Tommy's Honor (3 page)

They were wrong.

Here is the Royal and Ancient golfer in 1830: Dressed in a tan golfing frock, matching breeches, silk-lined waistcoat, and red jacket, with a high collar and a black top hat, he crosses muddy North Street on his way to the links. His pink nose, with ruby veins hinting at rivers of claret and gin, wrinkles at the scents of piss and dung. The gutter steams with the emptyings of chanty-pots. Pigs snuffle weeds in the rutted, unpaved street. The golfer dodges horses pulling coaches, donkeys pulling carts, ducks, chickens. Now a cork comes flying through the air, just missing him. The cork, punctured with short nails to give it weight, lands with a plunk. He turns to see who hit it—a boy of eight or nine, trying to hide a cut-down golf club behind his back.

“Sillybodkins,” the golfer says, smiling. He’d played that game himself on this very street, long ago.

Sillybodkins was the pretend golf of boys who cadged broken or discarded clubs and knocked corks up and down St. Andrews’ streets, aiming for targets of opportunity: lampposts, doorways, sleeping dogs. Real golf balls were impossibly expensive, but claret and champagne corks were plentiful; a properly weighted cork might carry a hundred yards. It might go farther than that if struck by nine-year-old Tom Morris, the sillybodkins king of North Street.

Tom Morris was born in 1821, the year a member of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club bought the town’s links. Ordinary men like John Morris, Tom’s father, were allowed on the course when the R& A men weren’t playing. John got in an occasional round with a second-hand ball, but he had little time for golf. He worked six days a week as a hand-loom weaver, doubling as a postman when the weaving trade went slack. He spent Sundays reading the Bible and shepherding his wife and seven children to morning and afternoon services at the town church.

Tom was the family’s second-youngest child. Born in a time when disease killed one in five children by the age of three, he had a life expectancy of forty-one. He ran the streets barefoot but didn’t go hungry. His father’s labors put porridge, potatoes, and turnips on the table along with fish, fowl, and sometimes beef. Tom got enough schooling to read, sign his name, and do simple sums, but what he loved was golf, and to his everlasting delight, golf’s holy land was two clouts of a cork from North Street.

In its medieval heyday, St. Andrews had been the center of Scottish Catholicism. The legendary bones of Andrew the apostle, housed in St. Andrews Cathedral according to the old story, brought pilgrims from all over Europe. But after Scotland became a Protestant country in 1560, the town began a long decline. St. Andrews’ population fell from about 14,000 in the early 1500s to 2,854 in 1793. In Tom’s youth there were no more than 4,000 souls in a town whose landmarks were the towers of a ruined cathedral, a crumbling castle, and the busy links. Creaking sloops carried grain and potatoes out of the harbor and returned with coal, timber, slate, and salt. Many St. Andreans still lived in wooden houses with thatched roofs covered with sod from the links, dried sod that periodically caught fire and burned down three or four houses. Each day a runner jogged eleven miles from nearby Crail, toting the daily mail for Tom’s father and other postmen to distribute. The first regular stagecoach service, going twice a week to Dundee and once a week to Cupar, began when Tom was seven.

As a boy he never expected to roam much past Dundee. He was sure to be a weaver, sitting at a loom all day, and perhaps a part-time postman, too. But Tom’s head was full of golf. He could take dead aim at a lamppost and hit it from ten paces. On the links he moved through the whins and tall grass like a hound, sniffing out lost balls. Each feathery ball was a treasure, even a misshapen, waterlogged one. He would play a few holes in the morning, before the red-coats came out, or at dusk when they were done, or race out between foursomes to hit a ball and chase it to the putting-green.

In 1835, Tom’s schooling ended. He was fourteen. His father lacked the money and social standing to send his sons to university; it was time for Tom to apprentice himself to a tradesman. Through a family connection, John arranged a meeting with Allan Robertson, the golf-ball maker who caddied for R& A worthies and even partnered with them in foursomes. A short, bull-necked fellow who sported filigreed waistcoats and bright-colored caps, Robertson was the first man to parlay caddying, ball-making, and playing into something like a full-time job. If his trade was a bit disreputable, at least it offered steady work. Tom’s mother might fret about her son’s working for a man who consorted with gamblers, drunkards, cheats, and low-livers, but what could she say? Her husband was for it. John Morris contracted his son to Allan Robertson for a term of four years as apprentice, to be followed by five years as a Robertson’s journeyman. On the morning his boyhood ended, fourteen-year-old Tom gathered his few belongings, left his parents’ house, and walked a quarter-mile to a stone cottage that would be his new home.

