Tommy's Honor (17 page)

Tommy worked his way to the clubhouse through thickets of well-wishers, accepting the usual handshakes and back-slaps. After a brief ceremony he left £25 with the Prestwick Golf Club treasurer—security for the Championship Belt’s safekeeping—and threw the Belt over his shoulder. He and his father walked uphill to the railway station.

When the news from Prestwick reached the sandstone clubhouse at the head of the St. Andrews links, R&A golfers drank to the health of their greenkeeper’s son. Toasts to “Young Tom” echoed along with the old refrain “St. Andrews forever!” The gentlemen’s spirits were high but not undiluted, not on an evening when they could look out over their empty links while the rest of the golf world was focused on Prestwick. As they pictured the middling crowds the Open lured to Tom Morris’s up-and-down links on the western frontier (next year, with the lad gunning for his third Belt in a row, there might be a few hundred more), they couldn’t help wondering how many thousands might come if the Open were ever to move to St. Andrews.

Tommy’s ball hung between clouds, carried forward by the lightest breeze, falling toward the Cardinal Bunker. A year had passed. The date was September 15, 1870. In the year since Tommy’s second Open victory his father and Willie Park had played a raucous series of matches; Tommy and Bob Fergusson had clashed again, with Tommy winning again; and golf had kept growing. There were now fifty-four active golfing societies in Britain, up from only ten in 1800. As the summer of 1870 dwindled all eyes turned to the Autumn Meeting of the Prestwick Golf Club and its annual sideshow, the Open Championship. If Tommy Morris could win a third consecutive Open, the Belt would be his forever. Losing would leave him as only one of three living former champions, along with his father and Park, and with fewer Open titles than either of them he would be the junior member of that threesome.

One thing was sure: The wind would not drive anyone off the course this year. The 1870 Open enjoyed the sort of weather that Scottish golfers say isn’t weather at all, but its absence. The London sporting journal
The Field
, which billed itself as “The Country Gentleman’s Newspaper,” told of “a genial warmth…only a zephyr coming from the golden island of Arran to the west.”

“There was scarcely any wind, and the heat was tempered by light, fleecy clouds, which hid the sun’s face,” the
Fifeshire Journal
reported. “Considerably more than the usual interest was manifested this year, as it was known that Young Tom was in excellent form, while other players were in equally good play, and all determined to do their best in order to prevent the young champion from permanently retiring the belt.” The day began with hundreds of spectators waiting for the champion at the first teeing-ground. They applauded as Tommy smacked his drive and set off after it. He was a dashing figure with chestnut curls under the brim of his Balmoral bonnet, his coattails flapping as he swung. The lion’s share of the crowd followed him down the fairway of the monster of an opening hole his father had laid out. Prestwick Golf Club members were so proud of the hole that they had measured it down to the inch: The longest hole in tournament golf was 578 yards, one foot and seven inches long. Spectators heard Tommy grunt as he struck a long-spoon second shot that left him with an uphill third of about 200 yards. Within seconds of reaching his gutty he swung again, his long spoon nipping the turf under the ball, and now the ball was a dot between clouds, starting its descent, headed for trouble.

A low ridge between him and the green blocked his view. He saw his ball arrowing toward the railway ties that shored up the long, deep Cardinal Bunker yawning darkly to the right of the green. If his ball ricocheted off a railway tie or buried in the sand, he might have trouble making six. Watching the ball dive toward the Cardinal, he talked to it: “
Go
.”

It cleared by inches. Spectators yelled as the ball kicked left onto the green. It was running too quickly; someone shouted “Stop!” Next came whoops and even laughter as the ball clacked the flagstick and disappeared.

Tommy couldn’t see it, but he knew from the crowd’s reaction. His arms went up, holding the club over his head with both hands as if it were a broadsword. A three!

An old sport who had bet against him turned away in disgust, saying, “It’s no’ golf at all, just miracles.”

The first trey ever made on Prestwick’s first hole was more singular than his ace the year before; three perfect shots are better than one. Tommy’s third shot of the 1870 Open was also the best-timed blow in golf’s early history. All over the course, players awaiting news of his round heard a burst of cheering so loud that only Tommy Morris could have triggered it. Whatever he had done, it was bad news for them.

