Tommy's Honor Part 4

Not that the greenkeeper's son played it that way. Tommy wanted to make three. While his father made four after four after four on the hole, Tommy would loft a daring approach inches over the burn in hopes of getting his ball close to the flag. As a result he made threes, fours, fives, and sixes. But that is what makes a good hole: You can disagree on how to play it, and no answer is right every time.

The adjacent eighteenth was a forgettable thing, its fairway crossed by Granny Clark's Wynd, a dirt path that led to the beach. Golfers stood waiting while men on horseback clopped across the path. They also waited for mule-carts, dogs, wrack-gatherers, and courting couples. They waited for the town's volunteer lifeboat crew to drag a thirty-foot lifeboat to the beach for lifesaving drills. The boat and the carts left deep ruts that golf b.a.l.l.s dived into. And the patchy little putting-green beyond Granny Clark's Wynd was not much better. It lay in a dark hollow where gra.s.s refused to grow. So Tom set to work digging another hollow, the Valley of Sin. He and his men used the earth they dug from the Valley of Sin to build a new putting-green for the Home Hole at the southeast corner of the links, a broad green that sloped from right to left and back to front. Tom said that greens on plateaus kept the golfer looking toward heaven. But this one had an unholy beginning. "In the course of the work," wrote Andra Kirkaldy, whose father helped Tom build the Home green, "human bones were exhumed." The workers struck a shallow burial pit that had been dug during the cholera out-break of 1832. Tom, who had turned eleven that year, remembered the fear that gripped the town. Now his workmen were affrighted by the sight of human bones. He could have left this green-site to the ghosts but he forged ahead, telling the men that they would dig if they wanted to be paid. After all, a man with a shovel could strike bone all over town.

St. Andrews was built on bones, from the Apostle's tooth and kneecap to the families stacked ten-deep in the Cathedral cemetery to a hill called Witch Howe, where women accused of sorcery were thrown into the sea. Before the death penalty for witchcraft was abolished in 1735, accused witches, whose crime was often no more than being old and friendless, had been bound in the shape of an X, with their left thumbs tied to their right feet and their right thumbs tied to their left feet. Their binding was a tribute to Saint Andrew, who according to legend was crucified with his limbs outstretched in the shape of an X-the X-shaped cross that became Scotland's flag. Thus X'd, the accused witch was cast from the bluffs into the sea. If she drowned, the bishop p.r.o.nounced her innocent. If she swam, her escape artistry proved guilt. Those who swam were dragged up the beach to be burned at the stake, and later buried who knew where. When a storm sent a chunk of Witch Howe tumbling to the beach in 1856, arm and leg bones hung from the broken earth.

The burial ground at the east end of the links was reburied as Tom's new Home green took shape. Even Balfour, grumbling that the eighteenth was "quite changed by the formation of an artificial table-land," called it "a beautiful green." Few modern players or spectators would guess that every champion who has won at St. Andrews, from Bobby Jones to Jack Nicklaus to Tiger Woods, has walked over the Valley of Sin to stand on an old boneyard as he finished his round.

The course was improving, but Tom's own game was stale. He knew that if he didn't play better he would lose the Belt-perhaps to his namesake, who made no secret of his hunger to win the clanking old thing for himself.

The Champions.h.i.+p Belt was part of the furniture of Tommy's youth, like the mirror, Mum's china, and the grandfather clock. It was no mere symbol but a thing with heft and texture, its red leather darkening with age, smooth to the touch but shot through with hairline cracks. Its silver buckle, showing tarnish, was slightly ridiculous with its engraver's error, the little silver golfer swinging a headless club. Still the Belt meant more than any other trophy a golf professional could win. Its winner was the Champion Golfer of Scotland.

After losing to Park in their singles match after the 1867 Open, Tommy got even in a rematch. Park was longer off the tee, though the gap was shrinking, but Tommy could hit shots no one else had imagined. He didn't need a driving putter to keep the ball under the wind. He naturally hit a low ball, and could smack chin-high screamers by closing the clubface at impact. Such a shot took exquisite timing-just as club met ball he turned his right wrist as if he were turning a door key from right to left.

Bernard Darwin wrote of a money match in which Tommy showed off a new use for the niblick, a cleek that had the loft of a modern eight-iron and a face not much bigger than a large coin: "Young Tommy Morris astonished the spectators by taking his niblick, a club that in those days had the face of a half-crown, wherewith to play a pitch on the green. Till that historic moment no one had ever dreamed of a niblick being used for anything but ordinary spadework." In Tommy's hands a club made for flipping the ball out of divots and rabbit sc.r.a.pes launched high approaches that dropped and stopped. From shorter range he did the same with his rut-iron. While veteran professionals b.u.mped long, low pitches that bounced and rolled to the hole, he was inventing what twentieth-century course designers would call target golf.

He had ambitions beyond golf, but they would wait. His mother might dream of seeing him in a business office, but Tommy had no yearning to push a steel-nibbed pen down columns of numbers day after humdrum day. He relished the slight stickiness of a tacky suede grip; the powerful s.h.i.+fting of forces at the top of the backswing; the crack of impact and the sight of the ball in the air, hanging for an instant before it fell to a thudding bounce on the putting-green, a fine flat thud that sounds nothing like a ball landing on longer gra.s.s. And then there was the crackle of a ten-pound note between his fingers, the texture of victory.

By the spring of 1868, seventeen-year-old Tommy and forty-seven-year-old Tom were making real money in foursomes matches. Ten, twenty, fifty fifty pounds in a day. No office job paid that much. pounds in a day. No office job paid that much.

