Читать книгу Tommy’s Honour: The Extraordinary Story of Golf’s Founding Father and Son - Kevin Cook - Страница 8

THE SUN OVER Prestwick moved backwards. It rose over inland hills, not the grey water that meant east to Tom, and set behind a mountain in an unfamiliar sea. Tom knew this water was no proper sea but the broad Firth of Clyde. He knew the mountain in the water, Goat Fell, was part of the Isle of Arran, a twenty-mile rock that rose from the firth. He knew he was on Scotland’s west coast, so far west that to go much farther you would need gills. But knowing his location on a map did nothing to ease Tom’s sense of dislocation. He was homesick.

Not that he complained. His wife was homesick, too, tired and fretful, and Nancy had other worries – a house to furnish, a child to clothe and feed. Their second baby, another son, had been born that spring, just before they left St Andrews. ‘An extra gift from God,’ she called him. They named the boy Thomas Morris Junior, after the boy they had lost. It was common when a son died young to give his name to the next son. It kept the father’s name alive. But they never called this boy Wee Tom. This one was Tommy. Loud and hungry from the start, he seemed to have life enough for two.

The Morrises lived in a tidy cottage provided by the Prestwick Golf Club. Members kept their golf clubs in wooden lock-boxes in the Morris cottage and held their meetings in the parlour. The cottage sat across a rutted road from the Red Lion Inn, where on 2 July 1851 the Earl of Eglinton and forty-nine other gentlemen had founded the club over dinner and drinks. It was Lord Eglinton’s friend Colonel James Ogilvie Fairlie, one of the R&A’s most prominent members, who convinced Tom to bring his wife and son to the world’s edge and rebuild Prestwick’s golf course. There was much to rebuild. What Tom found was fifty-odd acres of dunes, brush and ragged grasses with knee-high flagsticks scattered here and there. Some Prestwick golfers played randomly, aiming for any flag they could spot from wherever they found a ball. They clambered up and down towering dunes, slipping on sandy pathways, shouting ‘Fore’ and ‘Bloody hell!’ This was the thimble of turf where Tom was supposed to build the best links in the west.

That autumn he walked the links until he knew every acre. As Keeper of the Green, Tom was charged with teaching lessons and supervising caddies, but his prime task was maintaining the links, known collectively as ‘the green’. Prestwick’s threadbare green was a funnel-shaped patch of straw-coloured dunes, tan and purple heather, red poppies and wind-whipped bentgrass, the last of which was at least green. To the west was the beach. On the inland side ran a muddy stream, the Pow Burn, and the railway to Ayr and Glasgow, with the vine-covered ruins of a church beyond the railway. A rough road marked the links’ southern border; the northern edge, 770 yards away, was a low stone wall. Sheep roamed the dunes and dells, keeping the grass down and leaving their droppings on half-bare putting-greens. There were rabbit scrapes everywhere – oval depressions where buck rabbits shat and then rolled in their scat, marking their turf. Tom marked his territory with sticks, pacing off distances, imagining and re-imagining these dunes and hollows in hundreds of configurations. Suppose he put a putting-green here and dug a bunker beside it – where would the next hole be? Suppose he filled in a bunker, grew grass on top and made it a putting-green?

Tom had helped Allan lay out a few holes at Carnoustie, across the Firth of Tay from St Andrews, but this would be the first course he built himself. Sitting on a dune that cast a fifty-yard shadow, scratching his side-whiskers, he looked out over the Firth of Clyde to Arran, the long island on the western horizon. Sunsets made Arran appear to be on fire. The shore swept south towards hazy cliffs called the Heads of Ayr. Between Arran and the cliffs a little bump called Ailsa Craig poked out of the water. Prestwickers had another name for Ailsa Craig: they called it Paddy’s Milestone because it marked the midway point between Belfast and Glasgow, a crossing thousands of starved Irish had made and were still making in their coffin ships only to find the potatoes blighted here, too. The only work for them, the lucky ones who found work, was slaving in mines or feeding coal to the blast-furnaces that made Glasgow thrum all day and glow reddish brown at night.

Walking the wall of dunes between the beach and the links, Tom watched steamers and clipper ships going to and from Glasgow, thirty miles northeast. Closer to shore, brown seals broke the water. Still closer were knee-high waves, seaweed, driftwood, foam and sand. When golfers appeared on the links he turned to watch them, but sheep almost always outnumbered the golfers. One day the Earl of Eglinton’s greyhounds came streaking across the links, training for a race.

