Tommy's Honor (16 page)

Before trying his luck against Tommy, Fergusson challenged the senior Morris. In a series of six matches he made short, cruel work of Tom, sweeping all six. The chronicler Everard called it “the most exemplary castigation, for he won the whole series and each of them by a pretty substantial majority.” The worst drubbing of his father’s career spurred a quick response from Tommy, who announced that he would play a series of matches against Fergusson.

Tommy’s duels with Bob Fergusson were the most hotly anticipated money matches since the Famous Foursome of ’49 pitted Allan Robertson and Tom Morris against Musselburgh’s Dunn brothers. The players were polar opposites—bold, slashing Tommy swinging and even walking faster than his treelike opponent, who moved grudgingly except to unwind a long, powerful motion that slammed drives well over 200 yards. Fergusson hit cleek shots with such force that he dug gouges in the firmest turf. More than once he had hit a gutty so hard that it broke into pieces. His balance impressed Everard, who described him as “broad-backed and sturdy; it appeared as if nothing short of a volcanic upheaval or a dynamite cartridge would have power to make him budge till the stroke was finished.” Fergusson was so deft at running the ball onto the green with his putter that his supporters dubbed that stroke a “Musselburgh iron,” long before anyone called the same shot a Texas wedge.

Fergusson’s showdown with Tommy Morris began at St. Andrews. Musselburgh loyalists came by rail and ferry to the gray town where they were as welcome as cholera. They went home dejected after Tommy swept the day. The series then moved to the Musselburgh links, where hundreds of locals bird-dogged the golfers from the first tee to a stirring finish that saw Tommy and Fergusson finish dead even. So they went around again, and on the last hole of their playoff Fergusson fired a cleek shot that brushed the flag, setting off a frenzy of cheers and dancing in the hometown crowd. “Bob,” wrote Everard, “after most determined play…managed to win by one.” The series continued on the links of Luffness, just east of Edinburgh, where bettors made Tommy a three-to-two favorite. The short money proved to be the smart money, as “the science and calculation of young Tom told most decidedly in his favour. His putting was deadly, and before the match was half over, the result had almost become a foregone conclusion.”

He enlivened the Luffness match with a gesture that almost everyone present remembered. After striking a putt he would start for the next teeing-ground before the ball reached the hole. The Musselburgh writer George Colville recalled the scene: “Time and again when Morris had putted he would say to his caddie, ‘Pick it out the hole, laddie,’ and it went in every time.” Fergusson played his best golf at Luffness, only to see his teenaged opponent sink putt after putt to overrun him, eight holes up with seven to play. For the rest of his life Fergusson called Tommy’s performance that day the best golf he ever saw.

A return to Musselburgh “caused great excitement in the town,” Colville wrote, “and there were many wagers.” Fergusson was in command late in the match, three holes up with nine to go. At that point he lifted his game another notch—clouting long, dartlike drives, using his putter to slap forty-and fifty-yard chips that rolled up and over greenside mounds and died beside flagsticks. He carded an errorless 40 over the final nine. On most days he would have won in a rout, but Tommy reeled off one of his trademark runs of threes and fours to pull even, then won the last hole and the match, leaving the Musselburgh crowds as still as if he had knocked the air out of them.

Tommy had now avenged his father’s castigation at Fergusson’s hands, but he wasn’t through with Bob Fergusson. They met again at the St. Andrews Professional Tournament of 1869, in which the two of them outplayed the rest of the field to tie for top honors, shooting 87s in heavy wind and sideways rain. After an eighteen-hole playoff they were still tied, so they returned to the first teeing-ground for yet another playoff. As the news spread, townspeople hurried down North Street and Golf Place to watch. Soon it seemed the whole town had left work, school, and home to follow the marathon match. When Tommy pulled his driver back and peeked over his shoulder, he saw that a scatter of spectators had become a throng. Fergusson, unfazed, sent outward-nine drives booming toward Lucklaw Hill beyond the River Eden. Between shots he stood in silence, scratching his goateed chin. Tommy was louder. He told his ball to
go
or
run
or
duck in
. He cursed himself for making six on the long Hole o’ Cross going out, but clean fours on the next two holes kept the pressure on Fergusson, and on the quartet of holes that formed the shepherd’s crook at the far end of the links, Tommy flirted with perfection: 3-3-3-3. His 37 going out was the best nine-hole score ever shot at St. Andrews. His 40 coming in won the long playoff and completed a course-record round that would stand for twenty years. Seventy-seven! Tommy’s townspeople crowded around him, reaching out to shake his hand, pound him on the back, pat the top of his cap,
touch him
.

