Tommy's Honor (21 page)

There were two ways to foil a stymie. You could go around the other ball or chip over it. You had to take care not to knock the other ball into the hole, for if you did it counted—your foes went from lying three on the lip to writing three on their scorecard. There wasn’t room to putt around the other ball, so Tommy tried flipping his gutty into the hole, a shot he had practiced countless times in his father’s workshop. This time he chipped the ball too low. In the
Citizen
’s account Kidd “played a dead ‘stimy’ which Young Tom could not pass, but knocked Kidd’s ball in.”

The stymie was already controversial—some said it was “no’ golf” and called for a ban—but it would last for almost a century. Bobby Jones would stymie an opponent while winning his Grand Slam in 1930. The tactic was finally banned in 1952, eighty years after Kidd’s perfectly legal stymie at St. Andrews put his side another hole ahead. Tom botched another putt at the Road Hole and the Morrises lost, 3 and 1.

Summer days stretched toward midnight. In July you could read your pocket watch at 10:30
P.M.
, while shadows lengthened and the broad expanse of the first and last fairways looked as rippled and gray as water. Tom had a particularly long day on August 10, 1872, when the caddies went on strike. R&A members called it communism, a word popularized by Marx and Engels’s
The Communist Manifesto
in 1848. Some also blamed William Gladstone, the liberal prime minister who tolerated trade unions. Organized labor was seen by the gentry as a first step toward revolution. Right here in Fife, coal miners had threatened to strike unless their workweeks were cut to sixty hours. The
Citizen
told of colliers’ wives who were offering to replace their men in the mines, “stating that they neither cared for the union nor their husbands.”

The caddies’ strike put Tom in a delicate spot. It was his job to ride herd over the caddies, but some R&A members doubted his loyalty. Tom Morris was a former caddie, after all, and a famously soft touch for any sod with a sob story. And perhaps they were right to doubt him. Tom may have believed that society’s ladder was part of God’s design, but he knew how poorly treated the caddies were. He quietly supported them, letting them know they could count on a coin from Old Tom if they needed one. The strike ended when club members agreed to pay all caddies at least a shilling per round, the price of a gutta-percha ball.

Livingstone was found. After being mauled by a lion and beating malaria by stirring quinine into his sherry, he looked up to see Henry Stanley, the only other white person within hundreds of miles of Tanganyikan jungle. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” the newsman said.

There was news from Prestwick as well. On September 11, 1872, the Prestwick Club agreed to share the Open with the R&A and the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, with the clubs taking turns hosting the event at Prestwick, St. Andrews, and Musselburgh, respectively, starting with Prestwick that fall. The purse would be £20, the most ever, with £8 for the winner and four other cash prizes. Perhaps there would be a new Championship Belt as well, but that matter was tabled because time was short; the tournament would take place the day after tomorrow.

The Open Championship was reborn on Friday the 13th. Only eight players entered. Willie Park, Bob Fergusson, and The Rook opted to stay home rather than chase Tommy Morris around the links he grew up playing.

It rained hard all week, flooding grain fields the
Citizen
described that September as “terribly lain and twisted.” The wind rolled off the Firth of Clyde as golfers slogged through puddles to Prestwick’s first teeing-ground. The defending champion had the right to tee off first, an honor Tommy had held with growing impatience for two years. He uncorked a drive that drew shouts from the crowd. For much of the day, however, he putted more like his father than himself, missing three-and four-footers on rain-sodden greens. An ugly shot in the second round came to rest no more than three inches from the chin-high stone wall behind the fourth green. This was the Wall Hole, where he’d made a seven two years before. The wall, flecked with yellow moss, was no more than a stride from the back of the putting-green. With no room to make a normal swing, he turned his back to the green and tried a carom shot, hoping to bounce the ball off the wall toward the hole. To his horror the ball sprang straight up and went over the wall, into a muddy field full of tall grass and black-faced sheep. The sheep, chewing cud like Davie Strath with a chaw of tobacco, watched Tommy climb the wall and jump down on their side. From here he faced a pitch back over the wall to a green he couldn’t see. An error now could cost him any chance to win. Instead, what
The Field
called “a well-directed stroke with his niblick” lofted his ball to a soft landing on the green. He had dodged disaster, giving Davie a chance to lose.

After two rounds the markers turned their scorecards over and kept the last round’s numbers on the cards’ blank backs. Strath led by five strokes as the last twelve-hole round began. Bettors rejiggered the odds, making him a five-to-four favorite over Tommy, who had not been an underdog in an important event since winning his first Open.