Tom learned to enjoy Prestwick’s weather, which was less raw but no less fickle than Fife’s. Low clouds rolled in to pelt the coast with rain that turned to long white darts of sleet. Then the sky would relent as the land held its breath. The light changed in these lulls. It might turn yellow, purple or grey. Next might come drizzle, hard rain or diffident sun, or sometimes a mist that moved inland like a curtain, bright sunshine behind it, endless sky over water so clear that you could see fish in it.

At night, sitting up by an open window while Nancy and the baby slept, Tom made pencil sketches of the links on landscaper’s paper. He drew holes and combinations of holes, with arrows showing the line of play. The arrows started out sensibly enough, then tangled like seaweed. It was a maddening exercise – there wasn’t room for eighteen holes. But each night he also read his Bible: Ask the Lord to bless your plans …

Pacing, thinking, hearing the surf at the foot of the links, he might walk to the room where his wife and son slept, Nancy with her worries and Tommy with his chestnut curls and long lashes. What man hearing the sleeping breaths of his wife and child, could fail to take courage into the next day?

Tom saw what he should do. His course would be twelve holes, not eighteen. It would start with a long, unforgettable monster. The second hole would climb over towering dunes to a putting-green guarded by a huge, hungry bunker. Golfers who made it that far without surrendering would forgive him the zigzags ahead.

The club paid several labourers to help, but Tom did much of the digging and carting himself, using shovels, wheelbarrows and his bare hands. His opening hole was the longest in golf, measuring 578 yards at a time when a 200-yard drive was a long poke. The drive had to clear a swamp, the Goosedubs, staying clear of the humpbacked dunes to the left, and from there it was three solid clouts to the putting-green. The second hole, called Alps, led golfers up dunes that presented an optical illusion: they appeared to be mountains much further away. Tom planted surprises all over the links, turning the shaggy ground’s limitations to his advantage with deceptions that rewarded local knowledge. Club members who knew the course’s tricks would have an edge. The approach to the Alps Hole, for instance, called for a shot from a hollow called Purgatory. The shot had to clear towering dunes. Those dunes were so steep that caddies sometimes lost their footing and tumbled backwards on the way up. But clearing the dunes was not enough. A ball that summited the Alps could fall into a vast, deep, putting-green-sized bunker called Sahara. Only by clearing both the Alps and the Sahara Bunker could the golfer reach a green that sat in a grassy bowl, welcoming shots that were strong enough to find it. ‘The course went dodging in and out among lofty sand-hills,’ wrote the amateur champion and golf historian Horace Hutchison half a century later. ‘The holes were, for the most part, out of sight when one took the iron in hand for the approach, for they lay in deep dells among those sand-hills, and you lofted over the intervening mountain of sand, and there was all the fascinating excitement, as you climbed to the top of it, of seeing how near to the hole your ball may have happened to roll.’

With so little acreage to work with, Tom had no choice but to let holes crisscross. That was a minor defect at a time when a dozen rounds might complete a day’s play. Still, it could be unnerving to stroke a putt on the fifth green while someone’s second shot on the first hole zipped under your chin.

While working on the course Tom played it every day but the Sabbath. He was dead-set on knowing every inch, every shot his course could ruin or create. Often he played with his patron, Colonel Fairlie, who was as near to being Tom’s friend as a gentleman could be to a hireling. The gruff, clever Fairlie was forty-two, twelve years older than Tom, with a high forehead and a high, starched collar. Sporting a black, bristly moustache that curved down to meet his side-whiskers over a clean-shaven chin, he had the look of a sea-captain, scanning the horizon with squinted eyes, seeking his next challenge.