One money match pitted them against another talented pair, former Open winner Andrew Strath and pug-nosed Bob Kirk, the son of Tom's longtime caddie, now grown and winning bets left and right. According to the Fifes.h.i.+re Journal, Fifes.h.i.+re Journal, "either party considered themselves lucky if they got a single hole ahead, and when they did so, it was generally to be brought down the next one to 'all square.'" They were all square at the Home Hole in the first of two rounds. Tom could have won the hole with a long putt-still called a 'put' in the "either party considered themselves lucky if they got a single hole ahead, and when they did so, it was generally to be brought down the next one to 'all square.'" They were all square at the Home Hole in the first of two rounds. Tom could have won the hole with a long putt-still called a 'put' in the Journal Journal-but left it so far short that the Morrises' backers moaned. After Strath missed, it was Tommy's turn to hit his side's ball. He paced between the ball and the hole, studying the mess his father had left him. A three-yard putt, side-hill. Settling over it, he pictured the ball curving to the hole and rapped it hard enough to diminish the curve. By the time the ball felt gravity's pull it was nearly to the hole. When it fell, Tom breathed again.

"On coming back the second round, father and son gained the match by three holes and two to play," the Journal Journal reported. "Young Tom played a splendid game, and was admired by the large concourse of spectators as a youth of great promise. A good deal of betting was on this match." reported. "Young Tom played a splendid game, and was admired by the large concourse of spectators as a youth of great promise. A good deal of betting was on this match."

Sometimes the Morrises teamed against a pair of R&A golfers, spotting them a handful of strokes or generous odds. Sometimes Tom and Tommy split up, each taking a club member as his partner, with the members betting each other. Tommy came to know dozens of the gentlemen his father worked for. A few were soldiers who had fought in the Crimean War of 185456 or the Indian Mutiny of 185759. Captain Maitland-Dougall had joined the Royal Navy at age thirteen as plain old William Maitland. He served in Persia and China, where the Chinese fractured his skull but couldn't kill him, and came home in time to rescue those s.h.i.+pwrecked sailors in the Storm of '60. As progressive as he was brave, he added the name of his wife, the former Miss Dougall, to his own name when they married. Oddly enough the heroic Maitland-Dougall was a nervous, twitchy golfer, but Tommy liked him.

Other R&A golfers were men of leisure who had no careers beyond spending their family fortunes. They hunted fox and grouse, played golf and whist, drank, smoked, and filled their bellies with more good meat in a fortnight than a factory worker's family got in a year. One was Mister Cathcart, a fop whose motif was citrus. He traipsed the links in his lime-green jacket and yellow neckerchief. Two other gentlemen antic.i.p.ated the age of golf carts by riding ponies between shots. One of the pony riders, Sir John Low, employed three caddies at a time: Lang Willie to lug his clubs, a second caddie to lead the cream-colored pony, which left loose impediments on the greens, and a third who carried a stool that he planted on the green so that Sir John could rest his knightly bottom while he waited to putt.

Tommy was polite to the gentlemen, lowering his eyes and tipping his cap, for they were his father's employers. But he didn't have to like them. Some called themselves golfers but were only playing dress-up in their leather breeches and red golfing jackets. Butchers who worked the way these golfers played would have no fingers. And they looked down their noses at Tom Morris! "See here, Tom," Mister This or Major That would say. "Fetch me my putter, Tom." At the end of a round the nabob dropped a coin into Tom's upturned hat. Still the gentlemen said they loved Tom Morris as one of their own. Tommy heard that very phrase from one of them. "Good old Tom," the man said, "I think of him almost as one of my own..." Then came the next word: "...servants."

Tommy preferred the caddies. The renowned caddies of St. Andrews were "no' saints," as they gleefully admitted. They were poor, unshaven, often drunk, occasionally insolent. One R&A man called them "gentlemen of leisure, who for a consideration will consent to sneer at you for a whole round."

After watching his man take a smooth practice swing before chunking a drive, one caddie said, "Ye hit the ball best when it's no' there." There had been a time when he could have been backhanded full in the face for such cheek, or beaten to his knees with a golf club. But there were no beatings after Tom Morris came from Prestwick to supervise the caddies.

Caddies were "bronzed like Arabs" from their days in the sun, wrote Andra Kirkaldy, who joined their ranks as a boy. Each morning they gathered at the corner of the links by the Golf Hotel, waiting for loops that paid a s.h.i.+lling apiece. They saw that corner as their own property, "consecrated by the expectoration of tobacco-juice," Kirkaldy wrote, "and the fumes of 3-penny cut." They chewed the same tobacco that they smoked. They lit matches on their stubbled chins. Some drank on the job, sneaking sips from flasks called pocket pistols, and swore they weren't breaking Tom's rule against caddying drunk because they could hold their liquor. Their thirst was such that when the gentlemen put on a tournament for caddies, with a turkey for first place and a bottle of whisky for second, the finalists kept missing putts on purpose, trying to lose.

They loved Tom, their supervisor, who always had a few pennies for the poorest. In the winter, when there was hardly any work, he'd give a needy man five s.h.i.+llings. "Take this and buy meat," he said. "Don't drink the little that I'm able to give you." Tommy saw the money go from his father's hand to the paw of some poor wretch, money that could have put meat on the Morrises' own table, and he loved his father more.

Tommy never cared who carried his clubs-he sought no advice on the links-but he liked to gab with the caddies and hear their stories. There was one about a fishwife who bit off a piece of her husband's nose. When the magistrate ordered her to "keep the peace," the crone said, "I canna-I fed it to the cat." Another tall tale concerned a golfer whose playing partner dropped dead on the High Hole. Unwilling to leave his friend behind, he carried the poor b.u.g.g.e.r to the clubhouse, where a gentleman said, "What a fine Christian thing you've done!"

"Aye," the golfer said. "The worst bit was layin' him down and pickin' him up between shots."

