Tommy's Honor Part 3

The rails led north along Ayr Bay before curving inland through the town of Paisley, where shawl-weavers made a pattern that was all the rage in London, and from there to the brown sprawl of Glasgow. In 1800 the city's population had been 77,000. Now it was 400,000. Many of the new Glaswegians had fled Ireland or the starving Scottish highlands, where once-proud crofters survived winters by bleeding their livestock and frying up the blood. Life was often worse in Glasgow. Families huddled in piles of rags and straw in un-heated tenement flats. Children froze in their sleep. The sky was thin smoke and the sewers overflowed. Glasgow's leading products were s.h.i.+ps, locomotives, and vast clouds of eye-watering stench. The city's stink surpa.s.sed even that of Edinburgh, the capital known as "Auld Reekie" for its septic odor. Yet the metropolis was glorious, too, in the way that a blast furnace is glorious: noisy, dirty, and Promethean. Forty years before, Glasgow's foundries had produced 25,000 tons of iron in a year. The total was now more than 500,000 tons. This one city produced more iron than all of England. The train carrying the Morris family wheezed steam as it lurched into Glasgow's Bridge Street Station, where the Morrises boarded an eastbound train that took them from booming, boiling Glasgow into the green heart of Scotland.

It was only a hundred miles from Prestwick Station to St. Andrews, but the trip took all day as they switched from train to train on crisscrossing rail routes. In the forenoon they pa.s.sed the short, gloomy Kilsyth Hills, with the shoulders of the higher Campsie Fells behind. They changed trains at Green-hill, where the hills were green even in December, but if you were to hike to their summits you would see smudged skies hanging over lower land, where coal and ironstone mines had turned farmland into gray ant-hills. The Morrises' train rolled due north through Bannockburn and Stirling, pa.s.sing within longbow range of the battlegrounds where William Wallace beat the English in 1297 and Robert the Bruce beat them again in 1314. Tom and his family changed trains at Stirling Station, where Tom paid a porter to trundle their luggage onto an eastbound car while the children peered up at Stirling Castle on its flat rock pedestal a hundred feet above the trees. Perhaps Tom pointed up at the castle and told them a bit of its history: In 1542 Mary Queen of Scots was crowned up there at the ripe young age of nine months. Lord Livingstone placed the baby queen on her throne, and because she was too young to sit up, he stayed nearby to make sure that she didn't roll off onto the floor.

The train out of Stirling took the Morrises east into Fife. After a change to the Edinburgh & Northern Railway at Dunfermline, their route curved northeast through Ladybank Station, following the River Eden past fallow fields to Cupar and Leuchars, where the river spilled into the North Sea. Here at last was a final transfer of luggage and weary children to the snub-nosed little train that ran to St. Andrews.

The rail link from Leuchars was only four miles. They would just beat December's late-afternoon sunset. Tom and Nancy's hearts must have risen as they approached their hometown. For the children St. Andrews was a foreign place, a wintry town north of Moscow, north of Copenhagen, huddled on a promontory whipped by sea winds. One traveler recalled his first view of St. Andrews "across an almost treeless plain, a few spires standing on a point of rock." From a mile away the Morrises saw rooftops, chimney pots and crow-stepped gables, the tall clock tower of St. Salvator's in the middle ground, the spires of the crumbling cathedral behind. Near dusk, the town's west-facing windows mirrored the setting sun and St. Andrews seemed to glow. "I never saw anywhere such winter sunsets as at St. Andrews," wrote the local pastor. "Regularly each afternoon, through all November and December, the sky all round the horizon blazed with crimson and gold.... The men came out of the Club daily, and gazed their fill."

The train moved past the wide Cottage Bunker on the fifteenth hole, following the golf course to the west edge of town. Here the tracks ran right beside the course. The knee-high flagstick that marked the fifteenth hole, topped with a square of red flannel, was twenty paces from the rails. The train came in at fifteen miles per hour, slowing to a walking pace on its way to St. Andrews Station, where it huffed to a stop, exhausted. Tom helped his wife and children down to the wood-plank platform at the station. He picked up little Jack and led the way to town.

They took rented rooms on Golf Place. Tom also rented a shop nearby, an old candy shop where he set up a workbench and began turning out gutties and working on clubs. During the winter months when few golfers played, he paced the links, chewing his pipe, strategizing. Like his contemporary James Balfour, Tom relished what Balfour called "the grand history of St. Andrews and its sacred memories-its delightful air-the song of its numberless larks-which nestle among the whins-the scream of the sea-birds flying overhead-the blue sea dotted with a few fis.h.i.+ng-boats-the noise of its waves-the bay of the Eden as seen from the High Hole when the tide is full-the venerable towers and the broken outline of the ancient city." But as Custodier of the Links, as Tom was officially called, he was in hard fact the keeper of a dilapidated green. The links had deteriorated since Allan Robertson's death five years before, a slide that continued through the unhappy tenures of Watty Alexander and Alexander Herd. After Herd quit there was no greenkeeper at all for more than a year. By the time Tom arrived, cows grazed fairways gouged by cleeks. The putting-greens, too small for the traffic they endured now that golf was ever more popular, were b.u.mpy and brown; many were as rough as the fairways and teeing-grounds. Women dried and bleached their wash by draping it on whin bushes near Swilcan Burn. Hors.e.m.e.n, shepherds, and seaweed-pickers crossed the line of play, stamping the links with hoofprints and barrow tracks. At the Heathery Hole, bits of sh.e.l.l deflected putts on a bare, brown putting-green.

One of Tom's first moves was getting the cattle off his turf. With aid from influential R&A members, he established a new local law: Cows could graze on public land except except on the golf links. Tom doctored the Heathery Hole putting-green with hardy gra.s.s seed he ordered from Holland. He started work on new putting-greens for the first and Home holes, and introduced a practice that would last for most of his life: Each morning Tom Morris inspected the St. Andrews caddies, a ragged lot that included grimy barefoot boys of ten and eleven years old as well as grizzled men of sixty. Some of the older caddies reeked of cheap whisky, as did one or two of the boys. Tom told the caddies that he was not their father or pastor, but they were now in his charge, and he would sack any caddie who disgraced himself or these links with drink or coa.r.s.e language. Further, there would be no golf on the Sabbath, with no exceptions. on the golf links. Tom doctored the Heathery Hole putting-green with hardy gra.s.s seed he ordered from Holland. He started work on new putting-greens for the first and Home holes, and introduced a practice that would last for most of his life: Each morning Tom Morris inspected the St. Andrews caddies, a ragged lot that included grimy barefoot boys of ten and eleven years old as well as grizzled men of sixty. Some of the older caddies reeked of cheap whisky, as did one or two of the boys. Tom told the caddies that he was not their father or pastor, but they were now in his charge, and he would sack any caddie who disgraced himself or these links with drink or coa.r.s.e language. Further, there would be no golf on the Sabbath, with no exceptions.