Colonel James Ogilvie Fairlie came by his title by serving the Queen as an officer of the Ayrshire Yeomanry Cavalry, a reserve unit that marched in formation on the village green on holidays, striking fear into any seals or hungry Irishmen intent on attacking the coast. But while he was no warrior the colonel was an accomplished sportsman, a cricketer who had played for the home side in Scotland – England matches and who now purchased racehorses as casually as Tom bought hiking boots. Fairlie had taken up golf late in life but had made the most of his frequent trips to St Andrews from his home near Prestwick. With Tom’s help he became one of the best of the R&A’s gentleman players. He had never taken to the cocksure Allan Robertson, preferring Tom’s calm competence, and after bringing Tom west he was determined to see him succeed. Fairlie and Tom would sit on the grass near the twelfth green, watching golfers finish their rounds while Fairlie smoked a cigar. Soon Tom had a new gift from his benefactor: a lifelong habit. ‘The colonel would often give me a cigar. Then one day, I well remember, he gave me a pipe,’ Tom recalled decades later, ‘and after that I was a smoker for life. I had never smoked at all when I was a boy, and I would not now advise boys to smoke, young boys at least. But if I did not smoke until I was well on in life, I think I have made up for it.’

Fairlie had a short, graceless swing, but he was strong enough to rise on his toes and hit the ball as far as Tom did. The two of them played crown-and-shilling matches, with the colonel getting strokes. Fairlie marched ahead with Tom following, carrying the clubs. After a morning round the colonel sometimes hurried to Prestwick’s railway station for a trip to Ayr or Glasgow, returning in time for another round before dark. As he liked to say, the world was running faster these days, running on steam.

The rails were changing everything from golf (a fellow could play at Prestwick and Musselburgh in the same day) to food (fresh beef from Aberdeen!) to time itself. Until the 1840s every town and village had kept its own time, but railway schedules required them to synchronize their clocks. By 1855 all of England, Scotland and Wales followed Greenwich Mean Time, or ‘railway time’, transmitted by telegraph in periodic updates from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Still there were some things the machine age could not change, like a nobleman’s power to stop a train with his bare hands. To Fairlie’s great amusement, his friend the Earl of Eglinton, who owned half the region, had the right to flag down any train that passed through his lands. The earl would walk out from Eglinton Castle to the railway, lift his hand and create an unscheduled stop on the Ayr-Glasgow line. He rode free of charge and named his destination by saying, ‘Stop here.’ Sometimes he hopped off within hailing distance of a Prestwick caddie or, better yet, his man Fairlie and the new greenkeeper.

Fairlie would wave and shout hello to the man he called ‘Lord E!’ Tom would turn and see a man in spotless white breeches and a cape, dark hair spilling to his shoulders. Archibald Montgomerie, thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, was western Scotland’s leading sportsman. His stable of racehorses featured Flying Dutchman, winner of the 1849 Derby at Epsom. Eglinton raced greyhounds and sponsored archery, curling and lawn-bowling clubs. Tall and almost pretty with his heroic hair parted in the middle, he could have played Sir Lancelot in a pageant – or tested the knight in a joust.

‘Hullo, Jof,’ said Eglinton, using J.O. Fairlie’s nickname, ‘And Tom Morris!’

‘M’lord,’ said Tom, doffing his cap.

The smiling earl was always full of questions about the course. How good would it be? When could they hold a first-rate event on it? Fairlie explained Tom’s latest plans to build a prodigious first hole, to trick the eye at the second, to move a green or two or three and possibly shoot several hundred sheep. Tom was happy to let Fairlie do the talking. He was not certain how to speak or even stand in the presence of this Eton-educated noble who lived in a castle. Would it be improper to turn his back on the earl? Should he keep his shadow off Eglinton’s boots? Fairlie wasn’t shy around Eglinton, thumping the earl’s noble shoulder and speaking of horses and hounds, club dues, prospective members – Mister this and Sir that – and the upcoming season. Eglinton nodded enthusiastically. ‘Jolly good! Well done, well done.’

Fairlie said Prestwick’s links would give the earl more honour than ‘the Mudbath of ’39’. Mention of the Mudbath made them both laugh. One day Fairlie told Tom the story:

In 1839 the world went mad for medieval nostalgia. There were pageants, parades and minstrel shows in every corner of the empire, but the Camelot craze found its greatest proponent in Eglinton Castle. There the earl, who could trace his lineage twenty-four generations back to the wellsprings of chivalry, decided to stage an event that would make history live again, and on 29 August 1839, nearly 5,000 spectators came from all over Scotland and England to witness the chivalric spectacle of the century. Thirteen armoured knights on armoured steeds paraded from the castle to a newly built arena to re-enact the jousts of old. One of the knights was Napoleon III, prince of France. Another was James Ogilvie Fairlie, bedecked in a suit of armour that had cost him £400. The parade of knights and their retinues stretched for half a mile. As it neared the arena, the skies opened. A downpour turned the castle grounds to fast-flowing mud. Spectators tumbled under skidding, kicking horses; squires ran for dear life; knights dropped their lances, tumbled into the mud and lay there like turtles, weighed down by their armour. The great medieval tournament was a debacle that cost Eglinton £40,000.

