Tommy's Honor (11 page)

Allan Robertson relieved the congestion by enlarging the putting-greens. Each of his new double greens featured two holes and two flags. Now, rather than tussling for space like miners going opposite ways in a yard-wide tunnel, golfers moved smoothly out and back. To show them which hole was which on each double green, Robertson used white flags for the outward nine, red for the inward. The first red flags were cut from worn-out golfing jackets donated by R&A members.

It was soon clear that St. Andrews’ new, wider putting-greens called for wider fairways. Otherwise players left Robertson’s new, spacious greens only to duel for space in the same narrow pathways Balfour had compared to a city street. Robertson had done some clearing of whins, heather and long grass, but Tom inherited the bulk of that task, which would occupy him for years. He would widen the fairways, giving golfers more room for error, opening the way to a more freewheeling style of play.

After cutting back swaths of heather and high grass, Tom attacked the whins. There had been no whins at Prestwick, but the thick, sharp-bristled bushes choked the links at St. Andrews. Tom was a terrier with whins. The club paid local men to help—Hutchison called them Tom’s “horny-handed sons of toil”—but Tom’s hands were anything but soft. He could strike a match on them. Still, no bare hand could win a round with the whins’ skin-tearing thorns. Tom wore thick gloves on the days he battled whins: chopping off their branches, undermining them with picks and spades, yanking, grunting and wrestling until the gnarled brown bushes came out by the roots. Only then did he have the satisfaction of tossing a whin carcass into a barrow and lighting his pipe. And that was one bush out of thousands. All through the late 1860s Tom would come home with whin thorns sticking out of his jacket, his hat, and even his beard. Nancy and Lizzie would pick out the thorns and throw them in the fire. Tommy wondered which foe his father would rather be rid of, Willie Park or the whins.

Tommy wondered, too, whether his father’s backbreaking work was hurting his golf. After winning his third Open in 1864, Tom had failed to finish first or even second in the next two.

Both Morrises went to Prestwick for the 1865 Open. Fourteen-year-old Tommy, by far the youngest in the field, was making his first try for the Belt. His father was the betting favorite, but after two rounds Tom stood nine shots behind Andrew Strath, the gaunt St. Andrean who had succeeded him as Prestwick’s greenkeeper. Strath came from a large, colorful family. His younger brother, Davie, was a gifted golfer who would become Tommy’s foe and great friend. Another Strath brother called Mad Willie was a thug who specialized in home invasions. He would burst through your door at the dinner hour, beat you up, and steal your valuables—banknotes, teapots, silverware, even your hat if he liked it. Golfers joked that if Andrew Strath won the Belt he’d have to hide it from Mad Willie. But the joke was whispered, for everyone knew the Straths were an ill-starred family, prone to consumption. Twenty-nine-year-old Andrew already showed signs of the tuberculosis that would kill him.

Strath was apparently better at golf than greenkeeping. As the
Ayrshire Express
reported, “Never since the Belt was competed for has the weather been so good, the only drawback being that some of the putting-greens were not as smooth as hitherto.” Tom Morris, weary and scarred after months of whin-wrestling, fell apart in the second round. According to the
Express
, “No little consternation prevailed among the backers of the favourite when it was known that he had been beaten by his own son.” Not that Tommy was anywhere near the lead. Eight shots behind with twelve holes to go, Tommy picked up his ball and quit. At the last hole, scrawny Strath edged Willie Park for the Belt.

By 1866, Tom’s second full year on the job, the cost of maintaining the St. Andrews links was eight times what it had been in 1860. He had stayed under his £20 expense limit in his first year, billing the R&A for seventeen pounds, two shillings and sixpence for “labour assistance, cartage and grass seed…and a new wheel for the links barrow,” but the next year Tom nearly doubled his budget, spending a bit over £36 for labor and equipment, including an innovation that shored up the hole in the High Hole’s crumbly putting-green—an iron collar that was the first cup in a golf green. No one complained about the money he was spending. Even R&A members who had opposed Tom’s hiring praised him now. The fairways were wider, bunker walls re-sodded, divots filled with sand and grass seed to help them grow over. Best of all were the putting-greens. Tom made some of the course’s double greens still larger as well as smoother and greener. He top-dressed the greens with sand as he had at Prestwick, and helped his workmen whisk them with long, rough brooms made of dried evergreen branches strapped to old broomsticks. His conifer brooms resembled the kind that witches rode in fairy tales, and they worked a sort of magic, scraping the top layer of soil just enough to stimulate young grass. He said brooming a putting-green was like scratching an itch—the green
liked
it.