On one of his first mornings that winter, Tom was moving down the line of caddies, sniffing their breath, when he came to a tall, crooked-limbed fellow in a top hat and a long blue swallowtail coat.

"You know me, Tom," the man said, looking down at his old partner in feather-ball making. "Sweet milk I drink and nothing else."

"Lang Willie Robertson!" Tom said. "That milk breath could knock a man down."

Sixty-seven-year-old Lang Willie and other caddies pitched in during Tom's early labors, but few could keep up with him. He rose early for a dip in St. Andrews Bay even when there was ice on the shallows. His sun-and windburned skin stayed red all winter as he took up the work of mending and modernizing the old course, work that Allan Robertson had started eight winters before. Back in the cold months of 185758, the R&A had paid Robertson a one-time fee of 25 to enlarge most of the putting-greens so that two holes could be cut into the greens. Before then, golfers had gone outward to the Eden for nine holes and then played the homeward nine on the same narrow path, using the same putting-greens. In his Reminiscences of Golf on St. Andrews Links Reminiscences of Golf on St. Andrews Links, Balfour recalled fairways "no wider than a good, broad street," with thick whin bushes on both sides. A large bunker could fill most of the s.p.a.ce between. It was no wonder that players of Tom's generation learned to sacrifice distance for accuracy. As J. Gordon McPherson marveled in his 1891 book Golf and Golfers Golf and Golfers, "what skill was needed-especially with a side-wind-to avoid the Scylla of the whins without being caught by the Charybdis of the bunker!"

In those days holes like the third, Cartgate Out, and the fifteenth, Cartgate In, shared a small putting-green and the very same hole in the ground, which meant that golfers playing the third hole had to wait while others putted on the fifteenth, or vice versa. (The group reaching the green first had priority.) And since the next hole's teeing-ground had to be within eight club-lengths of the hole, golfers who had waited to putt out often did so while drives and curses whizzed past their ears. As more players took up golf, the links grew so crowded that gutties sometimes struck each other in mid-flight. A dozen or more golfers might be approaching, chipping, putting, and teeing off in a s.p.a.ce the size of a dining room. More than one player had the shock of swinging down at his ball just as another ball came flying in to strike his club and carom back the way it came. By the 1850s the links were so congested that a few R&A members avoided the crowds by playing at night. They placed lanterns beside the holes, creating an eerie firefly effect-beads of light leading out through the dark toward the Eden.

Allan Robertson relieved the congestion by enlarging the putting-greens. Each of his new double greens featured two holes and two flags. Now, rather than tussling for s.p.a.ce like miners going opposite ways in a yard-wide tunnel, golfers moved smoothly out and back. To show them which hole was which on each double green, Robertson used white flags for the outward nine, red for the inward. The first red flags were cut from worn-out golfing jackets donated by R&A members.

It was soon clear that St. Andrews' new, wider putting-greens called for wider fairways. Otherwise players left Robertson's new, s.p.a.cious greens only to duel for s.p.a.ce in the same narrow pathways Balfour had compared to a city street. Robertson had done some clearing of whins, heather and long gra.s.s, but Tom inherited the bulk of that task, which would occupy him for years. He would widen the fairways, giving golfers more room for error, opening the way to a more freewheeling style of play.

After cutting back swaths of heather and high gra.s.s, Tom attacked the whins. There had been no whins at Prestwick, but the thick, sharp-bristled bushes choked the links at St. Andrews. Tom was a terrier with whins. The club paid local men to help-Hutchison called them Tom's "h.o.r.n.y-handed sons of toil"-but Tom's hands were anything but soft. He could strike a match on them. Still, no bare hand could win a round with the whins' skin-tearing thorns. Tom wore thick gloves on the days he battled whins: chopping off their branches, undermining them with picks and spades, yanking, grunting and wrestling until the gnarled brown bushes came out by the roots. Only then did he have the satisfaction of tossing a whin carca.s.s into a barrow and lighting his pipe. And that was one bush out of thousands. All through the late 1860s Tom would come home with whin thorns sticking out of his jacket, his hat, and even his beard. Nancy and Lizzie would pick out the thorns and throw them in the fire. Tommy wondered which foe his father would rather be rid of, Willie Park or the whins.

Tommy wondered, too, whether his father's backbreaking work was hurting his golf. After winning his third Open in 1864, Tom had failed to finish first or even second in the next two.

Both Morrises went to Prestwick for the 1865 Open. Fourteen-year-old Tommy, by far the youngest in the field, was making his first try for the Belt. His father was the betting favorite, but after two rounds Tom stood nine shots behind Andrew Strath, the gaunt St. Andrean who had succeeded him as Prestwick's greenkeeper. Strath came from a large, colorful family. His younger brother, Davie, was a gifted golfer who would become Tommy's foe and great friend. Another Strath brother called Mad Willie was a thug who specialized in home invasions. He would burst through your door at the dinner hour, beat you up, and steal your valuables-banknotes, teapots, silverware, even your hat if he liked it. Golfers joked that if Andrew Strath won the Belt he'd have to hide it from Mad Willie. But the joke was whispered, for everyone knew the Straths were an ill-starred family, p.r.o.ne to consumption. Twenty-nine-year-old Andrew already showed signs of the tuberculosis that would kill him.

Strath was apparently better at golf than greenkeeping. As the Ayrs.h.i.+re Express Ayrs.h.i.+re Express reported, "Never since the Belt was competed for has the weather been so good, the only drawback being that some of the putting-greens were not as smooth as. .h.i.therto." Tom Morris, weary and scarred after months of whin-wrestling, fell apart in the second round. According to the reported, "Never since the Belt was competed for has the weather been so good, the only drawback being that some of the putting-greens were not as smooth as. .h.i.therto." Tom Morris, weary and scarred after months of whin-wrestling, fell apart in the second round. According to the Express Express, "No little consternation prevailed among the backers of the favourite when it was known that he had been beaten by his own son." Not that Tommy was anywhere near the lead. Eight shots behind with twelve holes to go, Tommy picked up his ball and quit. At the last hole, scrawny Strath edged Willie Park for the Belt.