‘Forty thousand pounds!’ said Fairlie, waving his cigar. Such a fortune would pay Tom’s salary for a thousand years. At least Fairlie got some good out of it. He won the rescheduled joust as well as the favour of the tournament’s Queen of Beauty, who went on to become Mrs James Ogilvie Fairlie.

Tom, ever the agreeable partner, would nod and smile while the earl and colonel laughed. Then it was back to business. ‘Carry on, Tom,’ said Eglinton.

Tom Morris was born to carry on. Determined to spend the club’s money wisely, he would pioneer a handful of greenkeeping techniques, including several that were widely imitated and one that became universal.

Many of Prestwick’s bunkers had walls that were crumbling, falling inward. Tom could have shored them up with sod, but that would have been expensive. Railway ties, however, cost nothing. The Glasgow and South Western Railway that ran past the course left old railway ties in a heap beside the railway station; they were rubbish to everyone but Tom. He carted them away and used them to bulwark his bunkers, creating a shot that was new to the game, the near-miss that caromed crazily to parts unknown.

He shored up bunkers and dug new ones. He scythed heather, trimmed greens and cut neat-edged holes in the greens. By the end of his first year in Prestwick the course was a fair challenge for Tom’s own game, but equally fair to Mr Sampson McInnes, a Prestwick member who was odds-on to leave any shot in his own shadow, and to the earl, who seldom finished twelve holes in fewer than eighty strokes. Tom gave the links’ landmarks colourful names: the dunes were called Alps and Himalayas; a patch of trouble was known as Purgatory; a sand pit was called Pandemonium. Some of the names were traditional, others he coined himself. He promoted them all with a wink, a smile and endless repetition. And, at the tenth hole, he made a discovery that changed greenkeeping forever. The putting-green there had been in worse shape than the Hole o’ Shell green at St Andrews. Tom moved the green to a new spot a few yards away – back-breaking work that took weeks. One day he spilled a wheelbarrow full of sand on the putting-green. When spring came he found hundreds of yellow-green shoots of grass sprouting on the sandy part of the green, while other spots lay bare. He filled his handkerchief with sand from a bunker, sprinkled the bare spots and kept returning to the bunker until the whole green was dusted with sand. Club members complained: did the tenth hole have a putting-green or a bunker with a hole in it? But the greenkeeper carried the day: by summer that putting-green was as smooth as a billiard table. Tom Morris had introduced top-dressing, a way to cultivate greens that golf-course workers still employ. From then on his refrain was ‘More sand!’ When golfers grumbled, Tom said, ‘Tut-tut, sand’s the life of a green, like meat to a man.’

As the course shaped up he settled into his other duties as golf professional. Tom caddied for Fairlie, Eglinton and other gentlemen. He taught lessons. He played rounds with club members, a chore that earned him three shillings per round. Tom also had the delicate task of handicapping the club members. Over several months he took each of them out on the links and observed each man’s swing, making notes in a cloth-bound book. Then he posted the members’ handicaps. Even Fairlie was handicapped fairly, which was all the colonel expected, knowing that Tom wouldn’t fudge a stroke to save his soul. But other club men were miffed. ‘Who is this caddie,’ they asked, ‘to rank a gentleman?’ Tom’s cause was aided by Eglinton, whose stabby putter was as deadly as Lancelot’s lance – deadly to his score. After the earl accepted an unflattering double-figure handicap with his usual what-a-fine-day-to-be-me smile, the others accepted theirs as well.

Soon the keenness of Tom’s eye was apparent to all. Matches stayed tight to the end; he knew the golfers’ skills better than they did. By the end of his first year, club men were congratulating Fairlie for recruiting this greenkeeper. Some went so far as to shake Tom’s hand.

