The Match | Mark Frost | Talks at Google

Good afternoon. This is the, I guess, next edition of the Authors at Google series with Mark Frost. I was realizing Mark and I have known each other probably for near 20 years or so, and it only occurred to me in the last few hours we had lunch that unfortunately, I think this event was a little bit miscast. You're all largely here probably because of what Mark has written about the game of golf, which is an extraordinary game, and these are really fascinating books. But Mark has a whole lot more, I think, to bring to the table and to bring discussion than simply his authoring about golf. And I think he's more than willing and probably will talk more about some of these other things than just golf. And one is really sort of the future of visual storytelling, of which Mark has, in the course of his career, done some of his most interesting work on some real seminal shows. Depending on your knowledge of TV history. Mark's, I think, first big success. He did write on the Six Million Dollar man, but we won't count that one was Hill Street Blues. And for those of you who might remember that series, which was really sort of the seminal cop show that brought things from the world of Dragnet to a real, more nitty gritty look at policing. Similarly, several years later, in, I think, what you might call the Lost of the Day, he co developed and co produced the series Twin Peaks with David lynch, which was a rather extraordinary phenomenon of the time and again exposing very different ways and frankly, more complex storytelling than folks had done in the medium before. So I think we have an opportunity to kind of really engage with Mark on all of those matters as well. His writing career. I don't need to go through all of it. It's all there in Wikipedia. More recently with a Fantastic Four series of films that Mark also did. But a lot of his work in the last several years, he's one of these renaissance media guys who's not tied to one form and has written a number of really fascinating books. The Game of Golf, for those of you who know it and love it, one of the greater physical challenges, I think, that any of us can embark on. I used to play golf. Thanks to Mark, I no longer do. When I lived in Los Angeles, I, for a period of about a year, year and a half, played golf about once a week with Mark and a couple of other buddies. The problem was that Mark and the other buddies were playing golf about three times a week, four times a week. They were getting better. I was not. It was less than relaxation and more humiliation. So I said, I don't think the game of golf is for me. So I'll watch Tiger Woods, I'll read the books. I no longer play the game any longer. But with that I will turn it over to Mark Frost and. And he'll spend some time chatting about his stuff. But then we want to open it up for as much engagement as possible.

