Читать книгу Tommy’s Honour: The Extraordinary Story of Golf’s Founding Father and Son - Kevin Cook - Страница 7

THE GAME THE Morrises played was already ancient. It was in the kingdom of Fife on Scotland’s east coast, the place where medieval shepherds used their crooks to knock stones at rabbit holes. They were at it within a century or two of King Macbeth’s death in 1057. In time, the shepherds’ sons and their sons’ sons whittled balls of wood to whack around the links, coastal wastelands where no trees or crops grew. They dug holes in flat places and planted sticks in the holes – targets for a game they called ‘gowf’ or ‘golfe’. Over the centuries the game would be called many other things, some printable, including ‘this human frustration’, ‘a good walk spoiled’ and ‘a weird combination of snooker and karate’.

Other countries had similar sports. One was chole, a Flemish pastime in which a team of players got three swings to advance a ball towards a goal that might be half a mile away. Then the opponents played defence, hitting the ball towards the nearest bog. The Dutch played a golflike game on ice, and it is fashionable in some circles to say that golf began in Holland. But if you ask a Scotsman if he owes his national game to some Amsterdammers on ice skates, he may shoot back, ‘That’s not golf.’ In fact, the Scots’ claim to the sport is simple and correct: they invented the game with the hole in the ground.

But they borrowed its name. ‘Golf’ is probably a corruption of kolf, a Dutch word for club. And as the game spread it corrupted its players – or so thought Scotland’s King James II, who banned it. The king was sick of seeing his soldiers wasting time on the links, neglecting their archery practice. No wee wooden ball would pierce armour and kill the damned English. In 1457, in the first recorded reference to the game, King James II decreed that ‘the golfe be utterly cryit doune and not usit’. Golfers ignored him.

His grandson, James IV, kept up the family tradition by calling the game ‘ridiculous … requiring neither strength nor skill’. Then he tried playing it. During a lull between wars with England, the young monarch emerged from Holyrood Palace with a brand-new driver in his hand. He greeted several lords and ladies gathered to mark the occasion, stepped up to the ball and – whiff! He missed. He tried again, whiffed again, threw down his club and stalked back to the palace. That might have been the end of royal golf, but to his credit James IV practised in secret until he could lace his drives more than fifty yards. He became the first royal golf nut and the first royal golf gambler. In 1504, after the king lost a two-guinea bet to the Earl of Bothwell, the debt was added to the nation’s tax bill.

A love of golf often passes from father to son. In the middle of the sixteenth century it went from father to son to daughter. Mary Stuart, better known as Mary Queen of Scots, was the only child of King James V, the golfing son of James IV. Mary ascended to the throne after her father died in 1542. She was six days old. When the news reached London, the gluttonous wife-killer Henry VIII, a tennis player, saw a chance to expand his empire. In a series of invasions called the ‘rough wooing’, he tried to force a royal marriage between his son, Prince Edward, and Scotland’s child queen. Mary was shipped to safety in France, where she grew into a striking beauty, six feet tall. Upon returning to Scotland the seventeen-year-old queen took up the national game and gave it a new word: she called the boy who lugged her clubs a cadet, which the Scots heard as ‘caddie’. Mary went on to be a golfing widow, hitting the links the same week her husband, Lord Darnley, was murdered. That faux pas gave her cousin, England’s Queen Elizabeth, an excuse to charge her with crimes against God, nature and good government. Mary Queen of Scots went on to lose a few more golf balls in Scotland and later, in England, her head.

By then a dozen generations of golfers had walked the four-mile loop of the links at St Andrews, over Swilcan Burn to the mouth of the River Eden and then back towards town, aiming for rooftops and the crumbling twelfth-century cathedral where ghosts were said to guard the remains of St Andrew, supposedly brought here by a monk in the year 345: three of the Apostle’s finger bones, an arm bone, a tooth and a kneecap. No man designed the golf course west of the town. The course was an accident. The fairways were narrow paths through thickets of scrub: thorny whin bushes, which the rest of the world called gorse, as well as heather, nettles, brambles, ground elder, dogtail, cocksfoot and chickweed. The putting-greens were clearings where players’ boots and the nibblings of rabbits and sheep kept the grass down. During storms the sheep huddled behind hillocks, where they scuffed and nibbled the grass and clover to the roots, leaving bare spots that eroded into sand bunkers. Other bunkers were carved by golfers slashing the turf in hollows where bad shots collected.

