Tommy's Honor (20 page)

Now, three years later, the players filed out of the Royal Hotel to finish the tournament in mist and drizzle. Tommy didn’t mind the rain; he rubbed up his grip with the lump of pine tar in his jacket pocket.

Strath was tired of losing to Tommy. “He swung high, and came through well with a sweeping stroke, driving a higher ball with more carry than Tommy’s,” one contemporary wrote, “but his putting was not so dangerous as his rival’s. Nor had he so even a disposition. He was excitable, talked quickly, was readily elated or depressed.” Strath nursed his three-shot lead while the course meandered to the beach and turned back toward the hotel. Tommy gained a stroke, then another.

The last hole was only 218 yards from the tee to a green beside the hotel. Tommy, aggressive as ever, knocked in a final putt, and Strath—working the tobacco in his cheek, chewing, spitting—failed to match him. Tommy had come from behind to win by a stroke.

“Tom Morris, jun., increased his already very long list of achievements by carrying off the first prize, consisting of a medal and £15,” one reporter wrote. “The members of the club regard this, the first golf tournament held in England, as a complete success.”

The next day brought a foursomes match between England and Scotland, with national pride and £5 at stake. Two professionals from English clubs challenged Tommy and Musselburgh’s Bob Fergusson. The Scots won in a rout, 8 and 7. Then the Champion Golfer headed home to St. Andrews, his triumph in England complete.

A letter to
The Field
congratulated Royal Liverpool for staging the golf show of the season: “Here the young champion added another leaf to his laurels; here England’s professionals fought and lost against Scotland’s, here they stayed together as brother golfers, and parted in the best fellowship, without jealousy or discontent, satisfied with their own performances, the prizes and the links, anxious only again to meet, and in friendly fray swing the hickory wand.”

The money and the medal Tommy won at Hoylake meant less to him than another piece of silver he received that spring. On April 20, 1872, Tommy’s twenty-first birthday, his sentimental Da handed him a pocket watch. The watch had a heavy silver case, a silver fob, and a palpable heartbeat. Tick-tock, like his father’s swing. From that day Tommy carried the watch in his vest pocket, near his heart.

At a meeting of the Royal and Ancient the following month, “the Secretary read a letter which he had received from the Honorary Secretary of the Prestwick Club as to the desirability of reviving the ‘Champion Belt’ competition.” This is the first reference to the Open in the minutes of R&A meetings. A committee was directed to explore cosponsorship of the Open, “and they were authorized to contribute a sum not exceeding £15 from the funds of the Club.”

That spring two of the club’s best gentleman golfers hit upon a clever bet. Robert Clark and Gilbert Mitchell Innes—the same Innes who had pushed Prestwick to share the Open, and who happened to belong to the R&A, as well—challenged any professional to beat their best ball. The amateurs won every time. Still they were two-to-one underdogs in spirited betting the day Tommy Morris took their dare. Innes and Clark held a 1-up lead through sixteen holes as the golfers and a bevy of bettors and spectators reached the Road Hole. The amateurs’ backers were mentally doubling their money until Tommy won the Road Hole, then ran in a putt on the boneyard Home Hole to pick their pockets.

By then, Queen Victoria had sped from England through Dundee in a royal-blue railway car that ate the rails at fifty miles per hour, heading for Balmoral Castle, west of Aberdeen. She and her adored husband, Prince Albert, had bought the castle and its vast grounds after its previous owner died from choking on a fishbone. The Queen suffered from the heat and traveled with a bucket of ice rattling under her seat; a footman replenished the ice faster than it could melt. Victoria had fled London for Balmoral twice a year ever since Prince Albert died of typhoid fever in 1861. She wore widow’s weeds for the rest of her life. “A cold, dark country,” she called Scotland, a place to match her mood. The second-youngest of her nine children was gray-eyed Prince Leopold, England’s first royal hemophiliac. After doctors told the prince that golf might aid his fragile health, a short course was laid out on the grounds of Windsor Castle. Nineteen-year-old Leopold looked forward to playing golf on real courses in Scotland, though he would need to watch out for whin thorns.