Thanks, Richard. Richard wasn't that bad. I think you got down to an 18 handicap at one point, didn't you? Well, anyway, it's a pleasure to be here. It's a thrill to see Google and I can talk about that a little bit later on. It's a company that is obviously right on the cutting edge of everything that's going on. And since we're on strike down in Los Angeles, we have nothing to do but think about the future right now. And it seems to me that the future might be happening right here in this cluster of buildings. Let me tell you a little bit about this current book. This book came out in November. And my involvement with writing about this particular sport began about seven years ago. As Richard outlined had been primarily working in film and television. I'd published three novels at that point and I'd never written nonfiction. I'd actually done some documentary work. And I'd always used golf as sort of my pressure valve for working in Hollywood and doing that kind of fairly uncomfortable work where you're under pressure a lot of the time. Golf was my escape from that. But I was also a kind of minor amateur golf historian. I had a Scottish grandfather who used to tell me stories about the game. And I took a particular interest in a story about a man named Francis we met who if you know anything about the game or if you read my first book, the Greatest Game Ever Played, or maybe saw the movie that we did later was the story of the first American to ever win the US Open. The first American born player who, as chance would have it, was a lower class kid from Massachusetts from outside of Boston, who had grown up across from perhaps the most exclusive and exclusive in terms of excluding country club in America, actually called the Country Club of Brookline, Massachusetts. It was the first country club to call itself the Country Club. And that's how it's still known today. So he grew up as a working class kid whose father was a laborer who had been fired by that country club at one point in his life and who had a real antipathy toward the rich people who played golf. There was a very clear class distinction between the people who played golf and the people who taught you golf or Built your courses or built your clubs. And golf professionals weren't even allowed to set foot in clubhouses until the 1920s. So Francis grew up with this dream of playing golf. He also had a particular aptitude for it. And he began to caddy as a kid as a way of making a living at the age of six. So he was steeped in the game very early on and discovered that what he really wanted to do was be a golf champion. He also had a father who had, as I said, had been rejected by everything that golf represented, who was dead set against this. So you had a classic father son conflict. And what resulted was a kid who walked across the street, entered the US Open in 1913 as an amateur, a hometown kid that no one had ever heard of, who literally went on to beat the two greatest players in the world who had come over from England with the express purpose of winning the US Open. A guy named Harry Varden and another man named Ted Ray, who were both multiple British Open champions. Harry had won a U.S. open, and there were no other players in America who had anything like their level of ability. So this is really the original Horatio Alger story in American sports. And as I delved into it a little bit more, I realized no one had ever written about it. There were a few articles here and there, but it had never gotten the full treatment that I thought a story like this deserved. So I called the United States Golf association, asked them what kind of archives they had about this, and did they have enough to support the research to do the full scale treatment that I thought this deserved? They said yes. My next job was finding the Frances we Met family. Francis we met had founded a scholarship fund for kids in Boston, for all of New England, actually, in 1949. Today, that scholarship gives away a million dollars a year in endowed scholarships to people in New England for kids who have worked in golf in some capacity or other. Frances, two daughters were then both still alive. And I was able to meet them and gain the family's cooperation and through them, learn the inside story of what had gone on inside that family as he was trying to accomplish this. All of that led to the creation of this book, the Greatest Game Ever Played, which was published in 2002. And it kind of was, I guess, the first time somebody had really gone back and peeled open the can on how golf began in this country, because it woke up a lot of interest in the history of the sport. Not just the history of the playing of the sport, but the social history of the sport and how this sport in particular has paralleled a lot of the bigger movements that you see going on in American society. Golf has often lagged behind as a way of reflecting the changes that are going on in this culture. But when you look at the guy who's on top of the game today, you see the game is probably finally being dragged into the 21st century, obviously in the person of Tiger Woods. So Francis we met was the first Tiger Woods. I guess that's the easiest way to put it. The book was very successful. People really responded to it. We made a movie of it for Disney and came out in 2005 that I wrote and produced. And we cast a young unknown actor named Shia LaBeouf as Francis we met, who is now on the verge of becoming a household name. If you saw Transformers or I'm sure everybody's gonna go see the Indiana Jones movie, he's playing young Indy in that group. And this is the movie that got Shia onto the big screen. So it was kind of cool. There's a secondary story that trailed after that that I wanted to follow up. If you saw the movie or read the book. Francis had this remarkable 10 year old caddy who picked up his bag on the day that the Open was going to start, who was wise beyond his years. A half orphan kid from a poor neighborhood who was tough as nails, who really became Sancho Panza to his man of La Mancha. And Francis always gave this kid an inordinate amount of credit for why he won the US Open. That guy's name was Eddie Lowery. He became an instant celebrity in Boston after Francis won. He went on to become the most successful Lincoln Mercury dealer in the United States of America. And he moved to San Jose in the mid-1930s, opened a showroom called Veneta Motors. They had one in San Jose, one in San Francisco. Became enormously wealthy. He was a member at Cypress Point and at Augusta national. And he was on the executive board of the usga. He was really in the center of the game. And Eddie was a real hustler and a guy who believed could get anything done. He was a dynamo. Anybody who met him never forgot him. He had a dream that before he left the game of golf, he could find another great amateur champion like Francis. We met had been, and I'll talk a little bit in a second about the two strains of the game, the professional side and the amateur side. They were very different and very much at odds with each other. He had working for him as salesman at