Tommy's Honor (29 page)

Golfers from as far off as India and America wrote to the venerable Morris, whose word was law wherever the game was played. One summer a St. Andrews lad named Freddie Tait, son of the professor who had painted golf balls with glowing phosphorus, hit a drive that tore a hole in a bystander’s hat. Tom told young Tait to buy the man a new hat. “Be glad ’tis only a hat you’ll buy,” he said, “and not a coffin.” It was a rare penalty for Tait, who was golden like Tommy, so lucky that when he dropped a hunting knife while wading in the bay, he found the knife by stepping on it—its blade sticking straight up between two of his toes. He grew up to be a gentleman golfer and soldier. After winning the Amateur Championship twice and getting shot in the leg during the Boer War in 1899, Freddie Tait rushed back into battle a month later and was shot in the heart. He was thirty. By then Prince Leopold had slipped on wet stairs at the yacht club in Cannes, France, cracking his knee and dying in a haze of blood and morphine. He too was thirty. Two years after that Tom’s son-in-law, James Hunter, died in Georgia at age thirty-seven. Lizzie brought her husband’s body and her four surviving children home to St. Andrews, where she helped look after Old Tom.

Davie Strath saw his money-match prospects dry up after Tommy died. The melancholy Strath became greenkeeper at North Berwick, then fled to Oz to preserve his health. “Oz” was what Scots called Australia, where warm January afternoons were thought to save consumptives’ lives. Davie had begun coughing blood by the time he booked passage to Melbourne, a trip that took eighty-four days. His throat closed on the way and he died speechless in 1879, three years before a German scientist identified the tubercle bacillus.

Jack Morris, Tommy’s paraplegic brother, worked late in his father’s workshop on the night of February 21, 1893. Jack, thirty-three years old, had been “making golf balls up to a late hour,” according to the
Citizen
, “and on retiring to rest was in his usual health.” He died in his bed. “It is understood death was caused by a spasm of the heart.” In fact Jack’s heart may have stopped after his pulmonary artery ruptured, just as Tommy’s had done.

“Tom has had his share of trial,” a friend wrote. “His wife and children are dead, save two—Jimmy and his only daughter, a young widow.” Still Tom kept his chin aimed toward heaven. Being gloomy was a bit of a sin, he said, because it suggested that we know the Lord’s business better than He does. All Tom knew for certain was that the game he and Tommy loved, the game poor Jack, Prince Leopold, Lang Willie, Colonel Fairlie, Lord Eglinton, Willie Park, and countless others all loved, was thriving. There had been only seven golf societies in Britain in 1800, and a dozen in Tom’s youth. By 1880 there were sixty. By 1890 there were 357. By 1900 there would be 2,330.

In the fall of 1895, twenty years after Tommy died, Tom played in his last Open. He was seventy-four years old, a deadeye with the putter but too weak to muscle the ball from a heavy lie in one of his bunkers. Attended by a crowd that had more than its share of gray whiskers, he came in seventy shots behind winner J.H. Taylor, the same Johnny Taylor from Devon who had mistaken Tom for St. Andrew thirty years before. And with that, Tom bowed out of the tournament he helped create. He had played in twenty-seven Open Championships, including the first fourteen, winning four times and striking more than 5,000 shots in Open competition. Now he was content to light his pipe and watch younger men play, though he still served as starter when the tournament returned to St. Andrews, giving each pairing a word of encouragement before nodding and saying, “You may go now, gentlemen.” He also teed up the incoming R&A captain at each fall’s Driving-In ceremony. Unlike Tommy, he never chafed at serving other men. “I’ve always tried—as my business it was—to make myself pleasant to them,” Tom said of his employers, “and they’ve been awful pleasant to me.”

In 1898, Lizzie Morris died at age forty-five and was buried in the Morris plot in the Cathedral cemetery. Her father mourned his only daughter, pulling a black armband over his sleeve yet again. He doted on her children, his only grandchildren. And he carried on, bunting a gutty around the links with provosts, professors, and statesmen including a pair of future Prime Ministers, Arthur Balfour and H.H. Asquith. No visitor escaped Tom’s promotion of the game and of what he called “my dear native town,” or his many tales of Tommy’s brilliance.

