Tommy's Honor (9 page)

He had half a dozen duties: cutting holes and sweeping rabbit droppings off putting-greens; trimming back heather and other weeds; overseeing caddies; teaching lessons; keeping club members’ handicaps and arranging their matches; and playing rounds with some of them, a task that called for infinite patience but now paid four shillings a round. He also settled disputes. One match turned when a Prestwick golfer swung too far under his ball and sent it straight up into his own beard, where it perched and would not budge. Tom’s ruling: loss of hole.

The greenkeeper also spent long hours in his workshop, surrounded by the props and paints that preceded each day’s dramatics on the links: blocks of wood; wood shavings; sheets of leather and sheepskin; glue; rubber; rags; strips of wool; chunks of black iron; jars of paint; hammers, chisels and saws; the odd, disembodied horn of a ram. When a Prestwick golfer brought him a driver with a grip that was worn or unraveled, Tom would strip off the old grip. He would wrap the hickory shaft with a wool rind, then wrap a strip of leather over the wool, then glue and tack the leather to the shaft. In those days golf-club grips could be as thick as the grips on modern tennis racquets. A fat grip helped absorb the shock of striking a rock-hard gutta-percha ball; it also suited the then-universal practice of holding the club in the palms of the hands rather than gripping it with the fingers, as later generations would.

In addition to repairing grips, Tom mended cracked shafts and clubheads. He strengthened wooden clubheads by screwing a thin plate of boiled ram’s horn to the sole. Clubheads needed such armor to survive impact with the hard gutta-percha ball. Back in the age of the feathery, clubheads had been made of thornwood or occasionally of fruitwoods from apple and pear trees. But gutties were stony enough to crack such brittle woods. The gutty era called for a clubhead with some give to it, and by the 1860s beech had supplanted thorn and fruitwoods. Clubmakers found that beechwood from trees grown in rich soil was too soft, but the wood was durable and pliable—perfect—if the trees grew in thin soil where high winds whipped the trees. Tom used to say that good beechwood, like good men, had suffered a bit.

To make a club he spliced a clubhead to a shaft and bound them together with waxed twine and animal glue. Tom used glue made from rendered cowhides, not the inferior kind made from bones. The shaft was a club’s crucial component. He had grown up swinging clubs with shafts of blond, whippy ash. Then hickory replaced ash; it was stiffer and twice as strong. Lumber ships carried tons of the reddish wood from Tennessee’s “hickory belt” for use in axe handles and pit props, the beams that kept coal pits from collapsing. As with beech, the wood’s quality depended on the tree it came from. Lowland or “swamp hickory” was soft, while high-country wood was too brittle. Hickory from the middle altitudes was just right, but it was not always available in the early 1860s, when the lumbermen of Tennessee were dropping their axes and picking up muskets, going to fight under the hickories at Shiloh, Chattanooga, and other battlegrounds of the American Civil War.

Scotland’s best golfers were connoisseurs of hickory. Willie Park’s son Willie Jr., who would go on to win two Opens, set down the standard in his 1896 book
The Game of Golf
: “The grain must run straight down the stick; it must be supple and yet not wobbly and have a fine steely spring without being too stiff.” Tom Morris, whose painstaking swing relied even more on timing and torque, had a word for what he wanted in a hickory shaft. The perfect shaft, he said, felt like music.

Clubs with iron heads were fairly new. Generically called
cleeks
, an old word for grappling hooks, they had been rare in the feathery age because they cut featheries to ribbons. But gutties clanged merrily off cleeks. By the time Tom set up shop in Prestwick in 1851, many golfers featured two or three irons in their sets of nine to twelve clubs. (There was no limit; you could play with thirty clubs if your caddie was willing.) Tom got iron clubheads from a Prestwick blacksmith who forged and hammered them as a sideline. They were heavy and black, like fire irons. Older players tended not to like cleeks but younger men loved them—a generational difference one young golfer would soon exploit to great effect. By the 1860s cleeks were a growing portion of Tom’s clubmaking work, but clubmaking was only a fraction of his business. He was above all a ball-maker.

After his feud with Allan Robertson, Tom had become the leading producer of gutta-percha balls. There must have been some satisfaction in that—the ball that had cost him his seat in Allan’s kitchen now put food on Tom’s table. Making gutties was far simpler than making featheries. A skilled worker could turn a lump of rubber into a finished ball in two and a half minutes. Gutties sold for only a shilling apiece, the price of a jar of jam or two pints of ale. That spurred an arithmetic Tom understood: Instead of making four featheries in a day and selling them at four shillings each for a total of sixteen shillings—not even a pound—he could make six dozen gutties, sell them at a shilling apiece and rake in three pounds twelve. The difference would make him a prosperous man.