Veneta Motors. Periodically he would go out and Try to find great golfers that he could give a job to as a salesman who could sell cars in the morning, maybe depending how good a golfer he was, and then play client golf in the afternoon, which is now golf has become this sort of way of doing business in this country. Eddie was one of the first people to kind of hit on this idea. So he had working for him, two young amateurs. One was the current United States Amateur champion, a guy named Harvey Ward, who was not much of a car salesman, but a hell of a golfer. And the other was a young guy named Ken Venturi, who was from the Bay Area. He'd gone to San Jose State, was 25 years old. He'd put these two guys in matches for about three years together. He'd make side bets and make a lot of money and pay them under the table. These guys had never lost a match in three years against the best amateur competition that anybody could come up with. So there was a little tournament over here around those years that Bing Crosby used to throw. It's now the at and T down at Pebble Beach. In those days, it was called the Bing Crosby Clambake. And it was a big social event. All the wealthy people from Palm beach and New York and that whole social scene would kind of land in Monterey for two weeks every year. And the culmination of that season was the clam bank. CEOs, movie stars, professional golfers would all get together, they'd all drink heavily, they'd all party. And eventually the thing started getting televised. And people fell in love with this idea. It was the first Pro Am event in this sport. And Eddie was a big part of this because he was a friend of bing's. So in 1956, he brings Harvey Ward and Ken Venturi down to play in the Clambake. They've both been entered as amateurs. And at a cocktail party the Monday of the week of the tournament, Eddie is bragging to anybody who'll listen that these two guys can beat any two golfers in the world in what's called a best ball match and best ball in golf. If Richard and I are playing, we'll take the better of our two scores on any particular hole, and that'll be our team score, and the other team will do the same. And if our score is better than theirs, we win the hole, and so on until the match is finished. If you're not familiar with match play, that's how it works. So he's had a few drinks in him. Eddie's had a tendency to get kind of loud. And his host takes exception to this and says, are you saying your two kids can beat any two players in the world, pros included? Because it just so happened all the good pros in the world where they're gathered for the tournament that week. And he says, you bet, Bring them on. I'm making a tee time tomorrow morning at 10:00 clock at Cypress Point. I'm bringing Harvey and Ken. You bring whoever you want. So the bet was made and it was for a substantial amount of money. It's a little hard to quantify. Depending on who you talk to, it might have been as much as $20,000, which in those days was pretty serious dough. Some people think it was for five. There's a lot of legend and lore here that you have to kind of cut your way through. The next morning, Eddie shows up with Harvey Ward and Ken Venturi and the fella he made the bet with. If you know anything about golf history, these two names will mean something to you. Shows up with Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan, who between them had 13 major championships, were the two greatest living professional golfers. They were both in their early 40s, still very much in their prime as players and absolute stone killers on a golf course. And Harvey and Ken see these two guys coming and the game was on. Now. It's a great setup. What's cool about it is that the match that followed is even better. It's probably the greatest match ever played on American soil. Four guys playing, 18 holes, 27 birdies and an eagle. Ben Hogan sets the course record that day with a 63. Ken Venturi and Byron Nelson shoots 65. Harvey Ward shoots 67, Parr 72. That's pretty good golf on a very difficult golf course. So the story of this book, the challenge as a writer, was to try to recreate a single match. And the fun of it was there were no ever, ever any reports about this match. It was a private match that took place out of the public eye. Nobody wrote about it, nobody knew about it, except the participants. Except that in the intervening years this thing had grown into a kind of Sasquatch, like legend of the most amazing game that nobody ever saw. So I had to start this process by tracking down Byron Nelson. I talked to him about five months before he passed away, and I got his whole version of the story. I had gotten to know Ken Venturi a little bit when I was writing the previous book, so I was able to sit down with Ken. If you ever watched golf. Ken was the lead commentator on CBS Golf for 35 years, he was the face of golf for all. All those tournaments. I think because of that and because he was the youngest member of this foursome and Hogan and Nelson had been his heroes. This entire event had been etched into his brain. And we were able to recreate every single shot as we went through laboriously, over and over again, to try to dig out those memories. And what's resulted is what's in the book. This is the. The actual story, as near as we can tell, and as near as anybody, I guess, will ever be able to tell what actually went on that day. And it was a great amount of fun to write. It was the first time I'd written a book about golf where I could actually talk to people who were alive. That made a big difference. And we've had a great response to it because it captures a kind of spirit about the game that golf still had back then. This is a little bit of what I was mentioning. Between the amateur and the professional side. Amateur golfers played for the love of the game. They played very much in the. What was the original spirit of the renewal of the Olympics. You played a sport because you love to compete. You love to try to bring out the best in yourself. It wasn't about money. It wasn't about glory. It was about confronting the obstacles in front of you and seeing what you could come up with. And amateurs, and I guess the best and most famous of the amateurs was Bobby Jones, were at a different level than the professionals. They didn't need this game to make a living. And so they had a kind of mystique about them. And they sort of stood for an ideal of human achievement that was unsullied by commercialism or having to do this to make a living or pull money out of a sport. There were no endorsements. There was no sort of big money going, changing hands behind the scenes. It was sort of pure. And that's what the amateur game represented. The pros, on the other hand, had had this long, terrible slog as guys who had been at the lowest end of the totem pole in the game of golf had had to fight for their rights and their privileges as human beings to be allowed and treated with the dignity that people who do this for a living should be. To the point where, when the PGA Tour started, these guys might make $200 if they won a tournament as recently