Tommy's Honor Part 7

"Strath and his backers were in high spirits from yesterday's success, he being four up," The Field The Field observed. "Put upon his mettle, the champion went to work with a will and secured the first two holes." Tommy took the first hole the next morning with a chip that nearly kissed the flagstick. When Strath's chip went bouncing sideways, his backers had to wonder: Was Davie funking again? Not yet-Strath took a long breath and matched Tommy shot for shot as they neared the Eden in a gentle rain. The players' scores on the ninth through fourteenth holes were identical: 4-4-3-5-5-5. Then Tommy pressed harder, smacking in putts from all over his father's greens. When his putt to win the Home Hole ducked in, the 200 battle was all square with eighteen holes left. observed. "Put upon his mettle, the champion went to work with a will and secured the first two holes." Tommy took the first hole the next morning with a chip that nearly kissed the flagstick. When Strath's chip went bouncing sideways, his backers had to wonder: Was Davie funking again? Not yet-Strath took a long breath and matched Tommy shot for shot as they neared the Eden in a gentle rain. The players' scores on the ninth through fourteenth holes were identical: 4-4-3-5-5-5. Then Tommy pressed harder, smacking in putts from all over his father's greens. When his putt to win the Home Hole ducked in, the 200 battle was all square with eighteen holes left.

The skies went from gray to blue. Bees hummed in the heather under a fat July sun. While Tommy and Strath made their way to the turn, St. Andrews' streets emptied as everyone went to the links. "The male population of the city appeared to have turned out en ma.s.se," the Citizen Citizen reported. "It was with the greatest difficulty players kept from being completely surrounded." The town had seldom seen such excitement since a circus pa.s.sed through thirty years before, dazzling St. Andrews with dancing dogs, fire eaters, and acrobats. The golf circus of '73 found Auld Daw Anderson hawking ginger beer and lemon crushes from his wicker cart by the ninth hole, wealthy travelers trading calling cards, bettors shouting offers in a crowd a dozen deep, pressed so close in the sudden heat that there were sweat stains in the oxters of the finest ladies and gentlemen. The players didn't disappoint: From the moment Tommy sank a curling putt on the first green, the golf was inspired. He led by two at the turn. Then, just as Strath's backers began to lose hope, their man won the tenth hole with a tidy four and squared the 108-hole match with a trey at the short eleventh. Strath took the next three holes with a flawless run of 4-5-5. Now Tommy was reeling, three down with only four holes left. reported. "It was with the greatest difficulty players kept from being completely surrounded." The town had seldom seen such excitement since a circus pa.s.sed through thirty years before, dazzling St. Andrews with dancing dogs, fire eaters, and acrobats. The golf circus of '73 found Auld Daw Anderson hawking ginger beer and lemon crushes from his wicker cart by the ninth hole, wealthy travelers trading calling cards, bettors shouting offers in a crowd a dozen deep, pressed so close in the sudden heat that there were sweat stains in the oxters of the finest ladies and gentlemen. The players didn't disappoint: From the moment Tommy sank a curling putt on the first green, the golf was inspired. He led by two at the turn. Then, just as Strath's backers began to lose hope, their man won the tenth hole with a tidy four and squared the 108-hole match with a trey at the short eleventh. Strath took the next three holes with a flawless run of 4-5-5. Now Tommy was reeling, three down with only four holes left.

At the long fifteenth, Cartgate In, both players drove safely right of the Cottage Bunker, aiming for the church steeple between shapely knolls called the Bosoms. Both had chips to the whale-shaped double green. Strath, waggling over a shot that was worryingly similar to the one he had foozled earlier, b.u.mped his chip with a firm stroke that sent it skipping toward the pin. The ball died near the hole. He looked up at his rival and for once, perhaps, there was defiance in Davie Strath's hollow-set eyes. Top that. Top that.

Tommy tried, but his ball ran past. They halved the hole, leaving the champion three holes down with three to play. Strath's supporters erupted in what the Citizen Citizen called "loud and prolonged cheering." Their man had entered that state of grace in which he could win but could not lose: He was dormy. called "loud and prolonged cheering." Their man had entered that state of grace in which he could win but could not lose: He was dormy.

"It is doubtful whether golf, or indeed life, has any sensation to offer equal to that of becoming dormy," Bernard Darwin wrote. Reflecting on "the ultimate poignancy of dorminess," he called it "a blessed relaxation after strain...a moment of almost delicious bliss." A match-play golfer leading by the same number of holes left to play can stumble, lose them all and have to settle for a draw, but he is immune to defeat. The word dormy dormy, wrote Darwin, "is the only one in our language which signifies that for one transcendent moment we can snap our fingers under the very nose of Fate."