Golfers and sheep vied for space on the links with fishermen drying their nets, women beating rugs or bleaching clothes, dogs chasing rabbits, cows and goats grazing, larks darting in and out of the whins, children playing hide and seek, and even the occasional citizen soldier doing his duty by old James II, practising his archery. Still, it was a golf town. In the seventeenth-century sermons of Robert Blair, minister of the town church, Reverend Blair likened the bond between God and the Church of Scotland to that of shaft and clubhead. Remote, wind-blistered St Andrews may have been shrinking as Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee grew, but the town’s sway in golf never shrank. Courses in Perth, Edinburgh, Kirkcaldy, Montrose and Musselburgh ranged from five to twenty-five holes, but after St Andrews rejiggered its twenty-two-hole course to make it tougher, the ‘St Andrews standard’ of eighteen became everyone’s standard. Scottish sportsmen played the game by thirteen rules adopted in 1754 by the Society of St Andrews Golfers. Some of those rules sound reasonable enough today (‘If a ball is stop’d by any person, horse, dog or any thing else, the ball so stop’d must be played where it lyes’), while others sound puzzling (‘Your tee must be upon the ground’). One timeless feature of the game was already clear to a St Andrews writer: ‘How in the evening each dilates on his own wonderful strokes, and the singular chances that befell him – all under the pleasurable delusion that every listener is as interested in his game as he himself is.’

The men who made the rules and played most of the golf were gentlemen: well-to-do landowners who didn’t need to work. The game was technically open to all and the St Andrews links, like most links, occupied public land. But few working men could afford to play in an age when whole families, including both parents as well as children as young as five or six, toiled six days a week to earn what a gentleman spent to buy a single golf ball.

Golf evolved as a rich man’s game partly because the feathery balls of the 1700s and early 1800s, leather pouches packed tight with goose feathers, were expensive. Men who could afford them saw golf as a healthy outdoor pastime like fox hunting. They met in town halls and taverns to drink, joke, argue and arrange challenge matches, and as the game grew they formed local clubs and played for trophies. In 1744, after tabling discussions of taxes, prostitution and the latest cholera outbreak, Edinburgh’s town council approved the purchase of a silver cup, to be played for each year by the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers. That move seemed to establish the gentlemen of the capital, who played in satin breeches and silk-lined jackets, as the game’s ruling body. But the golfers of Fife would have something to say about that.

The ‘twenty-two noblemen and gentlemen’ of the Society of St Andrews Golfers played in red hunting jackets, a look borrowed from the Fife Fox and Hounds Club. Some wore hiking boots that had tacks driven through the soles – the first golf spikes. After forming the Society of St Andrews Golfers in 1754 they commissioned a trophy of their own, a silver golf club. They also played for gold and silver medals, and these medal competitions led to a new way of keeping score. Since a round robin of one-on-one matches could take forever, the society came up with a different format: ‘[W]hoever puts in the ball at the fewest strokes … shall be declared and sustained victor.’ The new style was called medal play. In time it would eclipse the old way of playing. Medal play is what Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson and almost everyone else in modern golf play ninety percent of the time. Often called stroke play, it is the modern way to play golf: whoever takes the fewest strokes wins. But for more than a century, it was a sideshow. Golf was a match-play game between players who challenged each other to man-to-man contests (singles) or two-man battles (foursomes). In match play, you can take ten swings in a bunker or even pick up your ball and surrender; you lose only that one hole. Whoever wins the most holes wins the match.

‘Challenge matches are the life of golf,’ Andra Kirkaldy of St Andrews would write, looking back on the game as it was played in his youth. ‘Man against man, pocket against pocket, in deadly earnest is the thing.’

Stroke play might win you the honour of a club medal once or twice a year, but the rest of the calendar was for match play. That meant bets and more bets. Many wagers were for a few shillings, but there were plenty of five- and ten-pound matches. Some gentlemen thought nothing of playing for fifty pounds – more than enough to buy a fine pony like the one Sir John Low rode around the links, dismounting when it was his turn to hit. Fifty pounds was more than most men earned in a year. In Scotland in 1820 the average annual income was less than fifteen pounds, a sum Sir John might bet on one putt.

Some matches were for territorial pride as well as cash. In 1681 a pair of English noblemen told the Duke of York that golf began in England. Any Scot who claimed otherwise, they said, was a liar! The duke, a Scotsman who would be king of both countries, agreed to a challenge match to settle the matter. For his partner he chose John Patersone, a cobbler who was said to be the best golfer in Edinburgh. The shoemaker arrived with his clubs tucked under his arm, trembling to be in such exalted company. After the other men hit their tee shots, he steeled himself, swung from the heels and belted a drive that dropped their jaws. With Patersone leading the way, the Scots routed the English pair. The duke was so pleased he split his winnings with Patersone, who used the money to build a house on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, a fine stone house with the old golf motto etched above the front door: Far and Sure.

