Tommy's Honor (7 page)

With Tom Morris far away in Prestwick, they agreed that Park would play Tom’s older brother George. George Morris was smaller and darker than Tom. A passable golfer who could make his way around the links in a hundred strokes or fewer, George played in a white cap that made him look from a distance like a button mushroom. Park proceeded to pound him into paste. After losing the first eight holes in a row poor George cried, “For the love of God, man, give us a half!” Allan, an interested spectator, allowed that “Willie frightens us with his long driving.” Park would not get his shot at Allan anytime soon, but by demolishing George Morris he earned the next best thing, a big-money match against Tom, who stepped up to defend the Morris family’s honor. Their scrap would be Willie Park’s debut on the national stage. The betting favored Tom, who was thirty-three years old, at the height of his powers. But he too fell to Park in a one-sided match that ended with the boyish victor mobbed by Musselburgh fans chanting a clamorous call and response:

“Where’s the man who beat Tom Morris?”

“He’s not a man, only a laddie without whiskers!”

A week later, at North Berwick, Tom and Park played again. Colonel Fairlie went along to provide moral and financial backing. He bet heavily on Tom. But Tom’s precise drives and iffy putting proved no match for the strength and pinpoint short game of Park, who won by nine holes. “Park,” wrote Hutchison, “was now the rising, or rather the risen, sun.”

On November 4, 1854, readers of the
Edinburgh News
saw a notice that revealed itself to be a dare:

A GREAT MATCH at GOLF was Played at St Andrews Links on the 19th October by THOMAS MORRIS, servant of the Prestwick Golf Club (late of St Andrews) and William Park, Golf Ball Maker, Musselburgh. This was played at St Andrews, North Berwick, and Musselburgh—Three Rounds on each Green—WILLIAM PARK leading Morris Nine Holes at the conclusion of the game.

WILLIAM PARK Challenges Allan Robertson of St Andrews, or William Dunn, servant of the Blackheath Golf Club, London or Thomas Morris, for Fifty Pounds, on the same Greens as formerly. Money Ready.

—WILLIAM PARK, Golf Ball Maker

A St. Andrews newspaper deplored the cheek of “this braggart.” A less biased source called Park “a golfing crack of the first water, young and wiry, with immense driving powers; cool as a cucumber.” According to Hutchison, “So strong a player had he become that money in abundance was forthcoming to back him against Allan Robertson, but the latter could not be induced to play.” Like the heavyweight boxing champions of later eras, Allan was happy to let the contenders beat each other up.

Tom Morris and Willie Park would swing away at each other for the better part of a decade. Tom won a match to restore his good name, lost another when his putter betrayed him, then regained the upper hand when Park’s hell-bent playing style got him into trouble. After his stellar debut in ’54 Park endured a partial eclipse (an “obnubilation,” Hutchison called it), not because his talent waned but because Tom got better. In the next five years the two of them squared off more than twenty times, usually for £100 or more, only to prove that they were as evenly matched as two boots. Those battles spurred the growth of professional golf. Newspapers dispatched reporters to the latest “great match” between the two. Bettors shouted odds while venders hawked lemonade and ginger beer to spectators. Before long there were dozens of challenge matches pitting local heroes against the best golfers from other towns, with civic honor at stake. Park was Musselburgh’s warrior, Bob Andrew was Perth’s, and Tom played for Prestwick, though St. Andrews claimed him too. Meanwhile Allan Robertson stayed above the fray while occasionally trumping them all. After Tom set a scoring record by shooting 82 in a match at St. Andrews, Allan made that look like small beer with a 79 of his own. He was forty-three years old, past his prime, and his magical score came in a casual round, a quick eighteen with an R&A member. Still he and his supporters had no doubt that it was the finest performance ever.

Tom rode the train east to play matches at St. Andrews and dreamed of going home to stay, but as long as Allan reigned there, the town had no need for another professional. So Tom made the best of life in Prestwick. He carved and trimmed the links, taught lessons, recalibrated the members’ handicaps and refereed their disputes. He supervised the caddies and slipped the poorest ones a shilling when they went hungry. He set up a small shop where he made gutta-percha balls, cooking the rubber and molding it into a ball while the rubber was still hot—a simpler task than stuffing featheries. He kept up his old habit of sleeping by a window and leaving the window open several inches even in winter, a habit that drove Nancy to take little Tommy to another bed near the fire. One morning Tom woke under a thin blanket of snow.