For greens other than the one at the wet High Hole he used clay pipes as hole-liners. The pipes, made in nearby Kincaple, happened to be four and a quarter inches in diameter. Due to that quirk of the Kincaple brickworks, four and a quarter inches became the standard diameter of the cup. (Or at least that was the story in St. Andrews. Musselburgh golfers claimed they’d been cutting holes that size since 1829.)

While Tom mended the course, his son hit balls. Tommy’s swing would be imitated by a generation of golfers who saw themselves as his apostles. Gripping the club with his hands about a finger-width apart, Tommy kept the “V” between his right thumb and forefinger aimed at his right shoulder at address, as golfers do today. Twisting so far on the backswing that he nearly lost sight of the ball, he swung down with a sudden move that one witness compared to “the shutting of a jackknife.” He hit the ball low, drilling it into the wind. In golf as in all things, Tommy was a skeptic: Nobody could tell him how to hit a shot, he would find out for himself. He improved by making mistakes and then trying again a different way, or just trying harder. In the words of Bernard Darwin, grandson of the evolutionist and golf correspondent for the
Times
of London early in the next century, Tommy Morris was “palpably filled with golfing genius.” Tommy would have agreed with Darwin that “golf at its best is a perpetual adventure, that it consists in investing not in gilt-edged securities but in comparatively speculative stock, that it ought to be a risky business.” The boy played more like the daring Willie Park than like his own father, who was by nature a feather-ball player. Tom’s style was needlepoint—knitting a round together with straight lines from one safe spot to the next on ragged, narrow links. Tommy’s more imaginative, attacking game evolved along with the gutta-percha ball and the wider fairways and iron-headed clubs that came with it.

Far from mistrusting irons, as older players did, Tommy found new uses for them. One favorite was his rut iron. A forerunner of the sand wedge, the rut iron was made for digging a ball out of cart-wheel ruts. Most links were crisscrossed with ruts—cart tracks barely wider than a golf ball. The rut iron was a lofted specialty club designed to flip the ball out of a rut to safe ground. But Tommy used his rut iron from the fairway. As a Prestwick Golf Club historian wrote, he “developed the art of playing approach shots with a rut-iron, a shot so difficult as never to have been attempted before.” By swinging sharply down with the lofted little cleek, Tommy launched high approaches that stopped or even backed up when they hit the green. Backspin! As a tournament tactic, he invented it.

He perfected a different shot while practicing in his father’s workshop. Tom and his workers would be molding, cooling, and hammering gutties while Tommy, who did all he could to avoid such tedious labor, worked on his chipping. Fashioning a clay ring the size of the hole, he dropped the ring on the saw-dusted cement floor and chipped balls at it.

He was already a brilliant putter. His stance on the green was unique—right foot almost touching the ball, so close that it appeared he’d bump that foot with his wooden putter on the backswing. He gave putts a firm rap, coming upward through the stroke to add overspin that kept the ball rolling over bumps and bits of shell. “Young Tom was of an entirely different temperament from his father. He played with great dash and vigour,” reads Prestwick’s club history. “He was a notably good putter, always giving the hole a chance…the hero of the golfing world and the pride of Scotland.” It seemed he never missed inside five feet. “Of the short ones,” the golf chronicler H.S.C. Everard recalled, “he missed fewer than any player the writer has ever seen.”

Nobody ever said that about Tom. The elder Morris was a generally solid putter bedeviled by what later generations would call the yips. His putting woes earned him frequent ribbings from his son. “The hole’ll not come to you, Da,” Tommy said. “Be up!” Still Tom left crucial putts short. Tommy teased him, telling other golfers, “My father’d be a brave putter if the hole were always a yard nearer to ‘im.” Tom shook his fist, citing the Fifth Commandment:
Honor thy father!
But he liked the boy’s spirit. Tom may have feigned indifference when his son hit brilliant shots; may have offered only a handshake when the boy beat him for the first time, on a windy morning when Tommy sank a putt and threw his putter into the air; may have scolded Tommy later for making a show of himself. But Tom was quietly pleased. The boy wasn’t afraid to win.