The runner-up stood a dozen yards away, casting a long shadow that climbed the brown picket fence between the Home green and the R&A clubhouse. After several minutes of waiting, Fergusson caught Tommy’s eye. Bowing his head, the civil Musselburgh man touched the bill of his cap. It was a quiet man’s way of saying,
Well played
.

Tommy’s victories over Fergusson restored the Morrises’ honor but did nothing for Tom’s reputation. There were whispers on both sides of the Forth that “Old Tom” was no longer a golfer of the first rank. Wasn’t it sad that only two years after winning the Open he needed his son to fight his fights? Or, if you lived in Musselburgh, wasn’t it amusing?

Tom heard the questions. He joked about them. It wasn’t idle gossip that said Tom Morris was twenty yards shorter off the tee than his son and worse than ever with his putter. It was plain fact. Putting practice was no cure—he could hole twenty consecutive three-footers in practice and then miss half of them in a match. The caddies joked that Tom should make the hole bigger. He was the greenkeeper; he could find a brickworks that made hole liners six inches across; or he could make the hole a bucket. But Tom laughed and said no. As a stiff-backed Presbyterian he intended to earn his way into heaven; and as a golfer he would earn his way into the hole. He knew he could sink putts if he kept his head still and his wrists calm. But it was easier vowed than done, and it didn’t help that his current plight echoed an earlier embarrassment. As everyone knew, Tom had made his name as a golfer by avenging his brother George’s loss to Willie Park. George Morris, routed by Park in 1854, was renowned for asking for mercy: “For the love of God, man, give us a half!” Tom had no desire to be remembered as a charity case, not after four Open titles. Yet he could feel the game moving past him like a quickening breeze. After yielding the Belt to Tommy at Prestwick he had lost the course record at St. Andrews—the famous 79 he’d shared with Allan Robertson—to Tommy’s now-famous 77. When people saw Tom on the street these days, they asked about Tommy.

Tom was proud of his son. In addition to pride he felt stirrings of regret. A sharper pang than Burns’ nostalgia, this was the regret of an athlete who feels his body faltering. The reflex slows, the muscle aches. A physical forgetting erases part of what the athlete is, the main part, leaving him as clumsy as other men, but unlike other men he remembers a time when he never stumbled.

Tom sensed that he had set all the records he would ever set. Still there were reasons to rejoice: Scotland was full of golfers who thought they were better than they were; even an aging athlete could part them from their money. Tom’s family was increasingly respectable, the children healthy. Tommy was the best player the game had seen—with professional golf growing and purses fattening he might be wealthy before he turned twenty-five. Seventeen-year-old Lizzie was a pattern girl, well schooled in manners, Bible stories, and piano playing. Jimmy was a golfer of promise and still Tommy’s acolyte. Even lame Jack, a diligent club-finisher, had a trade. And the golf course Tom tended was in such fine fettle that golfers considered it perfect. After Tom filled in a little bunker on the fifteenth hole in 1869, A.G. Sutherland, a lawyer who summered in St. Andrews, demanded that he restore the bunker. When Tom refused, Sutherland sued him and the R&A, claiming that the greenkeeper and his bosses were despoiling the links. Three nights later, two golfers sneaked onto the course, re-dug the bunker by moonlight and left a note with Sutherland’s name on it.

Tom thought that was funny. He could have undone their sabotage with thirty barrows of dirt, but he waved his workers away from the pockmark on the left side of the fifteenth fairway, a hazard that has been known ever since as the Sutherland Bunker.

A morning storm assailed the 1869 Open. Thick fog hid the Prestwick links until thirty-mile-an-hour winds tore the fog apart, forcing players and spectators to pull their caps down tight. Fourteen men teed off that Thursday morning, but only nine finished. The others, including a golfer from Perth who soon found himself forty-four strokes off the lead, spent the last round in the clubhouse, warming their hands by the fire. They warmed their insides with drams of whisky and peered out through the building’s slot-shaped windows, waiting for the survivors to appear on the last hole.