By 1866, Tom's second full year on the job, the cost of maintaining the St. Andrews links was eight times what it had been in 1860. He had stayed under his 20 expense limit in his first year, billing the R&A for seventeen pounds, two s.h.i.+llings and sixpence for "labour a.s.sistance, cartage and gra.s.s seed...and a new wheel for the links barrow," but the next year Tom nearly doubled his budget, spending a bit over 36 for labor and equipment, including an innovation that sh.o.r.ed up the hole in the High Hole's crumbly putting-green-an iron collar that was the first cup in a golf green. No one complained about the money he was spending. Even R&A members who had opposed Tom's hiring praised him now. The fairways were wider, bunker walls re-sodded, divots filled with sand and gra.s.s seed to help them grow over. Best of all were the putting-greens. Tom made some of the course's double greens still larger as well as smoother and greener. He top-dressed the greens with sand as he had at Prestwick, and helped his workmen whisk them with long, rough brooms made of dried evergreen branches strapped to old broomsticks. His conifer brooms resembled the kind that witches rode in fairy tales, and they worked a sort of magic, sc.r.a.ping the top layer of soil just enough to stimulate young gra.s.s. He said brooming a putting-green was like scratching an itch-the green liked liked it. it.

For greens other than the one at the wet High Hole he used clay pipes as hole-liners. The pipes, made in nearby Kincaple, happened to be four and a quarter inches in diameter. Due to that quirk of the Kincaple brickworks, four and a quarter inches became the standard diameter of the cup. (Or at least that was the story in St. Andrews. Musselburgh golfers claimed they'd been cutting holes that size since 1829.) While Tom mended the course, his son hit b.a.l.l.s. Tommy's swing would be imitated by a generation of golfers who saw themselves as his apostles. Gripping the club with his hands about a finger-width apart, Tommy kept the "V" between his right thumb and forefinger aimed at his right shoulder at address, as golfers do today. Twisting so far on the backswing that he nearly lost sight of the ball, he swung down with a sudden move that one witness compared to "the shutting of a jackknife." He hit the ball low, drilling it into the wind. In golf as in all things, Tommy was a skeptic: n.o.body could tell him how to hit a shot, he would find out for himself. He improved by making mistakes and then trying again a different way, or just trying harder. In the words of Bernard Darwin, grandson of the evolutionist and golf correspondent for the Times Times of London early in the next century, Tommy Morris was "palpably filled with golfing genius." Tommy would have agreed with Darwin that "golf at its best is a perpetual adventure, that it consists in investing not in gilt-edged securities but in comparatively speculative stock, that it ought to be a risky business." The boy played more like the daring Willie Park than like his own father, who was by nature a feather-ball player. Tom's style was needlepoint-knitting a round together with straight lines from one safe spot to the next on ragged, narrow links. Tommy's more imaginative, attacking game evolved along with the gutta-percha ball and the wider fairways and iron-headed clubs that came with it. of London early in the next century, Tommy Morris was "palpably filled with golfing genius." Tommy would have agreed with Darwin that "golf at its best is a perpetual adventure, that it consists in investing not in gilt-edged securities but in comparatively speculative stock, that it ought to be a risky business." The boy played more like the daring Willie Park than like his own father, who was by nature a feather-ball player. Tom's style was needlepoint-knitting a round together with straight lines from one safe spot to the next on ragged, narrow links. Tommy's more imaginative, attacking game evolved along with the gutta-percha ball and the wider fairways and iron-headed clubs that came with it.

Far from mistrusting irons, as older players did, Tommy found new uses for them. One favorite was his rut iron. A forerunner of the sand wedge, the rut iron was made for digging a ball out of cart-wheel ruts. Most links were crisscrossed with ruts-cart tracks barely wider than a golf ball. The rut iron was a lofted specialty club designed to flip the ball out of a rut to safe ground. But Tommy used his rut iron from the fairway. As a Prestwick Golf Club historian wrote, he "developed the art of playing approach shots with a rut-iron, a shot so difficult as never to have been attempted before." By swinging sharply down with the lofted little cleek, Tommy launched high approaches that stopped or even backed up when they hit the green. Backspin! As a tournament tactic, he invented it.

He perfected a different shot while practicing in his father's workshop. Tom and his workers would be molding, cooling, and hammering gutties while Tommy, who did all he could to avoid such tedious labor, worked on his chipping. Fas.h.i.+oning a clay ring the size of the hole, he dropped the ring on the saw-dusted cement floor and chipped b.a.l.l.s at it.

He was already a brilliant putter. His stance on the green was unique-right foot almost touching the ball, so close that it appeared he'd b.u.mp that foot with his wooden putter on the backswing. He gave putts a firm rap, coming upward through the stroke to add overspin that kept the ball rolling over b.u.mps and bits of sh.e.l.l. "Young Tom was of an entirely different temperament from his father. He played with great dash and vigour," reads Prestwick's club history. "He was a notably good putter, always giving the hole a chance...the hero of the golfing world and the pride of Scotland." It seemed he never missed inside five feet. "Of the short ones," the golf chronicler H.S.C. Everard recalled, "he missed fewer than any player the writer has ever seen."

n.o.body ever said that about Tom. The elder Morris was a generally solid putter bedeviled by what later generations would call the yips. His putting woes earned him frequent ribbings from his son. "The hole'll not come to you, Da," Tommy said. "Be up!" Still Tom left crucial putts short. Tommy teased him, telling other golfers, "My father'd be a brave putter if the hole were always a yard nearer to 'im." Tom shook his fist, citing the Fifth Commandment: Honor thy father! Honor thy father! But he liked the boy's spirit. Tom may have feigned indifference when his son hit brilliant shots; may have offered only a handshake when the boy beat him for the first time, on a windy morning when Tommy sank a putt and threw his putter into the air; may have scolded Tommy later for making a show of himself. But Tom was quietly pleased. The boy wasn't afraid to win. But he liked the boy's spirit. Tom may have feigned indifference when his son hit brilliant shots; may have offered only a handshake when the boy beat him for the first time, on a windy morning when Tommy sank a putt and threw his putter into the air; may have scolded Tommy later for making a show of himself. But Tom was quietly pleased. The boy wasn't afraid to win.

As the 1860s progressed father and son began playing as a team in money matches. Small-stakes contests at first, but the wagers Tom made with cracks and club members grew to ten, twenty, even fifty pounds-Tom's annual salary as greenkeeper. He said little about these matches to Nancy, who wanted more for their bright academy-taught son than the life of a crack. Indeed Tommy lacked a prime credential for that low trade: Unlike all the other cracks, he was not also a caddie. This privilege was unique to him-from the start Tommy Morris was a player, never stooping to tee up someone else's ball.

