The Match

Eddie Lowery left his first imprint on the game of golf in 1913 as the 10-year-old caddie to underdog U.S. Open champion Francis Ouimet. Best-selling author Mark Frost continues Lowery's story 43 years later with Lowery as a multi-millionaire car-dealer, who boasted to fellow millionaire and golf staple George Coleman that amateur golfers Harvie Ward and Ken Venturi could hands down beat any other two golfers in the world in a best ball match. A bet was made for a substantial sum of cash, and a tee time was set at the prestigious Cypress Point Country Club (Hampton Roads, Virginia) for Ward and Venturi to play whomever Coleman decided to bring.The morning of the match, Coleman showed up with the other half of the foursome: Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson, the two most distinguished golfers in the world. Despite efforts to keep the match under wraps from the public, word leaked out as soon as the men arrived at the course and a hundred people surrounded them by the time they reached the first tee. Three and a half hours later, nearing the conclusion of what many in the game now refer to as the greatest private match in the history of American golf, the crowd lining Highway 1 and the eighteenth fairway numbered close to five thousand people.Mark Frost brings to life an unlikely golf match that changed golf forever.