By the 1800s, with seven golf societies scattered through Scotland and England, the game was respectable enough to seek royal patronage. In 1833, the officers of the upstart Perth Golfing Society irked golfers in Edinburgh and St Andrews by jumping the queue, securing the sponsorship of King William IV. The Perth club became Royal Perth, despite being only nine years old while Edinburgh’s Honourable Company was eighty-nine years old and the Society of St Andrews Golfers seventy-nine. Royal Perth! The sound of it soured all the claret in St Andrews. In 1834 a politically connected R&A member, Colonel John Murray Belshes, wrote to the king urging him to restore the old town’s prestige. When the monarch ignored his plea, Belshes reminded King William that among his many titles was one that warmed the hearts of St Andreans, for His Majesty was also the Duke of St Andrews. How fallible he would appear if he forgot the town that was part of his birthright!

With the speed of the latest laboratory fluid, electricity, the king gave his patronage to the Society of St Andrews Golfers, which got a new name, including two words to remind Royal Perth of its youth: the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews. Three summers later, King William sent the club ‘a Gold Medal, with Green Ribband … which His Majesty wishes should be challenged and played for annually’. The Royal & Ancient had taken a step towards its destiny as ruling body of a game that would be played not only on rough town greens but all over the world, and not only for crowns and shillings and the occasional fifty pounds, but for millions.

For the moment, though, golf still belonged to three or four hundred men in hunting jackets. Like the hunt, golf was a pursuit for prosperous fellows who wanted to stretch their muscles a bit before they fell into overstuffed chairs in chandeliered rooms to eat duck, pheasant, mutton and beef and drink claret and gin while they smoked and told stories. As some writers had already noted, the game was an abstract form of the primordial hunt: a pack of men journeys into perilous land, avoiding dangers, tracking first one target and then another, getting home safely by nightfall to gather by the fire.

Golf also shared something important with cockfighting and bare-knuckle boxing: it was easy to bet on. Every morning but Sunday the gentleman golfers of St Andrews would meet near the first teeing-ground to arrange their singles and foursomes matches, haggling over odds and strokes given. Starting in the hour before noon they slapped their first shots towards the railway station and marched after them, their caddies following a few respectful steps behind. The caddies were a threadbare lot, boys as young as seven jostling for work beside toothless men of eighty. They called the golfer ‘Mister’ unless he held a still-more-exalted title such as Captain or Major. The occasional golfer of high rank, like the sports-mad Earl of Eglinton, was called ‘M’lord’. Caddies were addressed by their first names, befitting their low rank. They were lucky to get a shilling per round, and lucky if their gentlemen didn’t smack them as well as the ball. A golfer who got bad advice from his caddie, or who detected laziness or cheek in him, was within his rights to backhand the caddie full in the face, or to take a club and whip him with it. Like the vast and growing empire some of them had served in India, Africa or the Holy Land, the men of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club held firm to the belief that they ruled by right with God’s approval. Never mind that revolt was in the air from teeming India to bloody Europe to distant America, or that the land these country gentlemen ruled was literally being turned upside-down, with farmland torn into quarries and mines as the Industrial Revolution gained steam by the hour. Scotland’s gentleman golfers could escape the cities’ sooty air, blast furnaces and hungry rabble by spending the day on the links. If the rest of the world was hurtling forward at breakneck speed, they told themselves, at least the old game was safe from revolution.

They were wrong.

Here is the Royal & 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 scent 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. He smiles. 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 further 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 & 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’s 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. He 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 centre of Scottish Catholicism. The legendary bones of St Andrew, housed in St Andrews Cathedral according to the old story, brought Catholic 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 a high of 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. 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 redcoats 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 them in foursomes. A short, bull-necked fellow who sported filigreed waistcoats and bright-coloured caps, Robertson was the first man to parlay caddying, ball-making and playing into something like a fulltime job. If his trade was a bit disreputable, at least it offered steady work. Tom’s mother might fret about her son working for a man who consorted with gamblers, drunkards, cheats and low-livers, but what could she say? Her husband was all 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 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 of a 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, he had mutton-chop side-whiskers, 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 100 strokes had something to celebrate, the pint-sized Robertson often broke 100 and once shot 87. Still, he was not a golfer by trade. No such career existed. So Robertson made and sold golf balls and caddied for the gentlemen 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, 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 a floor of wood planks. A pot kept water boiling over the fire. A sturdy worktable sat under an oil lamp that cast a wan yellow 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 goosefeathers 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, 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 will no longer be of any use. 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 side, a wooden panel in front and a slot. Place the butt end of a long awl into the slot and lean forward with all your weight at the crux of your ribcage, 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 the story 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 forebear 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 club-maker from Musselburgh grew weary of taking a ship across the Firth of Forth to Kirkaldy, then shouldering his wares and hiking twenty miles to St Andrews. To spare himself the trek, the club-maker 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 ninety-two pounds, 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 on 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 pounds.