Allan Robertson would prove easy to know, if not always easy to work for. Loud, cocky, full of mirth and wrath that could switch places in a blink, he was a grinning, muscular elf. Not quite five and a half feet tall, Robertson had mutton-chop sidewhiskers, an off-kilter smile, and the wrists and arms of a blacksmith. His strength and pickpocket’s touch helped make him the best golfer of his generation. In an era when anyone who made it around the links in a hundred strokes had something to celebrate, the pint-sized Robertson often broke a hundred and once shot eighty-seven. Still, he was not a golfer by trade. No such career existed. So Robertson made and sold golf balls and caddied for the gentleman of the R& A. As the town’s keenest eye for golf talent he also set the club members’ handicaps and played matchmaker, pairing them up in fair or interesting or mischievous ways.

Tom worked in Robertson’s golf-ball factory—a grand term for the kitchen in his little stone cottage at the corner of Golf Place and Links Road. The cramped kitchen had stone walls and a floor of wood planks. A pot kept water boiling over the fire. A long, sturdy work table sat under an oil lamp that cast a wan light specked with feather dust. Three men worked here: Allan Robertson, his cousin Lang Willie Robertson, and Tom Morris. Allan and Lang Willie were Tom’s teachers in ball-making, a craft that was equal parts science and upholstery.

To make a feather ball, you start with a wide strip of cowhide. Take a straight razor and cut three thin sections of hide, then soften the sections in water and alum. Trim the largest piece to the shape of an hourglass; this will be the middle of the ball. The other two pieces should be round. They are for the top and bottom. Sew the pieces together with waxed thread, forming a ball with a small hole at one end. Turn the ball inside-out so that the stitches are hidden on the inside. Now you’re ready for the gruntwork.

After boiling enough goose feathers to fill the standard measuring device—a top hat—pull a thick leather cuff over the hand that will hold the empty ball. Grab a handful of boiled goosedown, as soft as warm sand, and use a finger-length poker to push the down through the hole into the ball. Repeat until you need a short, T-shaped iron awl to stuff more and more feathers through that little hole. After twenty minutes of this, the short awl won’t be weapon enough. To drive one last handful of down into the jam-packed, unyielding ball, you need to wear a wood-and-leather harness. The harness straps around your chest. It has buckles up the sides, a wooden panel in front, and a slot at the crux of your ribcage. Place the butt end of a long awl into the slot and lean forward with all your weight, forcing the last feathers through the hole. When the top hat is empty and the ball is finally full, sew the hole shut as fast as you can.

The last stage of ball-stuffing was dangerous. If the awl slipped, the ball-maker could break a rib or impale himself. Lang Willie Robertson liked to tell about a ball-maker who pushed so hard that his workbench split in two, sending him tumbling forward in a whirl of awls, calipers, paint, waxed thread, and knitting needles as the ball bounced away, squirting feathers. As Allan’s cousin and assistant, Lang Willie outranked Tom in the Robertson kitchen, but he never acted superior. Six foot two, with rheumy eyes and whisky breath, he was older than Allan—almost forty. Lang Willie told the new apprentice all about the Robertsons, including a fore-bear who caddied for decades and “died in harness,” dropping dead in a clatter of clubs on the Burn Hole. That caddie left behind a son, David Robertson—Allan’s father, Lang Willie’s uncle—a caddie and golf hustler immortalized in a poem called “Golfiana”: “Davie, oldest of the cads/Gives half-one to unsuspicious lads/When he might give them two or even more/And win, perhaps, three matches out of four!” David Robertson sold golf equipment, too. That sideline came about when a clubmaker from Musselburgh grew weary of taking a ship across the Firth of Forth to Kirkcaldy, then shouldering his wares and hiking twenty miles to St. Andrews. To spare himself the trek, the clubmaker hired David Robertson as his salesman in the old town. Both men prospered, and upon his death David left his son, Allan, an estate worth £92, including two pounds’ worth of feathery golf balls.