The first autumn meeting of the Prestwick Golf Club was a feast for the palate and the eye. There were platters of meat, fish and duck; gallons of claret, gin and champagne; garlands of flowers; hours of singing and dancing. Fairlie wore a tartan cravat that cascaded down his chin, posing a hazard to his soup. He and the other club members sported brass-buttoned suits. Their jewelled ladies wore gowns festooned with silk ribbons and bows. Tom, dressed in his best Sunday tweed, stood at the festivities’ edge where a hired man belonged. After midnight the last of the food gave way to drink and more merry drink, with toasts and speeches lulling the moon into its cradle behind the Isle of Arran. At last the Earl of Eglinton stood up. Silverware tap-tapped on wine glasses; the ballroom went quiet. The earl’s gaze swept the room and found Tom.

Nodding towards the links outside, Eglinton announced that the course, their course, was ‘a wonder of our new golfing age’. To applause and calls of ‘Hear hear’, he raised his glass. His hand was smooth and pink, his teeth as white as perfect health.

‘To Tom Morris,’ he said. ‘Our perfect pioneer!’

As a player Tom was famous but not perfect. In 1851 he lost a match to Willie Dunn on the final hole. After his last putt missed, ‘Tom gave his ball a kick in disgust,’ wrote Hutchison, ‘while Dunn took a snuff with great gusto and smiled satisfactorily.’ Tom turned the tables the following year when the golf world descended on St Andrews for the R&A’s autumn meeting. In one foursomes duel he and Colonel Fairlie pipped Dunn and another Musselburgh golfer, the expert amateur Sir Robert Hay, who had ‘challenged the world’ with Dunn as his partner. Then Tom delighted his hometown by teaming with none other than Allan Robertson, who had ‘forgiven’ Tom – Allan’s word – and now made gutta-percha balls in his kitchen by the old links. The reunited Invincibles gave Hay and Dunn odds of two to one. Tom made side bets giving as much as five to one. ‘The betting was extreme in this important piece of golfing warfare,’ reported the Fifeshire Journal, ‘this all-absorbing trial of dexterity betwixt St Andrews and Musselburgh … The match was witnessed by doctors, lawyers and divines (young ones at least of the latter profession), professors, bankers, railway directors, merchants’ clerks, tradesmen, workmen … as well as a goodly sprinkling of general idlers.’

As at North Berwick three years before, Allan and Tom were out-driven by taller, stronger foes. Worse yet was Tom’s putting. He kept missing short putts, a fault that would dog him for most of his life. According to the Journal, ‘Tom, it was insinuated, was at his old trade of “funking”.’ But, in another late reversal, the Invincibles stormed back. On one eventful hole Allan wound up and slugged a drive that ‘shot far ahead of Mr Hay’s corresponding one; indeed, one could hardly conceive how Allan’s little body could propel a ball so far.’ Tom sank a crucial putt; he and Allan won in a walk. ‘In the progress inward, some boys removed the flags … and held them aloft in the procession, giving it the appearance of a triumphal entry,’ the Journal story concluded, calling Robertson and Morris ‘the cocks o’ the green. Long may they hold that honourable elevation. St Andrews for ever!’

That account was too negative for one St Andrean, who fired off a letter to the editor. ‘[Y]our correspondent says that at one stage of it he was afraid Tom was at his “old trade of funking” – that is, showing a want of nerve,’ wrote A GOLFER, who claimed that the match’s outcome ‘ought to dissipate every doubt – should any really exist – as to Tom’s pluck’.

Another dispatch lent weight to the charge that Tom Morris was a short-range funker. When an R&A member mailed a postcard addressed to THE MISSER OF SHORT PUTTS, PRESTWICK, the postman took it straight to Tom, who might have torn it apart or hidden it in his pocket. Instead he laughed and showed the card to half the town.

In the 1850s the Invincibles swept aside challengers in St Andrews, Prestwick, Perth, Musselburgh and half a dozen other Scottish towns.