Some of the caddies' tales were even true. One concerned Auld Daw Anderson, the white-haired fellow who lived in an upstairs apartment next door to the Morris house. Every morning Auld Daw pushed his wicker cart across Granny Clark's Wynd and then west to his post beside the End Hole, the ninth, where he sold ginger beer and lemonade. He also kept a flask of sterner stuff for those who knew to ask for it. Handing over the flask, he always said the same thing: "A wee nip for the inner man."

Auld Daw's father had been a forger and smuggler. "A daring old daftie he was, Daw's Da," said one caddie.

"That he was," another said. "Kept his loot in a secret closet in his mother's house. And quite a closet it was, for-"

"Th' authorities break into his mother's closet and what do they find? A chest o' drawers, a four-poster bed and thirty-eight gallons o' whisky! So they sent him to Oz-Australia-on a convict s.h.i.+p, leavin' Daw to a still worse fate-"

"Aye, worse. Become a caddie, he did."

The caddie called Hole-in-'is-Pocket made sure his man never lost a ball. If the ball was in the whins he dropped another down his pantleg and cried, "Here 'tis, and no' such a bad lie!" His opposite was Trap Door Johnson, who wore a boot with a hinged, hollow sole. When Trap Door stepped on a ball the sole opened and the ball vanished-until the next day, when he sold it.

A caddie named Mathy Gorum, who won bets by driving b.a.l.l.s off the lip of a ginger-beer bottle, dabbled in phrenology. Mathy would read your future by rubbing the b.u.mps on your head. "Och, you'll be comin' into a fortune, sir," he'd say, showing you his empty palm. Half-blind Archibald Stump, also called Stumpie Eye, wasn't much of a caddie. "Watch your own ball," he said, "for I can barely see the sun." Stumpie Eye played a yearly match with his wild-eyed sidekick Donal Blue, in which they danced between shots, let local lads pelt them with divots and dirt clods while they swung, and at the end dove into Swilcan Burn.

One caddie towered over the rest. By 1868 Lang Willie, Tom's colleague at the workbench in Allan Robertson's kitchen, had trod the links for sixty years. He still wore his trademark blue swallow-tailed jacket, white moleskin trousers and wrinkled black top hat. While other caddies taunted the R&A men or angled for tips by praising them-"Well struck, sir; a bonny lick!"-Lang Willie did neither. Asked how his man was doing, he always gave the same reply. "Just surprisin'," he said.

One nearsighted golfer always asked for Lang Willie. This man's eyes were worse than Stumpie Eye's; he'd knock a ball into the whins and peer forward, squinting, asking how he lay.

"Ye're in a capital situation, sire," said Lang Willie, who had paid a boy a penny to run ahead, find the man's ball and toss it to a safe spot. According to H.S.C. Everard's account, the boy often ran ahead and dropped the ball two hundred or more yards from the tee, "further than mortal man had ever driven before." The nearsighted golfer swore that he played like a champion when Lang Willie caddied.

One evening Lang Willie was toting the voluminous luggage of Sir Alexander Kinloch to the railway station when his feet got tangled at the edge of Swilcan Bridge. He spilled everything into the water-golf clubs, golf b.a.l.l.s, gun case, portmanteau, hat box, and kilt. "You d.a.m.ned fool!" said Kinloch. The towering caddie turned and said, "Do no' make such a song, Sir Alexander. The bags are no' in the Bay of Biscay. They're d.a.m.ned easy to get." Giving a sharp salute, he leaped into the burn.

Caddies who reached forty often looked sixty and lost some of their skills if not their wits. Old Mathy Gorum kept betting that he could drive b.a.l.l.s off ginger-beer bottles long after his nerves were gone. He would smash bottle after bottle until he was standing there weeping while the boy caddies laughed. But Lang Willie, due perhaps to some miracle of alcohol's preservative power, reached the Biblical age of threescore and ten. Then he sat down to porridge with his sister one morning. She said his face looked crooked. "Non-sense," he said, but the word came out blurred.

The town doctor said it was a stroke. Lang Willie said it was "just surprisin'." Later strokes clouded his eyes and put a quaver in his step, and by 1868 his mouth moved only on one side. By then Lang Willie walked with such a stoop that his top hat sometimes fell off. There were days when no golfer hired him. At the end of such a day Tom would clasp his hand and there would be a coin in the handshake.

That July, Lang Willie was lugging a gentleman's clubs at the Corner of the d.y.k.e Hole when he fell like a chopped tree. The undertaker had to make an extra-long coffin. After the funeral, Tom, Tommy, and the other caddies drank toasts and told Lang Willie stories in a haze of threepenny smoke. The men wondered who would be next to climb the ladder to heaven. None expected to see threescore and ten. Tom, who was forty-seven, had read a story in the newspaper saying that the average Scot had a life expectancy of forty-one. "Lads," he said, "it seems I've been dead for six years."

That fall he and Tommy rode the train past Stirling Castle and the shoulders of the Campsie Fells and the smudged air of Glasgow and weedy Paisley to Prestwick. Father and son made their way to the clubhouse through a scrum of players, caddies, spectators, and gentleman golfers. Many of the gentlemen were there to play in the Prestwick Golf Club's medal compet.i.tion, which they considered the main attraction of the week. The professionals playing in the eighth Open Champions.h.i.+p would serve as caddies in the medal event-except for Tommy, who was n.o.body's caddie.

A new stone clubhouse stood beside the links. It had cost the club 758, an imposing sum offset in part by the 170 the old Morris cottage fetched when the club sold it. Tom admired the long windows and black tile roof of the new clubhouse, but noted that the ground around it was uneven. Little Jack would have faced an uphill climb from the clubhouse to the village. This would be no place for a child who got around on a homemade trolley.

Tom took the Champions.h.i.+p Belt to the clubhouse, surrendered it to the treasurer and reclaimed the money he had left the year before. Not even he was trusted to keep the Belt without paying a security deposit.