as 1935. Now think about what's going on today in the game. And Tiger and Phil Mickelson. And these guys are. They own their own jets they're making maybe 10 to 12 million a year. When they win multiple tournaments, they're making quadruple that in endorsements. They're living like gods compared to this. It's only 70 years later. So these guys who carved out a living and the two who really were the ones who made a difference were Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson, who made the Tour what it was because they were so good. They created the sport that we know today. So in the 1950s, there was still this balance between the amateurs who played for love and the pros who played for money. This was the first and only time that the best amateurs in the world ever played the best professionals in the world. And that's another thematic concern that's in the book and I think is very interesting from a social perspective. What happens the next year is that a young guy comes storming out of Pennsylvania named Arnold Palmer, who's very charismatic. And it just so happens they start televising golf tournaments. And within four years, the guys who decided not to turn pro because it was kind of unseemly or you could make a better living selling cars or insurance, suddenly realized the professional game is where it's at. And from that moment, the amateur game has been in irreversible decline. The idea that today two amateurs could go out and give Tiger and Phil Mickelson a run for their money is ludicrous. It couldn't happen. There's so much dough on the table now. So this intrigued me because it was a moment in time when the game still mattered, when people were playing for the love of it. And that's what happened on that day. And because all four of these guys, in their own way, were quite extraordinary. And I write about their lives in some detail. That's what made it a compelling story for me. And what happened to them afterwards is not without interest either. Eddie Lowery, the very next year, is investigated by the IRS for income tax evasion. And in the process of throwing open his books, he was eventually exonerated. It comes into the public scrutiny that he's been paying Harvey Ward expenses to go play in some of these amateur tournaments. This is totally against the rules of amateur golf. And at this point, Harvey has now won back to back US amateur titles in 55 and 56. He's being talked about as the next Bobby Jones. Ken Venturi says, forget Palmer, forget Nicholas. Harvey Ward was the best player of that generation. But what happens to Harvey when this comes to light is that he doesn't decide to turn pro. He decides to refute the charges and fight them at a hearing at the usga. Ken Venturi, on the other hand, who faced very probably the same action against him, turns pro. And so it doesn't matter about his amateur status anymore. He never looks back. Harvey, on the other hand, goes and defends himself in front of the usga, and he is stripped of his amateur status and he's allowed to retain his titles, but he's not allowed to have anything to do with the game of golf for a year. And sadly, that sends Harvey Ward tumbling into a 20 year nightmare of alcoholism and unemployment and four marriages. His whole entire life falls apart until he pulls it together in the 1990s. He's now teaching back in his home state of North Carolina. At one point he'd been reduced to giving lessons in the upper floor of a department store in San Francisco for like five bucks. That was how low he felt. Ken Venturi says, I bumped into him one day at Fisherman's Wharf and he was shucking oysters for beer money from a guy who had been at that pinnacle only three or four years before. Anyway, in the 1990s, he finally straightens himself out. He discovers and becomes the coach for a young golfer named Payne Stewart, who later becomes a U.S. open winner. And Harvey does have a nice third act to his story. But that Harvey's story is the story of what happens to amateur golf once Jack Nicklaus wins two amateurs and turns pro. There has never been an amateur to this date who could play at that level, who has been able to resist the siren song of making that much money playing the game that they like. So all those things are kind of at work in the book. That's what I was trying to cover in the book. And also talk about the 1950s and how golf fit in. And Eisenhower was the first president to openly play golf, which kind of made it okay for middle class America to play golf. And then Palmer popularized it in a way that we now see Tiger doing. He was the first guy to kind of kick it up to that level. So that's the story of the match and the current book. We're about to do a documentary of it with Jim Nance and Ken Venturi that we're going to shoot in a couple months down in Monterey and just try to bring all this forward again. There's no photos of the match, but we're going to try to recreate it with Ken's story and shots of the course and a kind of Ken Burns approach. So that's the current book. I'd be Happy to answer any questions about that, about anything else. Sure, There were. Well, the curious thing is that the guy who was the caddy master at Cyprus when they started out, he said there were maybe four or five people who followed them. There were caddies. Each guy had a caddy, and George Coleman and Eddie Lowry were the two bet makers. He. According to this guy, he said by the time they finished, there were over 5,000 people gathered that word had gotten around the Monterey Peninsula that, holy cow, this match is going on. Venturi and Ward were celebrities in the San Francisco area, and Hogan and Nelson were superstars. So it was a day of practice rounds before the clambakes. There were a lot of people down there at pebble and at the other courses, and they apparently all shot over there as soon as it was over. I've talked to maybe four or five people who claim to have been there. The caddy master didn't follow the match, but he saw it finish. The caddies have since died. Both Eddie Lowery and George Coleman have passed away. So I did get a version that George Coleman had left. His widow gave me a tape. He told the story at a dinner party once, and she had a tape recording of it. So I got his version. And Eddie Lowery had left some written descriptions of it that his daughter gave to me. So I tried to hit it from every angle. And, you know, then you have to sort of go with the preponderance of opinion, which version is the right one, because there's clearly some conflicts. So it's, I guess, as close as you can get to the facts. I'm still getting calls from people around the country who've read the book and said, well, I think you got this wrong. And so I'm going back and examining. And the nice thing about a book is it's a live document. You can still make changes very deep into the life of a book. It's not like a movie where to go back in and change all those steps to. Unless you're George Lucas and you want to put more creatures in the bar in the cantina, you've got the money to do that in a book. You can still make those kind of amendments as you go. Sure.