Tommy was out of miracles. Still, he kept the ball out of the Sahara Bunker on the Alps Hole and well short of the wall at the fourth. Playing three pairings ahead of Strath, he kept the pressure on his friend, who lost two shots with what the newspapers called “an unfortunate iron” at the Alps Hole. With three holes left, his lead pared to a single stroke, Strath’s swing and his nerves were fraying. The bulge of tobacco in his cheek bobbed as he chewed and spat, chewed and spat. On the 417-yard final hole he watched his drive splash in Goosedubs swamp. His shoulders sagged. After a graceful 52 in the second round, a horrid third-round 61 left Strath three strokes behind Tommy, the winner and still Champion Golfer.

The first player to win three consecutive Open Championships was now the first to win four. Even today, no other golfer has won four Opens in a row. In addition to the £8 first prize, Tommy was handed a gold-plated medal inscribed
GOLF CHAMPION TROPHY
. There was no trophy, but the gentlemen running the event promised that his name would be engraved on the Open trophy when they got around to buying one.

Leaving Prestwick, Tommy was smiling about one of the tournament’s surprises: Tom had made enough putts to tie for fourth, good for two pounds ten shillings.

At the R&A’s Autumn Meeting a fortnight later, Major Boothby announced that per its recent agreement with Prestwick and the Honourable Company, the club would allot £10 toward the purchase of a £30 prize for the Open champion. The prize would not be a belt but a proper trophy, engraved with young Morris’s name as the first winner but not subject to his ownership. As
The Field
reported, “this trophy can never become the absolute property of any winner.” The Champion Golfer would keep the trophy for a year, then return it to the site of the next Open, and so on for as long as the tournament lasted.

Alexander Kinloch, newly elected captain of the Royal and Ancient, drove himself in during the same Autumn Meeting. Sir Robert Hay won the Royal Medal with a 94 that day, while Dr. Douglas Argyll Robertson claimed the Gold Medal with a 97. Captain Kinloch, wearing the Queen Adelaide medal that signified his captaincy, presented their medals at the club’s annual dinner that evening. Applause followed Hay and Robertson to the head table, where the 118-year-old Silver Club, ensconced with silver golf balls donated by past captains, was draped in blue and white, the colors of the Scottish flag and of the R&A. Since 1839, when the first Silver Club was fully covered by silver-plated balls, there had been two Silver Clubs. Now the R&A members stepped forward one by one to kiss them. Wine slid from bottles into goblets and quickly down gentlemen’s throats. Some men preferred gin, brandy, or whisky, though whisky was thought to be a commoner’s drink. Whatever their drink, most of the gentlemen stopped well short of falling-down drunk, for the R&A dinner was a warm-up for the next evening’s annual R&A Ball. Captain Kinloch had promised the grandest ball in memory, a night to make everyone forget the previous winter’s cheeky effort by the Rose Club. He had even hired the man who’d decorated the hall for the Rose Club Ball.

In the Town Hall ballroom the following night, gaslight flickered over table settings so lavish that guests filed by to spectate. A quadrille band from Edinburgh played under crossed swords, wreaths, banners, and floral arrangements. The flowers were made of paper and cloth, Scottish flowers having lost their petals to October frosts. “The walls of the large hall were entirely covered from floor to about 9 feet high with white calico,” read the
Citizen
, “the spandles of the roof being supported by Corinthian pilasters, while the spaces between were filled with fluted panels of various coloured cloths, the whole being surmounted with a grand festoon of evergreens and artificial flowers. At the south end of the hall were placed the silver clubs and golf medals of the club on a stand with a background of scarlet, fringed with ivy leaves.”

Captain Kinloch, resplendent in a red golfing jacket with a blue collar and gilt buttons stamped with the cross of St. Andrew, liked what he saw. The wealthy Kinloch had paid for it all, the decorations as well as a feast for a crowd of more than 200: sheep’s head broth, oatcakes, heaps of salt herring, onions, radishes and peas, grouse, ox feet, lobster and scallops, winkles, whelks, haddock and skink, flounder roasted alive over a fire, slabs of good Fife beef, sweet flummery, brandy, and snuff. Club members toasted the Queen’s health and Captain Kinloch’s as drinks before supper led to drinks with supper, the meal starting at one in the morning, followed by dancing and drinks.

Around three
A.M.
, R&A members began leaving the Town Hall, some staggering, for their carriages, homes, and hotels. At four, music and voices still drifted from the Town Hall.