Strath's transcendent finish dealt Tommy a news-making blow. When another halved hole made Davie the victor, 3-and-2, Tommy offered a handshake. Strath had won the 200 for his backers, enough cash to buy a hundred tweed jackets, two hundred bottles of fine claret or a thousand dozen of Kirky's Remakes. His own cut of about 20 was more than twice what Tommy had gotten for winning the last Open. "[A]fter another volley of cheers the crowd began gradually to disperse," reported the Citizen Citizen, whose correspondent, keeping track of strokes played as well as holes won, noted that Davie had shot 40 over the final nine to Tommy's 47. As The Field The Field warned, "the young champion will require to look to his laurels." The stage was set for a rematch. warned, "the young champion will require to look to his laurels." The stage was set for a rematch.

Tommy issued his challenge the following week. Strath accepted and the rematch was made: another three-day, 108-hole contest at St. Andrews, this time for 100. "The golf mania will reach its climax next week," The Field The Field predicted, "on the occasion of the return contest between Tom Morris jun., the champion golfer of Scotland, and Davie Strath. The betting is at evens." The duelists met late in the forenoon of August 27th. Again the air was festive, with gamblers bickering over odds that eventually favored Strath by three-to-two. As the previous winner, he had the honor. He cracked a long, straight drive, Tommy matched it and off they went, pursued by a boisterous crowd. At the head of the mob were well-dressed correspondents for the predicted, "on the occasion of the return contest between Tom Morris jun., the champion golfer of Scotland, and Davie Strath. The betting is at evens." The duelists met late in the forenoon of August 27th. Again the air was festive, with gamblers bickering over odds that eventually favored Strath by three-to-two. As the previous winner, he had the honor. He cracked a long, straight drive, Tommy matched it and off they went, pursued by a boisterous crowd. At the head of the mob were well-dressed correspondents for the Daily News Daily News and and Times Times of London, sent north to follow "The Great St. Andrews Golf Match" between "these two young Scotchmen." of London, sent north to follow "The Great St. Andrews Golf Match" between "these two young Scotchmen."

On the short, treacherous eighth hole, which Hutchison dubbed "that slantwise little catchy-hole," Strath stymied Tommy, who tried to chip over and in, but overshot. The day went to Strath by four-holes.

A hard-fought third round the next morning ended with thunder and a cloudburst that soaked the golfers and spectators. Tommy waited out a forty-five-minute luncheon break while rain drummed the roof of his father's house, where he still lived with his parents and siblings. Having dropped another hole, he stood five behind at the marathon's midpoint. Davie's backers were giddy, patting each other on the back, while Tommy's looked as glum as the weather. But that afternoon, playing in steady rain, Tommy found his stroke. He would start a putt rolling and walk off the green, telling boy caddie Ayton to fetch the ball from the hole. As one observer wrote, "[I]t seemed to us all he was simply invincible with his wooden putter." The St. Andrews golfer W. T. Linskill, who would captain Cambridge's golf team in the first Oxford-vs.-Cambridge match five years later, recalled a round with his hero on a day when "young Tommy holed ten putts of fifteen yards and over." This was such a day. Tommy made putts long and short, straight and twisting. Some banged the back of the hole and popped upward before they fell, some crawled over the hole's front edge, but nearly every putt he struck ended its journey underground. Tommy took back four holes of his five-hole deficit, then returned for the last day's play on a links jammed with spectators, including rival professionals. "As was to be expected, the number of on-lookers was larger than on the previous two days," reported The Field The Field, "and golfers were present in strong force from the princ.i.p.al clubs in Scotland, who enthusiastically watched the play of our two best professionals." Swinging from his heels, Tommy "almost invariably out-drove Strath." By noon "the crowd was larger than on any previous occasion.... All cla.s.ses were represented, hundreds of strangers being present from all parts of the country, even England contributing its quota." Captain Maitland-Dougall, acting as umpire, came to the players' rescue several times, holding back the b.u.mptious mob, calling for quiet when Tommy or Davie putted. Over the final eighteen, Tommy reclaimed his spot at the top of the game: "Strath did not gain a single hole in the last round."

Tommy Morris and Davie Strath helped legitimize professional golf in that summer of 1873. By staging the golf show of the year at a time when the game was becoming a spectator sport, they helped blaze a trail that Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods would follow, and their battles were as remarkable as any in golf history. Over the twelve rounds of their two 108-hole marathons, covering six days, Tommy finished three holes ahead overall. But in total strokes, astonis.h.i.+ngly, he and Strath were even: 1,027 to 1,027. As Everard put it, "for brilliant and steady play combined with absence of mistakes, the golf that those two exhibited day after day has never been surpa.s.sed."