I'm an oval state, so.

Oh, yeah, right.

What he's doing. Because he obviously has the skills to be out there on tour, and he's obviously doing very well.

Right.

He's obviously a pretty rare J sequel, kind of.

Yeah.

You don't see. And I wouldn't miss.

I don't. Unless you come from wealth already. It's a pretty hard thing to resist. I mean, look at what's happened to Michelle. We, you know, as a 13 year old kid, her parents saw a financial windfall for her, pushed her and I think excessively toward it to the point where people are now questioning whether she'll ever have a professional career. So, you know, there's arguments either way. I mean, if you'd rather be doing something else than play golf for love, I personally think it would be a pretty terrifying way to make a living. There's no guaranteed paychecks in golf. It's the only sport that's still like that. You are truly an entrepreneur out there. And if you can't hack it, the game lets you know pretty quickly. It's littered with people who couldn't make it on tour. A lot of them end up as club pros or, you know, selling clubs down at Roger Dunn's. I mean it's, it's a very tough way to make a living. So I don't see the amateur game coming back anytime soon. And I think with that much, when that much money enters the equation, it's, it's pretty much going to keep going in that direction. So you mentioned briefly just this idea of visual storytelling. Just out of curiosity, do we have any World of Warcraft players here in this audience way back? Well, because we've been on strike in Hollywood for three months. As you've probably noticed, television has actually been worse than it normally is recently. And we've been thinking about where is all this going to go in terms of what people use for entertainment and the generation behind ours. I can't watch a movie on an ipod. It's just too small. But I know people can do it and that there's a hunger for content that exceeds your need to have it be involved with spectacle. I saw my first movie at Grauman's Chinese Theater when I was 5 years old and it scared the crap out of me. But it made me think, holy cow, I'm in some kind of religious experience here. And so I always had a reverence for big theaters and big screens and you know, Lawrence of Arabia and those kind of movies had scope and size and drama and adult content that I don't think we're ever going to see again. Not to disparage today's movies because they can be equally cool, but I'm wondering, in the wake of the strike, which we hope will be settled sometime in the coming millennium, whether the way that we create and distribute and receive entertainment content is going to be irretrievably changed. Now, I have to confess, I do play World of Warcraft, and I would much rather sit down and take my level 70 Night Elf Hunter on a quest. This sounds stupid to confess, but that's much more interesting to me than an episode of Lost because it's actually a positive action. I'm involved in the story. I'm creating the content, in a sense, because I'm directing the character. Maybe because I do this for a living and I write characters, doing things all day long, I find that more refreshing. My guess is when you see that there's 15 million people playing online games, that there might be a sea change going on in how people want to be entertained. So I'm very curious to see where this is all going to go. As we get further into digital distribution and it's much easier to receive content, and probably as it gets cheaper to produce, you're going to see the YouTube phenomenon, I think, continue to push marginal mainstream entertainment more and more to the sidelines. So I feel like we're on the verge of a huge change in how humans entertain themselves, that it's going to no longer be quite as passive an experience. I'm hoping that people will hang on to books a little bit longer because I enjoy reading and writing them. But I can also see that there's this inevitable momentum toward people being in the center of the action and having much more control over what you're experiencing and downloading and ingesting. So I just wanted to say a few words about that. And if anybody's playing on the Hydraxis realm who wants to join our guild, we'd be happy to have you. So if you have any questions about all that, that'd be pretty cool, too. Yeah.