A week after the great R&A Ball, more than forty golfers vied for a £50 purse in Aberdeen. Davie Strath led at the midpoint but folded in the face of a late charge by Tommy. They were essentially touring professionals now, earning enough to make their expenses and a comfortable living besides. Tommy and Strath were planning a series of singles matches for the following year, duels that would draw golf fanatics by the thousands. Tommy thought they could get town councils to put up purses for both players, an idea that was sure to scandalize old-timers who believed the only pure match was winner-take-all.

Back home in St. Andrews, he was on his way to the links when he passed Alexander Kinloch. According to a story still told in St. Andrews, Tommy paid the R&A captain no attention.

“Stop,” the captain said. “You’ll tip your cap to a gentleman.”

Tommy stopped. He examined the captain, a man with mottled skin and gray whiskers, wearing a red golfing jacket and white leather breeches. “I would if I saw one,” he said.

L
ate in November the skies put on a rare show. First the Merry Dancers appeared, and within an hour those eerie red and yellow-green lights were pierced by buckshot—clusters of meteors that made white scratches in the northern lights.

Townspeople hurried to watch. They pointed at the sky. They stood on the beach and on The Scores, the seaside road that runs along the bluffs east of the links—families with small children riding on their fathers’ shoulders, young couples with maiden aunts in tow as chaperones, schoolboys running and laughing. The Morrises came out, all but Nancy, stuck in her sickbed. Thirteen-year-old Jack rode his wheeled trolley, his head at waist level in the crowd, Tommy and Jimmy making sure no one bumped him or blocked his view of the falling stars, which appeared in clusters, each one making what the
Citizen
called “a trail of mellow light in the sky.” Tom Morris, looking up, may have recalled other meteor showers in other years when looking up didn’t make his neck ache.

Townspeople talked about the Merry Meteors for weeks. Many said they were surely an omen for the coming year of 1873. The trouble was that no one could decide what they portended.

Tom had reason to regard the new year with suspicion. He would have been aghast at his son’s insulting the Captain of the Royal and Ancient.
I would if I saw one!
The line would be repeated on the links, in the streets, and in the pine corridors of the R&A clubhouse. Such an insult called for an apology, but Tommy would sooner bite through his tongue. If Captain Kinloch received an apology, Tom made it. As St. Andrews’ best diplomat, he would have spent months deflecting and de-emphasizing the insult, saying again and again how proud Tommy would be to defend his Open title here at home in the coming fall of 1873, for the greater glory of St. Andrews and the R&A.

Tommy escaped the resentments of his hometown by taking a job fifty miles away. He had turned down offers to be a resident professional at Blackheath, Westward Ho and North Berwick, but when the officers of a fledgling club in Stirling, a two-hour train ride from St. Andrews, offered him such a post a few weeks before Easter, he surprised them by accepting. According to the club’s records, “his terms were 30 a week and traveling expenses. His duties were to teach and play with the members.” Thirty shillings was a relative pittance, less than a fifth of the £8 he’d earned in a day at the last Open. He often won £20 in a match, more than three times what Stirling would pay for a month’s work. But there were few money matches in early spring, and he’d be free to leave at the end of April. While dreaming of life as a touring professional, he could try being a club professional, teaching lessons to gouty gentlemen, setting their handicaps, selling them clubs and balls. It would be easy. It would please his parents. And if the Champion Golfer tired of his duties he could always look up at the castle.

Stirling’s seven-hole course, ringed by wooded hills, looped through sun and shade under the stone walls of Stirling Castle, which rose from a 250-foot shelf of mottled black rock overlooking the course. Tommy remembered his father’s telling him that Mary Queen of Scots was crowned up there when she was an infant, too young to sit up on her throne. The gentlemen of Stirling Golf Club told him another bit of local lore: In 1507 the Queen of Scots’ grandfather, King James IV, employed a royal alchemist, John Damian, at Stirling Castle. The great Damian weaved himself a pair of enormous wings made of chicken feathers, and one day he mounted the castle wall and flew off. Straight down the wall to a crash landing in a dunghill.