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 back on the links, at the bottom of a ladder that stretched into the clouds. ‘Greetings, my son,’ said St 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, his grandfather 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 straight-forward character, striving to serve God and family by working hard, speaking plainly and 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. Allan had always been cordial to Tom’s father, but the men were not friends. 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, that India was a powderkeg, that Lord Palmerston was not to be trusted, and that 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 who 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 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 redolent of sand, mud and turf … the scent of the links.

By his sixteenth birthday, Tom Morris could have beaten most of the gentleman golfers. ‘Don’t let ’em know,’ Allan said. ‘They’ll find out soon enough.’ Tom caddied for many of the club members, and when his advice and encouragement helped his man win a bet, Tom might get more than the usual shilling at the end of the round. He might find a crown in his palm. One day it was a five-pound note! On that day he was wealthy. He could give half to his parents, buy a pair of warm socks, dine at the Golf Inn and still have enough to tithe to the church on Sunday morning.

In 1839, after four years of apprenticeship, Tom began his five-year term as a journeyman, living in rented rooms nearby but still working in Allan’s kitchen. He now stood two inches taller than Allan (though half a foot less than Lang Willie) and was ten to twenty yards longer off the tee. He could not help shaking his head at the get-ups his employer wore, including a different colour of waistcoat and cap for every day of the week. Sepia photos would preserve Allan Robertson in tasteful black and tan, but that dark cap was likely to be purple, matching his tie, while the waistcoat under his red jacket might be orange or lime green. Watching this peacock bustle to the first teeing-ground, Tom knew that plain brown tweed was right for him.

Allan’s red jacket might have seemed lacking in tact, too forward for a commoner, had he not been known and liked by the gentlemen. If his colourful clothes out-sparkled theirs, if his quoting of Homer or Shakespeare overreached, he knew his place. It was Allan who knelt to tee up his master’s ball. Scotland’s best golfer then waited at a respectful distance while the man topped his ball or sliced it into the whins.

When club members played matches, Allan, Tom, Lang Willie and the other caddies carried their clubs. Sometimes a club man hired a caddie to lug his clubs and be his partner against another member-caddie pair in foursomes – each two-man team playing a single ball, taking turns at hitting it. If the gentleman drove off the tee, the caddie hit the next shot, and so on. At the end of the round the caddie on the losing side got the usual fee, but the one who helped his man win could expect a bonus. Tom earned most of his money this way. If his team won he’d get silver in his palm and eat meat and potatoes that night at the Golf Inn, the Cross Keys or the Black Bull. If not, it was porridge in Allan’s kitchen.

Soon Tom was playing matches of a different kind. Two caddies would play two others for a small bet, or two caddies would team against a pair of club members, giving the gentlemen strokes. Tom found himself getting released from work to play as Allan’s partner. He relished those matches, not only for the golf, but also for the fun of seeing his boss in action. Allan was a born performer, fully in character from the moment he reached the teeing-ground, giving a little bow and doffing his cap to the gentlemen. Tom liked to watch him rehearse his swing as if he needed practice. Allan might make a clumsy practice swipe, digging up turf, then wince and say his back ached. That could be worth a stroke as the match was arranged.

Once the teams and strokes were set, Allan waited for any gentlemen in the group to hit. Then he stepped forward to tee up his own ball. He spat in his hands, rubbed them together. A quick waggle triggered his swing, the clubhead gliding in a perfect circle around his small, bullish frame. His clubs had quirky names – his flat-bladed bunker iron, a forerunner of the sand wedge, was called the Frying Pan; another club was the Doctor; another was Sir David Baird, named after the R&A medalist who gave it to him. He held them all high on the handle, a fingery grip that helped him flip the clubface open or closed at the last instant. No golfer had better touch, or more tricks.