Tommy rode a slow train coughing eastward from Leuchars. Golfers crowded the links ahead. Dogs romped though dunes, yapping at a sky specked with herring gulls; courting couples strolled the path to the beach; bathers waded in the shallows. This was the busy town Provost Playfair had imagined when he opened the rail link twenty years before. “A golf-mad town,” one writer called it. Tommy stepped off the train at St. Andrews Station. Coming home from an out-of-town match, another victory, in the summer of 1872, he had a copy of
The Scotsman
under his arm. The national newspaper carried a story from France, where a new guillotine had “performed with unquestioned success.” In Egypt, clipper ships moved like three-masted camels on the Suez Canal, which cut 6,000 miles off the route from London to Bombay. From farther south—the slave-trading port of Zanzibar—newsman Henry Stanley wired that he’d had no luck in his search for the Scottish explorer David Livingstone, who was presumed dead.

The world beckoned, but when Tommy looked up he saw the familiar spires and chimney pots of St. Andrews. Stopping to drop his luggage at his father’s house, he blinked while his eyes adjusted to the dimness. Few Scots were wasteful enough to light lamps in the daytime; on sunny days a traveler going inside would be blind for a moment. He found his sister, said hello, and went to look in on their mother. Nancy was confined to her bed. Her back and stomach ached. If she asked about Tommy’s plans for the summer, frowning when he spoke not about working as a gentleman’s clerk but about playing golf, he would cheer her with family talk and questions about her day. Tommy was a good listener, solicitous of his mother. When she tired of talking, he would kiss her forehead and leave her to her sewing.

Out again in first-of-summer light, he walked under white clouds stacked up to the sun. Just east of his father’s shop was a wood-walled stall where old Kirky, the creaky-jointed father of golfer Bob Kirk, sat boiling chunks of gutta-percha in a stew pan. When the chunks were putty-soft he plucked them out with tongs and rolled them round in his hands. Kirky’s hands were spotted red from frequent scaldings. A longtime caddie who had lugged Tom Morris’s clubs for years, Kirky supplemented his caddie pay by fashioning new gutties from bits of old ones, the way Dr. Frankenstein made a man in the popular novel. Kirky rolled his chunks of rubber until they were round, dropped them in cold water and spun them to make sure they cooled evenly. He dried and painted them and sold them as “Kirky’s Remakes.”

Caddies loafed around Kirky’s stall, trading stories. One would grouse about the three-hour rounds he endured while carrying for Sir John Low, a notorious “slow-coach” who played at such a glacial pace despite his pony that the caddies called him Sir John Slow. Another caddie might be telling the tale of two dour old-timers who never spoke. After two silent hours they were dead-even on the Home Hole, where one sank a putt to win the match. The other said, “Well in,” the only words either man had uttered. To which the first replied, “Chatterbox!”

Tourists spilled down the steps of the Golf Inn beyond Kirky’s stall. These holiday-makers, traveling in loud groups of three and four bachelors, came from all over to spend a few days or a week at golf’s mecca. They scuffed up the links by day and played whist all night, eating and drinking like nabobs, sleeping like stones until noon. “The golfer, having finished a large and late breakfast, lights a cigar and turns his steps toward the links,” reads one account of a pilgrimage to St. Andrews, where players arranged matches according to a time-honored calculus that balanced greed and ego. “If a man underrates his play, he may perhaps get a good partner and win his match, but he wounds his self-conceit; if he overrates it he loses his match, and makes an enemy of his partner.” The loser could resort to another tradition: the artful alibi. As Robert Chambers noted in the popular
Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal
, the typical golfer was never short of excuses: “It is often amusing to see…how eager he is to find palliations for his failure. ‘That blade of grass turned me aside!’ ‘I was disturbed by your moving.’ ‘Your shadow on the green put me out.’”

As golf grew, the R&A’s stone clubhouse grew with it. Built as a squat rectangle when Tommy was a year old, the gray hulk had always been an eyesore as well as a landmark. As one critic wrote, “the architect is, happily for himself, unknown.” In 1866 the club replaced the front window with a grand oriel window that gave members a panoramic view of the links. Now the clubhouse was getting a new north wing. Canvas and scaffolding shrouded its seaward side. The building’s hindquarters, long plagued by what club records call “the evils as regards smell,” had gotten a new block of toilets and a billiards room. Architect David Henry’s bill for that work came to £1,430, enough to fund the Open for half a century had the R&A chosen to do so. Instead the club negotiated with the Prestwick Club and the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers in hopes of saving £20 on the Open. Each passing month increased the chance that there would be no Open Championship in 1872.