At 11 A.M. A.M. on Wednesday, September 23, 1868, the first group teed off under fast-moving clouds. Bettors in the crowd called out their offers. on Wednesday, September 23, 1868, the first group teed off under fast-moving clouds. Bettors in the crowd called out their offers.

"Two five-pound notes to one on Tom Morris." Tom and Willie Park were the gamblers' choices, with Bob "The Rook" Andrew available at longer odds.

"The Rook at five to one!"

A pound on Tommy would fetch seven or eight. Bettors knew the teenager had talent, but what had he won? A tournament in the wind at Carnoustie. The Open favored seasoned professionals who could endure three circuits of the course under ever-mounting pressure. Open pressure had undone the Rook and turned the once-feared Willie Dunn into a last-place finisher. And now that the 1865 winner Andrew Strath had succ.u.mbed to tuberculosis, only two proven champions remained. Tom Morris and Willie Park had won the Belt seven times; no other living golfer had won even once.

Park looked north from the first teeing-ground toward the green almost 600 yards away. His open stance gave his muscled arms room for a forceful swipe at the ball. Picking his driver almost straight up, he s.h.i.+fted forward and brought the club down hard, sending his ball on a high line over the waving reeds of Goosedubs swamp. Tom poked a shorter drive and the hunt was on.

There was no "par" on Prestwick's prodigious opening hole, or on any hole. Along with birdie birdie and and bogey bogey the term had not yet been coined. Still there was a number the professionals expected to make on each hole. In that sense the idea of par existed, and in that sense the 578-yard first at Prestwick was a par six. In a quickening breeze off the firth, Park nearly reached the green in three. Chipping on and two-putting for his six, he tipped his cap to his backers. Tom and the Rook matched Park's work on that hole and the Alps Hole that followed. the term had not yet been coined. Still there was a number the professionals expected to make on each hole. In that sense the idea of par existed, and in that sense the 578-yard first at Prestwick was a par six. In a quickening breeze off the firth, Park nearly reached the green in three. Chipping on and two-putting for his six, he tipped his cap to his backers. Tom and the Rook matched Park's work on that hole and the Alps Hole that followed.

Back at the first teeing-ground, Tommy walloped his drive past the swamp. Next he swung his long spoon, a graceful, goose-necked fairway wood, and it got him within sight of the green. He tracked it down and stood over it again, waggling the club almost hard enough to snap its neck. Setting up with the ball forward in his stance, almost even with his left foot, he swung, opening the clubface a hair at impact, and watched as the wind carried his third shot high over the rise in front of the green, over the edge of the Cardinal Bunker. The ball bounced on the green with a fine thud. He nearly made four, settled for five.

The second hole, Alps, was where he used to race the wind downhill. His drive cleared the huge dune ahead, his approach skirted the immense Sahara Bunker and his putt cut the hole in half. He was the early leader, listening for the others golfers' fates in the cheers and groans of their supporters. A golf gallery was a living thing, moving and breathing, stretching here and thinning there, letting out sounds of joy and dismay.

At the seventh, Green Hollow, Tommy peered 140 yards to a green perched sideways in the Alps' gra.s.sy foothills. With the sun straight overhead he hit a niblick shot that kicked hard to the right, toward the knee-high flag. The ball spun and stopped. His three at Green Hollow began a stretch of near-perfect golf as he closed the first round 3-4-4-4-3-4. With the first of three rounds complete, he was alone in first place.

"Young Morris has shot fifty-one!" a man said. It was the lowest score yet in an Open.

Tommy played more like a boy in the second round, losing the lead to his father, whose course-record 50 said Take that Take that. Two rounds, two new scoring records on Tom's obstacle course. Around they came for a third and final tilt, with the sun leaning toward the Isle of Arran. Tom had a stroke on his son while Park lurked four behind. Willie Dunn, twenty strokes behind, would finish last again.

Park took chances in the last round and bunkered too many b.a.l.l.s on his way to a fourth-place finish. The Rook, however, was in full flight, hitting the ball higher than he had in the first seven Opens, sailing through the Alps Hole where his low sweepers had always struck the dunes and fallen back. His doomy countenance lightened, and when a last putt fell and his backers sang "Hoorah for the Rook, the Belt to the Rook!" he gave them a smile full of whisky-colored teeth. He finished at 159, three strokes better than Strath's record total in 1865.

News moved fitfully around the links. With no scoreboards, players' positions were a matter of rumor. No one was sure who had won until all the scorecards were turned in and totaled. Even so it was soon clear that the Rook's only Open victory would be a moral victory. He hadn't funked, but he had waited too long to play the best golf of his life. Both Morrises were coming in with lower scores.

Tom defended his t.i.tle with guile. He was not about to make an error that would cost him two or three strokes, as Park had done. As Tommy was likely to do. So Tom gentled his ball up, over and around the dunes, protecting his narrow lead. He did nothing very wrong, but left several putts short and yielded the advantage midway through the round, when his son made his third consecutive three at Green Hollow. From there Tommy went 3-5-3-3 on the next four holes, a stretch where amateur champions like Colonel Fairlie made sixes and cracks hoped for fours. Still Tom would not give in. When Tommy fired a three at him, Tom matched it. Each time the famous Misser of Short Putts faced one that might sink him, he steeled his nerves and knocked it in. He stayed close, giving the boy a chance to stop and think, to let doubt enter his mind, to look around at all the people looking at him: the haughty Earl of Stair and several other n.o.blemen, gentleman golfers with their ladies, bettors with scores of pounds riding on the outcome, professionals including Park and the Rook, newspaper reporters and curious Prestwickers-all watching to see if a seventeen-year-old boy could outplay the King of Clubs, his father.