I think another part of that is a movie or a TV show. The past experience doesn't seem to be enough anymore.

Yeah.

My friends watch TV with a laptop.

I do it.

But maybe not so much. Maybe it's a generational thing.

Yeah.

Looking at information about what's on, what they're seeing on tv. And some of my friends won't sit through a movie in a theater anymore.

Yeah.

Or they'll text them and something.

Sure.

I think part of it is is that hunger to be to help drive the entertainment. But part of it is there's so much bombardment media and messages that I think people are used to shorter versions of entertainment. I don't want to say shorter attention span, but bits of entertainment that are.

More brief and interruptible.

Well, I also Think that all started with Sesame street and a generation that grew up with things that came at you much quicker. My first job in television was working my way through college on the crew of the Mr. Rogers Neighborhood Show. Talk about a different pace of storytelling. I mean, we'd fall asleep in the studio just watching it as it was filming. I mean, he's a wonderful man, but you know, I have a 4 year old now and we've tried to get him to watch Mr. Rogers and it just doesn't work for him anymore. It's too slow. He needs more stimulation. So I know that the generation after ours grew up with more things coming at you more quickly. And I know I was very early on wanting to get as much of that coming at me as I wanted, as I could get. So I think that's driven us to the point where we are now where the idea of a big movie without special effects and dynamic editing and furious car crashes isn't going to sell anymore. Something, I mean, I guess the last one that was sort of ponderous and slow and big was Titanic, but it had a love story that people hooked into. But for instance, these fantastic four movies that I wrote, they kept telling us, take out the dialogue. You know, people don't want to hear any of these people talk. They want to see them break through something or burn something up. These movies are also being made for a global audience. So they're not trying to. They're not going to sit and listen to Oscar Wilde dialogue for an hour anymore. Those are much more niche kind of programming now. And so I think what you've seen in the studio is they've been moving more toward these big platform movies that they can sell around the world that are not terribly challenging to produce. You just simply have to kind of ramp up a marketing campaign and people show up for them. So that's the sea change that we see from the movie side that the marketing departments are now running. All the studios, all the heads of studios are former marketing heads. Now they will not make a movie unless they first develop the marketing campaign that is now the tail is wagging the dog content is less important than its marketability. And I'm wondering if as consumers, people are starting to catch on that the third Pirates of the Caribbean is not necessarily going to be that interesting. It's just simply a brand name that they don't have to reinvent and sell because they've sold it twice before already. So in a way, I think it's kind of cool that consumers are hipper and they're turning away from a lot of that stuff because in the last 10 years, since the studios now can own, produce, and distribute television shows, I think television's gotten a lot worse. And most of the people who used to do this for a living, I think feel the same way. And I think judging by the numbers of people who are looking elsewhere, the consumers are starting to agree as well. So I guess it's welcome to the 21st century and we'll see where we go from here. The thing that has always motivated me and that I knew since I was five years old was that storytelling is a very primal human experience and that everybody has a narrative that they spin out of their own life. The story that you tell yourself every day as you're connecting the dots to make sense of what's going on in your life. And that's always what's been great about the experience of interacting with meaningful stories is it helps you make sense of your own experience all the way back to Greek drama and cave painting and dancing around the campfire after the hunt. That's a very, very necessary part of our DNA. I think that's going to continue. But where it goes from here may actually be up as much to the audience now as it is to the creators. So it's going to be a wild ride. Anyway, I think we're. If we have any more questions or. Yeah.

So without giving away the end of the story, was there a. It was such a great match. Was there a follow up? Was there ideas of having a rematch? I mean, they all played so well. I'm curious that. How come we didn't hear about, you know, I'm sure the guy that represented Nelson and Hogan probably said, I want to play you guys again next year for a double the amount of money.

Sure, I can answer that. Am I good?

Oh, I'm also.

I'm wired. Okay, cool.

I was going to ask him about the.

Oh, yeah, no, we got it. The. They talked about a rematch immediately, and it never happened because six months later, Harvey Ward was banned from the game. So they never had a chance to do it. And Ken turned pro and he was an immediate success. He went on tour almost right away. Ken and Harvey played, ironically enough, three years later in the Pro Am at the Crosby with Ken now as the pro and Harvey as the amateur. And Ken knew at that moment that Harvey no longer cared about the game. He was missing putts and flirting with girls in the audience rather than actually trying to win. And he'd never seen him behave like that before. So it never came to pass. So that's what sort of makes it special, is that it was just this Brigadoon event that would never come again.