Tom called Allan ‘the cunningest player’. It was a polite way of saying that he was a hustler. If an opponent had the honour in a singles match, Allan would mutter aloud about the wind, even if there was no wind. If Allan had the honour he might pretend to swing all-out, grunting for effect, but hold off a bit at impact so that his ball stopped just short of a bunker. The opponent, believing the trap was out of range, would drive straight into it – and end up smiling as Allan praised his Herculean power. When teamed with a weak club member in an alternate-shot foursomes match, Allan had other ways to work the angles: if his partner faced a long carry over a hazard, he would make the man swallow his pride and putt their ball to the hazard’s brink, making Allan’s next shot easier. Sometimes he told a partner to swing and miss on purpose. ‘Well done, sir,’ he’d say, then step up and hit the ball past all trouble to the flag.

As Allan’s journeyman, Tom was less than a junior partner but better than a cousin, having long since surpassed Lang Willie at work by being more efficient and much easier to wake up in the morning. It was the same on the links, where Lang Willie played but was so loosely strung together that his golf swing reminded Tom of a man falling down stairs. Lang Willie knew he was no golfer. He joked that when he swung, his elbows kept trying to switch places with his knees. Meanwhile, Tom kept improving. By the time he turned twenty, Tom was the second-best golfer in St Andrews. After years of getting strokes from Allan – nine strokes at first, then six, four and finally two – they played even. In 1842, when club members put up a few pounds to sponsor a tournament for the caddies (all caddies but Allan, barred because he was thought to be unbeatable), Tom took home the purse.

Allan Robertson became the town’s hero in 1843 when he beat Willie Dunn, the long-hitting champion from Musselburgh. The match was a novel idea: more than a week of single combat between the best players from towns whose golfers couldn’t stand each other. Musselburgh was the golf hub of the south side of the Firth of Forth, the Edinburgh side, while St Andrews was the game’s cradle, and Robertson its saviour. With grit, clutch putting and a trick or two, Allan edged Dunn over twenty rounds while dozens of bettors, newspaper reporters and other spectators walked along with the players.

It was in this heady time that Tom won his first match against Allan. They played for a short-waisted red jacket offered as a prize by an R&A member. There were no spectators or reporters that day, but Tom felt like shouting when he sank the winning putt. Allan shrugged and said he hadn’t been trying because he didn’t like the jacket: ‘The wee coatie would fit Tom better,’ he said. But Tom knew something had changed that day. He had stepped up a rung.

Over the next year Allan began giving him a small share of his golf-ball sales and a growing share of the bets they won as foursomes partners. Before that, the boss had put up their portion of the stakes when he and Tom played a money match. Allan covered any losses and, fittingly, kept almost all of what they won. If Tom played well, the boss might give him ten percent; if not, a token penny told him what losers were worth. But now they were sharing risk and reward, with Allan haggling over odds and strokes at the first tee and Tom surprising rivals with his maturing game. And here was the answer to the question Tom had turned over in his head since he was fourteen: why had the great Robertson chosen Tom Morris as his apprentice? Because he had seen him swing. The game’s keenest eye had watched a boy knocking spoon shots down an open fairway, sometimes with a cracked feathery, sometimes with a cork. That eye had spotted Tom’s talent. Allan, who did nothing without a reason that served Allan, had needed a reliable foursomes partner. Now he had one.

Lying on his cot late at night, with the cold wind on his face, Tom may have wondered what God thought of all this. Here he was, still a journeyman, earning more money than his father ever had, most of it in wagers. Of course his luck could vanish in a breath – a broken leg, a plague of cholera, a new golfer who could beat him and Allan both. But for now he had every reason to be cautiously happy. If not yet prosperous, he was settled enough to think about settling down. If not fully respectable, he was close enough to smell the roast beef in Captain Broughton’s house.

Captain Broughton, one of the R&A’s leading players, lived in a columned mansion at 91 North Street. The beef in the captain’s kitchen was clean and bloody, not tinged with pepper, ginger and charcoal like the rank meat in alehouses and inns and Allan’s kitchen. Tom shut his eyes and breathed its scent into his nostrils. A working man like him could not set foot anywhere but in the kitchen of such a house, nor would he want to. In the hush of the parlour, with its grand piano, gold-framed mirror and leather-trimmed chairs around a table so perfectly polished that it shone like the mirror, he would have felt like a thief, a trespasser. It was better to stay in the kitchen, picking a scrap of fat off a platter of beef carried by Nancy Bayne, the maid.