There was no golf on the Sabbath. Golfer Andra Kirkaldy recalled the town's "broad clean streets in the quiet of Sunday, when every tavern door is closed." Six fresh-scrubbed Morrises went up North Street, pa.s.sing the little house where Tom was born, nodding to other churchgoers. They wore their "Sunday best," a recent Sabbath custom that signaled respectability. Tom had on a well-brushed tweed suit he wore only to church. Nancy wore a long dress and a bonnet with a ribbon that tied under her chin; if the sun was out she carried a parasol. Tommy walked stiffly in his short black jacket, frilled cotton s.h.i.+rt and black tie, striped breeches, peaked cap, and gleaming shoes freshly blacked by his sister, Lizzie, who was dressed in starchy frills and a little bonnet of her own. Jimmy to his deep satisfaction was decked out just like Tommy. Little Jack wore plain black. Unable to walk, he rode on his wheeled trolley, sometimes pushed by one of his brothers, sometimes pulling himself along. He wore leather half-gloves that protected his knuckles.

Holy Trinity Church covered half a block in the middle of town. A stone castle dating to 1412, it was rebuilt in the 1700s with crouching gargoyles and a bell tower twenty-five yards high. Tom had been christened here. He led his family through the church's iron gate to arched oaken doors that moved with the weight of centuries. Inside was gray Calvinism: cutty stools for sinners to sit on while the pastor scolded them from his stone pulpit; a Seat of Repentance for golfers caught playing on the Sabbath. The Seat of Repentance had fewer occupants after Tom came back from Prestwick and helped the pastor enforce the church's ban on Sunday golf. "If the golfers don't need a day of rest," Tom always said, "the greens surely do." His ban has remained in force from then until now, for more than 7,000 weeks; it still bars Sunday golf except for the one week every five years when the Open Champions.h.i.+p returns to St. Andrews.

Morning services began at eleven and let out at half past twelve. Like many other families the Morrises then walked from the kirk down to the Cathedral cemetery. Little Jack enjoyed this jaunt; the street was downhill here. If the wind was easterly they'd keep to the south side of South Street to stay farther from the gasworks, which stank even on Sundays. On some nights people in this corner of town went to bed holding their noses. A local doctor had parents bring sick children into the gasworks, to be held over the coals and breathe black fumes to cure their whooping cough. This part of town was where the fisher-folk lived. The streets were littered with heaps of herring guts, tails, and heads, the heaps nosed by pigs and pecked by black-backed herring gulls. South Street led past an old townhouse called Queen Mary's House, where the Queen of Scots had stayed during her visits to St. Andrews three hundred years before. Like most boys, Tommy was most interested in an upstairs bedroom in Queen Mary's house. That room figured in a lewd tale that local lads told, a tale that happened to be true: On a night in 1563 the French poet Chastelard, mad in love with the tall, red-headed Queen of Scots, hid in her bedroom. Chastelard spied on the queen as she disrobed, then forced himself on her nakedness. The Queen cried out, guards came running, and for his pa.s.sion the poet was hanged in the morning.

From Queen Mary's House it was steps to the ruined cathedral, a tumble of half-fallen walls and acres of gra.s.s open to the sky. For centuries this spot was the center of Scottish Catholicism. It fell in a day-June 14, 1559-after Protestant reformer John Knox finished a fiery three-day sermon at Holy Trinity and paris.h.i.+oners ran downhill to the cathedral, where with pikes, axes, and bare hands they pulled down the grand temple of Popery. Now the sea wind whistled through its walls and its decayed centerpiece, St. Rule's Tower, named for the monk that legend credited with carrying the arm bones, kneecap, and tooth of Apostle Andrew to this place. The Morrises walked through the gra.s.s toward St. Rule's until they reached a graveyard. Some of the stones were so old that weather had erased them. Others held seven or eight sets of names and numbers. A twelve-foot-deep plot could accommodate eight coffins, with newer generations stacked tight on top of the ones that came before.

One gravestone was an obelisk with an elfin, mutton-chopped face bulging out of it, as if the elf inside were trying to force his way out. Here lay Allan Robertson, under crossed golf clubs and the words FAR AND SURE. FAR AND SURE.

South of there stood a thick white stone. It marked the Morris family plot, purchased by Tom after his and Nancy's first son died. Tommy stood by his father, mother, sister, and brothers, reading the side of the stone that faced each day's sunrise. This was the grave of Wee Tom, the first Thomas Morris, Jr.

ERECTED.

BY.

THOMAS M MORRIS AND A AGNES B BAYNE.

IN M MEMORY OF THEIR B BELOVED SON.

THOMAS.

WHO DIED 9TH A APRIL 1850, A 1850, AGED 4 YEARS.

IN THE SILENT T TOMB WE LEAVE HIM.

TILL THE R RESURRECTION M MORN.

WHEN HIS S SAVIOUR WILL R RECEIVE HIM.

AND R RESTORE HIS LOVELY F FORM.

Under this marker was the elm box into which Tom had lifted his firstborn. His consolation stood beside him, a strong son with a jackknife swing and the same name. Names mattered. Nancy was Agnes Agnes on the stone because that was her given name. Lizzie was named for Nancy's mother, Elizabeth; Jimmy for Colonel Fairlie; Jack for Tom's father. Tommy's name honored his father but also Wee Tom, the eldest son who never lived to outgrow his nickname. on the stone because that was her given name. Lizzie was named for Nancy's mother, Elizabeth; Jimmy for Colonel Fairlie; Jack for Tom's father. Tommy's name honored his father but also Wee Tom, the eldest son who never lived to outgrow his nickname.

The Morrises then walked back up South Street to Holy Trinity, pa.s.sing through the same iron gate and oaken doors to attend afternoon services, filing into a pew under a vaulted ceiling that climbed into shadows. They listened and prayed. They sang the "Magnificat" and "Nunc Dimittis." By the time they got home it was almost time to eat. After a quiet dinner, tea, Bible reading, and bedtime prayers, everlasting Sunday gave way to Monday morning. Tom would be out the door early, headed for the beach and his morning swim. Tommy would wake early as well, and reach for his golf clubs.