I was also going to ask about the. The technology back then. I mean, did Ken Venturi talk about. I mean, there were younger guys in their late or early 20s, I guess. Were they mid-20s? Were they hitting the ball further than Hogan and Nelson, or were they.

No, they hit it about the same distance. I mean, Harvey was probably the biggest hitter in the bunch when he wound up. But Hogan. Golf is all about economy of motion and how all that your body parts are working together. And Hogan understood that better than anybody. So when he wanted to, he could hit the ball further than anybody. He was very slight. He was about 145 pounds. He was actually capable of hitting the ball with such violence that they said it was almost a sickening thud when you heard the ball compress off the club. By the end of the round, they were all smacking it pretty good. In those days, a really good drive was maybe 265 yards, maybe 280 tops. Those were the long hitters. Now we have guys hitting them 350. So it is a different game they're playing now. And like everything else, we'll see where it goes from here.

I'm curious if there's any sense of hypocrisy. You know, they were working at a car dealership, obviously. I mean, I grew up playing golf. I threw some money around, had fun growing up. But these guys were. This was some serious money for, you know, kids in those days. You know, working these deals, playing these private matches.

Right.

I'm assuming Harvey and Ken knew that they were treading on thin ice here.

Well, they weren't, but so was everybody else. It was a very common practice. In a way, that's what the hypocrisy of the. It was actually exposed the other way in that the USGA had always been able to turn a blind eye to this. Sponsors were always helping amateurs get to tournaments in various and subtle ways. This was because it was such a public event, because Harvey Eddie had been indicted by a grand jury that the evidence couldn't be ignored. And it was a reporter from the Chronicle who broke it before the USGA even looked at it. And when it hit the news wires, they had to step in. They were compelled to.

So did this go back to say, like, you know, the Bobby Jones era and Amber de Golf? I mean, that type of money?

Sure.

Okay.

Yeah. I mean, Jones was always very pure about that stuff. There was never a question about him, but there were plenty of others who, you know, found a way to make it work. Are we good? Yeah.

We were discussing this beforehand. I was wondering if you could talk about what you're working on. Now, you mentioned that you started research for a book about Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, which is a game that's been more watched and analyzed to death in many regards, what you've discovered.

Yeah, I was as big a fan as I've been about golf. I started out life as an even bigger baseball fan, and I had always wanted to write a baseball book. And there was one game in particular that I always felt was the most exciting I'd ever seen. And it was in the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. Game 6 of that series, which went 12 innings and was won very dramatically by a Carlton Fisk home run that sent it to a seventh game the next day in Boston. This was when Boston was just beginning to romanticize the idea that they were living under a curse that they could never win the World Series. And this seemed to really reinforce that idea. So it's also a fascinating time. 1975, pivotal year in American history. It's the end of the Nixon era. It's the end of Vietnam. It's a real transition going on socially. It's also. This is the last World Series and the last season ever played in baseball before the start of free agency. And so it's the game that I remember growing up where you actually knew who all the players were from year to year. They were, you could argue, was a form of indentured servitude. They were locked to the team that had signed them for life, and it was a great victory for them. And they've obviously profited enormously from it as players since then. Whether the game has profited from it is a larger issue. And so those are things I want to examine as well in looking at what happened in 1975. So that'll be out in 2009.

Two quick questions. One is, can you get me out to Cyprus? That's serious. I'll bug you about that later. Okay, not really. And two is, do you think Tiger woods has done enough for. I have to ask you a Tiger question. Do you think he's done enough for the game of golf? I mean, he's clearly brought a lot of money, a lot of fans, not clear all of the things that were going to happen in terms of diversity and other types of things. And Then recently there was this issue about the lynch comment made and he's like, look, I'm not going to tackle all the issues in the world. And this was probably wasn't the time for him to do it. But do you think he's doing enough?