Five years older than Tom, Nancy was one of four servants in the captain’s house. Along with another maid and a housekeeper who outranked the maids, she scrubbed, polished, dusted and cooked from six in the morning till after dark – all under the stern eye of the captain’s governess. Nancy was no beauty but rather a strong, sensible girl, a ‘pattern girl’ in the popular phrase. She knew her role in society’s pattern and played it with vigour and good humour. She already had a suitor, but when Tom Morris entered the picture the other fellow had no chance. Tom was a favourite of Captain Broughton. He caddied for the captain and sometimes partnered him in foursomes matches. Tom was Nancy’s favourite, too. He had a pleasing enough face, with neatly trimmed whiskers. His boots were almost new, and he took care to kick the dirt off them before he came into the captain’s kitchen. Tom had a jacket with no frays at the sleeve or elbow, and a pocket-watch with a silver chain. He had a kind eye and a bit of a spark to him, asking about Nancy’s day, offering a handshake when he took his leave. She was pleased to note that his hands were more callused than hers.

For Tom, even courtship was affected by golf. One day on the High Hole, he and Captain Broughton were playing a crown-and-shillings game – a crown on the match, a shilling per hole – when Tom found his ball buried in a bunker. He swung twice with no luck.

‘Pick it up,’ the captain said.

Tom said, ‘No, I might hole it.’

‘Ha! If you do, I’ll give you fifty pounds.’

‘Done.’

Tom’s biographer W.W. Tulloch told the story sixty years later. According to Tulloch, Tom ‘had another shot at it, eye on ball and perhaps on the fair Nancy. By some million-to-one chance the ball did actually go into the hole. “That will make a nice nest-egg for me to put in the bank,” said the young fellow.’ But the next day, when the captain brought the money, Tom surprised him by turning it down. There was no debt, he said – he had been joking.

Tom Morris married Nancy Bayne on 21 June 1844. The vows were read by the Reverend Principal Haldane of Holy Trinity church, who had christened baby Tom twenty-three years before. After the vows Captain Broughton, who had given the bride and groom a wedding gift of fifty pounds, led toasts to his favourite caddie and his former maid, who would do her scrubbing, dusting and cooking for Tom Morris from that day on.

Life was moving faster. In a year Nancy was pregnant, though no one in that time and place would use such an indelicate word. People said she was in ‘a family way’, or ‘no longer unwell’, meaning that her monthly flow of blood had ceased.

In the summer of 1846 Nancy reached the last stage of being no longer unwell – her confinement, when her husband was banished to a far room while women from both their families and then at last a midwife clustered around Nancy as she howled in her labour. Soon the midwife showed Tom the glad result: a healthy son. He and Nancy named the baby Thomas Morris Junior and called him Wee Tom.

If the child was meant to be a golfer, he was born at a good time. After Allan Robertson’s grand battle with Willie Dunn, other professionals began making their names in the game. Dunn and his brother Jamie were Musselburgh’s champions. Bob Andrew was Perth’s. Amateur competitions at the R&A and other clubs were still the main events on golf’s calendar, but people had now seen enough of the ‘cracks’, as crack-shot caddies were called, to know that amateur medalists were not in their league. Golf talk revolved around the cracks: who was the best of them? Could Dunn win a rematch against Robertson? Which town could field the best foursomes duo? By the middle of the century bettors from various clubs were risking weighty sums to find out. To their surprise, hundreds and even thousands of ordinary citizens were also excited about this new craze, the professional golf match. Soon a great foursomes match was arranged: a duel between the Dunns of Musselburgh and those two noted sticks from St Andrews, Allan Robertson and Tom Morris.

Sportsmen on both sides of the Forth pooled their cash. Each side came up with £200, which meant that the cracks would play for the staggering sum of £400. It wasn’t the players’ money; they would perform for the benefit of the bettors who put up the stakes. Still, news of the record-setting stakes catalyzed a reaction that fed on itself – more crucial than the prize money was its power to keep people talking about it, to keep the small but growing world of golf abuzz for weeks before the match. This was hype Victorian style. News may have travelled at a walking pace, in weekly newspapers and by word of mouth, but as the match approached it seemed half of Scotland knew about it. The players made bets of their own (they would get a piece of the £400 – ten percent was customary – if they won), and polished their clubs as the first day of play dawned clear and cool. The format was two out of three, with three matches of thirty-six holes each, to be played first at Musselburgh, then at St Andrews and finally on the supposedly neutral links at North Berwick, near Edinburgh. Everyone expected Allan Robertson and Willie Dunn to play stellar golf. Everyone knew that Jamie Dunn, Willie’s identical twin, was nearly his brother’s equal. The question mark was young Morris, who had never played in front of spectators and reporters.