Now Tommy's generation ruled the game. In Musselburgh the ex-prodigy Willie Park, who turned forty that year, was not amused. Young Morris may have gotten the best of him a time or two or three, but Park reckoned he could thrash Davie Strath, a known funker. In September the two of them squared off at Park's home links for stakes of 100. Musselburgh's rowdy golf fanatics turned out in such force that "a rope cordon was drawn up immediately behind the players," the Citizen Citizen reported. What may have been the first gallery rope in golf history was not the only drawback for the home crowd. Park, whose power had awed Allan Robertson twenty years before ("He frightens us with his long driving!") swung as hard as ever only to see Strath, who seemed half asleep, unfurl that smooth motion of his and out-drive Willie on the fly. Davie closed out the match with ease, three holes to the good. "Mr. Blyth, the umpire, asked for three cheers for the victor," the reported. What may have been the first gallery rope in golf history was not the only drawback for the home crowd. Park, whose power had awed Allan Robertson twenty years before ("He frightens us with his long driving!") swung as hard as ever only to see Strath, who seemed half asleep, unfurl that smooth motion of his and out-drive Willie on the fly. Davie closed out the match with ease, three holes to the good. "Mr. Blyth, the umpire, asked for three cheers for the victor," the Citizen Citizen noted. "He then announced that a subscription was open for the vanquished." A subscription was a collection: It was a dignified way of pa.s.sing the hat. Willie Park, described by the noted. "He then announced that a subscription was open for the vanquished." A subscription was a collection: It was a dignified way of pa.s.sing the hat. Willie Park, described by the Citizen Citizen as "the weaker and losing party," had been reduced to taking charity. as "the weaker and losing party," had been reduced to taking charity.

That fall, for the first time, the Open was coming to St. Andrews. Gossip centered on the town's leading players. Could Davie Strath win another clash with the four-time champion, or would Tommy claim his fifth Open in a row? Tom Morris, seldom mentioned as a contender, spent summer's end preparing the links for the event his R&A bosses had finally brought to his hometown. Tom raked and re-raked his putting-greens. He seeded and top-dressed them, exhorting his a.s.sistant greenkeeper, David Honeyman, to pile on the sand ("More sand, Honeyman!"). Tom scythed heather; chopped the black arms off whin bushes; hired extra workmen to load beach sand into barrows and roll them to dozens of bunkers, each of which he filled and refilled; supervised the men who ran his horse-drawn gra.s.s-cutter; and walked the course scores of times, bending his aching back to pull a weed or pick a bit of sh.e.l.l off a green. By the first September frost he was as close to satisfied as a perfectionist can be. The east bank of the River Eden had never looked more like the garden of the same name.

Two weeks before the Open, Prince Leopold rode the royal railcar thirty miles east from Balmoral Castle to Aberdeen. The prince waved to ten-deep crowds on his way to Royal Aberdeen Golf Club. Soon another young man stepped off a clattering railcar in the same city, where golf fanatics and celebrity-watchers shouted when they glimpsed his Balmoral bonnet. Tommy waved. He stopped to shake hands with his supporters before moving on to the Aberdeen links, where Prince Leopold and Davie Strath waited. Scotland's gentleman golfers may have been clucking at the way cra.s.s professionals were beginning to overshadow the amateur game, but the press and public were captivated. Tommy and Strath played for 15 under the watchful eyes of the prince while reporters and spectators followed them around the links. One correspondent called Strath's golf "brilliant" though Tommy beat him, 4 and 2. Cheers, applause, and hats flew up from the gallery as Tommy removed his bonnet and stepped forward to meet Prince Leopold, who looked as wan as Davie, his mustache hanging over pale, thin lips.

The prince spoke, but it was hard to hear his soft voice with so many people hip-hoorah-ing and calling on G.o.d to save him, a cheer that carried more freight in light of his health. Everyone knew the prince was a bleeder.

Prince Leopold, who had just turned twenty, shook hands with twenty-two-year-old Tommy Morris, who felt the pulse of royal blood in that delicate hand.

After twelve years at Prestwick the Open Champions.h.i.+p made its first visit to the links at St. Andrews on Sat.u.r.day the fourth of October, 1873. It had all the makings of a disaster. A storm settled over the Fife coast that week and camped there, dousing the course for two days and nights, blowing tiles off roofs and shutters off windows, throwing sea spray over the dunes, flooding bunkers. This Open was supposed to be a showcase for the artfully sown turf of Tom Morris's fairways and the putting-greens he had built for the first and last holes, but the tempest undid his work. Rainwater sluiced off putting-greens and stood waist-deep in bunkers. Acre-wide pools covered three fairways. Even the holes in the greens were full of water, leaving Tom to shake his head and quote Burns' line on best-laid schemes. The storm was bad news for him, his links, the town, the R&A, and Tommy, who wanted a fair fight above all. It was good only for ducks and Tommy's challengers, who hoped that the ponds and mud puddles might turn the odds their way.

One did more than hope. Tom Kidd, the whiskery dandy known for his colorful waistcoats and Whar-ye-goin' hat, sat up late on the eve of the tournament, working on his clubs. While the rain poured down outside his window, Kidd used a file to cut grooves in the faces of his cleeks.

The sun came out on Sat.u.r.day, glinting in pools of rainwater at every low point on the links. Much of the course was submerged. Ducks swam in the gullies in front of several greens. Pot bunkers had turned into rain barrels. The gentlemen running the Open announced a local rule for the tournament: Golfers could move a submerged ball to a spot no nearer the hole at a cost of one stroke. The so-called "pick and drop" rule made its Open debut that day.

