Tommy's Honor (2 page)

Tommy had the honor at the Road Hole. He knocked his drive over the railway sheds to the right, but turned his wrists a hair too soon. The ball hooked into knee-high grass. Three swings later he lay four in the greenside bunker, with Tom lying three on the edge of the green. Tommy scraped out of the sand and now lay five, forty feet from the flag. He shrugged and picked up his ball, conceding the hole. He was one hole up with one to play.

The Home Hole was short, less than three hundred yards. Tom’s drive wasn’t long, but it was straight. By now there were golfers milling around the clubhouse—club members in red jackets. A few spectators, early-rising townsmen, stood near a mudpile behind the Home green. Two shovels jutted up from the mudpile, which was roped off with wood stakes and fishing line. Tom was building a new green up there, above and behind the current one. To reach it, future golfers would have to play over or through the hollow where the green was now. He had been casting about for a name for that hollow, a memorable name to fit with the old reliable Hell Bunker and Elysian Fields—“Shady Acre” or “Slough of Despond,” something like that.

Teeing up, Tommy spat on his fingers. If he won or halved the last hole, he would carry the day. He took his stance and gave the ball a swat. His drive climbed toward the clouds over the town, blue-gray clouds split by shafts of sunlight. He lost sight of the ball, but the spectators watched it bounce thirty yards past his father’s ball. Tommy heard shouts and clapping as he crossed the old stone bridge over Swilcan Burn, and he couldn’t help himself—he waved.

All this time, Tom Morris was busy playing golf. He bumped his ball to the hollow, just hard enough to send it running toward the flag. Would it fall for a deuce? There was applause, then a groan as the ball slipped past the hole. Still, Tom’s three was a sure thing. Tommy had two strokes left to win the match.

He had thirty yards to the flag. A twenty-yard bump and ten yards of roll. But there was a patch of ankle-high grass just short of the green. He would have to clear that grass by an inch or two.

As he circled his ball, studying his lie, a pair of red-coated club men came to stand behind him. “I’d putt it,” one said.

Tommy’s chip cleared the ankle-high grass, but by too much. It ran three paces past the hole. The redcoats were quiet. The whole town was quiet. Except for Tom Morris, who nodded at the ball and said, “You’re still away, son.”

The putt was uphill. It would go left, but if Tommy aimed for the right-hand edge of the hole and hit it hard, it would fall. He drew back his putter and rapped the ball, hard.

In it went. The redcoats whooped. Tom Morris nodded again. He walked past the hole and offered a handshake, and in that moment Tommy was so happy that he didn’t want to blink. He didn’t want to move from this spot. He leaned back and flung his putter straight up at the sky. The club rose, turning like the wheels in God’s pocket watch.

T
he game the Morrises played was already ancient. It was in the kingdom of Fife on Scotland’s east coast that medieval shepherds used their crooks to knock stones at rabbit holes. They were at it within a century or two of King Macbeth’s death in 1057. In time the shepherds’ sons and their sons’ sons whittled balls of wood to whack around the links, coastal wastelands where no trees or crops grew. They dug holes in flat places and planted sticks in the holes—targets for a game they called
gowf
or
golfe
. Over the centuries the game would be called many other things, some printable, including “this human frustration,” “a good walk spoiled,” and “a weird combination of snooker and karate.”

Other countries had similar sports. One was
chole
, a Flemish pastime in which a team of players got three swings to advance a ball toward a goal that might be half a mile away. Then their opponents played defense, hitting the ball toward the nearest bog. The Dutch played a golflike game on ice, and it is fashionable in some circles to say that golf began in Holland. But if you ask a Scotsman if he owes his national game to some Amsterdammers on ice skates, he may shoot back, “That’s not golf.” In fact the Scots’ claim to the sport is simple and correct: They invented the game with the hole in the ground.

But they borrowed its name. “Golf” is probably a corruption of
kolf
, a Dutch word for club. And as the game spread it corrupted its players—or so thought Scotland’s King James II, who banned it. The king was sick of seeing his soldiers wasting time on the links, neglecting their archery practice. No wee wooden ball would pierce armor and kill the damned English. In 1457, in the first recorded reference to the game, King James II decreed that “the golfe be utterly cryit doune and not usit.” Golfers ignored him.

His grandson, James IV, kept up the family tradition by calling the game “ridiculous…requiring neither strength nor skill.” Then he tried playing it. During a lull between wars with England, the young monarch emerged from Holyrood Palace with a brand-new driver in his hand. He greeted several lords and ladies gathered to mark the occasion, stepped up to the ball and—whiff! He missed. He tried again, whiffed again, threw down his club, and stalked back to the palace. That might have been the end of royal golf, but to his credit James IV practiced in secret until he could lace his drives more than fifty yards. He became the first royal golf nut and first royal golf gambler. In 1504, after the king lost a two-guinea bet to the Earl of Bothwell, the debt was added to the nation’s tax bill.

