Tommy's Honor (22 page)

“It is doubtful whether golf, or indeed life, has any sensation to offer equal to that of becoming dormy,” Bernard Darwin wrote. Reflecting on “the ultimate poignancy of dorminess,” he called it “a blessed relaxation after strain…a moment of almost delicious bliss.” A match-play golfer leading by the same number of holes left to play can stumble, lose them all and have to settle for a draw, but he is immune to defeat. The word
dormy
, wrote Darwin, “is the only one in our language which signifies that for one transcendent moment we can snap our fingers under the very nose of Fate.”

Strath’s transcendent finish dealt Tommy a news-making blow. When another halved hole made Davie the victor, 3-and-2, Tommy offered a handshake. Strath had won the £200 for his backers, enough cash to buy a hundred tweed jackets, two hundred bottles of fine claret or a thousand dozen of Kirky’s Remakes. His own cut of about £20 was more than twice what Tommy had gotten for winning the last Open. “[A]fter another volley of cheers the crowd began gradually to disperse,” reported the
Citizen
, whose correspondent, keeping track of strokes played as well as holes won, noted that Davie had shot 40 over the final nine to Tommy’s 47. As
The Field
warned, “the young champion will require to look to his laurels.” The stage was set for a rematch.

Tommy issued his challenge the following week. Strath accepted and the rematch was made: another three-day, 108-hole contest at St. Andrews, this time for £100. “The golf mania will reach its climax next week,”
The Field
predicted, “on the occasion of the return contest between Tom Morris jun., the champion golfer of Scotland, and Davie Strath. The betting is at evens.” The duelists met late in the forenoon of August 27th. Again the air was festive, with gamblers bickering over odds that eventually favored Strath by three-to-two. As the previous winner, he had the honor. He cracked a long, straight drive, Tommy matched it and off they went, pursued by a boisterous crowd. At the head of the mob were well-dressed correspondents for the
Daily News
and
Times
of London, sent north to follow “The Great St. Andrews Golf Match” between “these two young Scotchmen.”

On the short, treacherous eighth hole, which Hutchison dubbed “that slantwise little catchy-hole,” Strath stymied Tommy, who tried to chip over and in, but overshot. The day went to Strath by four-holes.

A hard-fought third round the next morning ended with thunder and a cloudburst that soaked the golfers and spectators. Tommy waited out a forty-five-minute luncheon break while rain drummed the roof of his father’s house, where he still lived with his parents and siblings. Having dropped another hole, he stood five behind at the marathon’s midpoint. Davie’s backers were giddy, patting each other on the back, while Tommy’s looked as glum as the weather. But that afternoon, playing in steady rain, Tommy found his stroke. He would start a putt rolling and walk off the green, telling boy caddie Ayton to fetch the ball from the hole. As one observer wrote, “[I]t seemed to us all he was simply invincible with his wooden putter.” The St. Andrews golfer W. T. Linskill, who would captain Cambridge’s golf team in the first Oxford-vs.-Cambridge match five years later, recalled a round with his hero on a day when “young Tommy holed ten putts of fifteen yards and over.” This was such a day. Tommy made putts long and short, straight and twisting. Some banged the back of the hole and popped upward before they fell, some crawled over the hole’s front edge, but nearly every putt he struck ended its journey underground. Tommy took back four holes of his five-hole deficit, then returned for the last day’s play on a links jammed with spectators, including rival professionals. “As was to be expected, the number of on-lookers was larger than on the previous two days,” reported
The Field
, “and golfers were present in strong force from the principal clubs in Scotland, who enthusiastically watched the play of our two best professionals.” Swinging from his heels, Tommy “almost invariably out-drove Strath.” By noon “the crowd was larger than on any previous occasion…. All classes were represented, hundreds of strangers being present from all parts of the country, even England contributing its quota.” Captain Maitland-Dougall, acting as umpire, came to the players’ rescue several times, holding back the bumptious mob, calling for quiet when Tommy or Davie putted. Over the final eighteen, Tommy reclaimed his spot at the top of the game: “Strath did not gain a single hole in the last round.”