Gutties had their shortcomings, the most notable being that they didn’t go very far. A well-made feather ball might fly 200 yards off the tee and roll another twenty, while a gutty struck with the same force went about 180 yards and landed with a plop. But featheries were wildly inconsistent. A poorly made feather ball was liable to explode on contact and go nowhere. Gutties sometimes fractured, particularly on cold days—it happened often enough that there was a rule to cover it: Play the biggest chunk. But while a ruptured feather ball was ruined, a busted gutty was like Lazarus: Just pick up the pieces and heat them—you could do it by rubbing them between your hands—and you could remake your ball.

The rubber ball was cheaper, more durable, and more consistent than the feathery. It was also easier to putt because, unlike the slightly egg-shaped feather ball, a gutty was round. By the time Tom and Willie Park met in the first Open in 1860, the old ball was as dead as its feathered contemporary the dodo. Featheries from Allan’s kitchen were displayed as curiosities, hidebound relics of another age.

Gutta-percha
—the sap of a gnarled Asian evergreen that grows up to a hundred feet high. After a British explorer discovered it in 1842, hundreds of thousands of gutta trees were stripped of their bark and bled for milky sap that Malay workers collected in coconut shells. The rubber had myriad uses: Dentists filled cavities with it; chilly-footed matrons slept with hot-water bottles made of it; and in 1858 gutta-percha was used to insulate the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, which ran along the ocean floor from Ireland to Newfoundland, and which promptly snapped. In shredded chunks the rubber cushioned goods in transit, and it was in this form—as a packing material—that a St. Andrews divinity student named Robert Paterson encountered the stuff. Paterson claimed he had received a crate from Asia holding a statue of the Hindu god Vishnu. Chunks of gutta-percha fell out; he heated the rubber, molded it and…Eureka! A golf ball. Upon leaving Scotland years later to save souls in America, Paterson wrote, “I quit St. Andrews for a louder call, and left to golfers all I had, a ball.” But his creation ditty shouldn’t be taken literally. There are earlier accounts of gutties reaching Scotland by way of the Blackheath Club in England—disproving the Scottish claim that nothing good ever comes from the south.

Tom Morris didn’t care where gutta-percha came from as long as it kept coming. It came in dirty pink bricks that in warm weather were soft enough to hold a thumbprint. Tom cut strips from the bricks and softened the strips in hot water. When the rubber was warm he rolled it between his callused hands until it was as soft as dough, rolling it into a ball so close to perfectly round that it looked flawless. Then he dropped it into cold water to harden. He nudged and turned the ball as it bobbed to make it harden evenly, for if one part stayed above the surface too long it would swell and ruin the ball. When the ball was hard he dried it and tapped it all over with a sharp-nosed hammer, leaving scores of dents that resembled the dimples on a modern ball, dents that would help the ball slip through the air.

Hammering the balls was a recent innovation. The first gutties had been smooth, and they flew like shot birds: crazily and not far. Before long golfers noticed that gutties performed better after they had been nicked and scuffed. This was golf’s first lesson in aerodynamics. A smooth sphere fights its way through the air, but a scuffed one scratches the air just enough to tunnel its way through. Feathery balls, which whizzed audibly in flight, had been aerodynamic by accident: Their seams worked like the raised seams of a baseball, helping them cut through the air. Gutties had no seams, but wear and tear served the same purpose. In later years Tom would make gutties in an iron mold that stamped dimples into them, but in his early days as a ball-maker he was still using a hammer, tapping each new ball like a woodpecker.

While Tommy was off at school, second son Jimmy often joined Tom in the workshop. So did Jack, who was talking now but not walking. The youngest Morris would never walk. He got around by pulling himself along on a wheeled trolley Tom had made for him. He would sit on his trolley in a corner of the workshop, watching Tom hammer a ball or rub up a clubhead. “Da,” he might say, calling Tom by the name all the children used, “What’re you makin’, Da?”

Tom would smile at such a question. “Money.”

