Read an Excerpt
Harry Vardon and Francis Ouimet came from
different worlds and different generations, but their passion for golf set them
on parallel paths that would collide in the most spectacular match their sport
has ever known. Through hard work, courage, and determination, Vardon had
escaped a hopeless life of poverty in Britain to achieve universal recognition
as the greatest champion in the game's long and storied history. Ouimet, a
virtual unknown from Massachusetts, was only three years removed from his
youthful career as a lowly caddie. He worshiped Vardon, a man twice his age,
innovator of the modern grip and swing, daring only to dream of following in his
herds footsteps.
When these two unlikely opponents finally
came together in their legendary battle at the 1913 U.S. Open, the world's
reaction to its remarkable drama and heartstopping climax gave rise to the sport
of golf as we know it today.
Weaving together the stories of Vardon
and Ouimet to create his narrative, Mark Frost has crafted a uniquely involving,
intimate epic; equal parts sports biography, sweeping social history, and
emotional human drama.
Author
Mark Frost is the author of the bestselling novels The List
of 7, The 6 Messiahs, and Before I wake. This is his first nonfiction
book. He received a Writer's Guild Award and an Emmy nomination for his work as
executive story editor on the acclaimed television series Hill Street
Blues, and was the co-creator and executive producer of the ABC television
series Twin Peaks. He lives in Los Angeles and upstate New
York.
Reviews
"Anyone who loves golf, history, or just a great
story will relish this wonderful book"
--Scott Turow
"Put on a pair of soft slippers and get
into your favorite chair. You are about to drift back to the era of gutties and
wooden shafts. Mark Frost made me sit down and stay put as golf history comes to
conversational life in this very entertaining book."
--Gary McCord, author
and CBS golf analyst
"Francis Ouimet's showdown with Harry
Vardon was a watershed moment that changed the face of golf. At least this
remarkable story has been give the epic treatment it so richly
deserves."
--Butch Harmon, Tiger Woods' coach
"This is one of the best sports books I
have ever read. If I had known there was this much excitement in golf I would
have started playing earlier."
--Billy Crystal
"The story of the 1913 U.S. Open at
Brookline needed to be told again, especially today, and Mark Frost has done a
wonderful job of capturing the moment of golf's awakening in America. His work
is thoroughly researched and he has brought out the characters splendidly -- as
well as the excitement of young Francis Ouimet's victory."
--Ben Crenshaw,
1999 U.S. Ryder Cup captain
"I am a traditionalist and if you are a
traditionalist, you will enjoy this book. It will give you great insight into
how golf got its start in America, and the man who really introduced golf to
America: Francis Ouimet."
--Ken Venturi, former CBS golf senior analyst and
1964 U.S. Open champion
Excerpt
The following is an
excerpt from the book The Greatest Game Ever Played: Harry Vardon, Francis
Ouimet, and the Birth of Modern Golf
by Mark Frost
Published by Hyperion; October 2002; $30.00US/$42.00CAN;
0-7868-6920-8
Copyright © 2002 Good Comma Ink
Inc.
FRANCIS
It begins with the
simplicity of a fairy tale.
A small boy, combing through fields of
grass for buried treasure, uncovers a magical talisman: a gleaming white ball,
pristine, perfectly round, untouched by wear. Two words emblazoned on its cover:
VARDON FLYER. That name, so suggestive of powerful, confident, dreamlike
flight, burns itself into the boy's impressionable psyche. After seven- year-old
Francis Ouimet races home to place the ball in the dented tin box that guards
his growing cache of riches, the VARDON FLYER immediately becomes his
most prized possession. A gift from an unknown god named
Vardon.
Geography may be destiny, but in the case
of Francis Ouimet, destiny may have been more a result of real estate. The day
before Harry Vardon's twenty-third birthday in 1893 -- the year he entered his
first British Open Championship -- Francis DeSales Ouimet was born in Brookline,
Massachusetts, a sleepy Boston suburb. Four years later, his family purchased a
modest little two-story clapboard house directly across from The Country Club,
on a dusty dirt road called Clyde Street.
Francis's father, Arthur Ouimet, a
French-Canadian Catholic immigrant, depended on odd jobs to make ends meet;
occasionally he'd find them as a coachman or gardener for The Country Club's
affluent members. After six generations in Quebec, Arthur was the first of his
family to leave Montreal, fleeing the oppressive thumb of the English-Protestant
majority to seek his fortune in America; what he found instead was heart- break.
Uneducated, his English clotted with a thick Quebecois accent, the best Arthur
could manage in Massachusetts was a life of menial labor governed by the subtle
but still profound prejudices of the nineteenth-century Boston gentry.
Bostonians called this wave of immigrants "Frenchies," consigning them to
servile positions that the city's second-generation Irish no longer considered
suitable to their rising station.
After establishing himself on Brookline's
lower margins, at the age of twenty-eight Arthur Ouimet fell in love and married
a beautiful Irish girl named Mary Mahoney. Three years later Mary died in
childbirth and their sickly child, named Joseph after Arthur's father, followed
her in death only ten weeks later. The disaster scarred Arthur for life; from
that point forward he was described only as a cold, hardworking man with a hot
and ready temper. He married again in 1888, to another Irish lass, twenty-
seven-year-old Brookline native Mary Ellen Burke. Although she was a warm,
loving, and infinitely patient woman, for Arthur this second marriage exuded
less romance than an air of nineteenth-century practicality, creating a family
in order to solidify his economic standing. Within eight years Mary gave him
four children: Wilfred, the oldest by three years, then Francis, a daughter,
Louise, and finally Raymond, the youngest, born in the house on Clyde Street
that Arthur had bought that year. Haunted by nightmarish visions of sliding back
down into abject poverty, Arthur had nevertheless put enough aside to buy some
of the vacant land behind the house as well. They raised chickens, grew
vegetables, sank their own well. Arthur drummed into his children the hard
necessity of contributing to the family's welfare; his oldest son, Wilfred,
began to caddy at The Country Club not long after the Ouimets moved into their
new home.