As the 1860s progressed father and son began playing as a team in money matches. Small-stakes contests at first, but the wagers Tom made with cracks and club members grew to ten, twenty, even fifty pounds—Tom’s annual salary as greenkeeper. He said little about these matches to Nancy, who wanted more for their bright academy-taught son than the life of a crack. Indeed Tommy lacked a prime credential for that low trade: Unlike all the other cracks, he was not also a caddie. This privilege was unique to him—from the start Tommy Morris was a player, never stooping to tee up someone else’s ball.

There was no golf on the Sabbath. Golfer Andra Kirkaldy recalled the town’s “broad clean streets in the quiet of Sunday, when every tavern door is closed.” Six fresh-scrubbed Morrises went up North Street, passing the little house where Tom was born, nodding to other churchgoers. They wore their “Sunday best,” a recent Sabbath custom that signaled respectability. Tom had on a well-brushed tweed suit he wore only to church. Nancy wore a long dress and a bonnet with a ribbon that tied under her chin; if the sun was out she carried a parasol. Tommy walked stiffly in his short black jacket, frilled cotton shirt and black tie, striped breeches, peaked cap, and gleaming shoes freshly blacked by his sister, Lizzie, who was dressed in starchy frills and a little bonnet of her own. Jimmy to his deep satisfaction was decked out just like Tommy. Little Jack wore plain black. Unable to walk, he rode on his wheeled trolley, sometimes pushed by one of his brothers, sometimes pulling himself along. He wore leather half-gloves that protected his knuckles.

Holy Trinity Church covered half a block in the middle of town. A stone castle dating to 1412, it was rebuilt in the 1700s with crouching gargoyles and a bell tower twenty-five yards high. Tom had been christened here. He led his family through the church’s iron gate to arched oaken doors that moved with the weight of centuries. Inside was gray Calvinism: cutty stools for sinners to sit on while the pastor scolded them from his stone pulpit; a Seat of Repentance for golfers caught playing on the Sabbath. The Seat of Repentance had fewer occupants after Tom came back from Prestwick and helped the pastor enforce the church’s ban on Sunday golf. “If the golfers don’t need a day of rest,” Tom always said, “the greens surely do.” His ban has remained in force from then until now, for more than 7,000 weeks; it still bars Sunday golf except for the one week every five years when the Open Championship returns to St. Andrews.

Morning services began at eleven and let out at half past twelve. Like many other families the Morrises then walked from the kirk down to the Cathedral cemetery. Little Jack enjoyed this jaunt; the street was downhill here. If the wind was easterly they’d keep to the south side of South Street to stay farther from the gasworks, which stank even on Sundays. On some nights people in this corner of town went to bed holding their noses. A local doctor had parents bring sick children into the gasworks, to be held over the coals and breathe black fumes to cure their whooping cough. This part of town was where the fisher-folk lived. The streets were littered with heaps of herring guts, tails, and heads, the heaps nosed by pigs and pecked by black-backed herring gulls. South Street led past an old townhouse called Queen Mary’s House, where the Queen of Scots had stayed during her visits to St. Andrews three hundred years before. Like most boys, Tommy was most interested in an upstairs bedroom in Queen Mary’s house. That room figured in a lewd tale that local lads told, a tale that happened to be true: On a night in 1563 the French poet Chastelard, mad in love with the tall, red-headed Queen of Scots, hid in her bedroom. Chastelard spied on the queen as she disrobed, then forced himself on her nakedness. The Queen cried out, guards came running, and for his passion the poet was hanged in the morning.

From Queen Mary’s House it was steps to the ruined cathedral, a tumble of half-fallen walls and acres of grass open to the sky. For centuries this spot was the center of Scottish Catholicism. It fell in a day—June 14, 1559—after Protestant reformer John Knox finished a fiery three-day sermon at Holy Trinity and parishioners ran downhill to the cathedral, where with pikes, axes, and bare hands they pulled down the grand temple of Popery. Now the sea wind whistled through its walls and its decayed centerpiece, St. Rule’s Tower, named for the monk that legend credited with carrying the arm bones, kneecap, and tooth of Apostle Andrew to this place. The Morrises walked through the grass toward St. Rule’s until they reached a graveyard. Some of the stones were so old that weather had erased them. Others held seven or eight sets of names and numbers. A twelve-foot-deep plot could accommodate eight coffins, with newer generations stacked tight on top of the ones that came before.