Well, it's a hard question to answer. Has somebody done enough? I mean, it seems like an individual question. I mean, did Jack Nicklaus do enough? Did Willie Mays do enough for baseball? You know, the difference is that Tiger's going to become the first billionaire athlete which we've never really had before. He's going to pass Michael Jordan very soon as the guy who's made the most money playing sports in the history of mankind. The first T program which he started does an enormous amount. I've done a little bit of work with them. It's in almost every major city. It's very well funded. He's opened the learning centers associated with them, which I think is pretty admirable. He's also an incredibly busy guy. I mean, he's scheduled beyond belief for years in advance. So I don't feel like I'm in a position to judge whether he's done enough. I think he's done a lot. It's a matter of individual conscience really. You know, it's. Are you a socially committed person when you're that single minded as a champion in a sport, it's hard to be anything other than that because it's so all consuming. So I think until he retires actively as a player, it's going to be hard to see him, you know, running for president or doing all the other things that people might want him to do. Because when a guy is that great and that much better than everybody else, he becomes a kind of repository of a lot of other people's dreams, an avatar of what you. All your hopes and fantasies for what people could be. And he's still just a guy who has to get up every day. So I think he's pretty amazing. I've met him and he's a very, very impressive person. And I don't feel qualified to judge him on that issue. It's not easy being him. I mean, it's probably a lot of fun, but it can't be easy. I guess I'd put it that way. You didn't answer it.

Cypress Point.

Well. Well, we could talk. A large sum could change hands and that might make a difference. No, it's a very difficult place to play, as you know. But nothing is out of the realm of the possible. I'll put it that way. Yes.

I recently, having seen the movie the Greatest Game Ever Played on DVD a while ago, I picked up the book recently and read it. And as I was reading it, what fascinated me. I did not grow up with golf.

Yeah.

But it fascinated me, all the detail, all the history that was in there that I really didn't know about. This is interesting. I got into golf because he did.

Cool.

So I'm kind of following along, but it was just. I just wondered where you get all the details and everything about the individual holes of the matches from so long ago.

Well, the cool thing about particularly Greatest Game was that the medium of the day was newspapers. And there were no less than 12 daily newspapers from the Boston, New York area who had reporters on the grounds who were following them obsessively, shot by shot. So what I was able to do after gathering all that stuff from all those various libraries is created a big board with a timeline so that I could tell at any particular moment what was going on with this player at that hole, this player at that hole. And I wanted the experience, the reading experience to be like somebody watching it on television. So if something cool was happening over on 16, you could cut there at that moment. But organizing all the information was the real challenge. But I think I've got three trunks full of stuff that was written in the day. The written word was the. You know, was the. The main way we communicated.

It's just I'm not used to hearing things nowadays because written word isn't that. To get that detail out of the written word is the thing.

Yeah, it was very rare. I mean, it is now in our experience. I think. I'm going to have to ask, but.

How was it working on Twin Peaks?

Well, it was. It was like being in the Beatles for a year. You know, David and I created the show actually, just before the last writers strike 20 years ago now. And when the strike ended, ABC came back and said, you got to do that show for us now. We. We hardly remembered what we'd talked to them about. We told them the only way we would do this show is if you leave us completely alone. We're going to own it, we're going to run it. You can put it on for once or maybe twice is what we figured it would last. We had no idea that it would have any impact at all or that it would ever get seen. So it was kind of liberating. I mean, it was fun. If you were used to working in television where the weight of the notes could crush you, that you get from people who generally aren't qualified to comment on those sorts of things. And now it's much worse. We were left alone. We created enough space to just do that ourselves. And it was a little like saying, you know, my uncle's got a barn, you've got some curtains. Let's go put on a show. And we just hired all our friends and we found some cool actors and just went off and did it. So it was a great way to spend a couple of years. The making of the show was a lot more fun, actually, than the. The resulting cultural feedback, I'll put it that way. Which is a. Well, just that, you know, when you're on the COVID of every magazine and people are coming at you from every angle because they want to know this or that or they want a piece of something, it's harder to do the actual work that got you there. And that, in many ways was kind of the downfall of the show is that we got so distracted with the. The penumbra around the show that we couldn't actually deal with the making of the show. And I think to its credit, it stuck to its guns. It was truly weird from beginning to end. And it never became who Shot jr? It was this thing that people still talk about. And as I was saying to somebody today, Google's the only company I ever know that's become a verb. And that show became an adjective. People still describe things as being twin peakish. So it's fun to have a little bit of impact on the lexicon that way. What made the studio pick it up? Because it's such an odd show that. Yeah, the network, it was abc. The only reason they picked it up is because they were in last place. And that frequently happens when somebody's trailing the other networks. They'll take a chance and they'll say, you know what? Why don't. Maybe we should just trust the guys who make the shows to do something. There's a novel concept. So that's what they did. And to their credit, they lived up to that until they canceled us.

Thank you so much for visiting, Mark.

My pleasure. Thanks. Thank you.