Even after his back bent under the weight of his years, Tom never lost his good humor. When a neighbor bought an expensive telescope, golf’s G.O.M. took a look at the moon and said, “Faith, sir, she’s terrible full o’ bunkers.” In 1902, the year Tom got a ride in the town’s first automobile, the R&A commissioned a portrait of him by Sir George Reid, president of the Royal Scottish Academy. Tom duly reported to Reid’s studio in Edinburgh, where he sat for the better part of a week. When the renowned artist asked him to strike a golfing pose, Tom stuck a hand in his pocket and stood frozen in place. Reid asked what he was doing. “Waiting for the other man to begin,” Tom said. After Reid’s portrait of him went up in the R&A clubhouse, where it still hangs, an observer described Tom’s reaction: “He gazed upon it mutely for some time, and then remarked, ‘The cap’s like mine.’”

In 1906, the year Tom turned eighty-five, Jimmy Morris died at age fifty-two. A good player but never a great one, Tommy’s golfing brother had led the 1876 Open with two holes to go only to take nine swings on the Road Hole. He led again at Prestwick in 1878, until Jamie Anderson pipped him with help from an ace at the penultimate hole, where Anderson’s ball struck a hill behind the green and rolled back into the cup. Nine years later Jimmy matched Tommy’s 77 on their home links and briefly shared the course record, but soon another golfer shot 74. After that, Jimmy lived quietly, managing his father’s shop. And after a grand funeral, with flags flying at half-mast all over town, he joined the rising queue of his kin in the Morris plot in the Cathedral cemetery. And still Tom lived on.

In his last years Tom wore a great black overcoat and leaned on a cane. He kept his shoes, heavy brown brogues, polished to a mirror shine. His walks on the links were now confined to the acres near his shop. A collie named Silver, his constant companion, would wait for hours outside the shop, then bound up when Tom emerged and fall in step behind him as he fired up his pipe and set off toward town or teeing-ground.

Tom’s visits to the Cathedral churchyard were his hardest work. His rusty knees made it a chore to find safe footing in the grass. Like any man of eighty-five he was afraid of slipping. Sometimes he leaned on a gravestone. Even in summer the stones were cool to the touch. Here was Allan Robertson’s head-high obelisk with its bust of Allan on top. Nearby lay Tom Kidd, the dapper long driver who had used his ribbed cleeks to beat Tommy at the watery Open of ’73. Jamie Anderson was here too, in a sad unmarked grave. Tom was surely glad that Jamie’s father, Auld Daw, had gone sooner and was therefore spared that knowledge. Auld Daw had often bragged of how he put Jamie through college with coin from his ginger-beer cart. But after winning the Open in 1877, ’78, and ’79, Jamie developed a thirst for fine whisky that became in time a thirst for whisky of any sort. He went into club-making, drank his meager profits, died poor and got a pauper’s burial.

Tom made his way to the cemetery’s south wall. By mid-morning the dew had evaporated. The turf was dry—good footing for his shiny brogues. Tom made his way between other families’ plots to the Morris plot and Tommy’s monument. The statue of Tommy that Lord Justice General Inglis had dedicated in 1877 was nearly life-size, now weathered with age, white paint chipping off the out-of-round ball at the statue’s feet. This statue of Tommy had been addressing that ball for twenty-nine years, five years more than Tommy lived.

Near the statue stood the white marker that Tom still thought of as Wee Tom’s stone. There were now five more names on it. Tommy, whose name was listed second, would have been angry to see the careless line devoted to Meg (“Margaret Morris or Drennen…who died 11th Septr 1875”), whose maiden name was Drinnen, not Drennen, and who had died on the fourth of September. By the time the stone was carved, no one noticed the errors.

There was no room for more names on Wee Tom’s stone. When Tom’s time came, he would need a new marker. He knew his time was near. Eighty-six-year-old Tom Morris had lived to see the future through his squinted eyes. He had lived to see the year 1908, when men flew in aeroplanes and sent their voices through wires at lightning speed, and he had read the Ninetieth Psalm enough times to see the words without opening his Bible: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

One day a reporter followed him home. Tom invited the man in for tea. Leading him up the gravel garden path between the shop and his house, Tom climbed a flight of stairs to his sitting room overlooking the links. “He lights a gas stove in his house, where he has stored lots of wood for clubs,” his guest wrote, “thorn and apple and lindenwood for heads, hickory and ash for shafts. Sits in his armchair and lights his briar-root pipe. A large window looks out over the putting green on the first hole, the teeing ground of the starting point, the rocks, the sea of which he says he ‘never wearies.’ He’ll still holler at local lads playing on the Home green: ‘Off that puttin’ green!’ with a roar like a wounded lion.”