By Tommy's sixteenth year, professional golf was growing fast. The cracks' tournaments were no longer mere sideshows to the club members' medal compet.i.tions. They were coming to be seen as showcases for the game's leading talents-the national game most expertly played. Until 1864 the Open was the only significant event for professionals, but from 1864 to 1870 there would be fourteen more, five that were open to all comers and nine for professionals only. Such contests were still primarily excuses for gentlemen to get down a bet-in the absence of a good c.o.c.kfight, they would bet on a duel among the cracks-and the professionals didn't object to being so used, as long as they were not too cheaply bought. Willie Park for one scowled at the fistfuls of twenty-pound notes he saw changing hands at events in which the winning player got 2 or 5. As usual, he went public with his gripe. "If better inducements are not held out," the Fifes.h.i.+re Journal Fifes.h.i.+re Journal warned, "William Park at least will hesitate before he comes." Park's mood was sour. After narrowly losing the '65 Open to Strath, he had lost a pocket watch to the Grim Reaper. According to the Musselburgh golf writer George Colville, a gentleman promised Park an expensive watch if he could drive a ball off the watch without scratching the face. Park did just that, but the man died two days later and had the watch in his pocket when he was buried. warned, "William Park at least will hesitate before he comes." Park's mood was sour. After narrowly losing the '65 Open to Strath, he had lost a pocket watch to the Grim Reaper. According to the Musselburgh golf writer George Colville, a gentleman promised Park an expensive watch if he could drive a ball off the watch without scratching the face. Park did just that, but the man died two days later and had the watch in his pocket when he was buried.

"We are underpaid," Park told his fellow professionals, who seldom received a tenth of what was bet on them. They paid their own way to tournaments and bought their own food and drink, plenty of drink, but were treated as if their souls were as soiled as their boots. The cracks were never allowed in the gentleman golfers' clubhouses. A professional golfer who spoke out of turn or failed to tip his cap when a gentleman pa.s.sed was asking for a poke in the ribs with a walking stick: "Mind your manners, laddie." The cracks knew the club men could easily double or treble those 2 and 5 prizes, but the gentlemen hesitated and the cracks suspected they knew why: The gentleman golfers were worried. Might not these golf-playing caddies with their booming drives and trick shots eclipse the amateurs? The men of the R&A and other golf societies saw amateur golf as the true game, more skillful and pure than the shabby sport of the cracks. By supporting professional golfers, whom they saw as drunken, foul-mouthed louts, would they sabotage their own game? No one expected such a thing, not yet, but spectators and newspapers had been paying more attention to the cracks and less to amateur medalists-an ominous sign.

The youngest of the cracks was not yet a full-fledged professional and was not sure he wanted to be one. But with wrists as thick as a blacksmith's, Tommy Morris was already doing things no professional could do. His pre-swing waggle of the club, a forceful half swing, was so vigorous that he sometimes snapped a club's hickory shaft while waggling. Not even muscular Willie Park broke shafts without hitting the ball. Tommy loved doing that, for it proved his own strength and put worry in other golfers' eyes. His father only rolled his eyes-there's one more shaft to repair. But while Nancy hoped their son would find clean work in an office, Tom was dogged by a growing feeling that no golfer Tommy's age had ever played half as well. It was a strange idea, sobering, intoxicating. If the boy kept improving, Tom might not be King of Clubs for long. But there might soon be a new, even more profitable edition of the Invincibles.

In 1867 the two Morrises went to Carnoustie on the north side of the wide gray Firth of Tay. Twenty years before, Tom had cut his teeth as a course designer at Carnoustie, helping Allan Robertson lay out ten holes over tilting land threaded by the yard-wide Barry Burn. Now a purse of 20 drew golfers to those same ten holes for the biggest professional tournament yet.

Stepping off the train behind his father, Tommy was practically Sunday-dressed in his clean black jacket, vest, high collar and tie, topped off by a Balmoral bonnet he wore c.o.c.ked to one side. He was one of the few male travelers with no beard or mustache; he had barely started shaving. He and Tom were approaching the links when they encountered Willie Park. The reigning Open champion looked Tommy up and down. "Tom," he asked, "what have you brought this laddie here for?" Park was needling them-he knew who "this laddie" was, having regained the Belt at the '66 Open while Tom finished fourth and Tommy struggled home in ninth place, eighteen shots behind.

"You'll see what for," said Tom. "You'll see."

There were few level stances on Carnoustie's wind-lashed links. Thirty-two professionals, the largest field ever, slashed, spat, and cursed ill winds, bad lies, and worse bounces. Tom fell apart in the second round but Tommy stayed close to the pace set by Park and Bob Andrew, the Rook. After learning to slap b.a.l.l.s out of waist-high whins at St. Andrews, Tommy wasn't flummoxed by hanging lies at Carnoustie. He slashed low, medium-length drives, sent chip shots rolling up to peek at the hole, and on the last green of the third and last round he stood over a putt to tie for the lead. He spent so much time looking the putt over, settling into his stance, that some spectators thought he was afraid to make the stroke. At last he gave the ball a sharp rap. In it went.

Tommy had outlasted twenty-nine professionals including his father. Now he would go to a playoff round with Park and the Rook. While the three of them headed for the first teeing-ground, bettors shouted odds for the playoff, making Tommy a distant third choice. Just before the extra round began, a gambling man found Tom Morris in the crowd and offered generous odds if he'd bet on his son. Tom turned the man down, saying the boy was "over-young." He thought Tommy would lose.

The boy held nothing back in the playoff. If anything he swung harder than before, his bonnet flying off as he followed through. Spectators rose on tiptoe to watch his low, wind-cheating drives. Schoolboys ran to see where they bounced. Safe again! Tommy gained a quick stroke on Andrew, who soon gained it back, and on Park, who fell far behind and would settle for third-place money. Tommy traded shots and glances with the Rook, whose squinty smile seemed to suggest that he saw some dark humor in the game. As the playoff wore on, Tommy's focus narrowed until he didn't see the Rook or the crowd, only the ball and the target. Drive, approach, chip, putt. Nothing could be simpler. When Andrew faltered, Tommy added to his lead. The Rook, who had often lost to the first Tom Morris, was left gritting his teeth while this hard-swinging boy outplayed him. For him, Tommy was surely one Morris too many.

On the last green, spectators shouted and pounded his back. Tommy, knowing better than to make a show of himself, nodded thanks. The Carnoustie gentleman who held the purse stepped up to hand him 8, the winner's share.

Walking the St. Andrews links, Tommy looked north toward Carnoustie. On clear nights the northern sky was not black but ice blue, as if lamplit from the other side of the horizon. He was schooled enough to know why: That faint light was the reflection of polar ice. A glow that had mystified the ancients could be explained by science.

