"Head-to-head play is hunting-and-gathering golf. It's about bringing a victory back to the clubhouse, regardless of method or style."

There has been so much annual numbingly cliched chatter about match play and excuse-making for the "vagaries" of the format. Lost in all of the chatter is how much this format meant to sustaining the game for centuries. And how incredible some of the battles once were.

Bill Fields brings a wonderful historical perspective to the table with this short but sweet retrospective on match play's role in the game, including some truly zany grudge matches.

That wasn't the case in the late fall of 1875 at St. Andrews, where four-time British Open champion Young Tom Morris was lured into a six-day, 12-round match for 50 pounds against wealthy 18-year-old English amateur Arthur Molesworth, who was getting three strokes a side.

The cold weather deteriorated from bothersome to brutal as the marathon went on, the links a frozen, snowy mess the morning of the final day when balls painted red had to be used. "Even with [Old Tom Morris'] workmen shoveling and sweeping, greens were unputtable," Kevin Cook writes in Tommy's Honor. "The players chipped on and then chipped their 'putts,' trying to flip their gutties into the hole as if they were stymied."

Not until the 206th hole did Morris close out his foe, the long, tiring, frosty encounter finally ending when the 24-year-old phenom sank a putt for a 2 on the now-thawed grass at No. 8. Morris would be dead within a month, the victim of an embolism on Christmas Day perhaps hastened by the strain of the match. The stymie left golf for good in 1952, and the PGA Championship became a stroke-play event in 1958.

These days, 200-hole tussles can only be found in the past. For the very best, match play is a sword fight in a drone world. But thank goodness one-on-one at least occasionally offers a glint of what was.