With threes at the first, third, sixth, seventh, eighth, and tenth holes, he blazed through the first round in 47, breaking his own record by two. Forty-seven broke another barrier: Four was a good score on any hole; his 47 on Prestwick’s twelve-hole links made Tommy the first golfer to average less than four over a full round. Already he stood nine shots ahead of his father and thirteen ahead of Willie Park, who had long since stopped wondering what the “laddie” was doing at a men’s tournament. Only Davie Strath and Bob Kirk had stayed close to Tommy’s pace. When Strath shot 49 in the second round to Tommy’s 51, he drew within five shots of the lead.

One round to go. Twelve holes stood between Tommy and permanent possession of the Belt—the same twelve stretches of grass, dunes, and scrub he grew up on.

He stood at the first teeing-ground between the Home Hole and the beach. This spot was no more than ten paces from where his father had sat with old Colonel Fairlie almost twenty years before, when Tom picked up the tobacco habit that gave him the dusty sweet scent that Tommy loved. Tom was now too far behind to sniff the lead, but Strath and Kirk still hoped to catch Tommy. As the last round began, spectators squeezed in around the first teeing-ground, standing four and five deep on the cobbled Station Road, jostling and standing on tiptoe to see the golfers. Tommy waggled. He coiled his driver behind him until it brushed the back of his neck, paused for an instant and let fly. Applause and glad shouts pursued him up the first long fairway to the green, where there was no miracle this time, no three, only a five that fortified his lead. Solid play on the Alps and Tunnel holes left him with a start of 5-5-3. But at the fourth, where the reedy Pow Burn ran beside the fairway and a stone wall stood behind the green, Tommy faltered. He bunkered his second shot and left his recovery short. He took two more swings to reach the green, where he missed a putt and tapped in for seven. It was his worst score in the Open since his Belt-winning run began, a span of one hundred holes. For once Tommy Morris had given strokes away.

The fifth teeing-ground was in the northwest corner of the course, within spitting distance of the tall grass at the top of the beach. The surf was loud here. The breeze was gently inland, the crowd fretful, quiet. Tommy stood with his back to the weathered stone wall that marked the north border of the course. He shook his head at his stumbles on the Wall Hole.
Seven!
He had given himself a chance to lose. Still angry, he stepped to his ball and swung hard, eager to leave the Wall Hole behind. After a drive and a long-spoon shot he lay two about seventy yards short of the fifth green. He aimed for the red flag, swung his rut-iron and sent the ball so high that men in the crowd, looking up to follow its flight, held onto their hats to keep them from falling off. The ball dropped almost straight down. It thudded and fell silent a yard from the flag. Tommy stepped to the green and banged it in.
Four
.

Over the next ten minutes he made threes at Green Hollow and Station. His trey at the Station Hole was two strokes worse than his now-famous ace there, but good enough to stretch his lead. His gallery had swollen; it was ten-deep in places. Everyone wanted to follow the leader, whose every swing brought him closer to permanent possession of the Belt. His last full swing was a long, bouncing approach to the green at the 417-yard Home Hole. His putt for a closing four brought cheers that Prestwickers remembered a generation later. Tommy yanked off his Balmoral bonnet and flung it.

His three-round total of 149 set a record that would never be broken. His finishing kick gave him a twelve-shot triumph over Strath and Kirk, who tied for second place. Tom Morris finished another stroke back, thirteen behind his son. William Doleman set an amateur record by shooting 169 but was still twenty strokes behind, while Willie Park trailed by a humbling twenty-four.

Gentleman golfers crowded into the clubhouse for the last presentation of the Championship Belt. Spectators outside pressed their noses to windows, angling for a peek at Tommy as he approached the white-whiskered Earl of Stair, who stood holding the Belt.

“His play was excellent—in fact we never saw golf clubs handled so beautifully,”
The Field
reported, “and he was at the end of the third round hailed as the champion for the third time in succession and consequently the permanent custodier of the belt. The trophy is of red morocco, mounted with massive silver plates, the front having figures in bold relief representing the play at the ancient game…. The Earl of Stair formally presented the belt to young Morris in the Club House.”

That evening, with the Belt under his arm, Tommy celebrated with his father, friends, and golf fanatics until Prestwick’s pubs all barred their doors. Doleman, the amateur who would later help define the concept of par, told anyone who would listen that Tommy’s score that day had set a new standard: By Doleman’s calculations, Tommy’s 149 was “two strokes more than perfect play.”

“A man generally wins a championship by the narrowest possible margin,” Bernard Darwin wrote. “Tommy for the three years he won the Belt was on an average nine strokes better than the runner-up.” Tommy’s total of 460 strokes in his three Open victories was thirty-five shots better than the next-best total—495 by Tom Morris—while only five shots separated Tom’s 495 from Bob Kirk’s third-best 500. No other player would so outshine his peers until 130 years later, when Tiger Woods began winning major championships by double-digit margins.