Ten years before, lying on this turf after a pell-mell run down the Alps, Tommy had looked up and seen white dragons and sailing s.h.i.+ps crossing the sky. Today they were only clouds. They were the vapor of water, as he knew from his natural philosophy cla.s.ses at Ayr Academy. Clouds were the seas' breath drawn into the sky to fall as rain that flowed through rivers and burns, mills, distilleries, and our own bodies until it found its way back to the seas. The more he knew of the world, the more he believed that a world without magic could still be full of wonders.

He turned to his father. "Far and sure, Da," he said.

Tom nodded. "Far and sure."

They both knew the last hole by heart: 417 paces, wind right to left, dunes to the right and Goosedubs Swamp to the left. One hole for the Belt. Tommy had the honor.

He waggled. He pulled his driver back behind his head, twisting until his left shoulder touched his chin and the driver's shaft brushed the hairs on the back of his neck. At the top of his swing he was coiled so far to the right that he nearly lost sight of the ball. Then he uncoiled, his right elbow digging into his side, his hips and shoulders turning, pulling the clubhead through an arc that blurred into a sound. Crack! Crack! The ball long gone already, long and straight. The ball long gone already, long and straight.

Spectators ran after it. Someone shouted that Tommy had won.

Not yet. A misfire could still cost him two or three strokes, enough to give his father a last putt to force a playoff. Tommy would win if he played the last hole the safe way, knocking a niblick to a broad part of the fairway a hundred yards short of the putting-green, then another niblick to the green, where he could take two putts, make his five and claim the Belt. But five was not a number that Tommy cared to shoot for. He had a long spoon in his hands and a flag a bit more than 200 yards away. He would try to make three.

It was all Tom could have hoped for. Not even Willie Park tried for threes when fives would win. It was a foolish choice, the only choice that could still cost Tommy the Open.

Tommy's second shot took off on a low line, cutting through the wind. For a second it looked bound for the Goosedubs, but the ball held its line against the wind, safely to the right. It was still in the air when Tom nodded as if to say Good for you. Good for you. Tommy's ball was headed for the green, and the tournament was clinched. His backers shouted. Tommy's ball was headed for the green, and the tournament was clinched. His backers shouted. Young Morris has done it! Young Morris has done it!

Young Tommy- Tom Junior- The boy has won!

He chipped close and made four. His third-round score was 49, yet another course record. Spectators, bettors, and golfers gathered round to see the Earl of Stair present the Belt to the new champion. Tommy held the Belt up for all to see, spurring the loudest cheers of the day.

Seventeen-year-old Tommy had smashed the Open record by eight strokes. The Ayrs.h.i.+re Express Ayrs.h.i.+re Express noted that "the winner of the Belt was the youngest compet.i.tor on the Links," a distinction he won even more handily than he won the Belt, for he was the youngest by ten years. His victory made golf-watchers think Tommy might win two or three Opens in a row. Who would stop him? noted that "the winner of the Belt was the youngest compet.i.tor on the Links," a distinction he won even more handily than he won the Belt, for he was the youngest by ten years. His victory made golf-watchers think Tommy might win two or three Opens in a row. Who would stop him?

After winning the Open, Tommy posed in Thomas Rodger's studio.

Tommy to the Fore.

The champion stood with his fist on his hip. While taking his pose he rustled the arras behind him, a velvet curtain meant to add a touch of theater to the photograph. Tommy Morris wore his Sunday best, all black except for a high white collar, his watch fob and the broad silver buckle of the Champions.h.i.+p Belt. His eyes challenged the camera. He wanted the photographer to hurry up and let him go. Tommy could barely stand still for ten seconds, much less the minute it took to expose a calotype image. He was itching to move. move. Even worse than standing stock-still was holding this pose, fist on hip, as if he were some pretentious nabob. The pose was forced on him by the size of the Champions.h.i.+p Belt-there were no clamps or notches on the Belt, which was far too big for Tommy's thirty-inch-waist. His fist pressing the Belt to his hip was all that kept the Belt from sliding down to the floor. Even worse than standing stock-still was holding this pose, fist on hip, as if he were some pretentious nabob. The pose was forced on him by the size of the Champions.h.i.+p Belt-there were no clamps or notches on the Belt, which was far too big for Tommy's thirty-inch-waist. His fist pressing the Belt to his hip was all that kept the Belt from sliding down to the floor.

He stood in a little gla.s.s house, the outdoor studio of "calotype artist" Thomas Rodger, who had built this greenhouse in the sunniest part of his garden. It was hot inside Rodger's gla.s.s studio. The light was strong enough to show the weave of Tommy's necktie and the texture of his thin mustache. Rodger captured the image on thick white paper coated with silver nitrate. Tommy appeared first as a pale gray ghost. Rodger washed the paper with gallic acid; the gray parts darkened and there stood the Champion Golfer of Scotland. Long before his image was fixed on paper, however, Tommy was crossing North Street on his way to the links. It was late in the forenoon and he had his own things to make: wagers, putts, money.

His era was the true dawn of professional golf. Club members still saw their medal compet.i.tions as the game's most important events and lauded their medalists with banquets, long speeches, and innumerable toasts, but golf-watchers were increasingly drawn to the professionals, who played the game better. A new idea was afoot-the belief that there was something special about seeing the national sport played at its highest level, even if the player was not wellborn or well-to-do.

The men of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews were not above encouraging the professionals. Prestwick had stolen some of the old town's thunder with its Open Champions.h.i.+p, but the Open was by definition open to all golfers, amateur and professional, and by 1868 it was clear that the amateurs were overmatched. William Doleman, a Glasgow baker who was the best amateur in Scotland, led the amateurs in that year's Open with a score of 181, a far cry from Tommy's 154. The R&A members reasoned that if all the best golfers were professionals, a professionals-only event might help drive home St. Andrews' claim to be golf's capital. "[I]f not at the head quarters of the game, where can golfers expect to see the best playing?" the Fifes.h.i.+re Journal Fifes.h.i.+re Journal asked. asked.

