Tommy's Honor (14 page)

After watching his man take a smooth practice swing before chunking a drive, one caddie said, “Ye hit the ball best when it’s no’ there.” There had been a time when he could have been backhanded full in the face for such cheek, or beaten to his knees with a golf club. But there were no beatings after Tom Morris came from Prestwick to supervise the caddies.

Caddies were “bronzed like Arabs” from their days in the sun, wrote Andra Kirkaldy, who joined their ranks as a boy. Each morning they gathered at the corner of the links by the Golf Hotel, waiting for loops that paid a shilling apiece. They saw that corner as their own property, “consecrated by the expectoration of tobacco-juice,” Kirkaldy wrote, “and the fumes of 3-penny cut.” They chewed the same tobacco that they smoked. They lit matches on their stubbled chins. Some drank on the job, sneaking sips from flasks called pocket pistols, and swore they weren’t breaking Tom’s rule against caddying drunk because they could hold their liquor. Their thirst was such that when the gentlemen put on a tournament for caddies, with a turkey for first place and a bottle of whisky for second, the finalists kept missing putts on purpose, trying to lose.

They loved Tom, their supervisor, who always had a few pennies for the poorest. In the winter, when there was hardly any work, he’d give a needy man five shillings. “Take this and buy meat,” he said. “Don’t drink the little that I’m able to give you.” Tommy saw the money go from his father’s hand to the paw of some poor wretch, money that could have put meat on the Morrises’ own table, and he loved his father more.

Tommy never cared who carried his clubs—he sought no advice on the links—but he liked to gab with the caddies and hear their stories. There was one about a fishwife who bit off a piece of her husband’s nose. When the magistrate ordered her to “keep the peace,” the crone said, “I canna—I fed it to the cat.” Another tall tale concerned a golfer whose playing partner dropped dead on the High Hole. Unwilling to leave his friend behind, he carried the poor bugger to the clubhouse, where a gentleman said, “What a fine Christian thing you’ve done!”

“Aye,” the golfer said. “The worst bit was layin’ him down and pickin’ him up between shots.”

Some of the caddies’ tales were even true. One concerned Auld Daw Anderson, the white-haired fellow who lived in an upstairs apartment next door to the Morris house. Every morning Auld Daw pushed his wicker cart across Granny Clark’s Wynd and then west to his post beside the End Hole, the ninth, where he sold ginger beer and lemonade. He also kept a flask of sterner stuff for those who knew to ask for it. Handing over the flask, he always said the same thing: “A wee nip for the inner man.”

Auld Daw’s father had been a forger and smuggler. “A daring old daftie he was, Daw’s Da,” said one caddie.

“That he was,” another said. “Kept his loot in a secret closet in his mother’s house. And quite a closet it was, for—”

“Th’ authorities break into his mother’s closet and what do they find? A chest o’ drawers, a four-poster bed and thirty-eight gallons o’ whisky! So they sent him to Oz—Australia—on a convict ship, leavin’ Daw to a still worse fate—”

“Aye, worse. Become a caddie, he did.”

The caddie called Hole-in-’is-Pocket made sure his man never lost a ball. If the ball was in the whins he dropped another down his pantleg and cried, “Here ’tis, and no’ such a bad lie!” His opposite was Trap Door Johnson, who wore a boot with a hinged, hollow sole. When Trap Door stepped on a ball the sole opened and the ball vanished—until the next day, when he sold it.

A caddie named Mathy Gorum, who won bets by driving balls off the lip of a ginger-beer bottle, dabbled in phrenology. Mathy would read your future by rubbing the bumps on your head. “Och, you’ll be comin’ into a fortune, sir,” he’d say, showing you his empty palm. Half-blind Archibald Stump, also called Stumpie Eye, wasn’t much of a caddie. “Watch your own ball,” he said, “for I can barely see the sun.” Stumpie Eye played a yearly match with his wild-eyed sidekick Donal Blue, in which they danced between shots, let local lads pelt them with divots and dirt clods while they swung, and at the end dove into Swilcan Burn.

One caddie towered over the rest. By 1868 Lang Willie, Tom’s colleague at the workbench in Allan Robertson’s kitchen, had trod the links for sixty years. He still wore his trademark blue swallow-tailed jacket, white moleskin trousers and wrinkled black top hat. While other caddies taunted the R&A men or angled for tips by praising them—“Well struck, sir; a bonny lick!”—Lang Willie did neither. Asked how his man was doing, he always gave the same reply. “Just surprisin’,” he said.