The
Fifeshire Journal
of September 22, 1870 had the view from St. Andrews: “‘Young Tom has won the belt for the third time,’ were the words in everybody’s mouths when the news arrived of his success, and they seemed to convey the
acme
of satisfaction. A flag was displayed from Mr. Morris’s workshop, and when it became known that the champion would arrive on Saturday night with the 10 o’clock train, a number of his friends awaited his arrival, and he had scarcely set foot on the railway terminus ere he was hoisted shoulder high and borne in triumph to Mr. Leslie’s Golf Inn, where his health was drank with every honour.”

He was seven months shy of his twentieth birthday.

H
e walked the links with a crowd behind him—schoolboys and red-coated gentlemen, gamblers waving money, curious townspeople, travelers on holiday, lace-and ribbon-decked ladies and their blushing daughters, all craning for a look at the Belt-winner. Some handed him slips of paper and asked for what they called his autograph. That puzzled him. What use was his signature? Tommy shrugged and signed with the loops and flourishes he had learned from Laurence Anderson, the hard-eyed old Writing Master at Ayr Academy, who would cuff you if your pen hand slipped. Tommy chatted with the autograph-seekers. He was handsome and polite, this bonny braw lad who played the old game better than his elders. He had grown a fuller mustache—more manly, he thought—that drooped around the corners of his smile.

When Tommy came home to St. Andrews with the Belt, his return was greeted with church bells. Allan Robertson and Tom Morris had been local celebrities after winning the Famous Foursome of 1849, but the hubbub around Tommy’s three-Open sweep was something new. The
Fifeshire Journal
described a gathering at the Golf Inn, near the links: “Mr. Denham, London, who proposed the champion’s health, said the feat he had performed had never been done before, and in all probability would never be repeated. By it he had brought the highest honour which any golfer could confer upon the ancient city and on all interested in the national game of golf.” The champion stood to acknowledge his supporters’ applause, nodding to his Rose Club friends as well as to his father and his brothers Jimmy and Jack, the latter sitting on his wooden trolley on the floor. The
Journal
scribe took down his words: “Thank you for this highly complimentary demonstration,” Tommy said. “Three years ago, I determined to become proprietor of the Belt. As you all know, I had the satisfaction of realizing that goal last Thursday at Prestwick.” Amid loud cheers, he lifted his glass to toast to another golfer. “To Tom Morris Senior!” he said.

The applause went on, led by Tommy, until his father stood up. After apologizing for being a poor speaker, Tom cleared his throat. “Seven years ago, I almost succeeded in making that Belt my own,” he said, “having held it for two years and lost it in the third by a very little. I feel proud, however, that my successful rival, the ultimate winner of the Belt, is my son.”

Each year’s Open winner earned a year’s reign as “Champion Golfer of Scotland.” By carrying the Belt off for all time, Tommy made that title forever his as well, at least in the popular mind. According to one of the first published histories of the game, “a new star rose in the golfing firmament, one before which all others had to pale their ineffectual fires. This was Young Tom Morris, who soon proved himself quite a royal and ancient Samson by metaphorically standing head and shoulders above his compeers of the green.” Any towering on Tommy’s part was indeed metaphoric, since he stood five foot eight, a jot more than his father but well short of Fergusson and Dunn, the gangly Musselburgh men. Still he overshadowed them and every other golfer, and his popularity changed professional sport for good. Before Tommy won the Belt, the only respectable sportsmen were country gentlemen whose wealth bankrolled their amusements. The word
sport
reeked of decadence; as a verb it still suggested sex. For a tradesman’s son to make a career as a sportsman and hold his head high was unthinkable, and yet here he was, the academy-trained son of a greenkeeper, drawing a crowd to the links. His brother Jimmy, now fifteen, was only one of the boys who trailed Tommy the way gulls chase a fishing boat. Andra Kirkaldy was another. Ten years old in 1870, Kirkaldy recalled his boyhood hero in his 1921 book
Fifty Years of Golf
. Tommy Morris, he wrote, had “the gift of golf…. We were all his worshippers.”