Twenty-six players entered, more than triple the turnout of the previous year at Prestwick. They would go twice around the St. Andrews links for a total of thirty-six holes, the same total as three circuits of Prestwick's twelve-hole course. The winner would get 11, a medal, and a new trophy, a silver pitcher the three sponsoring clubs had commissioned. Tommy was the bettors' favorite, widely seen as invincible, while Strath was the clear second choice. By the time play began at ten A.M. A.M. "a large crowd had taken up their position on the ground," "a large crowd had taken up their position on the ground," The Field The Field reported. Tommy struggled from the start, slas.h.i.+ng drives that skipped into puddles and missing more short putts in the first go-round than he missed in a typical week. His first-round score of 94 suggests that the course was practically unplayable. "The driving was bad," wrote reported. Tommy struggled from the start, slas.h.i.+ng drives that skipped into puddles and missing more short putts in the first go-round than he missed in a typical week. His first-round score of 94 suggests that the course was practically unplayable. "The driving was bad," wrote The Field The Field's correspondent, "but the putting was wretched." Tommy's supporters took heart from the fact that no one else did much better. The three first-round leaders shot 91. One was Bob Kirk, the pug-nosed son of Kirky the ballmaker. Another was Jamie Anderson, the thirty-year-old son of Auld Daw, presumably raised on the ginger beer his father sold. Anderson's cautious, pinpoint game suited the day's poor conditions. His backers swore that Jamie had once played ninety consecutive holes without hitting a bad shot. Still it was the other co-leader who had the gallery chattering: Tom Kidd, who had spent the previous night etching grooves into his irons' faces, was having the day of his life. Kidd's prodigious drives sailed past ponds that Anderson, Kirk, and even Tommy couldn't carry, and his "ribbed" irons, as he called them, added backspin that stopped his ball while other players' approach shots skipped or slid off the greens.

Kidd's tactic was nothing new, though purists considered it unsporting. Allan Robertson had tried scoring the faces of his cleeks twenty years before. Ribbed cleeks antic.i.p.ated the square-grooved irons used more than a century later by Mark Calcavecchia, who won the 1989 Open Champions.h.i.+p. But unlike Calcavecchia's controversial irons, Kidd's clubs were clearly legal. Kidd left the other co-leaders behind by shooting 39 on the outward nine that afternoon, a jaw-dropping score given the puddles and mud on the course. Kirk fell back first. Jamie Anderson, flailing in a watery bunker on the Heathery Hole, made a nightmarish 9 there, but rallied on the inward nine as Kidd began laboring under the weight of the lead. While Tommy and Anderson crept into contention, Kidd was falling apart, sixes and sevens disfiguring his card. After that sparkling 39 going out, he would stagger home in 49.

That meant Tommy was still alive. The Champion Golfer, surrounded by St. Andreans urging him on, wanted nothing more than a fifth Open victory today. Surely that s.h.i.+ny new trophy belonged in the house at 6 Pilmour Links Road. The t.i.tle had been his since he was seventeen, and no one who wasn't named Thomas Morris had won it since 1867.

Tommy studied the putt he had left on the Home Hole green his father had made. The green was sodden; he could hear the squish squish of wet soil with each step he took. Tommy always played quickly from tee to green but took his time on any putt of more than a foot or two, examining the break, settling into his stance with the toe of his right boot nearly touching the ball, gathering his wits before starting the ball on its way to the hole and willing it to go in. of wet soil with each step he took. Tommy always played quickly from tee to green but took his time on any putt of more than a foot or two, examining the break, settling into his stance with the toe of his right boot nearly touching the ball, gathering his wits before starting the ball on its way to the hole and willing it to go in.

He gave it extra force and overspin to make sure it reached the hole. Droplets of water spun up off the ball as it rolled. The crowd drew a collective breath, then let out a huge glad roar as the ball struck the back of the hole and dropped.

Four twosomes back, Tom Kidd heard the noise. The dapper leader was still bas.h.i.+ng drives and hitting ribbed-iron approaches that hopped and stopped on Tom's wet greens, but now he was missing putts left and right and short. By the time he wobbled to the teeing-ground at the Road Hole, Kidd was desperate for good news. It came in the form of a number: 183. Spectators relayed the number from the Home green through the crowd that lined the last two holes. Tommy Morris had shot 89 in the second round and was in at 183, an astronomical two-round total for him, giving Kidd a bit of breathing room.

The other contender, Jamie Anderson, had fought back from his 9 at the Heathery Hole until he stood at the last teeing-ground with a chance to finish at 179. All he needed was a standard four on the Home Hole, which measured a jot more than 250 yards. Anderson drove his ball to a dry spot on the wide lawn that served as fairway to both the first and last holes, but his approach fell short, the ball trickling to a muddy lie. He could not control his chip, which squirted off at an angle, barely reaching the green. Two putts for five left Anderson at 180, three shots less than Tommy's score.