Tommy may have seen his time at Stirling as a reiteration of Damian’s trajectory. The club members were not bad fellows but they were dreadful golfers. As their professional he needed endless patience, and his month at Stirling may have increased Tommy’s regard for his father, who spent long hours with men whose idea of a golf swing included clenched eyes and dancing feet. When a gentleman golfer swung twice before popping the ball fifty yards, Tom Morris would smile and call the shot “a clout, well played!” But when the Stirling golfers held their first tournament, it took all the tact Tommy could summon to tell a newspaperman that he was pleased with the zigzag spectacle. The subsequent item in
The Field
told of the new club’s “competition for the silver Challenge Cup…won by Mr. Robert Shand (Stirling) with 99 strokes…. Tom Morris, jun., from St. Andrews, acted as umpire, and expressed himself satisfied with the play.”

On May Day, the traditional start of summer in Scotland, Tommy took an eastbound train from Stirling Station, leaving the life of a hireling behind.

In summer, dandelions and half-inch daisies spring from a links already dotted with golf balls. Fast-moving clouds cast shadows that pass over golfers like premonitions. Tommy was glad to be home, winning matches on the St. Andrews links where he would soon defend his four Open titles. His insult to the Captain forgiven if not forgotten, he was golf’s leading citizen, a hero with a leonine mustache and Balmoral bonnet, swinging all-out in the style every local boy copied: right knee knuckling inward as his backswing began, trunk twisting to its limit as his left shoulder turned under his chin. “Every muscle of his well-knit frame was summoned into service,” one writer recalled. “He stood well back from the ball, and with dashing, pressing, forceful style of driving, which seldom failed, sent it whizzing on its far and sure flight.”

R&A golfers crowded the links until grouse season opened in August and they went shooting on the moors. In July and early August they played high-stakes golf matches. Tommy often joined them. He could only shake his head at their occasional club-throwing, foot-stamping fits, wondering how a man could hit two awful shots in a row and then curse fate when, wrapping his elbows around his ears on the backswing, he hit a third. “The Links,” wrote Pastor Boyd, “are sometimes a place of awful language: such are the temptations of Golf.” Boyd recalled a “peppery” match during which the Reverend John Tulloch, head of the divinity college at St. Andrews University and one of the queen’s chaplains, offered his partner a swing tip. The man shook his club in Rev. Tulloch’s face and cried, “No directions! I’ll take no directions!” Another golfer was so profane that his R&A brethren, who called him Mr. Dammit, joked that rather than driving himself into the club, he swore himself in.

Unlike other professionals who were paid at the gentlemen’s whim, Tommy insisted on getting his couple of crowns before he hit a ball. He knew his worth, as they said. Other professionals would send a friend through the crowd with hat in hand, begging, “Silver, if you please, sir?” Tommy was too proud for that—entirely too proud for a greenkeeper’s son, some said. Did he not personify the greed, gall, and common ambition that were the ugliest aspects of modern life? As the preacher James Baldwin Brown said of Tommy’s generation, “nothing is more detestable…than the air of self-assertion and independence in the young.” Tommy, who was better educated than many R&A members, was known to correct them when they misspoke—as if being right could undo the social defect of his birth. The gentlemen preferred his father, who never spoke out of turn or looked them too hard in the eye. Old Tom had a genius for tact. He had a way of lowering his head to the perfect degree when speaking to a gentleman, showing deference without being slavish about it.

Tom’s diplomacy was tested again when Tommy and Davie Strath capitalized on a kind of golf that gentlemen scorned. The young professionals began staging their own events, singles matches that drew large, raucous crowds. Their matches were good theater because they were perfect opposites: Tommy’s brio vs. Strath’s cool technique, fire vs. ice. And to the dismay of the men who had controlled the sport, young Morris and Strath were not content to perform for their betters’ amusement, giving gentlemen something to bet on and then passing the hat for themselves. Instead Morris and Strath launched a road show, a series of matches like the great boxing bouts of the next century. Such matches had always been winner-take-all, but Tommy and Davie demanded—and got—what would come to be called appearance fees. North Berwick paid them £25 each to play a match there. The North Berwick town council tried to keep the payment secret, but news leaked out and gentleman golfers huffed as if the boys had robbed a bank. One red-coated curmudgeon called such events “a deadness” that deprived the players of “their honour.” Tommy seemed to enjoy tumult, which left his father stuck in the middle again, humoring the R&A men who held his future in their soft pink hands. And while Tom did not admit it, he was on Tommy’s side in this matter. Tom Morris might have been old, but he was modern enough to believe that even a greenkeeper’s son had a right to bargain for his work.