Allan liked to joke about the Dunns: ‘Keep your eye on ’em, or Willie might hit every shot.’ The tall twins often dressed alike, but at Musselburgh they did their opponents and spectators a favour by wearing different ties, Willie’s blue and Jamie’s grey. They went on to play identically well, out-driving the St Andrews duo, alternating shots with dead aim. To the cheers of their home-course supporters, the twins routed Allan and Tom. The day’s scheduled thirty-six holes ended after only twenty-four, the Dunns leading by thirteen holes with twelve to play. It was a bitter defeat for the St Andreans. Matters worsened a week later at St Andrews, where the ballyhooed showdown looked to be a mismatch. Allan kept missing putts – ‘funking’, it was called, meaning choking. Then, late in the day, the twins faltered. Tom led a rally over the last nine holes and he and Allan squeaked by with a victory on the Home Hole. Now the sides were dead even. Had the contest been scored by holes rather than courses, Tom and Allan would have been behind, needing a miracle on the last day. As it was, all they needed was one good afternoon.

On the morning of the final thirty-six holes, a special train carted crowds of so-called ‘golf-fanatics’ to the quirky little North Berwick links below Berwick Law, a dead volcano. At its foot, crowds gathered near the first teeing-ground at the edge of a red sandstone town that had never seen anything like this.

Rain fell in sheets that morning, sluicing into the weedy old quarry beside the first fairway. The torrent peaked just as dozens of Allan and Tom’s supporters were crossing the Forth on the Burntisland Ferry. By the time they reached the course they were clammy and miserable and outnumbered ten to one by the Dunns’ supporters. The rain moved offshore, leaving clean sky and a breeze that blew several spectators’ hats down the fairway. Allan and Tom had the honour, which meant that Allan did. Before teeing off he took a moment to look around at the huge, still-growing crowd around him, a throng that stretched along the fairway almost to the green. There were more than a thousand people watching. So many faces, all silent for one long moment before he sent the ball on its way.

Allan’s drive was straight, but short. Willie Dunn’s drive flew past it. Willie held his driver high at the end of his swing, waving it forward as if to chase the ball farther. The Dunns’ backers cheered and shook their fists. ‘I never saw a match where such vehement party spirit was displayed,’ Tom Peter wrote in his memoir, Reminiscences of Golf. ‘So great was the keenness and anxiety to see whose ball had the best lie, that no sooner were the shots played than off the whole crowd ran, helter-skelter.’

The Dunn twins’ power impressed Peter: ‘They went sweeping over hazards which the St Andrews men had to play short of.’ With twenty-six holes played and eight to go, the Dunns were four holes ahead. Gamblers in the crowd raised their hands and shouted offers: ‘Fifteen to one against Robertson and Morris.’ ‘Twenty to one!’

Allan had been useless all day, hitting crooked drives and funking putts. Tom Peter heard a catcall from the crowd: ‘That wee body in the red jacket canno’ play golf!’ That yell may have been the spur the proud Robertson needed. A minute later he sank his first putt of consequence in more than a week. He and Tom took that hole and the next one, too. They halved the one after that and won two of the following three in what one report would call ‘a most extraordinary run of surprises’. Suddenly the match was even with two holes to play. Two holes for £400. The Dunns wore identical frowns. The crowd pushed close enough to hear the whisk of Allan’s swing as he drove his and Tom’s ball into one of the worst spots in sight, a patch of shin-high grass 130 yards out. The ball hopped once and disappeared.

Tom slashed it out, but two shots later he and Allan lay four in a greenside bunker. The Dunns lay two only twenty yards away. But their ball had come to rest against a paving stone bordering a path near the green. ‘They wished the stone removed, and called for someone to go for a spade,’ Tom Peter recalled, ‘but Sir David Baird would not sanction its removal, because it was off the course and a fixture.’ The match referee was the same Baird who’d given Allan the eponymous club he was using. Musselburgh fanatics hissed at him, but the ruling was correct. The Dunns slapped at their ball three times before it popped loose, costing them their two-shot advantage and one more. Peter watched them unravel: ‘Both men had by this time lost all judgement and nerve, and played most recklessly.’ The most pivotal hole of the century’s first half went to Robertson and Morris, who took the final hole as well. Their backers were delirious, and £400 richer. Tom and Allan got a beggar’s cut of that, plus their end of several side bets, and for weeks after returning to St Andrews they enjoyed free meals and free pints. Tom was his hometown’s particular hero – hadn’t he downed the Dunns almost in spite of Allan? Following ‘the Famous Foursome’, Tom Morris’ health was toasted so often that it seemed he would surely live to be 100 years old.