It wouldn't take much money. The cracks would pay their own way from one end of Scotland to the other to play for ten pounds. They groused when Prestwick cut the Open's prize money in 1868-Tommy got only 6 for his victory, a pound less than his father had won the year before-but most of them made the trip anyway. So it was not surprising that they hustled to St. Andrews when R&A members topped the Open's prize money at an event of their own, offering a purse of 20 with 8 for the victor. The St. Andrews Professional Tournament, conceived in 1865 and all but forgotten today, instantly became a legitimate rival to the Open.

Like bounty hunters in America's Wild West, the crack golfers of Scotland were with few exceptions a rough-hewn, money-hungry bunch, smelling of tobacco and whisky. Two weeks after Tommy's Open victory, they gathered in the shadow of the R&A clubhouse, where they chatted and made a few final side bets. Tommy stood at the first teeing-ground, squeezing the suede grip of his b.u.t.terscotch-colored driver, waggling the club almost to the snapping point. The others, his father included, had no intention of letting this stripling pocket prize money they needed for eating, drinking, betting, and, in Tom's case, t.i.thing. They could not be bothered to watch Tommy slash a drive that nearly reached Swilcan Burn.

There was another young golfer on hand that morning, a tall, thin fellow of twenty-seven with a smoothly elegant swing. Davie Strath, a friend of Tommy's who worked as a clerk in a law office, had learned the game by tagging along with his brother Andrew, the 1865 Open champion. After Andrew succeeded Tom Morris and Charlie Hunter as greenkeeper at Prestwick, Davie followed him there. In the summer of 1868 he spent long days sitting in a stiff-backed chair by Andrew's bed, watching his tubercular brother sputter for breath, praying out loud with Andrew and praying for him when he had no breath to pray, until the merciful day when Andrew sank into his cow's-hair mattress and lay still. He was the latest in a long line of Straths to die of consumption, and when Davie returned to St. Andrews half the town expected that his own handkerchief would soon be spotted red. Thinly handsome with dark, l.u.s.trous hair combed straight back from the widow's peak above his high forehead, black-clad Davie often looked preoccupied, like a nervous undertaker. Even his slow backswing had a melancholy air. Like Tommy, Davie had never done much caddying. Instead he studied mathematics and bookkeeping. He was a reader, equally keen on Homer, Plato, and Archimedes. Like Tommy he believed that a professional golfer could also be a respectable young man-a radical thought that triggered golf's first dispute over amateur status.

By entering the St. Andrews Professional Tournament in 1868, Davie Strath challenged the R&A members' conception of the game. "It was objected to him that he was not a professional," the Fifes.h.i.+re Journal Fifes.h.i.+re Journal reported, "because he is a clerk in a lawyer's office, and not at the call of gentleman players." In short, he wasn't a caddie. The men running the event still equated professionals and caddies: A professional golfer was a caddie who also played for money. Tommy had slipped through the cracks by playing for money before anyone objected, but Strath was no greenkeeper's son. He was a law clerk with designs on middle-cla.s.s respectability. Club members urged him to drop out of the tournament. They said he was risking his future if he played. reported, "because he is a clerk in a lawyer's office, and not at the call of gentleman players." In short, he wasn't a caddie. The men running the event still equated professionals and caddies: A professional golfer was a caddie who also played for money. Tommy had slipped through the cracks by playing for money before anyone objected, but Strath was no greenkeeper's son. He was a law clerk with designs on middle-cla.s.s respectability. Club members urged him to drop out of the tournament. They said he was risking his future if he played.

On the eve of the event, Strath was called to a meeting chaired by Major Robert Boothby and General George Moncrieff of the R&A. Boothby and Moncrieff were in a bit of a hurry, for it was the night of the club's annual ball, a highlight of the town's social calendar, a night of feasting, music, and dancing until dawn. They had decided "to give young David a choice," noted the Journal Journal, "either that he decline to play as a professional, or by playing on the morrow as one, elect to be regarded as a professional for ever." The fact that Major Boothby had won 10 at an "amateur" event at Perth didn't matter because he was already a gentleman. As Peter Lewis of the British Golf Museum puts it, the chasm between the gentry and golf professionals "was not about money in the 1860s, it was about att.i.tude and whether someone could be conceived of as a gentleman." Boothby and Moncrieff wanted young Strath to think twice before joining the unsavory ranks of the cracks.

Strath did not back down. "He foolishly, we think, elected to cast in his lot with the professionals," the Journal Journal sniffed. The next morning, Davie Strath sealed his fate with one of his slow, mournful backswings and a drive toward Swilcan Burn. sniffed. The next morning, Davie Strath sealed his fate with one of his slow, mournful backswings and a drive toward Swilcan Burn.

The eighteen-hole St. Andrews Professional Tournament of 1868 was finished before many R&A members got out of bed-"before the gentlemen awoke from the recuperative slumber of the Ball morning to the fact of the existence of a new day," in one report. Tommy won; Strath came in fifth. Tommy's 8 first prize, along with the 6 he won at the Open and 5 from another tournament the next week gave him 19 in prize money in less than a month-a fraction of what others had won by betting on him and perhaps less than he'd won in side bets, but a tidy sum in an era when farmhands earned 10 a year and some houses in St. Andrews still sold for 20. No one had imagined that a golfer would ever earn so much simply by swinging his sticks. Tommy was starting to think that it might be possible to do nothing else-to play a tournament or money match in one place and then move on to the next, the way play-acting troupes went from town to town.

Could a man be a touring professional golfer? That farfetched notion was much discussed at the Cross Keys Inn on Market Street, where Tommy sat by the fire nursing a pint of blackstrap, a golden mix of porter and soda water that was his father's favorite drink. He and friends including Davie Strath and James Conacher, a fellow member of the local Young Men's Improvement Society, gathered at the Cross Keys to celebrate Strath's professional debut. Strath, so often nervous or morose, brightened in Tommy's presence. They joked about certain snuff-sniffing majors and generals, ancient men who believed that no money golfer could be more than a low-living crack. Who needed the Royal and Ancient? The ambitious young men of St. Andrews could form their own club.