One nearsighted golfer always asked for Lang Willie. This man’s eyes were worse than Stumpie Eye’s; he’d knock a ball into the whins and peer forward, squinting, asking how he lay.

“Ye’re in a capital situation, sire,” said Lang Willie, who had paid a boy a penny to run ahead, find the man’s ball and toss it to a safe spot. According to H.S.C. Everard’s account, the boy often ran ahead and dropped the ball two hundred or more yards from the tee, “further than mortal man had ever driven before.” The nearsighted golfer swore that he played like a champion when Lang Willie caddied.

One evening Lang Willie was toting the voluminous luggage of Sir Alexander Kinloch to the railway station when his feet got tangled at the edge of Swilcan Bridge. He spilled everything into the water—golf clubs, golf balls, gun case, portmanteau, hat box, and kilt. “You damned fool!” said Kinloch. The towering caddie turned and said, “Do no’ make such a song, Sir Alexander. The bags are no’ in the Bay of Biscay. They’re damned easy to get.” Giving a sharp salute, he leaped into the burn.

Caddies who reached forty often looked sixty and lost some of their skills if not their wits. Old Mathy Gorum kept betting that he could drive balls off ginger-beer bottles long after his nerves were gone. He would smash bottle after bottle until he was standing there weeping while the boy caddies laughed. But Lang Willie, due perhaps to some miracle of alcohol’s preservative power, reached the Biblical age of threescore and ten. Then he sat down to porridge with his sister one morning. She said his face looked crooked. “Non-sense,” he said, but the word came out blurred.

The town doctor said it was a stroke. Lang Willie said it was “just surprisin’.” Later strokes clouded his eyes and put a quaver in his step, and by 1868 his mouth moved only on one side. By then Lang Willie walked with such a stoop that his top hat sometimes fell off. There were days when no golfer hired him. At the end of such a day Tom would clasp his hand and there would be a coin in the handshake.

That July, Lang Willie was lugging a gentleman’s clubs at the Corner of the Dyke Hole when he fell like a chopped tree. The undertaker had to make an extra-long coffin. After the funeral, Tom, Tommy, and the other caddies drank toasts and told Lang Willie stories in a haze of threepenny smoke. The men wondered who would be next to climb the ladder to heaven. None expected to see threescore and ten. Tom, who was forty-seven, had read a story in the newspaper saying that the average Scot had a life expectancy of forty-one. “Lads,” he said, “it seems I’ve been dead for six years.”

That fall he and Tommy rode the train past Stirling Castle and the shoulders of the Campsie Fells and the smudged air of Glasgow and weedy Paisley to Prestwick. Father and son made their way to the clubhouse through a scrum of players, caddies, spectators, and gentleman golfers. Many of the gentlemen were there to play in the Prestwick Golf Club’s medal competition, which they considered the main attraction of the week. The professionals playing in the eighth Open Championship would serve as caddies in the medal event—except for Tommy, who was nobody’s caddie.

A new stone clubhouse stood beside the links. It had cost the club £758, an imposing sum offset in part by the £170 the old Morris cottage fetched when the club sold it. Tom admired the long windows and black tile roof of the new clubhouse, but noted that the ground around it was uneven. Little Jack would have faced an uphill climb from the clubhouse to the village. This would be no place for a child who got around on a homemade trolley.

Tom took the Championship Belt to the clubhouse, surrendered it to the treasurer and reclaimed the money he had left the year before. Not even he was trusted to keep the Belt without paying a security deposit.

At 11
A.M.
on Wednesday, September 23, 1868, the first group teed off under fast-moving clouds. Bettors in the crowd called out their offers.

“Two five-pound notes to one on Tom Morris.” Tom and Willie Park were the gamblers’ choices, with Bob “The Rook” Andrew available at longer odds.

“The Rook at five to one!”

A pound on Tommy would fetch seven or eight. Bettors knew the teenager had talent, but what had he won? A tournament in the wind at Carnoustie. The Open favored seasoned professionals who could endure three circuits of the course under ever-mounting pressure. Open pressure had undone the Rook and turned the once-feared Willie Dunn into a last-place finisher. And now that the 1865 winner Andrew Strath had succumbed to tuberculosis, only two proven champions remained. Tom Morris and Willie Park had won the Belt seven times; no other living golfer had won even once.