Part of Tommy’s appeal was the way he exuded pleasure in motion. The Scots word is
kithe
, for express or reveal. The exhilaration of the boy who raced up and down dunes was kithed in the young man as what golfer J.R. Gairdner called Tommy’s “easy confidence and perfect optimism.” It took optimism to swing hard at a solid rubber ball with a nineteenth-century driver, a thick-handled hickory switch with a concave head that measured less than an inch from top to bottom. Still the Champion Golfer made perfect contact more often than not. You could tell from the billiard-ball
clack
at impact, ever so slightly louder when he swung all-out. Everard noted how easily Tommy added “just another half-ounce of pith where something extra was required…the enemy were never safe with him.”

Twenty years earlier he would have been a minor, local figure. It was Tommy’s good fortune to arrive as the machine age began churning out one of its most important products, leisure time, without which there would have been no golf boom. Workdays were getting shorter in the 1860s—for many in the middle and working classes, the Sabbath rest day was now preceded by free afternoon called the Saturday half-holiday. That afternoon off was a first step toward the work-free weekend of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It gave people time to make railway trips to the seaside, particularly when the occasional Monday off for a local or national holiday followed the Sabbath. Traditionally, however, seaside towns had little to offer but muddy beaches and shallows that smelled faintly of sewage. Music halls were urban diversions. Circuses and fairs might come around once a year. Ladies and gentlemen spent their resort holidays promenading in their holiday finery, the men tipping their black silk top hats, the women averting their eyes from passersby because a lady did not acknowledge anyone to whom she had not been introduced. Children ran to the beach to build sand castles and climb aboard what passed for thrill rides—donkeys that trudged up and down the sands. Another prime recreation was bathing, which meant wading. Seawater was thought to promote circulation and digestion, so bathers made a point to swallow a few mouthfuls. One joke told of a bumpkin who treated his wife and daughters to a fortnight in St. Andrews. He left them there at high tide, went home to work the farm and returned when the tide was out, the beach dry for a quarter-mile. “Good Lord,” he cried, “they must ha’ drunken well!”

Professional golf provided drama that donkey rides and wading couldn’t match. Men bet on it; boys hailed their towns’ heroes and dreamed of emulating them, and even women were intrigued by the deeds of a young hero who swung so hard that his hat flew off. Golf became a spectator sport in the 1870s as hundreds and then thousands of spectators came out to follow professional matches and tournaments. Like the soccer and rugby lovers of the time, they were called fanatics, a term that was later shortened to “fans.”

Now that Tommy owned the Belt, professionals had little to play for but money. There was seldom much of it. He was the only golfer in the Open who didn’t need to caddie during Prestwick’s autumn meeting to cover his expenses. But the money was improving: Research by Peter Lewis of the British Golf Museum turned up two dozen professional tournaments in the 1860s, with an average purse of £12.92. There would be twice as many in the 1870s, when the typical purse nearly doubled to £23.87, with an average first prize of about £10. Fatter purses were one of the first signs of the late-century phenomenon Bernard Darwin would call the golf boom. This first boomlet did not make anyone rich, but it did vastly improve the lot of one member of the Young Men’s Improvement Society of St. Andrews: By winning more often than anyone else, Tommy put more than £200 into his bank account before he turned twenty. Two hundred pounds was a bonny penny, equal to about £15,000 today, and by some measures his savings were still more impressive. Houses and horses, for example, were far cheaper then. With £200 he could have bought a respectable house and put a horse in every room. Of the 1.4 million workers in Scotland in 1870, fewer than half of one percent had incomes of £1,000 per year. Tommy was not yet at their level, but then he was only nineteen.

He made much of his money in foursomes matches. When an R&A member and a professional played against another member-professional duo, the club men bet with each other and gave the cracks a fee. Occasionally Tommy partnered a member against two professionals—a tall order in foursomes, in which his amateur partner hit half their side’s shots. All these professional-amateur games were for the amusement of the gentlemen, who would give their professional partners what amounted to a gratuity at the end of the match. A gentleman who had won might give his professional ten or even twenty percent of the bet; one who had lost might give his professional less, or give him nothing if he thought the cur had cost him the match.

The most sought-after player dared to change the ground rules. To the surprise of R&A members and the consternation of his father, Tommy demanded payment upfront: a fair fee for his time. And being Tommy, he got it.

His spirit was infectious. Even nervous jabbers like Maitland-Dougall made braver strokes when they teamed with the Champion Golfer. It was hard to fuss and fidget when he was rolling putts and then pointing at the ball, ordering it to “Duck in!” Even his father made more short putts when he played with Tommy. “Rap it, Da,” Tulloch heard Tommy say. “The hole’s not coming to you!”