Tom was amused at the way writers practically queued up to visit him, filling notebooks with what they must have hoped would be his last words. “Let us look at him in his home,” Tulloch wrote in a magazine story. “Above his mantelpiece there is a large frame containing photographs.” The largest showed his golfing sons—Tommy on one side and Jimmy on the other, above the course record they had briefly shared: the magical number 77. “The walls of Tom’s sanctum are covered with photographs of famous golfers and great golf matches. His bedroom is similarly decked, and on his toilet-table and mantelpiece are heaps of golf balls. He always sleeps with the window open, and one morning he woke to find himself half-enveloped in snow.” Tulloch was already burnishing anecdotes for the biography he would publish within weeks of Tom’s demise. “His habits are very simple, and on a Sunday night you will find him, after having seen him officiate as an elder of the Town Church, quietly reading his family Bible with the big print. And if you ask him, he will rise from its perusal to show you the famous trophy, the champion belt of red morocco with rich silver ornamentations, bearing golfing devices. This became the property of young Tommy through three annual consecutive wins.”

Tom never had to be asked to show off the Championship Belt. “I have it in my house,” he told another writer. “In my eyes it is absolutely priceless.” Hefting the Belt became something of a rite of passage for visitors. He would guide their hands over its red leather and tarnished silver plates, pointing out the medal to the left of the buckle that read
TOM MORRIS JUNR, CHAMPION GOLFER
. Many were surprised at how heavy the Belt was. “Heavy with memories,” Tom said.

He was often asked about the golfers of the old days. Allan Robertson was the “cleverest little player,” he said. “Willie Park was a splendid driver and a splendid putter. I’ve been neither, yet I managed to beat him.” The Rook had his days, Tom said, and Davie Strath would be more remembered had he not played his best when Tommy played better. Yet they were small beer compared to the one who must never be forgotten.

“I could cope with ’em all” on the course, said Tom. “All but Tommy. He was the best the old game ever saw.”

After Tom retired as greenkeeper in 1903, the R&A kept him on full salary and renamed the Old Course’s eighteenth hole after him. The boneyard Home Hole has officially been the Tom Morris Hole ever since, though hardly anyone calls it that. The club also made Tom an honorary member—a bit of an afterthought after forty years’ service. Not that he would dream of exercising the unspecified privileges of honorary membership. Even as G.O.M. he was the same tradesman who had spent decades tapping on the club secretary’s window. He would have felt as uneasy in the hushed corridors of the R&A clubhouse as the gentlemen would have felt seeing him there. Tom made life easier for everyone by spending his days 300 yards away, in a sunny corner of the members’ lounge at the New Club.

Founded in 1902, the New Club incorporated a clutch of local golf societies including the Rose Club. Each chipped in £100 to buy a house beside the eighteenth fairway, which they turned into their clubhouse. The New Club’s members included merchants, professors, and a former town provost as well as grocers, tailors, hatters, fishmongers, and a confectioner. They had planned to call themselves the Tom Morris Golf Club, but Tom said he would bolt if they did it. Instead he became the club’s unofficial figurehead. Tom Morris spent long afternoons in a bright corner of the members’ lounge, sitting in a high-backed leather chair by the window, watching golfers bump balls through the Valley of Sin to the Home green while sun through the window warmed his bones. He would smile and nod when someone tapped his shoulder or squeezed his hand, but his memory was going; he greeted old friends as if meeting them for the first time.

On a Sunday in May, 1908, Tom made his way from church to his seat by the window at the New Club. From here he could see what he still called the Home Hole, with the R&A clubhouse and the sea beyond. To his left the course bent toward the River Eden as it had for centuries. His old enemies the whins were young again, bursting with spring blooms. Tom, feeling a bit bursting himself, climbed out of his chair and started for the toilet.

A short, dark corridor led from the members’ lounge to the loo. There were two doors at the far end. The one on the right was the toilet door. The other door opened onto a stone staircase that led to the cellar. Tom, coming from his seat in dazzling sun, fuddled and momentarily blind in the darkness of the corridor, opened the door on the left and stepped into space.