Tommy's reign was over. Spectators walked past him to watch bearded, bedraggled Kidd trudge up the last fairway toward town, clinging to his lead and a rib-faced iron niblick. His pitch shot plunked to earth, close enough. One last putt and the deed was done: Tom Kidd was the Champion Golfer of Scotland.

Tommy applauded him and shook his hand. Red-coated R&A officials brought out the new trophy, a silver pitcher made by the Edinburgh silversmiths Mackay Cunningham & Co. at a cost of 30. The Golf Champion Trophy, as it was named, was a claret jug, a familiar feature of nineteenth-century clubhouses. Gentleman golfers had long bet wine as well as money on their matches and had lugged their claret to the clubhouse in such jugs in case they lost. Twelve inches high, this new Claret Jug-it was quickly, indelibly capitalized-would hold enough claret, champagne, or whisky to get a happy Open winner and several friends singing. But what it held mattered less than who held it. The jug would be kept for a year by the reigning Open champion, whose name would be engraved on its curved surface, and each champion would pa.s.s it on to his successor. In its time the game's most-prized trophy would share railway berths with Harry Vardon, J.H. Taylor, and James Braid, the "Great Triumvirate" who combined to win sixteen Open Champions.h.i.+ps. The jug would ride in cruise-s.h.i.+p cabins with Bobby Jones, the American amateur who won three Opens. It would accompany Open winners until 1928, when the R&A decided to keep the trophy in its clubhouse year-round. That year the R&A commissioned a Claret Jug replica that has traveled with the champions ever since, while the original stayed home in St. Andrews (except in 1982, when Tom Watson, given the original by mistake, took it to his home in Kansas City, where a wild Watson practice swing dented it.) Every summer the one true Jug is hauled out and handed briefly to the Open winner, who is introduced as the "Champion Golfer of the Year." The winner kisses the Claret Jug and holds it aloft for the crowd to see. His name is engraved on its wooden base-the latest name on a list of champions that reaches back to the soggy Sat.u.r.day in 1873 when Tom Kidd upset Tommy Morris.

Yet if you look at the original Claret Jug in its gla.s.s case in the R&A clubhouse, lifting your eyes from the square wooden base where the name of the 2006 champion, Tiger Woods, is engraved, you see that Kidd's name is not first on the list, but second. The first line belongs to the 1872 winner, whose name was backdated when the trophy was made. The first champion listed on the Claret Jug was and still is Tom Morris Jnr. Tom Morris Jnr.

Seeing his name ahead of Kidd's on the trophy was no solace to Tommy, who spent the last weeks of 1873 seeing the Citizen Citizen and the and the Fifes.h.i.+re Journal Fifes.h.i.+re Journal bestow on Kidd the t.i.tle Tommy had thought of as his birthright: bestow on Kidd the t.i.tle Tommy had thought of as his birthright: "Tom Kidd (champion) beat Mr. Louden by 5 and 4....""Tom Kidd, the champion golfer, announced his engagement...."

But as Tom Morris was pleased to point out (for he so loved a proverb), "'tis an ill wind that bloweth no good." The storm that swamped the links, ruined all Tom's work, and probably cost Tommy a fifth Open was a boon to some-and not just the men who took long odds on Kidd. As the whole town learned after the Open, Kidd's triumph was a boon for love as well. It made him solvent enough to propose to his beloved Eliza, who became the new champion's fiancee within hours of his victory. As Open champion, Kidd took home 11, the richest purse of his career, and a gold medal that he promptly sold to pay for his wedding. He would have sold the Claret Jug if he hadn't been legally bound to return it.

Tommy Morris had his own affairs to think about. He spent much of that winter courting a woman who had come to St. Andrews from Edinburgh. She was older than he, long of leg, dark of hair and eye.

Margaret.

Courting couples walked to St. Andrews Cathedral at the northeast tip of town.

Tommy and Meg.

She was tall enough to look him straight in the eye. Her hair was black, or rather the darkest possible brown, showing the brown only in direct sunlight. Margaret Drinnen was older than Tommy and she was no innocent, people said, but that was no sin as far as he was concerned. The St. Andrews la.s.ses he knew, stuffed into their crinolines and flounced mult.i.tiered dresses, resembled toy dolls and knew as much of life as a doll knows. Raised to be marriageable, they could play piano, sew, and pray, and many would be rudely surprised by the barnyard aspects of their wedding nights. But this was a woman of thirty, new in town, working as a maid in one of the grand houses on The Scores.