While the champion’s iron play was “uniformly magnificent,” in Darwin’s words, “by all accounts it was his putting that, as it were, put the coping stone on the rest of his game, and gave him that inside turn against all his rivals and particularly his nearest competitor, Davie Strath.” As a foursomes team Tommy and Strath were practically unbeatable, with Davie’s elegant game complementing his Rose Club friend’s bold strokes. But though he and Strath were friends, Tommy turned more often to his father when he chose a foursomes partner. Newspaper accounts of money matches in the early 1870s are peppered with references to the team of “Tom Jr” or “Young Tom” and the golfer now known as “Old Tom.” But filial loyalty had its costs. It cost Tommy money and injured his father’s self-respect, for this loyalty was also a form of charity. As Hutchison wrote, Tom hurt his son’s chances: “[A] spell of the most utter bad play, lasting four or five years, took possession of him: and this was the more provoking, inasmuch as it occurred when his son Tommy was at the very zenith of his powers, and father and son were in the habit of playing other professionals.” To use Hutchison’s five damning words, Tom was “a drag upon his son.”

Tommy was willing to be dragged. He carried his father in dozens of foursomes matches, knowing that the money match—the thrill of the hunt on the links—was in his father’s blood. Like many sportsmen before and since, Tom felt most alive when a wager hung in the balance. Tommy, who played more for self-kithing, was shrewd enough to see that his father’s decades of winning bets, paying bills, and wrestling with whins had given him, Tommy, the chance to play for love and money. This was the luxury of being a striver’s son. “During these years of phenomenal success he lived with his father at St. Andrews, and many a great match they played,” wrote fulsome Tulloch. “Often, too, they would be out on the links at the same time, playing in different matches with some of the members of the Royal and Ancient Club and their visitors, who were proud to enjoy alike their play, their talk and their friendship. And at night father and son would talk over their matches…. The father was proud of his son, and the son was full of affection and reverence for the father, though he could chaff him when he missed one of the short putts that would have been easy of negotiation to the lad.”

Tom needed no help in his roles as greenkeeper, shopkeeper, husband, and father. His greens were as smooth as suede after he spent £8 for the game’s first lawn-mowing machine in 1872. In the shop, where the smoke from his pipe mixed with steam and sawdust, Tom oversaw Jimmy, who was always dying to run out to follow his big brother Tommy, and Jack, whose sandbag legs grew fat but whose eleven-year-old arms and hands were so strong that he won Indian-wrestling bouts with Tom’s assistant James Foulis. The four of them and a crew of hired men made gutties and clubs, using shafts and clubheads that came from clubmaker Robert Forgan’s shop next door. Forgan was the white-bearded nephew of Hugh Philp, the woodworking Stradivarius who made niblicks, spoons, drivers, putters, lockers, and even a wheel barrow for his R&A patrons. In 2005 a Philp putter would sell at auction in Edinburgh for £70,000. Before his death in 1856 Philp passed his secrets down to Forgan, who was a better clubmaker than his neighbor Tom Morris but less famous, which led to an uneasy alliance: Tom paid Forgan for half-finished clubs, which Tom’s workers assembled, polished and stamped TOM MORRIS, the one name that was known wherever golf was played. One day an order came from Bombay, where British colonists had founded a golfing society:
Send 180 sets of golf clubs
. Tom hired extra men who worked in shifts around the clock until 1,440 clubs were finished, stamped, and packed into 180 boxes that went by horse-drawn cart, train and clipper ship to India.

Forgan was said to envy Tom Morris’s fame, and Tom may have felt a little guilty about their arrangement. The only side of his house without a window was the one facing Forgan’s shop.

On the links, Tom contended with weeds, heather, divots, grass-killing salt spray, and drunken caddies. Most of all he fought whins. The thorny shrubs were pretty in spring when they were garbed in yellow flowers, but in the summer they sprouted hairy black seed pods. One shrub could produced 10,000 seeds in a year; seeds that could lie dormant for forty years before springing to life. In his seventh and eighth year as keeper of the St. Andrews links, Tom was still coming home with scrapes on his arms and whin thorns in his jacket and beard. Eighteen-year-old Lizzie plucked out the thorns for her father. Nancy, fifty-five years old, was often ill. Her heart raced, her stomach ached, and she suffered from a stiffness that the doctor called congestion of the spine. She lay in bed with the curtains drawn to protect her from miasmas, the palls of bad air that were thought to carry illness. At night, Tom would sit by her bed reading the Bible aloud until she fell asleep.