A love of golf often passes from father to son. In the middle of the sixteenth century it went from father to son to daughter. Mary Stuart, better known as Mary Queen of Scots, was the only child of King James V, the golfing son of James IV. Mary ascended to the throne after her father died in 1542. She was six days old. When the news reached London, the gluttonous wife-killer Henry VIII, a tennis player, saw a chance to expand his empire. In a series of invasions called the “rough wooing,” he tried to force a royal marriage between his son, Prince Edward, and Scotland’s child queen. Mary was shipped to safety in France, where she grew into a striking beauty, six feet tall. Upon returning to Scotland the seventeen-year-old queen took up the national game and gave it a new word: She called the boy who lugged her clubs a
cadet
, which the Scots heard as “caddie.” Mary went on to become a golfing widow, hitting the links the same week her husband, Lord Darnley, was murdered. That faux pas gave her cousin, England’s Queen Elizabeth, an excuse to charge Mary with crimes against God, nature, and good government. Mary Queen of Scots would lose a few more golf balls in Scotland and later, in England, her head.

By then a dozen generations of golfers had walked the four-mile loop of the links at St. Andrews, over Swilcan Burn to the mouth of the River Eden and then back toward town, aiming for rooftops and the crumbling twelfth-century cathedral where ghosts were said to guard the remains of Saint Andrew, supposedly brought here by a monk in the year 345: three of the apostle’s finger bones, an arm bone, a tooth, and a kneecap. No man designed the golf course a mile west of town. The course was an accident. The fairways were narrow paths through thickets of scrub: thorny whin bushes, which the rest of the world called gorse, as well as heather, nettles, brambles, ground elder, dogtail, cocksfoot, and chickweed. The putting-greens were clearings where players’ boots and the nibblings of rabbits and sheep kept the grass down. During storms the sheep huddled behind hillocks, where they scuffed and nibbled the grass and clover to the roots, leaving bare spots that eroded into sand bunkers. Other bunkers were carved by golfers slashing the turf in hollows where bad shots collected.

Golfers and sheep vied for space on the links with fishermen drying their nets, women beating rugs or bleaching clothes, dogs chasing rabbits, cows and goats grazing, larks darting in and out of the whins, children playing hide-and-seek, and even the occasional citizen soldier doing his duty by old James II, practicing his archery. Still, it was a golf town. In the seventeenth-century sermons of Robert Blair, minister of the town church, Reverend Blair likened the bond between God and the Church of Scotland to that of shaft and clubhead. Remote, wind-blistered St. Andrews may have been shrinking as Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dundee grew, but its sway in golf never shrank. Courses in Perth, Edinburgh, Kirkcaldy, Montrose, and Musselburgh ranged from five to twenty-five holes, but after St. Andrewsrejiggered its twenty-two-hole course to make it tougher, the “St. Andrews standard” of eighteen became everyone’s standard. Scottish sportsmen played the game by thirteen rules adopted in 1754 by the Society of St. Andrews Golfers. Some of those rules sound reasonable enough today (“If a ball is stop’d by any person, horse, dog or any thing else, the ball so stop’d must be played where it lyes”), while others sound puzzling (“Your tee must be upon the ground”). One timeless feature of the game was already clear to a St. Andrews writer: “How in the evening each dilates on his own wonderful strokes, and the singular chances that befell him—all under the pleasurable delusion that every listener is as interested in his game as he himself is.”

The men who made the rules and played most of the golf were gentlemen: well-to-do landowners who didn’t need to work. The game was technically open to all, and the St. Andrews links, like most links, occupied public land. But few workingmen could afford to play in an age when whole families, including both parents as well as children as young as five or six, toiled six days a week to earn what a gentleman spent to buy a single golf ball. Golf evolved as a rich man’s game partly because the feathery balls of the 1700s and early 1800s, leather pouches packed with goose feathers, were expensive. Men who could afford them met in town halls and taverns to drink, joke, argue, and arrange challenge matches, and as the game grew they formed local clubs and played for trophies. In 1744, after tabling discussion of taxes, prostitution, and the latest cholera outbreak, Edinburgh’s town council approved the purchase of a silver loving cup, to be played for each year by the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers. That move seemed to establish the gentlemen of the capital, who played in satin breeches and silk-lined jackets, as the game’s ruling body. But the golfers of Fife would have something to say about that.

The “twenty-two noblemen and gentlemen” of the Society of St. Andrews Golfers played in red hunting jackets, a look borrowed from the Fife Fox and Hounds Club. Some wore hiking boots that had tacks driven through the soles—the first golf spikes. After forming the Society of St. Andrews Golfers in 1754, they commissioned a trophy of their own, a silver golf club. They also played for gold and silver medals, and these medal competitions led to a new way of keeping score. Since a round-robin of one-on-one matches could take forever, the Society came up with a more efficient format: “[W]hoever puts in the ball at the fewest strokes…shall be declared and sustained victor.” The new style was called medal play. In time it would eclipse the old way of playing. Medal play is what Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, and almost everyone else in modern golf play 99 percent of the time. Often called “stroke play,” it is our definition of golf: Whoever takes the fewest strokes wins. But for more than a century, golf was a match-play game between players who challenged each other to man-to-man contests (singles) or two-man battles (foursomes). In match play, you can take ten swings in a bunker or even pick up your ball and surrender; you lose only that one hole. Whoever wins the most
holes
wins the match.