No one knows how she and Tommy met. It may have been a dance. Margaret arrived from Edinburgh in 1872, too late to attend the Rose Club Ball that January, but there were other dances. Victorian mores set strict limits on contact between young men and women; dances were designed to subvert the limits. A young woman held her handkerchief a certain way to signal her willingness to dance with a particular fellow. He would bow and offer his hand. She moved to him and their left hands interlocked, his right hand on the curve of her waist. Scottish couples danced the faddish French quadrille as well as such old Scottish reliables as the Gay Gordons and Strip the Willow. Tommy may have first seen Margaret across the Town Hall ballroom, a tall woman in a long, dark gown and white kid gloves that stretched to her elbows, her dark hair framing an angular face that turned his way for a moment before a crowd of dancers drifted between them.

She came from West Lothian, a region the journalist William Cobbett described in 1832 as "a very fine county altogether; it has a due mixture of orchards, woods, corn-fields and pastures.... b.u.t.ter and milk are the chief products of the soil." Since then, coal and ironstone mines had turned farmland into a moonscape of coal pits and slag heaps, one of the most poisonous places on earth and one of the most productive, for the industry that blackened West Lothian helped build the British Empire.

Britain lacked the vast forests that preindustrial iron-making required. For centuries, as Barbara Freese wrote in Coal: A Human History Coal: A Human History, "iron was still essentially a forest product; you couldn't make it without burning vast amounts of wood, which Britain simply didn't have." Coal was plentiful but it contained impurities that made for bad iron. Baking the coal yielded c.o.ke, which worked better, and in the 1780s technical advances helped smelters use c.o.ke and iron ore to make high-quality iron in unheard-of tonnages. Between 1830 and 1844, with steam-powered blast furnaces running day and night, Scottish iron production rose from 40,000 tons to 412,000. By 1850 Scottish iron accounted for ninety percent of Britain's iron exports.

Margaret Drinnen's father Walter, called Watty, was a coal-pit bottomer. He ran the cage that took men from the surface to the tunnels of a West Lothian mine owned by the Coltness Iron Company. Coltness had built a ramshackle town, Whitburn, atop the underground seams of coal and ironstone it owned. Watty Drinnen, a black-fingered, black-toothed man, lived with his wife and six children at number 5 Crofthead Road, Whitburn, one of 129 identical shacks facing a rutted dirt track. The eight Drinnens shared two rooms with a boarder who paid a few pennies rent. Margaret and the rest shared three water closets with more than a thousand inhabitants of the other two-room shacks on Crofthead Road. Some mornings the toilet lines were so long that people relieved themselves outdoors, adding to the stench of coal and sulfur that hung in the air until rain drove it into the muck. According to David Malcolm, a St. Andrews golf historian who uncovered many details of Margaret's life, her hometown was almost unimaginably foul. "The h.e.l.lish filth and squalor of mid-nineteenth-century Whitburn," says Malcolm, "were entirely outwith the experience of present times."

A generation earlier, women and children had worked in the mines, dragging coal up steep flights of steps. "The mother...descends the pit with her older daughters when each, having a basket, lays it down, and into it the large coals are rolled: and such is the weight that it frequently takes two men to lift the burden upon their backs," goes one account. "The mother sets out first, carrying a lighted candle in her teeth; the girls follow...they proceed with weary steps and slow, ascend the stairs...till they arrive at the pit top, where the coals are laid down for sale; in this manner they go for 8 to 10 hours almost without resting. It is no uncommon thing to see them when ascending from the pit weeping most bitterly." Eleven-year-old girls dragged hundred-pound loads and were "hags" before they turned twenty. An 1853 law that barred females from working underground simply s.h.i.+fted the burden to boys. In 1872 the House of Commons pa.s.sed a bill cutting the daily s.h.i.+fts of boy miners-those under the age of thirteen-from twelve hours to ten. That left boys of nine and ten with six-day, sixty-hour workweeks. Men worked longer hours, including the occasional twenty-hour s.h.i.+ft, sweating in darkness so thick they could taste it.

The air in the mines was heavy with coal dust. It stung the eyes and blackened bread that sat out too long. Coal wagons rode rails through rat-infested tunnels to the pit in the Coltness mine, where Watty Drinnen ran the steam-powered cage that had replaced the stairs-an innovation that coal-masters considered a kindness to miners. The wagons sometimes crushed exhausted boys who had fallen asleep on the rails. Killed boys were buried on Sunday, the one day their relatives didn't have to work.

After women were prohibited from working underground, they sought other ways to supplement their husbands' meager wages. Many looked after the children of other miners' families as well as their own, calming the sick ones with watered-down ale or whisky. They would pour a week's worth of porridge into a pewter-lined drawer; after it hardened you could cut out a chunk and fry it for breakfast, or wrap it in a handkerchief to save for lunch. Margaret Drinnen probably cooked hundreds of drawers' worth of porridge while contemplating her one likely alternative to spinster-hood: marrying a miner and moving to another cramped shack in Whitburn. Even that honor was denied to many girls, since miners didn't always marry the girls they got pregnant. When Margaret was eighteen, her older sister Agnes bore an illegitimate son. The same fate befell another Drinnen sister, Helen, three years later.