He watched his family grow. Each birth was a terror to Nancy, borne down as she was by thoughts of fever and death. Her birth pains grew worse. She was sure she would die, but out came Elizabeth in 1852, as strong and healthy as Tommy. By the time Nancy entered her next confinement four years later a numbing substance called chloroform had spared Queen Victoria the pain of her most recent labor. Yet many doctors were reluctant to tell women about chloroform, country doctors most of all. Their reservations were religious, not medical. Had not the Lord cursed Eve, saying, “In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children”? Should medicine nullify Genesis? The doctors thought not, so women went on suffering the old way and most had a glad result, as Nancy did in 1856 with the birth of her fourth child and second surviving son, James Ogilvie Fairlie Morris, named after the Colonel.

With three healthy children and a husband to fret about, Nancy was as content as she would ever be. She greeted neighbors, sang out in church. She smiled most of all on Tommy, her first answered prayer, a bold, happy child who chased dogs and birds on the links and played soldier by parading behind the Ayrshire Yeomanry Cavalry. Townspeople noticed the Morrises’ eldest child. Tommy seemed to have some spark that was not like Tom or Nancy or some mix of the two of them but something of his own, some force that made the boy think he could outrun a greyhound or leap and pull a gull out of the sky.

Tommy was waist-high to his father when he took his first swings at Prestwick, whacking old gutties with a cut-down club. Tom taught the boy how to grip the club in the palms of his hands and pull it back, keeping his right elbow high, until the shaft was almost flat against the back of his neck—the old St. Andrews swing. Tommy showed no great talent at first but he had heart. Teeing up an old gutty on the beach, he would aim seaward, knock his ball into the surf, wait for it to wash back up and smack it again, trying to drive it across twenty miles of water to the Isle of Arran.

Tommy turned eight years old in the spring of 1859. Nancy often dressed him in a sailor’s togs and cap, the boys’ fashion of the time. That fall he noticed that his mother moved more heavily as she dressed him. She was pregnant again, plump, flush and happy. But soon there was unsettling news from St. Andrews.

“Allan Robertson is dead,” Tom said. “Dead of jaundice.” Allan had been forty-four, only six years older than Tom.

Golfers mourned the great Robertson as “a giant, a titan…pleasant, fearless, just, gentle and invincible.” Tom could have disputed “invincible” and Willie Park “fearless.” Both could have quibbled with “just.” But of course they held their tongues. Tom never uttered a word against the man who had hired and fired him, though he may have allowed himself a smile when one eulogist invoked Allan’s “great grit” by telling how “the little giant would roll up his shirt-sleeves before playing an important drive.” Tom knew that the shirt-sleeves tactic wasn’t grit. It was a trick. Before a crucial shot Allan would pause and hand his jacket to his caddie. He would pace the teeing-ground, roll up his sleeves and spit in his hands—not to bolster himself but to unnerve his opponent, to slow the crucial moment, giving the other fellow time to lose his nerve.

Allan Robertson was buried in the Cathedral cemetery at St. Andrews, a hundred paces from Wee Tom’s grave, in the warm September of 1859. Three weeks later Nancy Morris gave birth to another son, John, in the cottage at Prestwick.

They would call the baby Jack, and would soon find that there was something wrong with his legs.

Tommy and his sister Lizzie spent the last morning of the year, called Hogmanay or Cake Day, racing other children to Prestwick merchants’ doors, chanting, “Ma feet’s cauld, ma shoe’s thin, gi’e me cakes and let me rin!” Given shortbread, a penny or an orange, they would “rin” at top speed to the next door. The adults’ fun came that evening, Old Year’s Night, when pipers and drummers played in the streets, men and women danced, and at midnight they all sang “Auld Lang Syne.” Many of the men would start New Year’s Day, called Ne’erday, with a hangover. Not Tom, who limited his drinking to blackstrap beer and an occasional nip of whisky. Tom began 1860 the way he began every day. He woke, pulled on his bathing long johns and took a dip in the bone-chilling Firth of Clyde. Afterward, shivering as he climbed the beach to the links and his cottage beyond, he felt strong, washed clean.

His wife hoped the new year would take them home to St. Andrews. With Allan gone, the way was clear for Tom. Nancy and Tom both had family there, and family mattered most in troubled times. Nancy was worried about baby Jack, who grew but did not kick or crawl. Tom, though, was in no hurry to flit back to Fife—he wanted no one saying he had rushed to fill Allan’s place. He said it was better to bide in Prestwick for now, and if baby Jack would not walk just yet, Tom was glad to carry him around the house.