Allan claimed never to have lost in single combat – despite his ‘wee coatie’ match with Tom and other losses he considered unofficial. As the ’50s progressed he defended his ‘perfect’ record with Jesuitical zeal. Singles mattered more after Willie Dunn moved south to be greenkeeper at Blackheath, near London, where he earned ten shillings a week – about twenty-five pounds per year – for serving Englishmen like the peevish Lord Starmont, who broke two sets of clubs over his knee during his first round of golf and pronounced himself satisfied with the day’s exercise. Dunn’s departure left Scotland to Allan Robertson and Tom Morris, only one of whom could be the country’s King of Clubs, a title the east-coast newspapers gave to Allan. The king’s crown would be hard to dislodge. On one visit to St Andrews, Tom played his old boss and beat him. Allan called it a casual, unofficial match, though bets had been laid and paid. The west-coast Ayr Observer, loyal to Tom, crowed, ‘The palm of victory, which has so long reposed in quiescence in the sombre shade of St Rule, is gracefully waving in the westering breezes.’ But the Fifeshire Journal defended the rule of St Rule’s, the tallest cathedral tower in St Andrews, by sniffing, ‘Who would have conceived aught so preposterous as that insignificant match should be seized and a claim to the championship constructed upon it by anyone conversant with the usages of golf?’ Or, more simply put: frontiersman, go hang.

The newspaper war escalated, with the Observer denouncing the Journal’s ‘treasonable discourses’ and claiming, ‘Tom is “the King of Scotland”, and reflects the highest credit on Prestwick.’ To which the Journal shot back: ‘The Prestwick colony is in open revolt against the lord liege of golfers – the “bona fide” King of Clubs – Allan.’

The problem was that no one had found a way to identify the best golfer. Most clubs held annual and semi-annual tournaments, but the cracks were not allowed to play; instead they caddied for the gentlemen. The cracks had their challenge matches, which may have made for much amusing betting among the gentlemen, but which could not crown a true King of Clubs for two reasons. First, there was no way to say which of many matches was the match, the big one. Second, a ranking based on challenge matches could be stymied by a king who would not risk his crown.

‘I prefer having Tom as a partner,’ said Allan, royally coy.

Fairlie and Eglinton urged Tom to issue a loud, once-and-for-all challenge, but Tom would not shame Allan into playing him. Still, he let his patrons know that if they arranged a £100 match, he would show up. But Allan declined repeated offers and Tom let the matter drop, leaving the nascent sport of professional golf in uneasy equilibrium, tippingly balanced between east and west, Robertson and Morris, a balance that would hold until a new player barged onstage to send everything ass-over-teapot.

His name was Willie Park. The son of a farmer who scraped up a living by pushing a plough for a Musselburgh landowner, Willie grew up with seven brothers and sisters in a cottage on the high road that passed the links just east of Edinburgh. As a gaunt, hungry lad Willie caddied for members of the Musselburgh Golf Club. He learned to play the game on summer evenings after the gentlemen went into the clubhouse for dinner and drinks. He started out with one club, a hooked stick he’d whittled down from a tree root. Thanks in part to a handy source of calories – a baker who played the local boys for pies – the caddie with the whittled stick grew strong and bullish. After winning enough bets to buy a set of real golf clubs, he beat every caddie in sight. He went into business making the new gutta-percha balls, which he carried in the deep pockets of a long coat he wore around the links. But Willie Park made his name as a player and, in 1854, he did what strong young men are born to do. He went looking for older men to fight.

Whether you played Park for crowns and shillings, for twenty pounds or for a pie, he left no doubt that he wanted to kill you on the links. He claimed he had never played a round of golf for pleasure. For the better part of a year he issued challenges to Allan Robertson, the living legend he planned to debunk, daring the King of Clubs to play him in messages sent through other golfers and finally in a newspaper advertisement. The response from St Andrews was silence. But if Robertson thought Willie Park would take no answer for an answer, he was wrong. In 1854 Park bought a rail ticket to Robertson’s town. The young tough was twenty years old on the day he stepped off the train in enemy territory. As a Musselburgh man he was allergic to the staid old snoot-in-the-air town. He began playing practice rounds alone, smacking booming, parabolic drives that sent caddies hurrying to Allan’s door with news of the stranger’s arrival. Park, with his slightly open stance and fierce downswing, made contact so clean that his drives sounded like pistol shots. His drives carried to places where R&A members often found their second shots.

After one such exhibition Park strutted to Allan’s cottage on the corner of Golf Place and Links Road. He introduced himself and demanded a match.

Allan was amused. He admired pluck. But he was not about to risk his crown playing a potentially dangerous upstart, so he accepted the challenge with a proviso: young Willie would have to earn his shot at Allan by beating another St Andrews professional.

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 100 strokes or fewer, George played in a white cap that from a distance made him look 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 honour.