Margaret, the tall striking-looking one, wanted none of that. She was literate thanks to a school system founded on the belief that reading the Bible was vital to spiritual growth. Bright and capable, Margaret apprenticed as a lace tambourer, doing weaving that required quick, talented fingers. Lace tambourers occasionally landed work as ladies' maids, and Margaret won a post as a maid in Edinburgh-a triumph for a Whitburn girl. "In those days you dreamed dreamed your daughter might get a job 'in service,'" says Malcolm. "She'd be fed and clothed and live in a clean, well lighted house, a respectable house." Margaret worked in the home of a prominent solicitor in Edinburgh's thriving New Town, where she toiled like a dray mare for food, board, and pay of about 8 a year. your daughter might get a job 'in service,'" says Malcolm. "She'd be fed and clothed and live in a clean, well lighted house, a respectable house." Margaret worked in the home of a prominent solicitor in Edinburgh's thriving New Town, where she toiled like a dray mare for food, board, and pay of about 8 a year.

Housemaids typically worked from dawn until 10:30 or eleven P.M. P.M., cleaning floors on their hands and knees, feeding coal fires, sweeping and shaking out rugs, dusting, was.h.i.+ng windows, serving meals, making beds, heating and carrying water for baths, polis.h.i.+ng bra.s.s, blacking shoes. Maids worked seven days a week and had little time for social lives. Some were literally barred from courts.h.i.+p: In many of Edinburgh's better houses, the maid's bedroom was the only one with bars on the windows. Still, the bars were not always enough to keep her virginal. Many maids were preyed on by men in the homes where they worked, men whose only other s.e.xual outlet was paying prost.i.tutes who had probably fled the ranks of domestic servants. As historian T. C. Smout of St. Andrews University notes, four-fifths of the prost.i.tutes in the Edinburgh Magdalene Asylum had been maids.

Somehow Margaret thrived. Stiffer of spine than her ladylike manner suggested, she had a certain grace that set her apart. In 1872 she moved up in the world again. The Edinburgh solicitor's mother, who lived in St. Andrews, needed a bright, reliable maid. The solicitor's wife recommended Margaret, who went to live and work in a grand villa on The Scores, facing the sea.

If she hadn't already heard of St. Andrews' golfing celebrity, she soon heard plenty. Everyone in town knew "our Tommy." Girls found him das.h.i.+ng; matrons clucked fondly over his quick smile, his fine-but-not-fancy suits, and his gallantry, for he was quite the young gent despite being only a greenkeeper's son.

Like Margaret, Tommy had seen a bit of the world. He often visited smoke-shrouded Edinburgh with his Rose Club friends, some of whom spent time and coin in the city's brothels-there were more than a hundred-and came home with unmentionable itches. Tommy may have done some scratching of his own. Young men were not expected to stay virginal into their twenties, and he was almost certainly not a virgin at twenty-two. Yet he wasn't a wastrel, either. There was too much of his father's common sense in him for that. Which left Tommy with a challenge: If whoring wasn't his taste, and neither were innocent girls who lived to sew and pray, he would need to find an unusual woman.

It seems Tommy's parents were not pleased to hear that their son was courting Margaret Drinnen. They had doubtless pictured him marrying a wealthy gentleman's daughter. Never mind that Nancy had also been a maid in her day. This was different. Tommy was a celebrity, and his parents had reason to hope for a marriage that would secure all their futures in the middle cla.s.s. But in love as in other things, Tommy made his own choices.

At least courting Margaret wasn't sapping his strength. Tommy was in top form in 1873 and '74, winning singles and foursomes matches in bunches, filling the pockets of both Tom Morrises.

The 1874 Open, held in April to coincide with the spring meeting of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, renewed the duel between the Morrises of St. Andrews and the golfers of Musselburgh. The surprise was that Musselburgh's hero this time was not Willie Park or Bob Fergusson, but a man who had spent twenty years fis.h.i.+ng.

A morning hailstorm turned the nine-hole Musselburgh links cold, b.u.mpy, and white. The hail left melt.w.a.ter on the putting-greens, but a breeze off the Firth of Forth dried them before play began at noon. Tom Kidd's ribbed irons would do him no good today. A field of thirty-two golfers, the largest ever, featured five prominent St. Andreans: defending champion Kidd, sporting one of his colorful silk waistcoats, black-clad Davie Strath, and three Morrises-the famous two as well as Jimmy, a whip-thin young man of eighteen with even-thinner hopes of finis.h.i.+ng ahead of his older brother.

Most of the crowd followed Tommy and Willie Park, the marquee pairing. Golf had changed mightily in the seven years since Park turned to Tom Morris at Carnoustie and asked, "What have you brought this laddie here for?" Now Willie had strands of gray in his bushy side-whiskers. He still swung as hard as any man, but these days his driving frightened no one. Tommy, Strath, and Kidd could all outdistance him. Park drew whoops from the Musselburgh crowd when he sank a long putt at the first hole, called The Graves to honor the sixteenth-century soldiers buried under the green. He wavered with a six at the next hole, a score Tommy was annoyed to match after a perfect drive and a second shot that sliced so far to the right that his ball rolled into a road beside the course. From there Tommy chunked his approach, the heel of his cleek bouncing at impact, the ball blooping only halfway to the green-a shot as noisome as the Park fanatics who applauded it. He and Park both finished the first eighteen in 83 strokes.

