Tommy's Honor (13 page)

A case in point was the new first hole at St. Andrews.

When Tom became Custodier of the Links, the ground in front of the clubhouse was often underwater, swamped by high tides. Storms sent saltwater sloshing up the clubhouse steps. It took a visionary politician and a pair of poetry lovers to beat back the tides.

The politician was Hugh Lyon Playfair, the most famous St. Andrean since the mythical jumble of bones that was Saint Andrew. Born in 1786, Playfair served Her Majesty’s Army in India, where he marched in formation and played golf. Playfair was a founder of the Dum Dum Club, the first golf club outside the British Isles, laid out on a stretch of scorched grass that is now the site of Calcutta’s international airport. Like other gentleman soldiers with room in their luggage for Indian gold, rubies, and emeralds, Playfair came home a wealthy man. Sporting the whiskers and jowls of a white walrus, he paraded around town in a top hat, silk tie, and black greatcoat. As provost of St. Andrews he launched a modernization campaign. “The new broom,” Playfair called himself, and his twenty-year rule swept dunghills and horse carcasses from muddy streets that were soon paved for the first time. Provost Playfair brought the rail link from Leuchars. He brought the telegraph that clicked news at lightning speed from Edinburgh, London, and the world. It was he who saw the town’s future as a tourist center, with golf its prime attraction. An avid golfer, he was elected captain of the R&A in 1856, the year he turned seventy and went to London to be knighted by Queen Victoria. After that he had his clubs engraved with a line to foil pilferers:
THIS WAS STOLEN FROM SIR HUGH LYON PLAYFAIR.

Affronted by the tides that swamped parts of his home links, Playfair envisioned a breakwater between the course and the beach. He dispatched workmen to bury old boat hulls at the top of the beach. When the sea crept over and around the buried hulls, Playfair ordered more wrecks buried, and in time the land in front of the clubhouse was reclaimed from the sea. Playfair’s project would be relaunched decades later by Tom Morris and George Bruce, a builder who followed Playfair in the chain of town provosts and followed Tom into meetings of the town’s Burns Society.

If golf was Scotland’s game, Robert Burns was Scotland’s muse. In 1859 the poet’s centenary was celebrated in every town. Those events evolved into the Burns Suppers still held every January to mark the poet’s birthday. At Burns Suppers in St. Andrews, Tom Morris and George Bruce would share steaming haggis—sheep’s entrails, oatmeal, and spices cooked in the sheep’s stomach—the dish Burns called “Great chief-tan of the puddin’-race!” They would rise to recite “To a Mouse” (“Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie”) or, grinningly, “Green Grow the Rashes, O” (“The sweetest hours that e’er I spend/Are spent among the lasses, O”) or, hearts rising, “Scots Wha Hae” (“Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,/ Scots wham Bruce has aften led,/Welcome to your gory bed/Or to victorie”).

On the course, the job was to contain what Burns called the “roar o’sea.” What Playfair began, George Bruce would finish by using construction debris as a breakwater. Hundreds of cartloads of rocky soil, rubbish, and cement were dumped into wrecked fishing boats. Bruce directed the horse-drawn carts of rubbish and the sweating laborers who unloaded the carts and buried the hulls. He and Tom Morris looked on while the workmen overturned a cement-laden sloop, pressing their shoulders to the hull until the splintering husk gave up and rolled into place. Victory!

The breakwater called the Bruce Embankment would create a dry mile north and east of the first teeing-ground. Along with Playfair’s work, it remade the seaward side of town. Tom used a quarter-mile of reclaimed land to build a new first hole in front of the clubhouse. He re-turfed the widest fairway in Scotland and built a green on the far brink of Swilcan Burn, so near the stream that a golfer’s power was neutralized. Tom’s new first hole was a finesse player’s hole. A gimmick hole, some would say. Still it has a thought behind it: The first hole at St. Andrews is a good Presbyterian hole, one that rewards those with the good sense to play it humbly. Hit your second shot to the back of the green, two-putt and move on.

Not that the greenkeeper’s son played it that way. Tommy wanted to make three. While his father made four after four after four on the hole, Tommy would loft a daring approach inches over the burn in hopes of getting his ball close to the flag. As a result he made threes, fours, fives, and sixes. But that is what makes a good hole: You can disagree on how to play it, and no answer is right every time.