Park looked north from the first teeing-ground toward the green almost 600 yards away. His open stance gave his muscled arms room for a forceful swipe at the ball. Picking his driver almost straight up, he shifted forward and brought the club down hard, sending his ball on a high line over the waving reeds of Goosedubs swamp. Tom poked a shorter drive and the hunt was on.

There was no “par” on Prestwick’s prodigious opening hole, or on any hole. Along with
birdie
and
bogey
the term had not yet been coined. Still there was a number the professionals expected to make on each hole. In that sense the idea of par existed, and in that sense the 578-yard first at Prestwick was a par six. In a quickening breeze off the firth, Park nearly reached the green in three. Chipping on and two-putting for his six, he tipped his cap to his backers. Tom and the Rook matched Park’s work on that hole and the Alps Hole that followed.

Back at the first teeing-ground, Tommy walloped his drive past the swamp. Next he swung his long spoon, a graceful, goose-necked fairway wood, and it got him within sight of the green. He tracked it down and stood over it again, waggling the club almost hard enough to snap its neck. Setting up with the ball forward in his stance, almost even with his left foot, he swung, opening the clubface a hair at impact, and watched as the wind carried his third shot high over the rise in front of the green, over the edge of the Cardinal Bunker. The ball bounced on the green with a fine thud. He nearly made four, settled for five.

The second hole, Alps, was where he used to race the wind downhill. His drive cleared the huge dune ahead, his approach skirted the immense Sahara Bunker and his putt cut the hole in half. He was the early leader, listening for the others golfers’ fates in the cheers and groans of their supporters. A golf gallery was a living thing, moving and breathing, stretching here and thinning there, letting out sounds of joy and dismay.

At the seventh, Green Hollow, Tommy peered 140 yards to a green perched sideways in the Alps’ grassy foothills. With the sun straight overhead he hit a niblick shot that kicked hard to the right, toward the knee-high flag. The ball spun and stopped. His three at Green Hollow began a stretch of near-perfect golf as he closed the first round 3-4-4-4-3-4. With the first of three rounds complete, he was alone in first place.

“Young Morris has shot fifty-one!” a man said. It was the lowest score yet in an Open.

Tommy played more like a boy in the second round, losing the lead to his father, whose course-record 50 said
Take that
. Two rounds, two new scoring records on Tom’s obstacle course. Around they came for a third and final tilt, with the sun leaning toward the Isle of Arran. Tom had a stroke on his son while Park lurked four behind. Willie Dunn, twenty strokes behind, would finish last again.

Park took chances in the last round and bunkered too many balls on his way to a fourth-place finish. The Rook, however, was in full flight, hitting the ball higher than he had in the first seven Opens, sailing through the Alps Hole where his low sweepers had always struck the dunes and fallen back. His doomy countenance lightened, and when a last putt fell and his backers sang “Hoorah for the Rook, the Belt to the Rook!” he gave them a smile full of whisky-colored teeth. He finished at 159, three strokes better than Strath’s record total in 1865.

News moved fitfully around the links. With no scoreboards, players’ positions were a matter of rumor. No one was sure who had won until all the scorecards were turned in and totaled. Even so it was soon clear that the Rook’s only Open victory would be a moral victory. He hadn’t funked, but he had waited too long to play the best golf of his life. Both Morrises were coming in with lower scores.

Tom defended his title with guile. He was not about to make an error that would cost him two or three strokes, as Park had done. As Tommy was likely to do. So Tom gentled his ball up, over and around the dunes, protecting his narrow lead. He did nothing very wrong, but left several putts short and yielded the advantage midway through the round, when his son made his third consecutive three at Green Hollow. From there Tommy went 3-5-3-3 on the next four holes, a stretch where amateur champions like Colonel Fairlie made sixes and cracks hoped for fours. Still Tom would not give in. When Tommy fired a three at him, Tom matched it. Each time the famous Misser of Short Putts faced one that might sink him, he steeled his nerves and knocked it in. He stayed close, giving the boy a chance to stop and think, to let doubt enter his mind, to look around at all the people looking at him: the haughty Earl of Stair and several other noblemen, gentleman golfers with their ladies, bettors with scores of pounds riding on the outcome, professionals including Park and the Rook, newspaper reporters and curious Prestwickers—all watching to see if a seventeen-year-old boy could outplay the King of Clubs, his father.