Tommy Morris and Davie Strath helped legitimize professional golf in that summer of 1873. By staging the golf show of the year at a time when the game was becoming a spectator sport, they helped blaze a trail that Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods would follow, and their battles were as remarkable as any in golf history. Over the twelve rounds of their two 108-hole marathons, covering six days, Tommy finished three holes ahead overall. But in total strokes, astonishingly, he and Strath were even: 1,027 to 1,027. As Everard put it, “for brilliant and steady play combined with absence of mistakes, the golf that those two exhibited day after day has never been surpassed.”

Now Tommy’s generation ruled the game. In Musselburgh the ex-prodigy Willie Park, who turned forty that year, was not amused. Young Morris may have gotten the best of him a time or two or three, but Park reckoned he could thrash Davie Strath, a known funker. In September the two of them squared off at Park’s home links for stakes of £100. Musselburgh’s rowdy golf fanatics turned out in such force that “a rope cordon was drawn up immediately behind the players,” the
Citizen
reported. What may have been the first gallery rope in golf history was not the only drawback for the home crowd. Park, whose power had awed Allan Robertson twenty years before (“He frightens us with his long driving!”) swung as hard as ever only to see Strath, who seemed half asleep, unfurl that smooth motion of his and out-drive Willie on the fly. Davie closed out the match with ease, three holes to the good. “Mr. Blyth, the umpire, asked for three cheers for the victor,” the
Citizen
noted. “He then announced that a subscription was open for the vanquished.” A subscription was a collection: It was a dignified way of passing the hat. Willie Park, described by the
Citizen
as “the weaker and losing party,” had been reduced to taking charity.

That fall, for the first time, the Open was coming to St. Andrews. Gossip centered on the town’s leading players. Could Davie Strath win another clash with the four-time champion, or would Tommy claim his fifth Open in a row? Tom Morris, seldom mentioned as a contender, spent summer’s end preparing the links for the event his R&A bosses had finally brought to his hometown. Tom raked and re-raked his putting-greens. He seeded and top-dressed them, exhorting his assistant greenkeeper, David Honeyman, to pile on the sand (“More sand, Honeyman!”). Tom scythed heather; chopped the black arms off whin bushes; hired extra workmen to load beach sand into barrows and roll them to dozens of bunkers, each of which he filled and refilled; supervised the men who ran his horse-drawn grass-cutter; and walked the course scores of times, bending his aching back to pull a weed or pick a bit of shell off a green. By the first September frost he was as close to satisfied as a perfectionist can be. The east bank of the River Eden had never looked more like the garden of the same name.

Two weeks before the Open, Prince Leopold rode the royal railcar thirty miles east from Balmoral Castle to Aberdeen. The prince waved to ten-deep crowds on his way to Royal Aberdeen Golf Club. Soon another young man stepped off a clattering railcar in the same city, where golf fanatics and celebrity-watchers shouted when they glimpsed his Balmoral bonnet. Tommy waved. He stopped to shake hands with his supporters before moving on to the Aberdeen links, where Prince Leopold and Davie Strath waited. Scotland’s gentleman golfers may have been clucking at the way crass professionals were beginning to overshadow the amateur game, but the press and public were captivated. Tommy and Strath played for £15 under the watchful eyes of the prince while reporters and spectators followed them around the links. One correspondent called Strath’s golf “brilliant” though Tommy beat him, 4 and 2. Cheers, applause, and hats flew up from the gallery as Tommy removed his bonnet and stepped forward to meet Prince Leopold, who looked as wan as Davie, his mustache hanging over pale, thin lips.

The prince spoke, but it was hard to hear his soft voice with so many people hip-hoorah-ing and calling on God to save him, a cheer that carried more freight in light of his health. Everyone knew the prince was a bleeder.

Prince Leopold, who had just turned twenty, shook hands with twenty-two-year-old Tommy Morris, who felt the pulse of royal blood in that delicate hand.

