is slight and smaller in stature, but his outsized hands, inherited from his beloved blacksmith father, are those of a hardened adult. His face already looks as careworn and weathered as that of a man in his twenties. He is Byrons temperamental opposite in every regardguarded, pessimistic, introvertedand has come by it the hard way, through misfortune. By all accounts Ben Hogan had lived an idyllic country childhood similar to Byrons, until it was shattered six years earlier in a moment of unspeakable tragedy that he and his family will keep a closeted secret until the end of their days. From that terrible divide young Hogans life descended into an ordeal of urban poverty and child labor that damaged and darkened what had been until that moment a carefree, innocent spirit. Since securing his first job as a caddie three years earlier, Hogan has only recently begun to play the game himself and for the first time glimpsed a path that could lead him out of his nightmarish existence. His perilous, fifteen-year journey of deliverance is only just beginning, and anything from assured; he will have to carve and claw his way out of the deep hole into which life has dropped him, a club in his hands as his only tool.

Their nine-hole caddie championship match ends in a tie when Nelson sinks a thirty-foot putt on the last green, just as hed watched his idol Walter Hagen do at the recent PGA Championship. Urged by the members to settle the matter in a play-off, Ben wins their first extra hole. Under the impression that they were playing sudden death, Ben is puzzled when his competitor and their gallery hurry on to the next tee without congratulations or comment; only then does he realize he didnt know, or wasnt told, that they are engaged in a nine-hole play-off. Emotionally crushed, Ben quickly gives back his advantage, and Byron has a chance to win at the final hole if he can sink another thirty-footer. As he stands over that putt, Byron tells himself: This putt is for the U.S. Open. Tracking straight and sure, in it falls to win the match. Both boys are handed a new iron from the pro shop as their prize, which, each lacking the one the other received, they promptly trade with each other.

The victorious, outgoing Byron follows the members whove witnessed their battle into the clubhouse for a Christmas dinner with all the trimmings. The winner in more ways than one, Byron learns he will also be awarded a junior membership and full playing privileges at the club, assuring him regular access to the golf course, exactly the break his developing skills need to realize his dream of becoming a champion golfer. On this night, Byrons future success in the game hes grown to love seems all but guaranteed. Within three years he will be confident enough to step onto the games national stage.

There will be no holiday dinner or extended club privileges for the runner-up, but then he has never known anything other than the short end of a bargain. For starters, he was born left-handed into a right-handed world and is still struggling to play golf from that unfamiliar side. Nor will he be ready anytime soon to compete as a professional; any chance he has to arrive at that distant station will come only through relentless hard work and ruthless self-discipline. To the end of his days he will never find satisfaction or consolation in finishing second, at anything.

As twilight fades, young Ben Hogan grips his new five iron and heads back to the practice range alone.

Pinehurst, North Carolina, 1948

On a whim, and at the last minute, a twenty-two-year-old economics major named Edward Harvie Ward drives down to Pinehurst from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill to enter the North & South Amateur Championship. Played on Donald Rosss famed Number Two Course, this match play tournament is considered second in importance only to the USGA National Amateur and for nearly fifty years has drawn an equally accomplished field. Although Harvie, as hes been known all his life, plays on the Tar Heels collegiate team, and qualified for the National Amateur the year before, the native North Carolinian anticipates an early exit; hes brought along only a toothbrush and the white Oxford shirt and crimson cashmere sweater on his back.