The house on Clyde Street sat directly
across from The Country Club's seventeenth fairway and green, the sight Francis
woke to every morning outside his second-floor bedroom window. Soon after they
moved in, his mother used to routinely find Francis, at the age of four,
standing across the street, staring at players on the fairway through a stand of
beech trees. He didn't know how, he could never later even adequately explain
why, but from his first glance, Francis found the forms and rituals of the game
mesmerizing. Golf seeped into his young mind; it may be no exaggeration to say
Francis was America's first golf addict who grew up with the game. His family's
earliest recollection of the boy would be right at home in a nineteenth-century
tall tale, befitting the kind of legends told about Mike Fink or Paul Bunyan; he
walked around the house crying for his brother Wilfred's first golf club. When
he finally got his hands on it -- a cut-down driver, nearly as tall as he was --
Francis spent countless hours swinging that club in their backyard. He began
attending the one-room Putterham Schoolhouse the following year, and discovered
a trespassing shortcut that traversed The Country Club's fairways. Francis soon
developed an uncanny eye for locating lost golf balls on his daily commute and
by the age of seven had amassed that precious trove he kept in the old
gingersnap tin under his bed.
Francis and Wilfred began their playing
careers on the seldom traveled dirt surface of Clyde Street in front of the
Ouimet home, digging out holes with the heels of their boots at the base of two
streetlamps a hundred yards apart, knocking balls endlessly back and forth.
Before they made much headway as players, they turned themselves into golf
course architects. When their father brought home a new lawn mower to use on his
gardening jobs, the boys waited until Arthur was away at work, then appropriated
the mower to hack a primitive three-hole course out of the overgrown cow pasture
behind their house.
The first hole required a hundred-yard
carry off the tee over a creek to a small oval green. The second provided a
breather, a fifty-yard par three. The third returned back across the creek to a
circular green they stamped into their own backyard. Before long that home green
required no mowing at all; they trampled it so often, they wore out the grass.
Tin cans from the family kitchen served as cups. Their equipment consisted of
Wilfred's one club and Francis's hoard of lost balls. He was fortunate The
Country Club continually replenished his supply because their training ground
demanded unerring accuracy; it consisted more of hazard than fairway -- marsh,
gravel pit, swamp, high weeds. Hitting any ball more than a few yards off line
into the unknown wilderness meant kissing it good-bye. Francis said later that
as a result of learning the game on this primitive lay- out, every real course
he subsequently played, no matter how ragged the fairways or threadbare the
putting surfaces, felt as luxurious to him as White House lawns and green felt
billiard tables.
Francis found little companionship at
first for his mysterious attraction to the game; American golf was only five
years older than he was, making him both prodigy and pioneer. The same could be
said for the club across the street that sparked and nurtured his obsession;
only a handful of courses in the United States predate The Country Club and few
that came into existence afterward ever took to the game with equal alacrity.
Because they opened their doors in 1882, The Country Club at Brookline makes an
airtight argument for itself as sui generis; they were a club and it was in the
country, hence its members became the first American organization to use the now
generically applied name for private sporting establishments. But they didn't
start out playing golf. Although The Country Club immediately attracted a solid,
prosperous membership of Boston Brahmins, the Scottish game was still six years
away from setting down roots in New England soil; horse racing and riding at
hounds were The Country Club's original organizing interests. The hundred acres
they acquired for that purpose centered around a half-mile racetrack called
Clyde Park that had been in continuous operation since the 1860s. The legal
structure of The Country Club allowed its members to assume financial
responsibility for an annual racing season that filled the track's grandstand
with spectators from miles around at fifty cents a head; with that income
underwriting their ambitions, facilities for target shooting, archery, tennis,
polo, ice-skating, and curling soon followed. A simple two-story roadhouse and
former hotel on a bluff overlooking the heart of the property became their
clubhouse, and over the years expanded in all directions into the genteel,
rambling, pale yellow mansion that still plays host to its members
today.
In March of 1893, two months before the
birth of that boy who'd soon be scavenging her fairways, in response to
increasing member curiosity The Country Club added a rudimentary six-hole golf
course that leapfrogged back and forth around the racetrack. Built in its
entirety for the modest sum of fifty dollars spent on a few bags of grass seed,
sand for primitive bunkers, and nine tin cans for holes. When early enthusiasts
conducted their first exhibition of the game that spring, golf at The Country
Club made an astonishing debut, hinting at the magic to come. The first shot
struck off the first tee by a Mr. Arthur Hunnewell ran like a scared rabbit
ninety yards to the green and dove neatly into the cup for a hole in one. Since
no one knew any better, the small crowd who had turned out to watch the
proceedings didn't even react; since they'd been given to understand that
putting the ball in the hole was the whole point of the exercise, they just
assumed this was business as usual. Arthur Hunnewell played golf passionately
for another thirty years. He never scored another ace in his
life.
Copyright © 2002 Good Comma Ink Inc.