The adjacent eighteenth was a forgettable thing, its fairway crossed by Granny Clark’s Wynd, a dirt path that led to the beach. Golfers stood waiting while men on horseback clopped across the path. They also waited for mule-carts, dogs, wrack-gatherers, and courting couples. They waited for the town’s volunteer lifeboat crew to drag a thirty-foot lifeboat to the beach for lifesaving drills. The boat and the carts left deep ruts that golf balls dived into. And the patchy little putting-green beyond Granny Clark’s Wynd was not much better. It lay in a dark hollow where grass refused to grow. So Tom set to work digging another hollow, the Valley of Sin. He and his men used the earth they dug from the Valley of Sin to build a new putting-green for the Home Hole at the southeast corner of the links, a broad green that sloped from right to left and back to front. Tom said that greens on plateaus kept the golfer looking toward heaven. But this one had an unholy beginning. “In the course of the work,” wrote Andra Kirkaldy, whose father helped Tom build the Home green, “human bones were exhumed.” The workers struck a shallow burial pit that had been dug during the cholera out-break of 1832. Tom, who had turned eleven that year, remembered the fear that gripped the town. Now his workmen were affrighted by the sight of human bones. He could have left this green-site to the ghosts but he forged ahead, telling the men that they would dig if they wanted to be paid. After all, a man with a shovel could strike bone all over town.

St. Andrews was built on bones, from the Apostle’s tooth and kneecap to the families stacked ten-deep in the Cathedral cemetery to a hill called Witch Howe, where women accused of sorcery were thrown into the sea. Before the death penalty for witchcraft was abolished in 1735, accused witches, whose crime was often no more than being old and friendless, had been bound in the shape of an X, with their left thumbs tied to their right feet and their right thumbs tied to their left feet. Their binding was a tribute to Saint Andrew, who according to legend was crucified with his limbs outstretched in the shape of an X—the X-shaped cross that became Scotland’s flag. Thus X’d, the accused witch was cast from the bluffs into the sea. If she drowned, the bishop pronounced her innocent. If she swam, her escape artistry proved guilt. Those who swam were dragged up the beach to be burned at the stake, and later buried who knew where. When a storm sent a chunk of Witch Howe tumbling to the beach in 1856, arm and leg bones hung from the broken earth.

The burial ground at the east end of the links was reburied as Tom’s new Home green took shape. Even Balfour, grumbling that the eighteenth was “quite changed by the formation of an artificial table-land,” called it “a beautiful green.” Few modern players or spectators would guess that every champion who has won at St. Andrews, from Bobby Jones to Jack Nicklaus to Tiger Woods, has walked over the Valley of Sin to stand on an old boneyard as he finished his round.

The course was improving, but Tom’s own game was stale. He knew that if he didn’t play better he would lose the Belt—perhaps to his namesake, who made no secret of his hunger to win the clanking old thing for himself.

The Championship Belt was part of the furniture of Tommy’s youth, like the mirror, Mum’s china, and the grandfather clock. It was no mere symbol but a thing with heft and texture, its red leather darkening with age, smooth to the touch but shot through with hairline cracks. Its silver buckle, showing tarnish, was slightly ridiculous with its engraver’s error, the little silver golfer swinging a headless club. Still the Belt meant more than any other trophy a golf professional could win. Its winner was the Champion Golfer of Scotland.

After losing to Park in their singles match after the 1867 Open, Tommy got even in a rematch. Park was longer off the tee, though the gap was shrinking, but Tommy could hit shots no one else had imagined. He didn’t need a driving putter to keep the ball under the wind. He naturally hit a low ball, and could smack chin-high screamers by closing the clubface at impact. Such a shot took exquisite timing—just as club met ball he turned his right wrist as if he were turning a door key from right to left.

Bernard Darwin wrote of a money match in which Tommy showed off a new use for the niblick, a cleek that had the loft of a modern eight-iron and a face not much bigger than a large coin: “Young Tommy Morris astonished the spectators by taking his niblick, a club that in those days had the face of a half-crown, wherewith to play a pitch on the green. Till that historic moment no one had ever dreamed of a niblick being used for anything but ordinary spadework.” In Tommy’s hands a club made for flipping the ball out of divots and rabbit scrapes launched high approaches that dropped and stopped. From shorter range he did the same with his rut-iron. While veteran professionals bumped long, low pitches that bounced and rolled to the hole, he was inventing what twentieth-century course designers would call target golf.