In 1862 the defending Open champion lapped the field by thirteen strokes, a margin of victory that has never been equaled. But Tom Morris earned not a penny for his second Open win. While Willie Park, now described in the
Fifeshire Journal
as “the ex-champion golfer,” got £5 for finishing second, another year’s possession of the Belt was thought to be reward enough for the champion. Less than a week later a hopping-mad Park challenged Tom to a marathon match for £100, and Tom took the dare. The duel of the year would open with two rounds at Musselburgh, Park’s territory, followed by two rounds at Prestwick, two more at North Berwick and finally two at St. Andrews.

In the weeks leading up to the match, Tom prepared like a modern athlete: He went into training, playing round after round and giving up “the divine weed,” his pipe tobacco. Over four Saturdays in November and December of 1862 he beat Willie by two holes at Musselburgh; by five at Prestwick; and sealed his triumph with a four-hole victory at North Berwick. A
Fifeshire Journal
writer wired an account that saddled Park “with the heavy incubus of being eleven holes behind.” Surrounded by a final-day crowd of more than 300, Tom built his lead to fourteen holes, knocking his drives ten yards past those of Park, who trudged with his head down. Willie’s supporters said he had to be ill.

The national newspaper
The Scotsman
called Tom’s seventeen-hole margin “unparalleled in the annals of golfing.” At a banquet celebrating Tom’s victory, Prestwick golfers applauded and called his name until at last he stood up. “I would prefer playing Park to making a speech,” said Tom, whose blushing proved his point. “There is no disguising the fact that William Park is as good a golfer as ever lifted a club, and it was my great good fortune to defeat such a formidable opponent on all the four greens.” He announced that he was swearing off eight-round marathon matches because training for this one had cost him valuable time in his workshop. It had also cost him “one of the great pleasures the Good Lord allows us,” he said, and with a flourish he fired up his pipe.

Tom could have made the Belt his property by winning a third straight Open in 1863. He played well enough through rain and hat-grabbing winds, but a familiar figure stood in his way. Park was in top form again, clouting long parabolas, his chin leading the way as he marched to a two-stroke victory. That left Morris and Park with two Opens each, while the rest of the golfing population had none. Park carried the Belt back to his workshop beside the Musselburgh links, leaving Nancy Morris with an empty space on the mantel at 40 High Street in Prestwick, where the Morrises now lived. This second cottage was farther from the links than their first, closer to the center of town. It sat on a paved street that little Jack could get about on his homemade trolley. And though the Morrises had moved to a better home on a better street, there was talk in town that the club wanted Tom to move his brood back to the links. What good was a greenkeeper who lived far from the green? A gentleman golfer should be able to knock on the keeper’s door at any hour. The club’s officers were planning to build a new clubhouse on the links; perhaps Tom could be persuaded to move his family there. The officers were not pressing the issue, at least not yet, because another strain of gossip was coursing through town: People said that the R&A wanted to hire Tom away.

In the mid-1850s the Royal and Ancient had hired a pair of greenkeepers named Watty Alexander and Alexander Herd. Under the two Alexanders, who were paid a combined £6 a year, the putting-greens at St. Andrews grew ragged. Fairways sprouted gouges dug by golfers swinging cleeks. The minutes of an R&A meeting reported that the faces of bunkers were crumbling, “much breached by frequent visitations.” After the
Fifeshire Journal
described a course that was “sorely cut up…execrable,” the club’s powerful green committee fired Watty Alexander, leaving Herd to wage a lonely war against the elements. Poor Herd. If he seeded a green, the seed died. If he pushed a wheelbarrow to the beach, filled it with sand and brought it back to fill rabbit holes in a bunker, the clouds chose that moment to burst and flood the bunker, undoing his work, leaving him bailing rainwater with a bucket while seagulls and club members cackled. Such a job can change a man, if only from drunken bastard to poor miserable drunken bastard. Herd quit in 1863.

Inside the R&A clubhouse, a sandstone strongbox looming over the first teeing-ground, one question became imperative: What would it take to bring back Tom Morris? When the clubhouse was built in 1854 it was pale brown, but a decade of wind and rain had leached its color. Tom wasn’t the first to observe that sandstone and golfers both started tan and weathered to gray. To the graying men inside, the need for a greenkeeper multiplied when Edward, Prince of Wales, eldest son of Queen Victoria and future king, agreed to become the club’s patron and first royal captain. With the prince’s year-long captaincy to begin in the fall of ’63, the more-royal-than-ever Royal and Ancient could not make its home on a second-rate green. And so the question of Morris’s return became more urgent. The Prestwick Golf Club paid Tom £39 per year. No other greenkeeper made nearly as much, and many R&A members believed he would race back to St. Andrews for the same amount.