As tradesmen's sons, Tommy and his friends had no hope of ever joining the R&A. Not being tradesmen themselves, they didn't fit into the St. Andrews Golf Club, a band of plumbers, tailors, cabinetmakers, and other so-called "mechanics" who played when the R&A men were not using the links. And so in 1868 Tommy and friends banded together and gave themselves a cheeky name: the Rose Golf Club.

There was already a Thistle Club in town, named for Scotland's national flower and dedicated to upright Scottish values. The thistle's opposite was the rose, national symbol of England, sign of modernity and empire. In making the rose their symbol, Tommy, Strath, Conacher, and their circle were claiming to be citizens of a modern world whose capital was London, 400 miles away. They believed that Scotland should be less Scottish and more British, and might better be called North Britain. They aligned themselves with Dr. Samuel Johnson, who had written that "the best prospect a Scotsman ever sees is the high road to London." (On a 1773 visit to St. Andrews with his Boswell, the Scotsman James Boswell, Dr. Johnson remarked on the town's "silence and solitude of active indigence and gloomy depopulation.") The members of the Rose Club thumbed their noses at Burns, haggis, kilts, and other things Scottish, except of course for golf, and while officially a golf club they seldom played the links as a group. More often they met to dine, drink, and debate world events into the wee hours.

The Rose Club's emblem was as provocative as the name. Its petals suggested an aspect of female anatomy. The club members' s.e.xual lives were furtive at best, at least until they married, and even then the realities of s.e.x could be a rude surprise to their brides, who were expected to be virginal until marriage. Some Scottish la.s.ses were kept in such ignorance that they did not know where babies came from until they gave birth. Scottish lads of the time, however, were as randy as those of any country or century. The adventurous visited prost.i.tutes in the dark corners of Edinburgh or in the fisher-folk's quarters in St. Andrews, where a fellow could sin with a toothless woman while the salty blood-scent of herring-guts filled the room and a piglet rooted under the bed-or was it a child? s.e.x preoccupied the Rose Club men no less than it had moved the author of the 1819 poem "Sanctandrews," who described girls was.h.i.+ng clothes in Swilcan Burn, lifting their skirts to keep them dry: "Swilcan la.s.ses clean, spreading their clothes upon the daisied lea/And skelping freely oe'r the green, with petticoats high kilted up I ween/And note of jocund ribaldry most meet; from was.h.i.+ng-tub their limbs are seen." Even Burns rhymed "fate" with "mate" and wished his way under his Jennie's "petticoatie." The Rose Club lads had no use for Burns' rusticity but liked his honest l.u.s.t.

Lacking a clubhouse, they met in pubs. They were regulars at the Criterion and the Cross Keys, where they ate lamb stew and and argued about books, politics, money, sometimes even golf. Young men born in fast-changing times, they wished they could ride the new underground railcars that crawled under London like iron moles, open carts pulled by steam engines through tunnels lit by oil lamps. The Rose Club discussed the Crown's recent ban on public hangings in London, a law enacted not because hangings were barbaric but because they were getting too popular. The Rose Club debated the schemes of Glasgow surgeon Joseph Lister, who cleaned wounds and scalpels with carbolic acid on the theory that the acid killed "germs." Even after Lister's trick cut the death rate for major surgery from 50 percent to 10, surgeons scoffed when he suggested that they wash their hands between operations.

Tommy and friends sat in the flicker of a gas lamp, dipping boiled potatoes into a tee-sized mound of salt on a scarred oak table. Some drank small beer, a low-alcohol brew. Some drank blackstrap or claret. A few sipped stronger stuff. A whisky drinker might offer a toast to science, for according to Monsieur Pasteur of France it was those germs, tiny unseen creatures eating and excreting, that turned water and grain into whisky. After midnight the innkeeper would shoo the debaters through the door and the merry men of the Rose Club would spill into a darkened town, for the lamplighter had already made his last rounds, extinguis.h.i.+ng streetlamps to save gas between midnight and dawn. They found their ways home by moonlight.

Twenty-one miles to the south, another young golfer was making his name in Musselburgh. Bob Fergusson was no debater and no drinker, but a teetotaler who rarely spoke above a whisper. Long-legged, spare, and goateed like the martyred American president Lincoln, twenty-four-year-old Fergusson was the best Musselburgh golfer to come along since Willie Park, and like Park he first attracted wide notice by challenging a famous St. Andrean.

"There was doubtless jealousy between St. Andrews and Musselburgh," Bernard Darwin wrote, "but it seems fair to say that St. Andrews was unquestionably the metropolis of the game, where on the whole the best golf was played by the best players." That sort of talk could get a man punched in Musselburgh, where partisan crowds hissed St. Andrews golfers and cheered their mistakes. Fergusson, though, was a gentle soul who s.h.i.+ed from inflaming the old civic rivalry. One St. Andrean called him "uncommonly civil for a Musselburgh man." When Fergusson issued a challenge he did it not with a newspaper ad but with a whispered suggestion followed by a handshake.

Before trying his luck against Tommy, Fergusson challenged the senior Morris. In a series of six matches he made short, cruel work of Tom, sweeping all six. The chronicler Everard called it "the most exemplary castigation, for he won the whole series and each of them by a pretty substantial majority." The worst drubbing of his father's career spurred a quick response from Tommy, who announced that he would play a series of matches against Fergusson.