Tom stayed close to the lead in the early going. He had trained with an eye toward this day, even cutting back on his beloved tobacco. The weather suited him—cold and wet were no bother to a man who had begun his day by wading in the Firth of Clyde, and gusts that blew longer hitters’ drives off-course had less effect on his low, shorter ball.

Davie Strath stayed closer to the lead, his swing as syrupy as ever despite the wind. A tobacco chewer, he worked his jaw nervously between shots. Strath matched Tommy shot for shot in the morning and often looked poised to overtake him but the leader kept wriggling out of trouble. Once, after his ball bounced into a whin bush and stuck there, waist-high in a cluster of thorns, Tommy swung and hit it like a cricketer, slapping the ball over a bunker to the putting-green. As Everard observed of him, “every ounce of strength went into the stroke, and as for a bad lie, he seemed positively to revel in it.” Andra Kirkaldy never forgot Tommy’s Balmoral bonnet, a dark blue, flat-topped cap similar to a tam o’shanter, with a
toorie
, a cloth bead, on top. In his 1921 memoir, Kirkaldy described the bonnet “that so often fell off as he ‘followed through’ with that grand swing of his, sometimes nearly falling on his face.” Kirkaldy was a child in Tommy’s heyday, too dazzled by his hero’s full-tilt style to see the balance and precision that helped Tommy alter a shot at impact, turning his wrists left or right at the last split-second. What stuck with Kirkaldy was an image of that hat in the air, and over decades of retelling and embroidering the tale he helped work Tommy’s wool bonnet into the fabric of golf lore. Even today St. Andreans will tell you that Young Tom Morris used to swing so hard that he’d stagger forward, his bonnet flying off, only to regain his balance at the last instant and catch the hat before it touched the ground. Perhaps it happened once or twice, or perhaps the hat trick never happened but became part of Tommy’s story because it sounded like something only he could do.

In the first round of the 1869 Open he made his usual trey at Green Hollow, the seventh of Prestwick’s twelve holes. Next came the Station Hole, 166 yards over the Alps to a green guarded by the Sahara Bunker’s half acre of sand. Fall short and you could make five or six on the Station Hole. The professionals hoped for three, settled for four.

The line was just right of the clubhouse. Tommy’s tee shot started low, then rose. He liked the shot; spectators saw him take a step forward, shielding his eyes. The ball landed on the front edge of the putting-green, five yards short of the knee-high flag. It hopped and began rolling, not directly toward the red flannel flag but off to one side—a superior shot that looked ever better as the ball lost speed, curling toward the flagstick. The more speed the ball lost the more it curled until, on the last turn, it fell into the hole.

There was a silence, a sonic blink. Tommy stood at the teeing-ground, unable to see the ball, listening for cheers or groans but hearing nothing.

Then a roar went up. He’d holed it in one! Men and boys ran onto the putting-green to gape at the ball in the hole. The gallery cheered every step of Tommy’s 166-yard march to the flag, the noise ebbing when he reached the green, cresting again when he picked his ball out of the hole and held it up for all to see. With one swing he had added two shots to his lead and a boost to his legend: This was the first recorded ace in the history of professional golf.

Tommy finished the round in 50 strokes, one shy of his record. A second-round 55 put him four ahead of Strath and six up on Bob Kirk. Tom had fallen back by now—first by ten strokes, then fifteen, feeling no music in his hickory shafts and little strength in his legs. In the third round, climbing the dunes of the course he had built, Tom used a golf club as a walking stick.

Strath was next to lose hope. His syrupy tempo never varied but gusts off the firth buffeted his scarecrow figure, bumping him off-balance. Strath foozled an approach along the ground into the Cardinal Bunker, took three swings to get out, and was finished. He tramped in with an ugly 60 in the final round, letting the nub-nosed Kirk slip past him into second place, good for £4. But Kirk was a distant second: When the scores were tallied and the scorecards signed, including the card showing Tommy’s 1 on the Station Hole, the defending champion had won by eleven strokes. In Everard’s words, “He absolutely spread-eagled the field.”

The
Fifeshire Journal
noted, “It is worthy of notice that ‘Young Tom’ has won the belt both last year and this with the lowest scores ever recorded.”