Tom and Colonel Fairlie saw the new decade as a time for Prestwick to rise in the golf world. Fairlie and Lord Eglinton had already run a Grand National Interclub tournament for amateurs in 1857. Eglinton provided the trophy for that event, just as he had given a silver Eglinton Jug to Ayrshire’s curling champions, another jug to its lawn bowlers, and a golden belt for Irvine’s archers to shoot for. Now he proposed to outdo himself with a Championship Belt for the world’s best professional golfer. Fairlie tried to persuade other clubs to share sponsorship duties and expenses, and got a collective yawn for his trouble, so he and Eglinton agreed to go it alone. They reasoned that a tournament for the cracks could promote Prestwick as a golf hub and establish Tom Morris as the new King of Clubs. The Earl would preside over the event, smiling and waving, weakening the knees of women of all classes, while Fairlie handled the details.

Fairlie and Lord Colville, another officer of the Prestwick Club, dashed off letters to eleven of the thirty-five golf clubs then in existence—those that were large and important enough to have likely contenders for a professional championship. Knowing that many of the cracks were uncouth, Prestwick’s officers took precautions. “I have just been talking to Lord Eglinton in regard to the entry of players,” Fairlie noted, writing to club secretaries from Eglinton Castle, “and to avoid having any objectionable characters we think that the plan is to write to the Secretaries of all golfing societies requesting them to name & send their
two best professional players
—depending on them for their Characters.” Having the clubs vouch for their entrants, he believed, would make the contest “quite safe.”

The Prestwick officers made up invitations, written in blue ink on pale blue paper, and posted them to St. Andrews, Musselburgh, Perth, Aberdeen and six other Scottish towns, plus Blackheath in England. But not all of their blue notes were well received. Didn’t Eglinton and Fairlie know what sort of crowd they were inviting? Prestwick’s own professional might be an upstanding fellow, but the common crack was, in Hutchison’s words, “a feckless, reckless creature…. His sole loves are golf and whisky.” These glorified caddies might embarrass everyone with their drinking and cursing. They might cheat. What right-minded gentleman would vouch for them?

In the end only eight professionals turned up for what would become the first Open Championship, the world’s oldest and greatest golf tournament. Even so, the one-day event threatened to overshadow the autumn meeting of the Prestwick Club that followed a day later. One newspaper writer came up with a more dignified name for the cracks: they were “golfing celebrities.” Still they kept their hosts improvising to the last minute. During practice rounds in the days before the tournament the professionals offended club members and their wives with ragged dress and worse manners. One was said to have spent a night in the town’s drunk tank. Fairlie found a way to improve the players’ dress if not their morals: He gave each golfer a lumberman’s jacket to play in—black-and-green tartans, the kind worn by laborers on Eglinton’s estates. Seen from a distance, the players in their checkered jackets resembled a lost team of woodsmen, searching in vain for a tree to cut down.

The Championship Belt they would vie for was made by Edinburgh silversmiths James & Walter Marshall for the news-making sum of £25. Fashioned of Morocco leather festooned with silver plates showing golf scenes and the Burgh of Prestwick’s coat of arms, it featured a wide, gleaming buckle, minutely filigreed, that showed a golfer teeing off. Bizarrely, the little golfer on the buckle swung a shaft without a clubhead—an oversight that escaped notice at first. The Belt was lauded as “the finest thing ever competed for.” It was so valuable that the winner, who would gain possession of it for a year in lieu of prize money, would have to leave a security deposit before taking it home. Eglinton and Fairlie added spice to the fight by announcing that the tournament would be an annual event, and any player who won three times in a row would own the Belt forever.

On the clear, windy morning of October 17, 1860, the players gathered in front of the Red Lion Inn, the hotel where Eglinton and Fairlie had founded the Prestwick Golf Club nine years before. Milling about in their lumber jackets, rubbing their hands to keep warm, Tom Morris, Willie Park, Bob Andrew and five others were told the event’s particulars: They would go around Prestwick’s twelve-hole course three times for a total of thirty-six holes; the rules of the Prestwick Golf Club would apply; the winner by fewest strokes would keep the Belt for a year; and each pair of competitors would be accompanied by a club member who would ensure that there was no cheating. The professionals were required to sign a form affirming that they accepted these conditions. Some were illiterate, so they signed with Xs.