After twelve years at Prestwick the Open Championship made its first visit to the links at St. Andrews on Saturday the fourth of October, 1873. It had all the makings of a disaster. A storm settled over the Fife coast that week and camped there, dousing the course for two days and nights, blowing tiles off roofs and shutters off windows, throwing sea spray over the dunes, flooding bunkers. This Open was supposed to be a showcase for the artfully sown turf of Tom Morris’s fairways and the putting-greens he had built for the first and last holes, but the tempest undid his work. Rainwater sluiced off putting-greens and stood waist-deep in bunkers. Acre-wide pools covered three fairways. Even the holes in the greens were full of water, leaving Tom to shake his head and quote Burns’ line on best-laid schemes. The storm was bad news for him, his links, the town, the R&A, and Tommy, who wanted a fair fight above all. It was good only for ducks and Tommy’s challengers, who hoped that the ponds and mud puddles might turn the odds their way.

One did more than hope. Tom Kidd, the whiskery dandy known for his colorful waistcoats and Whar-ye-goin’ hat, sat up late on the eve of the tournament, working on his clubs. While the rain poured down outside his window, Kidd used a file to cut grooves in the faces of his cleeks.

The sun came out on Saturday, glinting in pools of rainwater at every low point on the links. Much of the course was submerged. Ducks swam in the gullies in front of several greens. Pot bunkers had turned into rain barrels. The gentlemen running the Open announced a local rule for the tournament: Golfers could move a submerged ball to a spot no nearer the hole at a cost of one stroke. The so-called “pick and drop” rule made its Open debut that day.

Twenty-six players entered, more than triple the turnout of the previous year at Prestwick. They would go twice around the St. Andrews links for a total of thirty-six holes, the same total as three circuits of Prestwick’s twelve-hole course. The winner would get £11, a medal, and a new trophy, a silver pitcher the three sponsoring clubs had commissioned. Tommy was the bettors’ favorite, widely seen as invincible, while Strath was the clear second choice. By the time play began at ten
A.M.
“a large crowd had taken up their position on the ground,”
The Field
reported. Tommy struggled from the start, slashing drives that skipped into puddles and missing more short putts in the first go-round than he missed in a typical week. His first-round score of 94 suggests that the course was practically unplayable. “The driving was bad,” wrote
The Field
’s correspondent, “but the putting was wretched.” Tommy’s supporters took heart from the fact that no one else did much better. The three first-round leaders shot 91. One was Bob Kirk, the pug-nosed son of Kirky the ballmaker. Another was Jamie Anderson, the thirty-year-old son of Auld Daw, presumably raised on the ginger beer his father sold. Anderson’s cautious, pinpoint game suited the day’s poor conditions. His backers swore that Jamie had once played ninety consecutive holes without hitting a bad shot. Still it was the other co-leader who had the gallery chattering: Tom Kidd, who had spent the previous night etching grooves into his irons’ faces, was having the day of his life. Kidd’s prodigious drives sailed past ponds that Anderson, Kirk, and even Tommy couldn’t carry, and his “ribbed” irons, as he called them, added backspin that stopped his ball while other players’ approach shots skipped or slid off the greens.

Kidd’s tactic was nothing new, though purists considered it unsporting. Allan Robertson had tried scoring the faces of his cleeks twenty years before. Ribbed cleeks anticipated the square-grooved irons used more than a century later by Mark Calcavecchia, who won the 1989 Open Championship. But unlike Calcavecchia’s controversial irons, Kidd’s clubs were clearly legal. Kidd left the other co-leaders behind by shooting 39 on the outward nine that afternoon, a jaw-dropping score given the puddles and mud on the course. Kirk fell back first. Jamie Anderson, flailing in a watery bunker on the Heathery Hole, made a nightmarish 9 there, but rallied on the inward nine as Kidd began laboring under the weight of the lead. While Tommy and Anderson crept into contention, Kidd was falling apart, sixes and sevens disfiguring his card. After that sparkling 39 going out, he would stagger home in 49.

That meant Tommy was still alive. The Champion Golfer, surrounded by St. Andreans urging him on, wanted nothing more than a fifth Open victory today. Surely that shiny new trophy belonged in the house at 6 Pilmour Links Road. The title had been his since he was seventeen, and no one who wasn’t named Thomas Morris had won it since 1867.

Tommy studied the putt he had left on the Home Hole green his father had made. The green was sodden; he could hear the
squish
of wet soil with each step he took. Tommy always played quickly from tee to green but took his time on any putt of more than a foot or two, examining the break, settling into his stance with the toe of his right boot nearly touching the ball, gathering his wits before starting the ball on its way to the hole and willing it to go in.