For a week that summer, St. Andrews was packed with golf-fanatics who spoke of little but the latest skirmish between Morris and Strath. Even R&A officers came out in the rain to watch Tommy and Davie play for an eye-catching £200. Side bets added hundreds more. Tommy was a five-to-four favorite in what
The Field
called “the most important golf match played since 1870.” On the morning of the first day’s play Tommy pointed to a boy caddie named David Ayton. “Here, lad,” he said, handing over his clubs. “Put these under your oxter.” Young Ayton did as he was told, stowing the clubs under his armpit, and followed the Champion Golfer to the teeing-ground.

Strath was coming off a victory over Tommy in a celebrated match that spring. As Everard would write, Strath’s “style was the very poetry of swing, the most perfectly graceful.” Davie had been swinging a bit harder since his last-round collapse in the 1872 Open, his driver making a louder clack on the ball. He impressed spectators and reporters by out-driving the champion on the early holes. Still, Tommy had Strath’s backers fearing a rout ten minutes into their three-day, 108-hole contest. He won the first two holes, one with a stymie. But at the simple sixth Tommy lashed a long drive that found wet sand in one of the Coffin bunkers. He flailed twice without escaping and surrendered the hole. Strath gained another hole coming in and the first of the day’s two rounds ended even. After a rainy luncheon break and another eighteen holes—Tommy sinking a pair of long putts, Strath answering with two of his own—they were deadlocked with two days and seventy-two holes to go. “Considering the wet state of the grass, better play has seldom if ever been seen on any course,” the
Citizen
declared.

The next day Tommy led by a hole with one to play in the morning round, but stumbled at the short Home Hole, where he always expected to make three. With his gutty in an iffy lie, he chose valor over discretion. He swung hard, the ball squirted to a worse lie, he made six and they were tied again.

In the afternoon round, beginning the second half of the 108-hole contest, the black-clad Strath out-drove and outputted the champion to take command of the match. His supporters sent him off the Home green with a round of hoorahs. With seventy-two holes played and thirty-six to play tomorrow, Davie Strath slept that night—tried to sleep—with a four-hole lead.

“Strath and his backers were in high spirits from yesterday’s success, he being four up,”
The Field
observed. “Put upon his mettle, the champion went to work with a will and secured the first two holes.” Tommy took the first hole the next morning with a chip that nearly kissed the flagstick. When Strath’s chip went bouncing sideways, his backers had to wonder: Was Davie funking again? Not yet—Strath took a long breath and matched Tommy shot for shot as they neared the Eden in a gentle rain. The players’ scores on the ninth through fourteenth holes were identical: 4-4-3-5-5-5. Then Tommy pressed harder, smacking in putts from all over his father’s greens. When his putt to win the Home Hole ducked in, the £200 battle was all square with eighteen holes left.

The skies went from gray to blue. Bees hummed in the heather under a fat July sun. While Tommy and Strath made their way to the turn, St. Andrews’ streets emptied as everyone went to the links. “The male population of the city appeared to have turned out en masse,” the
Citizen
reported. “It was with the greatest difficulty players kept from being completely surrounded.” The town had seldom seen such excitement since a circus passed through thirty years before, dazzling St. Andrews with dancing dogs, fire eaters, and acrobats. The golf circus of ’73 found Auld Daw Anderson hawking ginger beer and lemon crushes from his wicker cart by the ninth hole, wealthy travelers trading calling cards, bettors shouting offers in a crowd a dozen deep, pressed so close in the sudden heat that there were sweat stains in the oxters of the finest ladies and gentlemen. The players didn’t disappoint: From the moment Tommy sank a curling putt on the first green, the golf was inspired. He led by two at the turn. Then, just as Strath’s backers began to lose hope, their man won the tenth hole with a tidy four and squared the 108-hole match with a trey at the short eleventh. Strath took the next three holes with a flawless run of 4-5-5. Now Tommy was reeling, three down with only four holes left.

At the long fifteenth, Cartgate In, both players drove safely right of the Cottage Bunker, aiming for the church steeple between shapely knolls called the Bosoms. Both had chips to the whale-shaped double green. Strath, waggling over a shot that was worryingly similar to the one he had foozled earlier, bumped his chip with a firm stroke that sent it skipping toward the pin. The ball died near the hole. He looked up at his rival and for once, perhaps, there was defiance in Davie Strath’s hollow-set eyes.
Top that.

Tommy tried, but his ball ran past. They halved the hole, leaving the champion three holes down with three to play. Strath’s supporters erupted in what the
Citizen
called “loud and prolonged cheering.” Their man had entered that state of grace in which he could win but could not lose: He was dormy.