"The Longest Shot," "The Upset" and "On Par" On Saturday, June 18, 1955, at 9 p.m., NBC, in its second year of televising the United States Open golf championship, signed off from its scheduled one hour of live coverage at the Olympic Club in San Francisco by declaring Ben Hogan the winner of his record fifth Open. The legendary golfer Gene Sarazen, serving as color man for NBC and pressed for time, quickly congratulated Hogan as he came off the 18th green and persuaded him to hold up five fingers, which he did, somewhat reluctantly. Bettmann/Corbis Jack Fleck, left, won the 1955 U.S. Open in an 18-hole playoff against Ben Hogan. Jack Fleck, Ben Hogan, and Pro Golf's Greatest Upset at the 1955 U.S. Open By Neil Sagebiel Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press. $25.99. Jack Fleck's Incredible Victory Over Ben Hogan at the U.S. Open By Al Barkow Chicago Review Press. $24.95. The Everyday Golfer's Survival Guide By Bill Pennington Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $26. Slight problem. There were still players left on the course. One of them, a yoga-­loving, white-flour-hating municipal pro from Davenport, Iowa, named Jack Fleck, rallied from nine strokes back over the final 54 holes - still an Open record - and birdied two of the last four holes to tie Hogan and force an 18-hole Sunday playoff, which he won. NBC chose not to broadcast the playoff. Come on. Pre-empt "People Are Funny" and "Mr. Peepers"? Be serious. Fifty-seven years after the fact (and in time for this year's Open at Olympic), two books about one of golf's most improbable upsets have surfaced simultaneously. Like the clash between Hogan and Fleck, the works pit an established, celebrated veteran against a relative upstart. And as in 1955, the upstart wins. But, unlike in 1955, it's not close. "The Longest Shot" is the first book from Neil Sagebiel, the founder and editor of Armchair Golf Blog, and he makes a strong bid to create shelf space for himself alongside 21st-century golf literati like John Feinstein, Mark Frost and Don Van Natta Jr. Sagebiel takes his time, working leisurely as golf demands, but does a thorough job. And his narrative pace during the last hour of that final round, as he bounces back and forth between Hogan in the locker room and Fleck on the course, may have a rhythm more suited to a tennis rally, but here it aces. At the top of his bibliography, Sagebiel cites a 1989 retrospective by Al Barkow, "The History of the PGA Tour." Barkow is the author of more than a dozen golf books over a career that has spanned five decades. In 2005, he received the PGA Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism. Apparently, that was a lifetime ago. In "The Upset," he makes so many sloppy mistakes that he irrevocably mars a potentially solid effort. Barkow gets the name of Fleck's caddie, Emil Schroder, wrong. Barkow calls him "John Schroeder," confusing Fleck's bag-toter with the 1970s and "80s touring pro and television commentator. Then, inexplicably, he posts an incorrect score in Fleck's second round. You put down the wrong score and sign your name to it, you're disqualified. These are not my rules. The authors differ sharply on Hogan's deportment in defeat. Who is right? Sagebiel says: "At the moment of his greatest disappointment in golf, Ben Hogan displayed a kind of grace in defeat that Jack Fleck would remember for the rest of his life." Conversely, Barkow calls Hogan a show-stealer for announcing his retirement and writes: "It was simply the act of a totally self-absorbed person. The term solipsism comes to mind. Strong words, which a reader might take at face value, until Barkow reveals that years later, Hogan reneged on an implied promise to let him write his autobiography. The revelation serves no purpose except to make a reader question every less than flattering assessment of Bantam Ben. Both authors employ a play-by-play narrative of the final day, and in both works Fleck emerges as captivating, ultimately star-crossed and an athlete whose diet and faith put him ahead of his time. The morning before Saturday's final 36 holes (the third and fourth rounds were contested on the same day until 1965), Fleck claimed to have looked in the mirror while shaving and heard a voice say, "Jack, you are going to win the Open." He would later tell people: "It just came out and I heard it. I felt the Lord must have been talking to me" - words uttered half a century before Tim Tebow was a gleam in a marketer's eye. There have traditionally been three types of golf books: historical ones like "The Longest Shot" and "The Upset," and those that are either instructional or utterly frivolous, in which various celebrities and "celebrities" mix alleged humor and ersatz modesty as they hack around a links memoir. Now, mercifully, there is a fourth. Bill Scheft, a novelist and a writer for "Late Show With David Letterman," edited the collection "America's Gift to Golf: Herbert Warren Wind on the Masters."