Almost before the cheers died down, his luck went south. The coming months would test Tom’s courage and even his faith.

It began with a new ball. In the late 1840s, a few golfers in England began using balls made of rubber. The stuff was called ‘gutta percha’. Made from the sap of a Malaysian rubber tree, it was easy to mould into a ball and was more durable than leather and feathers. It was cheaper, too. A gutta-percha ball resisted rain better than a feathery, which tended to split at the seams in wet weather, and the ‘gutty’ cost less than half as much – a mere shilling versus half a crown for a feathery ball. When Gourlay, the Musselburgh feathery-maker, got his hands on one of the first gutties, he saw the future coming.

Allan Robertson was frantic. He had always said that nothing good ever came from the south. Now here came a threat to his livelihood in the form of a grey orb bouncing from England via Musselburgh to the St Andrews links his father and grandfather had stocked with featheries. Allan could not even bring himself to pronounce ‘gutta percha’. He called the new balls ‘the filth’. Playing with them was ‘no’ golf. He paid boys pennies to hunt down gutties and bring them to his house, where they watched Allan burn the balls in the kitchen fire. These public burnings filled the room with acrid blue-black smoke. Tom and Lang Willie, stuffing and sewing featheries in a fog that made their eyes itch, had to swear they would never play golf with the filth.

The Famous Foursome had lifted Tom’s standing with the gentleman golfers of the R&A, who now insisted on getting him as a caddie or partner. One morning Tom went out for a friendly match with a prominent club member, the preeningly handsome Mr John Campbell, a man another member described as ‘magnificent and pompous’. On the inward nine, Tom ran out of golf balls. Campbell gave him one of his own gutties to finish the round. Tom thought nothing of it; he couldn’t leave Mr Campbell out there alone. Over a hole or two he found the rubber ball nothing special – easier to putt than a feathery, since it was seamless and a little heavier, but shorter off the tee. They were nearing the Home Hole when Allan, playing the outward nine, came storming towards them, shouting. His own Tom, playing that filth! Despite his vow! Tom tried to defend himself, but Allan was beyond reason. As Tom would recall half a century later, ‘Allan in such a temper cried out to me never to show face again.’

Just like that. After more than ten years of working side by side, ten years and some 25,000 golf balls made of leather and feathers and sweat, Tom was fired. When he tried again to explain, Allan turned his back. But Tom also had his pride. He would not beg. He would take up the loom first. He would take his wife and child and leave his hometown before he begged.

Just like that a life changes forever. Heading home, Tom may have looked back towards the links, dark green in late-day sun, to see golfers gathered at the first teeing-ground. He did not want to leave home and surely did not relish the thought of giving his wife the news. He might believe, might know that God closes no door without opening another, but Nancy was prone to gloomy spells. She had fretted and wept over Wee Tom’s latest illness, though the doctor said it was nothing. How much would she fret over a jobless husband? Tom steeled himself as he kicked his boots clean at their door.

The child was sicker. The doctor called it baby fever, though Wee Tom was four years old, no baby. Four-year-olds were thought to be safe from the thousand things that pulled babies underground. But the boy wheezed and grew hotter. The doctor said they should keep the curtains drawn and let the child rest. A day later he said they should pray. Tom sat and prayed with Nancy, each of them holding one of Wee Tom’s hands, hands that were small and too hot. The child’s hair was wet with sweat, his eyes glazed.

Thomas Morris Junior died on 9 April 1850. Tom, with Nancy beside him, wrapped the little body in spotless linen. He lifted Wee Tom and placed him in a box of yellow elm, the wood so fresh that it wept sap. Later that week they put the box in the ground in the cemetery at the east end of town, beside the ruins of St Andrews cathedral.

Tom Morris, so recently St Andrews’ hero, walked the town in a daze. His friends worried about him. What would Tom do? The answer came from an R&A member who found him a job as golf professional at a brand new club in Prestwick, on the far side of Scotland. Tom agreed to pack up his golf clubs, his wife and his sorrow and go west to Prestwick.

Before they left, he and Nancy bought a tall white stone for Wee Tom’s grave. They paid a stonecutter to etch the child’s name and his birth and death dates on the slab, along with a verse that looked forward to Resurrection Day.

Their departure was put off until 1851. There were details to iron out. Where would they live in Prestwick? Who would join the new golf club there? The Prestwick course was another matter – Tom would have to build one. But for every trouble, he thought, the Good Lord provides a reason to rejoice. As he and Nancy prepared to leave home she was plump and happy, with a new life kicking inside her.