More than most St. Andreans-more than his father-Tommy was a modern, even at sixteen. Unlike the phrenologist who taught cla.s.ses in town, he did not believe that the b.u.mps on people's heads told their futures. Unlike the fishwives at the bottom of North Street, he did not believe that the souls of drowned sailors lived in seagulls. Tommy smiled when his mother spoke of a sea monster that had frightened St. Andrews children since the moon was new, a creature made of kelp, rope, and dead men's hair: "Beware the shallows, or the Water Skelpie'll git you!" If there were such a creature, he thought, it would run in terror from the sight of Tom Morris in his long johns, rising from his morning dip in the bay.

Looking north over miles of black water, Tommy saw a pinpoint of light sweeping an arc around Inchcape Rock, fourteen miles out. Its source was Scotland's newest, finest lighthouse, a man-made marvel. Even from fourteen miles' distance the beam was bright, sharp white, and yet here was a mystery: Sometimes the lighthouse beam and the polar glow behind it were blotted out by brighter lights-s.h.i.+mmering streaks of unearthly green, yellow, and red that filled the night sky. Science could not explain them but had given them a name, aurora borealis aurora borealis. The northern lights. Scots called them the "Merry Dancers."

Tommy stood watching the lights climb over the water. He did not believe in magic, but the dancing sky seemed to disagree.

Boat hulls buried on the beach would keep the sea from swamping the links.

Collision Course.

With his graying beard and forward-leaning gait, walking with one hand in his pocket and the other under the bowl of his pipe, Tom was one of St. Andrews' best-known figures. Good old Tom Morris was never too busy to stop and chat, to doff his cap to a lady or (with a wink) to a little girl, or to ruff a lad's hair and ask to hear a favorite Bible verse. But he wouldn't tarry long. Tom always had work to do. On Sundays it was G.o.d's work: Bible reading before and after church, handing 'round the bag for collections during services, walking his family to the cemetery, Bible reading in the evening. On other days he did his own work: inspecting caddies, uprooting whins, top-dressing greens, hammering and painting gutties, winning bets.

By 1867, three years after returning from Prestwick, Tom had won praise from all quarters for refurbis.h.i.+ng the links. He had also matched Allan Robertson's most famous feat by shooting 79 there. Only he and Robertson had visited the low side of 80. Yet for all his t.i.tles, the Custodier of the Links and King of Clubs was still a caddie when his social superiors crooked their fingers his way. He often carried for Colonel Fairlie and occasionally for R&A officers and visiting dignitaries. When the English novelist Anthony Trollope came to town and tried his hand at the Scottish game, Tom teed up his swings and misses. As Holy Trinity pastor A.K.H. Boyd recalled in his memoir Twenty-Five Years of St. Andrews Twenty-Five Years of St. Andrews, Trollope cursed like a sailor but was gracious when asked about a literary rival, Charles d.i.c.kens, saying, "The little fellow has the real spark of genius." After one topped shot the theatrical Trollope feigned a swoon. "[H]aving made a somewhat worse stroke than usual, he fainted with grief, and fell down upon the green," wrote Boyd. "He had not adverted to the fact that he had a golf-ball in his pocket, and falling upon that ball he started up with a yell of agony, quite unfeigned." From that day on, Trollope called golf a dangerous game.

Watching his father kneel to tee up another man's ball set Tommy's teeth on edge. Tom, unbothered, said there was an art to making a sand tee just the right height for a golfer's swing, and applying a drop of spit to the ball so that a few grains of sand stuck to it, adding backspin when it landed. There was no shame in kneeling, he said. Had not our Savior told his followers to render unto Caesar? After all, Tom said, it was not his immortal soul that bent, only his knee.

On the days he caddied for Fairlie, Tom would start by fetching the Colonel's sticks from the R&A clubhouse, where they were kept in a wooden locker the size and shape of a small coffin. He readied them for play in the time-honored fas.h.i.+on, by rubbing them up. He rubbed cleeks with emery paper, applying a good s.h.i.+ne to the edges of the blade while leaving the middle of the clubface a darker gray. A darker sweet spot, he said, "helps the eye be easily caught when aiming." After finis.h.i.+ng the cleeks he rubbed Fairlie's wooden clubs with a rabbit's foot, dipping it first into a pot of linseed oil, then buffing the shafts and clubheads with the oily rabbit's foot, giving the wood a waterproof coating as slick as an otter's back.

After the clubs were rubbed up he stuck them under his arm and went to meet his man at the teeing-ground. It would be twenty years before anyone thought to put golf clubs in a bag that the caddie could sling over his shoulder. If Tom was partnering Fairlie in a foursomes match that day, he left his own clubs behind. When a caddie and his man played as a team, both of them used the gentleman's clubs-a custom that played a part in the 1867 Open.

Taking his dip in the Firth of Clyde on the morning of the Open, Tom watched fast-moving clouds and felt a freshening wind that blew gulls sideways down the sh.o.r.e. He remembered a black, flat-faced wood that Colonel Fairlie employed to hit low drives under the wind. A driving putter, it was called. Tom thought the Colonel's club might help him get the Belt back.

Willie Park had the same thought on the same morning, but for once Park was not bold enough. By the time he found Fairlie and asked to borrow the driving putter, Tom had the club tucked under his arm.

Through two rounds on Prestwick's up-and-down links, Tom led Park and Bob "The Rook" Andrew by two shots. Willie Dunn, who would finish last in a field of ten, must have wished he had spared himself the long trip north from Blackheath. For all his brilliance in match play, he was undone by stroke play and would never come close to winning an Open. Perhaps Dunn bought a pint that night for another of fate's victims, the Rook, who fell apart yet again in the late going.

Afternoon winds hummed and then paused as if holding their breath, daring the golfers to swing. Tom, wielding the black driving putter, led most of the day but could not shake Park, who kept hammering drives and knocking in putts, pressing the issue as he had throughout their ten-year duel.

"No compet.i.tion excites more interest among the lovers of the grand national pastime," intoned the Fifes.h.i.+re Journal Fifes.h.i.+re Journal, than one between "the two most distinguished professionals," Morris and Park. The gruff Fairlie followed along, clenching his fist each time Tom smacked another low-hanging drive. After the first two rounds, which was all the Prestwick scorecards could accommodate, the scorekeepers turned their cards over, as they did in all the early Opens, and recorded the third and final round on the cards' blank backs. In the end it was Park who missed a crucial putt, and forty-six-year-old Tom was the champion again-the oldest Open champion yet. That was no great distinction after only eight Opens, but even today, after 135 Open Champions.h.i.+ps, no other winner has been as old as Old Tom was in 1867. He earned a year's possession of the Belt and 7, while Park, who now trailed his rival four Opens to three, won 5 for finis.h.i.+ng second. Andrew Strath got 3 for third place. That left the last pound of the 16 purse for the fourth-place golfer, sixteen-year-old Tom Morris Jr., who came in five shots behind his father.