Allan’s kitchen crew made or repaired an occasional club, but the trade was mainly featheries. The feather ball had been standard since the 1600s. It was expensive—up to two shillings and sixpence each, enough to buy a new driver—because making the thing was so difficult. Even after you stuffed a ball and sewed it shut, there was work to do. You gave it a light knocking with a thin-headed hammer to even out any bumps. You gave it three coats of white paint and a stamp that showed who made it. (Balls from Allan’s kitchen were stamped simply
ALLAN
.) Then you put the ball aside for two days. As it dried, the feathers inside expanded, pushing the cover to its limit. A feathery might sound soft, but a new one was like hardwood—hard enough to kill a man. Tom knew of two people who had died after being felled by flying golf balls, a schoolboy hit in the head and a grown man struck in the chest.

Feathery balls were so precious that one of Allan’s rivals, the Musselburgh ball-maker Douglas Gourlay, put one in the collection plate at the Episcopal Church in Bruntsfield one Sunday. If you were to find that ball today, you could sell it for thousands of dollars.

A skilled ball-maker could stuff, sew, paint, and stamp three balls in a day. An adept could make four. Allowing for misfortune (torn leather, bruised ribs, needle-pricked fingers), three men could make fifty or more featheries in a week, enough for Allan to keep up his household, pay Lang Willie, and feed apprentice Tom, who worked for room, board, and training. One year Allan Robertson’s kitchen-table factory produced 2,456 balls. All the while Allan barked at Lang Willie and Tom to work harder, faster. Laggards and dullards, he called them. Or worse,
Irish
laggards and dullards, which only amused Lang Willie and Tom, neither of whom had been much closer to Ireland than the Eden Brae at the end of the links.

Lang Willie, sitting with his endless legs bent under him, made the time pass with jokes like the one about the caddie who died and found himself at the bottom of a ladder that stretched into the clouds. “Greetings, my son,” said Saint Peter, handing the man a piece of chalk. The saint informed the caddie that as he climbed to heaven he must write his sins on the ladder, one per rung. So up the caddie went. “Took the Lord’s name in vain.
Step
,” said Lang Willie, narrating the ascent. “Impure thoughts.
Step
,” he said. “Drank to excess.
Step. Step. Step. Step
.” This went on until the man was miles above the earth. And then, to his astonishment, he saw another caddie—his own long-dead grandfather—climbing down the ladder out of the clouds. When asked why, the grandfather-caddie cried: “More chalk!”

Tom learned more than ball-making and old stories in Allan’s house. He learned that a man can have multiple aims. Tom, like his father, was a straightforward character, striving to serve God and family by working hard, speaking plainly, deceiving no one. But the more he knew of ball-making the more clearly he saw that it took no great skill to stuff and sew golf balls. Why then should the great Robertson have chosen Tom Morris to be his apprentice? They weren’t cousins. Of all the lads who could use a leg up into a thriving trade, why Tom?

From the week Tom went to live in the Robertson cottage, fifty paces from the links, Allan schooled him in the game as well as the trade: how to grip the club for more control, how to hit shots high or low to suit the weather, how to flip the ball out of sand. On summer evenings when the sun stayed up past ten o’clock, they played match after match of two or three or nine holes, with Allan giving Tom strokes and beating him anyway. There was always a bet. Playing without betting, Allan said, was “no’ golf.” After Tom had lost the few pennies Allan had given him that week, they played for plucks—winner gets to keep one of the loser’s clubs. This made no sense, since both of them played with Allan’s clubs, but the boss didn’t mind as long as he won. Tom didn’t mind, either. He welcomed any chance to leave the sweaty kitchen for the great green links. Boss and apprentice spent long hours out there, hours of thunder and wind, much of which came from Allan’s mouth. He loved to sound off on things he had read in
The Scotsman
and
Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal
, from politics and art to the price of good leather. Tom, straining to hear as the wind blew the words down the fairway, gathered that good leather cost too much, India was a powder keg, Lord Palmerston was not to be trusted, and some mad Englishman had dug up a Grecian Venus that had no arms.

Tom listened harder when the subject was golf. He heard about the weaknesses of gentlemen like Sir David Baird, who might be the R& A’s best ball-striker but could not play in rain. Monsieur Messieux, the Frenchman, could hit the ball a mile but was
merde
on the putting-green. There were other secrets: an invisible break on the eighth green; a spot to the right of the twelfth green that would kick a ball straight left. Each night, lying on his straw mattress, Tom pictured the golf course in his mind’s eye, as if from above, and imagined different ways to play each hole. He would leave the window open a few inches even on cold nights, to test his strength even while he slept. The chill never woke him. He slept like a stone. When he woke he was alert right away but kept his eyes shut for a moment as he prayed, smelling salt air redo-lent of sand, mud, and turf, the scent of the links.