“Challenge matches are the life of golf,” Andra Kirkaldy of St. Andrews would write, looking back on the game as it was played in his youth. “Man against man, pocket against pocket, in deadly earnest is the thing.”

Stroke play might win you the honor of a club medal once or twice a year, but the rest of the calendar was for match play. That meant bets and more bets. Many wagers were for a few shillings, but there were plenty of five-and ten-pound matches. Some gentlemen thought nothing of playing for £50—more than enough to buy a fine pony like the one Sir John Low rode around the links, dismounting when it was his turn to hit. In Scotland in 1820 the average annual income was less than £15, a sum Sir John might bet on one putt.

Some matches were for territorial pride as well as cash. In 1681 a pair of English noblemen told the Duke of York that golf began in England. Any Scot who claimed otherwise, they said, was a liar! The duke, a Scotsman who would be king of both countries, agreed to a challenge match to settle the matter. For his partner he chose John Patersone, a cobbler who was said to be the best golfer in Edinburgh. The shoemaker arrived with his clubs tucked under his arm, trembling to be in such exalted company. After the other men hit their tee shots he steeled himself, swung from the heels, and belted a drive that dropped their jaws. With Patersone leading the way, the Scots routed the English pair. The duke was so pleased that he split his winnings with Patersone, who used the money to build a house on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, a fine stone house with the old golf motto etched above the front door:
Far and Sure
.

By the 1800s, with seven golf societies scattered across Scotland and England, the game was respectable enough to seek royal patronage. In 1833 the officers of the upstart Perth Golfing Society irked golfers in Edinburgh and St. Andrews by jumping the queue, securing the sponsorship of King William IV. The Perth club became “Royal Perth” despite being only nine years old, while Edinburgh’s Honourable Company was eighty-nine years old and the Society of St. Andrews Golfers seventy-nine.
Royal Perth!
The sound of it soured all the claret in St. Andrews. In 1834 a politically connected R& A member, Colonel John Murray Belshes, wrote to the king urging him to restore the old town’s prestige. When the monarch ignored his plea, Belshes reminded King William that among his many titles was one that warmed the hearts of St. Andreans, for His Majesty was also the Duke of St. Andrews. How fallible he would appear if he forgot the town that was part of his birthright!

With the speed of the latest laboratory fluid, electricity, the king gave his patronage to the Society of St. Andrews Golfers, which got a new name including two words to remind Royal Perth of its youth: the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. Three summers later, King William sent the club “a Gold Medal, with Green Ribband…which His Majesty wishes should be challenged and played for annually.” The Royal and Ancient had taken a step toward its destiny as the ruling body of a game that would be played not only on rough town greens but all over the world, and not only for crowns and shillings and the occasional £50, but for millions.

For the moment, though, golf still belonged to three or four hundred men in hunting jackets. Like the hunt, golf was a pursuit for prosperous fellows who wanted to stretch their muscles a bit before they fell into overstuffed chairs in chandeliered rooms to eat duck, pheasant, mutton, and beef and drink claret and gin while they smoked and told stories. As some writers had noted, the game was an abstract of the primordial hunt: A pack of men journeys into perilous land, avoiding dangers, tracking first one target and then another, getting home safely by nightfall to gather by the fire.

Golf also shared something important with such popular sports as cockfighting and bare-knuckle boxing: It was easy to bet on. Every morning but Sunday the gentleman golfers of St. Andrews would meet near the first teeing-ground to arrange their singles and foursomes matches, haggling over odds and strokes given. They slapped their first shots toward the rail station and marched after them, their caddies following a few respectful steps behind. The caddies were a threadbare lot, boys as young as seven jostling for work beside toothless men of eighty. They called the golfer “Mister” unless he held a still-more-exalted title such as Captain or Major. The occasional golfer of high rank, like the sports-mad Earl of Eglinton, was called “M’lord.” Caddies were lucky to get a shilling per round, and lucky if their gentlemen didn’t smack them as well as the ball. A golfer who got bad advice from his caddie, or detected laziness or cheek in him, was within his rights to backhand the caddie full in the face, or take a club and whip him with it. Like the vast and growing empire that some of them had served in India, Africa, or the Holy Land, the men of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club held firm to the belief that they ruled by right with God’s approval. Never mind that revolt was in the air from teeming India to bloody Europe to distant America, or that the land these country gentlemen ruled was being literally turned upside down, farmland torn into quarries and mines as the industrial revolution gained steam by the hour. Scotland’s gentleman golfers could escape the cities’ sooty air, blast furnaces, and hungry rabble by spending the day on the links. If the rest of the world was hurtling forward at breakneck speed, they told themselves, at least the old game was safe from revolution.