Tom Morris stood at the first teeing-ground, his hands stuffed into his jacket pockets. He was pairing golfers with caddies, helping the golfers decide who had priority on the tee, and telling tourist golfers where to aim. Had he told them how to spit or scratch themselves, they probably would have obeyed. Tommy had long been amazed at how sheepish most golfers were. From the lowliest mechanic to the proudest nobleman, they all wanted a professional to tell them what to do. Tom Morris’s gift was that he could tell any man what to do without giving offense.

After the men teed off and started after their bouncing drives, Tom climbed the steps at the southwest corner of the clubhouse. He walked to the club secretary’s window and gave it a tap. He waited, tapped again. After a minute the window went up. The secretary leaned out and spoke into Tom’s sunburned ear. It was the same every day: the club officer telling the greenkeeper which important gentlemen would be playing in the foursomes to come. Tom would nod and then go back around the clubhouse to the teeing-ground. In eight years as greenkeeper for the Royal and Ancient Golf Club he had now and then been inside the clubhouse but had never once sat down there. A greenkeeper in that clubhouse would not sit without being invited to sit, an invitation that had not come and never would.

While Tom knew his place, he saw the course as his domain and bent it to his will with little interference from the Green Committee. For centuries the first teeing-ground had been the only one that was not on or near a putting-green. To play the second through eighteenth holes, players teed off within a few club-lengths of the hole in the previous green. The distance had tripled since Tom’s youth, from four club-lengths to twelve, as golfers realized that stamping around near the hole was no favor to the putting-green. Now Tom was building a separate teeing-ground for each hole. He was following the lead of Tommy and his Rose Club friends, who deemed the twelve-club-length rule ridiculous and teed off from flat spots nearby. Some R&A men objected: Who were these lads to make up their own rules? But Tom saw the wisdom of the new approach. The pace of play quickened and the greens suffered less. By 1876 every hole at St. Andrews would have its own teeing-ground. In time every course in the world would make the same change.

Tom’s own troubles on the greens were harder to correct. “A man may miss a short putt,” Bernard Darwin wrote, “and yet be a good husband, a good father and an honest Christian gentleman.” Not that such virtues made the misser feel much better. Tom tried putting with his right forefinger wrapped tight around his putter’s grip, to no avail. He tried putting with the forefinger extended down the shaft, and when that didn’t help he joked about having that finger amputated. Everard recalled a day when Tom tried putting with a cleek, made several long ones and went home delighted, “happy in possession of the magic secret.” But the magic didn’t last. Five years after winning the 1867 Open, Tom was missing most of his four-foot putts.

In July he and Tommy played as a team in what the
Citizen
called “the first great professional match of the season.” Their opponents were Davie Strath and another young St. Andrean, a jut-jawed powerhouse named Tom Kidd. Four years older than Tommy, Kidd wore his side-whiskers so bushy that the wind ruffled them. Unlike his black-coated partner, Kidd was a dandy. On Sundays he dressed “like a peacock,” one St. Andrean wrote, “with tall hat, blue socks, lavender trousers, yellow kid gloves and a cane.” He sported a silk top hat he called his “Whar-ye-goin’?” hat, so splendid it made people ask what destination could be worthy of such a hat.

Tommy may have shaken his head at Kidd’s plumage, but he admired the way the man whacked drives well past 200 yards. Kidd and the painstaking Strath were such a well-matched foursomes pair that bettors made them even money against Tommy and his faltering father. According to
The Field
, which recounted the event for readers all over the Empire, “Old Tom led off at half-past eleven with a fine tee shot, in the presence of a large company of spectators.” Twenty holes later, with Strath and Kidd 2-up, Tom left a putt two paces short. With Tommy facing a dodgy putt to save four for their side, Kidd tried a defensive ploy: He left his team’s third shot on the edge of the hole, blocking Tommy’s putt. In those days a ball on the green could not be marked unless two balls were touching, so Kidd and Strath’s ball served as an obstacle. Kidd and Strath were sure of making four on the hole while Kidd’s ploy, called a stymie (sometimes spelled
stimy
) blocked the Morrises’ chance to make four.