He had ambitions beyond golf, but they would wait. His mother might dream of seeing him in a business office, but Tommy had no yearning to push a steel-nibbed pen down columns of numbers day after humdrum day. He relished the slight stickiness of a tacky suede grip; the powerful shifting of forces at the top of the backswing; the crack of impact and the sight of the ball in the air, hanging for an instant before it fell to a thudding bounce on the putting-green, a fine flat thud that sounds nothing like a ball landing on longer grass. And then there was the crackle of a ten-pound note between his fingers, the texture of victory.

By the spring of 1868, seventeen-year-old Tommy and forty-seven-year-old Tom were making real money in foursomes matches. Ten, twenty,
fifty
pounds in a day. No office job paid that much.

One money match pitted them against another talented pair, former Open winner Andrew Strath and pug-nosed Bob Kirk, the son of Tom’s longtime caddie, now grown and winning bets left and right. According to the
Fifeshire Journal,
“either party considered themselves lucky if they got a single hole ahead, and when they did so, it was generally to be brought down the next one to ‘all square.’” They were all square at the Home Hole in the first of two rounds. Tom could have won the hole with a long putt—still called a ‘put’ in the
Journal
—but left it so far short that the Morrises’ backers moaned. After Strath missed, it was Tommy’s turn to hit his side’s ball. He paced between the ball and the hole, studying the mess his father had left him. A three-yard putt, side-hill. Settling over it, he pictured the ball curving to the hole and rapped it hard enough to diminish the curve. By the time the ball felt gravity’s pull it was nearly to the hole. When it fell, Tom breathed again.

“On coming back the second round, father and son gained the match by three holes and two to play,” the
Journal
reported. “Young Tom played a splendid game, and was admired by the large concourse of spectators as a youth of great promise. A good deal of betting was on this match.”

Sometimes the Morrises teamed against a pair of R&A golfers, spotting them a handful of strokes or generous odds. Sometimes Tom and Tommy split up, each taking a club member as his partner, with the members betting each other. Tommy came to know dozens of the gentlemen his father worked for. A few were soldiers who had fought in the Crimean War of 1854–56 or the Indian Mutiny of 1857–59. Captain Maitland-Dougall had joined the Royal Navy at age thirteen as plain old William Maitland. He served in Persia and China, where the Chinese fractured his skull but couldn’t kill him, and came home in time to rescue those shipwrecked sailors in the Storm of ’60. As progressive as he was brave, he added the name of his wife, the former Miss Dougall, to his own name when they married. Oddly enough the heroic Maitland-Dougall was a nervous, twitchy golfer, but Tommy liked him.

Other R&A golfers were men of leisure who had no careers beyond spending their family fortunes. They hunted fox and grouse, played golf and whist, drank, smoked, and filled their bellies with more good meat in a fortnight than a factory worker’s family got in a year. One was Mister Cathcart, a fop whose motif was citrus. He traipsed the links in his lime-green jacket and yellow neckerchief. Two other gentlemen anticipated the age of golf carts by riding ponies between shots. One of the pony riders, Sir John Low, employed three caddies at a time: Lang Willie to lug his clubs, a second caddie to lead the cream-colored pony, which left loose impediments on the greens, and a third who carried a stool that he planted on the green so that Sir John could rest his knightly bottom while he waited to putt.

Tommy was polite to the gentlemen, lowering his eyes and tipping his cap, for they were his father’s employers. But he didn’t have to like them. Some called themselves golfers but were only playing dress-up in their leather breeches and red golfing jackets. Butchers who worked the way these golfers played would have no fingers. And they looked down their noses at Tom Morris! “See here, Tom,” Mister This or Major That would say. “Fetch me my putter, Tom.” At the end of a round the nabob dropped a coin into Tom’s upturned hat. Still the gentlemen said they loved Tom Morris as one of their own. Tommy heard that very phrase from one of them. “Good old Tom,” the man said, “I think of him almost as one of my own…” Then came the next word: “…servants.”

Tommy preferred the caddies. The renowned caddies of St. Andrews were “no’ saints,” as they gleefully admitted. They were poor, unshaven, often drunk, occasionally insolent. One R&A man called them “gentlemen of leisure, who for a consideration will consent to sneer at you for a whole round.”