Tommy's duels with Bob Fergusson were the most hotly antic.i.p.ated money matches since the Famous Foursome of '49 pitted Allan Robertson and Tom Morris against Musselburgh's Dunn brothers. The players were polar opposites-bold, slas.h.i.+ng Tommy swinging and even walking faster than his treelike opponent, who moved grudgingly except to unwind a long, powerful motion that slammed drives well over 200 yards. Fergusson hit cleek shots with such force that he dug gouges in the firmest turf. More than once he had hit a gutty so hard that it broke into pieces. His balance impressed Everard, who described him as "broad-backed and st.u.r.dy; it appeared as if nothing short of a volcanic upheaval or a dynamite cartridge would have power to make him budge till the stroke was finished." Fergusson was so deft at running the ball onto the green with his putter that his supporters dubbed that stroke a "Musselburgh iron," long before anyone called the same shot a Texas wedge.

Fergusson's showdown with Tommy Morris began at St. Andrews. Musselburgh loyalists came by rail and ferry to the gray town where they were as welcome as cholera. They went home dejected after Tommy swept the day. The series then moved to the Musselburgh links, where hundreds of locals bird-dogged the golfers from the first tee to a stirring finish that saw Tommy and Fergusson finish dead even. So they went around again, and on the last hole of their playoff Fergusson fired a cleek shot that brushed the flag, setting off a frenzy of cheers and dancing in the hometown crowd. "Bob," wrote Everard, "after most determined play...managed to win by one." The series continued on the links of Luffness, just east of Edinburgh, where bettors made Tommy a three-to-two favorite. The short money proved to be the smart money, as "the science and calculation of young Tom told most decidedly in his favour. His putting was deadly, and before the match was half over, the result had almost become a foregone conclusion."

He enlivened the Luffness match with a gesture that almost everyone present remembered. After striking a putt he would start for the next teeing-ground before the ball reached the hole. The Musselburgh writer George Colville recalled the scene: "Time and again when Morris had putted he would say to his caddie, 'Pick it out the hole, laddie,' and it went in every time." Fergusson played his best golf at Luffness, only to see his teenaged opponent sink putt after putt to overrun him, eight holes up with seven to play. For the rest of his life Fergusson called Tommy's performance that day the best golf he ever saw.

A return to Musselburgh "caused great excitement in the town," Colville wrote, "and there were many wagers." Fergusson was in command late in the match, three holes up with nine to go. At that point he lifted his game another notch-clouting long, dartlike drives, using his putter to slap forty-and fifty-yard chips that rolled up and over greenside mounds and died beside flagsticks. He carded an errorless 40 over the final nine. On most days he would have won in a rout, but Tommy reeled off one of his trademark runs of threes and fours to pull even, then won the last hole and the match, leaving the Musselburgh crowds as still as if he had knocked the air out of them.

Tommy had now avenged his father's castigation at Fergusson's hands, but he wasn't through with Bob Fergusson. They met again at the St. Andrews Professional Tournament of 1869, in which the two of them outplayed the rest of the field to tie for top honors, shooting 87s in heavy wind and sideways rain. After an eighteen-hole playoff they were still tied, so they returned to the first teeing-ground for yet another playoff. As the news spread, townspeople hurried down North Street and Golf Place to watch. Soon it seemed the whole town had left work, school, and home to follow the marathon match. When Tommy pulled his driver back and peeked over his shoulder, he saw that a scatter of spectators had become a throng. Fergusson, unfazed, sent outward-nine drives booming toward Lucklaw Hill beyond the River Eden. Between shots he stood in silence, scratching his goateed chin. Tommy was louder. He told his ball to go go or or run run or or duck in duck in. He cursed himself for making six on the long Hole o' Cross going out, but clean fours on the next two holes kept the pressure on Fergusson, and on the quartet of holes that formed the shepherd's crook at the far end of the links, Tommy flirted with perfection: 3-3-3-3. His 37 going out was the best nine-hole score ever shot at St. Andrews. His 40 coming in won the long playoff and completed a course-record round that would stand for twenty years. Seventy-seven! Tommy's townspeople crowded around him, reaching out to shake his hand, pound him on the back, pat the top of his cap, touch him touch him.

The runner-up stood a dozen yards away, casting a long shadow that climbed the brown picket fence between the Home green and the R&A clubhouse. After several minutes of waiting, Fergusson caught Tommy's eye. Bowing his head, the civil Musselburgh man touched the bill of his cap. It was a quiet man's way of saying, Well played Well played.

Tommy's victories over Fergusson restored the Morrises' honor but did nothing for Tom's reputation. There were whispers on both sides of the Forth that "Old Tom" was no longer a golfer of the first rank. Wasn't it sad that only two years after winning the Open he needed his son to fight his fights? Or, if you lived in Musselburgh, wasn't it amusing?

Tom heard the questions. He joked about them. It wasn't idle gossip that said Tom Morris was twenty yards shorter off the tee than his son and worse than ever with his putter. It was plain fact. Putting practice was no cure-he could hole twenty consecutive three-footers in practice and then miss half of them in a match. The caddies joked that Tom should make the hole bigger. He was the greenkeeper; he could find a brickworks that made hole liners six inches across; or he could make the hole a bucket. But Tom laughed and said no. As a stiff-backed Presbyterian he intended to earn his way into heaven; and as a golfer he would earn his way into the hole. He knew he could sink putts if he kept his head still and his wrists calm. But it was easier vowed than done, and it didn't help that his current plight echoed an earlier embarra.s.sment. As everyone knew, Tom had made his name as a golfer by avenging his brother George's loss to Willie Park. George Morris, routed by Park in 1854, was renowned for asking for mercy: "For the love of G.o.d, man, give us a half!" Tom had no desire to be remembered as a charity case, not after four Open t.i.tles. Yet he could feel the game moving past him like a quickening breeze. After yielding the Belt to Tommy at Prestwick he had lost the course record at St. Andrews-the famous 79 he'd shared with Allan Robertson-to Tommy's now-famous 77. When people saw Tom on the street these days, they asked about Tommy.