After the Belt ceremony there was still enough light for one more round. Tommy found Park and dared him to play a money match. The Musselburgh man smiled. Willie Park, who had yet to duck a challenge in his thirty-four years, nodded and headed for the first teeing-ground. The match prompted spirited betting and drew a curious crowd to what often appeared to be a duel to see which golfer could swing harder. Tommy may have led by that measure, but despite fighting Willie down to the final tee he was humbled, 2 and 1.

Once again the Belt went up over the mantel in the Morris place. This was a new mantel in a new house beside the St. Andrews links, a tall stone house at number 6 Pilmour Links Road. Tom had bought it the year before. The doorsill sported a big black "6," a poor omen for golfers. Occasional snows between Martinmas and May Day piled up like white icing on the flat roof, until the town's sooty air turned the snow as gray as the house.

It was a gossiped-about house. One cause for talk was the fact that Tom had bought bought it. Victorian Scotland was a rental society; not one in ten Scotsmen owned his home. It was curious, too, that the previous owner, a clubmaker and part-time crack named G.D. Brown, had agreed to sell his house so soon after Tom came home from Prestwick. Brown was a dapper, coa.r.s.e-talking c.o.c.kney who had married money; his wife was the daughter of a rich London ale-seller. Brown was never a good fit for St. Andrews-too loud, too English-but he hadn't talked about leaving. Then, just when Tom Morris needs a house by the links, Brown picks up stakes, packs up his ale heiress, and disappears, leaving behind an eight-room house in a prime spot and a shop full of golf clubs waiting to be sold. Why? it. Victorian Scotland was a rental society; not one in ten Scotsmen owned his home. It was curious, too, that the previous owner, a clubmaker and part-time crack named G.D. Brown, had agreed to sell his house so soon after Tom came home from Prestwick. Brown was a dapper, coa.r.s.e-talking c.o.c.kney who had married money; his wife was the daughter of a rich London ale-seller. Brown was never a good fit for St. Andrews-too loud, too English-but he hadn't talked about leaving. Then, just when Tom Morris needs a house by the links, Brown picks up stakes, packs up his ale heiress, and disappears, leaving behind an eight-room house in a prime spot and a shop full of golf clubs waiting to be sold. Why?

There was a hidden hand in the sale. As part of the deal that brought the Morrises home from Prestwick, town officials agreed to help Tom find just such a place. They pressured G.D. Brown to sell, and seven months after taking up his shovel and barrow as St. Andrews' greenkeeper, Tom received a loan from town provost Thomas Milton for 500-the exact amount it took to pry Brown out of his house. The town was betting that Tom Morris would help make St. Andrews the undisputed capital of golf. But that 500 and the house it bought were both a boon and a burden to Tom, who took on a debt that was ten times his annual salary.

The Morris children peeked out from the windows at 6 Pilmour Links Road while their mother filled the house with respectable things, herself included. It was a sign of respectability that Nancy did not work outside the home, performing instead the still-new role of stay-at-home wife, the so-called "angel of the household." Such a woman personified the values of a nascent middle cla.s.s. Rather than milk cows, gut herring, or clean another woman's rooms, she stocked her own with table linen from Dunfermline, carpets from Kilmarnock, upholstered chairs, and a grandfather clock. She put a potted fern on either side of the fireplace. She bought a blue-and-white china teapot that never held tea but only sat, dry and haughty, on a shelf with Nancy's cups, saucers, stone-ware mugs, and her favorite nutcracker.

The man of the house, whose paternal authority came straight down from heaven, gladly ceded rule over pots, pans, and linens to Nancy while spending every day but Sunday on the links or in the shop. Every morning after his dip in the bay he returned, still wet, and changed into dry tweeds. Walking past the sitting room, kitchen, and scullery, he went out the back door to a small garden between the house and the shop. Nancy grew roses, turnips, and onions in the garden. The light was poor, with direct sun only for the hours around noon, and her vegetables grew small and sickly. Her roses were hardier, particularly those near the family's dry-hole privy, a shed that spiders haunted in the summer. Nancy's rose bushes climbed well up the privy's paint-chipped walls.

A gravel path led through the garden. Tom would clomp down the path on his way from the house to the shop, with little Jack not far behind. Eight years old, Jack had strong hands and wrists, thickened by years of dragging himself around on his wheeled trolley. Cripples did not go to school, so Jack stayed home and helped his father in the shop. He got around the house, garden, and workshop by pulling himself along on railings that Tom had built into the walls at knee level, giving Jack a hand-hold wherever he was. The boy would grab a rail at the back door and yank himself into the garden, where the gravel path ran downhill; he would zoom through the garden, pebbles flying behind him, and barrel into the shop.

Jack did finis.h.i.+ng work on new clubs. He polished the heads of spoons, as fairway woods were called, and drivers. He tightened the whipping that bound clubheads to shafts. He worked beside James Foulis, a young carpenter Tom had hired to help in the shop. They made quite a trio-graying Tom and the bony, hollow-cheeked Foulis on the workbench, with fleshy Jack sitting below them, gripping the head of a driver in his fists, rubbing it up until its surface gleamed like gla.s.s.

The heart of any golf shop was a st.u.r.dy workbench. According to J.H. Taylor, the English golfer and clubmaker, a proper workbench "must be strongly built, and should not be more than thirty-three inches high." This was the same Taylor who as a boy caught a glimpse of Tom Morris and thought Tom was Saint Andrew. Taylor, whose clubmaking was as precise as his golf, listed the items on his workbench: a vice with a 3-inch jaw; a 14-inch bow saw; a 12-inch tenon saw; a 14-inch half-round wood rasp; a 14-inch half-round cabinet rasp; a 14-inch half-round cabinet file; a 3/8-inch gouge; a 1-inch chisel; a medium hammer; a brace; a lead ladle; a 3/16-inch twist drill; a small bit; a 12-inch screwdriver; a sc.r.a.per; a screw for leads; a steel-bottom plane; a glue-pot; an oil-stone; an oilcan; a pair of scales; and weights up to eight ounces. Tom's shop held all that as well as a spherical iron mold for making gutties, Tom's primary business. Each gutty went into the mold as warm putty and came out as a near-perfect sphere that was hammered all over to make it fly better; given two coats of white paint and then set aside for three months to cure before it was sold. Each ball was stamped with the same letters emblazoned on the sign over the workshop door: T. MORRIS T. MORRIS A name that meant probity and good golf, if not good putting. A name that meant probity and good golf, if not good putting.