Their scrap would be Willie Park’s debut on the national stage. The betting favoured Tom, who was thirty-three years old and 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 4 November 1854, readers of the Edinburgh News saw a notice that revealed itself in the second paragraph 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 more than 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 vendors 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 honour 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 moulding 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 it open several inches, even in winter, a habit that drove Nancy to take little Tommy to another bed near the fire.

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 labour. Yet many doctors were reluctant to tell women about the 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 neighbours, sang out in church. She smiled most of all on Tommy, her first answered prayer, a bold, happy boy 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 autumn 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. He was remembered 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 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 there was something wrong with his legs.

Tom began 1860 the way he began every day. On New Year’s Day he woke, pulled on his bathing longjohns and took a dip in the bone-chilling Firth of Clyde. Afterwards, 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. Family mattered most in troubled times. Nancy was worried about baby Jack, who grew but who 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 now 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 and 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 the 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. The jackets were heavy black-and-green tartans, the kind worn by labourers on Eglinton’s estates. Seen from a distance, the players in their chequered 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 twenty-five pounds. 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 it three times in a row would own the Belt forever.

On the clear, windy morning of 17 October 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 them 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 the fewest strokes would keep the Belt for a year; 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.

At half-past eleven the golfers walked to the first teeing-ground beside the twelfth hole’s putting-green. About a hundred spectators followed them – gentlemen golfers leading their wives and children, Prestwickers of all classes and occupations. Fairlie scanned the horizon, seeking omens in the weather. Tall, smiling Eglinton stood nearby, his hair flowing in the wind. Nine-year-old Tommy Morris slipped between gentlemen’s jackets and ladies’ frills to get a clear view of his father. As the home-club professional, Tom had the honour of teeing off first. He was favoured to win. After all, he had built the course. He stood a few club-lengths from the twelfth hole’s knee-high flag and waited while his caddie teed up a ball on a lump of wet sand. Tom took a last look at the fairway ahead – his Herculean first hole, well over a quarter of a mile of turf – and began his ticktock swing, the first swing in the history of major-championship golf. At that moment, according to one account, a gust sent his tie up over his chin and momentarily blinded him. He managed to strike the ball soundly, but missed his target. He would struggle with his aim for most of the day.

Bob Andrew played next. The lanky, glum-faced crack Andrew was called the Rook for his beadyeyed resemblance to a crow. He was second choice in the day’s betting. The Rook’s backers were delighted to take him at three-to-one odds. Andrew hit a low, skimming drive, then followed Tom past Goosedubs Swamp along with their caddies and most of the spectators, including the gentleman marker who would keep their scores. Spectators in those days tracked their favourites from hole to hole rather than staying put and letting the golfers pass by. They tromped across putting-greens and often stood in bunkers if that helped them see the putting. No one raked bunkers during play; that would have seemed like cheating.

According to Prestwick’s club history, ‘generally there was a feeling that the championship lay between Morris and Andrew.’ Willie Park, the second pairing’s featured player, disagreed with the general feeling. Park made a slew of side bets, backing himself. He was the bettors’ third choice at Prestwick; the smart money figured that the twenty-seven-year-old’s reckless style would hurt him in a medal-play event in which one wild spell or one unlucky hole could cost him the Belt. But Park got off to a strong start, launching a drive that one writer described as sounding ‘as if it had been shot from some rocket apparatus’.

On Tom’s epic first hole and the long uphill second, Park’s power tipped the balance in his favour. ‘At the commencement of the game the interest was concentrated in Tom Morris and the Rook, who were paired together,’ the Ayr Advertiser reported, ‘but it very soon had become apparent that the struggle for supremacy would be betwixt Park and Tom Morris. Park made the best start, four ahead of Tom in the first two holes. At the end of the first round Park had scored 55, and Tom 58.’ Both men shot 59 in the second round, leaving Park three strokes ahead. By then it was a two-man tournament.

As the final round unfolded, Park made a tidy four at Prestwick’s 400-yard fourth hole, where a stone wall crowded the back of the green. Tom, playing a minute ahead of his rival, kept finding his ball in the bunkers he had shored up with railway ties. ‘At this crisis the excitement waxed most intense,’ one observer noted, adding that, ‘frequenters of the links will also admit that in all their experience of Morris they never saw him come to grief so often.’ But Tom kept grinding out fours and fives, whittling a stroke off Park’s lead, then another.