Outside the shop lay the broad, green links. Four years of ax-and spadework had turned narrow trails through bramble into outward and inward nines, side by side. The putting-greens Allan Robertson had doubled grew still bigger under Tom, who seeded, sanded and broomed them until their piebald turf was soft and true. R&A men joked that Tom was making the greens so smooth that even Tom could make four-foot putts. Balfour and other old-timers complained that the course was now six shots simpler. Tom said no, it was fairer, and he had numbers on his side. In his first five years as greenkeeper the winning score in the R&A's annual medal compet.i.tion ranged from 92 to 98. Lesser medals went to gentlemen shooting no worse than 99 and no better than 96. If the course was getting easy, the difference was hard to detect. Of more than five hundred R&A members, only a handful ever broke 100.

Tom knew better than the members that the Old Lady, as he sometimes called the course, had many ways to defend her virtue. Tom had not stilled the wind. He had not warned golfers about the invisible breaks on several greens. If St. Andrews's links lacked the myriad blind shots found at Prestwick, optical illusions were at work here, too. At St. Andrews the gra.s.s itself was deceptive: More than forty varieties of bent and fescue gra.s.ses ranged in color from near yellow to the deepest forest green, making it hard to judge where the ground undulated and where it only appeared to.

Somehow the old course changed but did not change. That was a trait it shared with golf, a game that owes much of its character to its fields of play, no two alike. Bernard Darwin called golf "something of a new belief founded on old holes. How these old holes attained the form in which we know them no one can tell. a.s.suredly it was not owing to the genius of some one heaven-sent designer." Instead, Darwin saw a force that his grandfather had discerned in nature: "It was rather through good fortune and a gradual process of evolution. The holes changed their forms many times according as whins grew or were hacked away, according as the wind silted up sand here or blew it away there, according as the instruments of the game changed so that men could hit farther and essay short cuts and new roads. Yet they possessed some indestructible virtue, so that, however they changed superficially, golfers united in praising them and loved to play them, gaining from the playing of them some pleasing emotion that other holes could not afford. To define that emotion and the cause of it was really to make a discovery, and to proclaim the discovery was to proclaim a new faith."

A case in point was the new first hole at St. Andrews.

When Tom became Custodier of the Links, the ground in front of the clubhouse was often underwater, swamped by high tides. Storms sent salt.w.a.ter slos.h.i.+ng up the clubhouse steps. It took a visionary politician and a pair of poetry lovers to beat back the tides.

The politician was Hugh Lyon Playfair, the most famous St. Andrean since the mythical jumble of bones that was Saint Andrew. Born in 1786, Playfair served Her Majesty's Army in India, where he marched in formation and played golf. Playfair was a founder of the Dum Dum Club, the first golf club outside the British Isles, laid out on a stretch of scorched gra.s.s that is now the site of Calcutta's international airport. Like other gentleman soldiers with room in their luggage for Indian gold, rubies, and emeralds, Playfair came home a wealthy man. Sporting the whiskers and jowls of a white walrus, he paraded around town in a top hat, silk tie, and black greatcoat. As provost of St. Andrews he launched a modernization campaign. "The new broom," Playfair called himself, and his twenty-year rule swept dunghills and horse carca.s.ses from muddy streets that were soon paved for the first time. Provost Playfair brought the rail link from Leuchars. He brought the telegraph that clicked news at lightning speed from Edinburgh, London, and the world. It was he who saw the town's future as a tourist center, with golf its prime attraction. An avid golfer, he was elected captain of the R&A in 1856, the year he turned seventy and went to London to be knighted by Queen Victoria. After that he had his clubs engraved with a line to foil pilferers: THIS WAS STOLEN FROM SIR HUGH LYON PLAYFAIR. THIS WAS STOLEN FROM SIR HUGH LYON PLAYFAIR.

Affronted by the tides that swamped parts of his home links, Playfair envisioned a breakwater between the course and the beach. He dispatched workmen to bury old boat hulls at the top of the beach. When the sea crept over and around the buried hulls, Playfair ordered more wrecks buried, and in time the land in front of the clubhouse was reclaimed from the sea. Playfair's project would be relaunched decades later by Tom Morris and George Bruce, a builder who followed Playfair in the chain of town provosts and followed Tom into meetings of the town's Burns Society.

If golf was Scotland's game, Robert Burns was Scotland's muse. In 1859 the poet's centenary was celebrated in every town. Those events evolved into the Burns Suppers still held every January to mark the poet's birthday. At Burns Suppers in St. Andrews, Tom Morris and George Bruce would share steaming haggis-sheep's entrails, oatmeal, and spices cooked in the sheep's stomach-the dish Burns called "Great chief-tan of the puddin'-race!" They would rise to recite "To a Mouse" ("Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie") or, grinningly, "Green Grow the Rashes, O" ("The sweetest hours that e'er I spend/Are spent among the la.s.ses, O") or, hearts rising, "Scots Wha Hae" ("Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled,/ Scots wham Bruce has aften led,/Welcome to your gory bed/Or to victorie").

On the course, the job was to contain what Burns called the "roar o'sea." What Playfair began, George Bruce would finish by using construction debris as a breakwater. Hundreds of cartloads of rocky soil, rubbish, and cement were dumped into wrecked fis.h.i.+ng boats. Bruce directed the horse-drawn carts of rubbish and the sweating laborers who unloaded the carts and buried the hulls. He and Tom Morris looked on while the workmen overturned a cement-laden sloop, pressing their shoulders to the hull until the splintering husk gave up and rolled into place. Victory!

The breakwater called the Bruce Embankment would create a dry mile north and east of the first teeing-ground. Along with Playfair's work, it remade the seaward side of town. Tom used a quarter-mile of reclaimed land to build a new first hole in front of the clubhouse. He re-turfed the widest fairway in Scotland and built a green on the far brink of Swilcan Burn, so near the stream that a golfer's power was neutralized. Tom's new first hole was a finesse player's hole. A gimmick hole, some would say. Still it has a thought behind it: The first hole at St. Andrews is a good Presbyterian hole, one that rewards those with the good sense to play it humbly. Hit your second shot to the back of the green, two-putt and move on.