A hum in the gallery told them that someone was doing better. The crowd around Tommy and Park dwindled as spectators hurried to follow the surprise leader, who had fired a flawless 75 over the first eighteen holes. As The Field The Field put it, "onlookers who had been following other couples forsook their allegiance and attached themselves to the game of Mungo." When Willie Park heard the news, he smiled. The leader was his younger brother Mungo, the golfer who had gone to sea. put it, "onlookers who had been following other couples forsook their allegiance and attached themselves to the game of Mungo." When Willie Park heard the news, he smiled. The leader was his younger brother Mungo, the golfer who had gone to sea.

In his youth, Mungo Park had been the best boy golfer in Musselburgh. Then he took work on a North Sea fis.h.i.+ng boat, perilous work that seemed to offer a better future than that of a golfer. After twenty years at sea Mungo came home, tanned and fearless, with scarred, corded forearms and a mustachioed face creased by winter gales. He bought a set of hickories and began beating all the local golfers except his brother Willie. And at the 1874 Open he shocked the crowd and probably even himself by taking an eight-shot lead on Willie and the player they both feared, Tommy Morris.

The more his gallery grew, the more Mungo squirmed. He gave five strokes back during his third circuit of the nine-hole course while getting no challenge from Willie, who fell back stroke by stroke. But Tommy crept closer while Mungo's putter suffered from the shakes. The Field The Field's reporter saw the crowd yo-yo back toward Tommy: "A goodly number of the spectators bethought themselves of reverting again to their old favourite...towards the close of the match it was antic.i.p.ated that he would at least 'tie.'" Mungo wrestled home a putt on the last green to finish his closing eighteen in 84 shots for a total of 159, a score that eliminated every contender but one.

Now Mungo's supporters charged out to join Tommy's gallery. Some went to watch, some to hoot and hiss, some to kick his ball if they could. He disappointed them by spearing his drive into the fairway. As the Scotsman Scotsman reported, he was "swiping beautifully" with his driver. At the next hole, named the Gas Hole for the fuming gasworks behind the green, he struck an approach that fell on a shallow arc, skipped forward and sniffed at the hole. For an instant it seemed it would fall in, but the ball ran just past. On his way to the green he had the same numbers in his head as everyone else: If he made this putt, then a standard three at the short Home Hole would be enough to tie Mungo. This putt and a deuce at the Home Hole would win the Claret Jug. reported, he was "swiping beautifully" with his driver. At the next hole, named the Gas Hole for the fuming gasworks behind the green, he struck an approach that fell on a shallow arc, skipped forward and sniffed at the hole. For an instant it seemed it would fall in, but the ball ran just past. On his way to the green he had the same numbers in his head as everyone else: If he made this putt, then a standard three at the short Home Hole would be enough to tie Mungo. This putt and a deuce at the Home Hole would win the Claret Jug.

Tommy spent most of a minute studying the putt. It wasn't long, no more than a yard, but he was careful with every putt. He took his stance, centering his weight over the ball, and spanked it at the hole.

It stayed out. There were cheers from the crowd. Willie Park, standing beside the green, blinked. He could barely believe what he had seen: Tommy Morris schlaffing a short putt.

Tommy still had one chance. A deuce at the Home Hole would force a playoff. His target was starkly framed for him-the jostling mob packed tight around the putting-green less than 160 yards away. Tommy waggled his iron. He knuckled his right knee inward and brought the club back, twisting so far that he nearly lost sight of the ball, then jackknifed downward and clack clack-the ball took off like a bullet.

It rose and kept rising. He had put too much steam behind it. The ball carried over the flag, over the green and the crowd. It bounced and finally stopped on the far side of a railing behind and above the green.

This ball needed no kick from a Morris-hater. It was bad enough as it lay. The spectators cleared a path between the ball and the green. The shot was downhill; Tommy saw that he could putt it. He saw a hollow in the green, a shallow slope that would turn the ball toward the hole.

A long, smooth stroke got the ball started. It bounced onto the green and curved as it closed in on the hole, with Tommy glaring at the ball as if daring it to miss.

It was close-a brave try that drew applause from the hostile gallery-but again it stayed out. Shouts and a round of hip-hip-hoorays announced the news: Mungo Park was Champion Golfer of Scotland. Willie Park bear-hugged his brother while Tommy flubbed his tap-in to finish at 161. He had made up six shots in the last eighteen holes to lose by two. But the margin didn't matter. A loss was a loss. A loss was an ugliness, the collapse of the image he had in his mind of the ball going in. As The Field The Field put it, "the blue ribbon of the golfing green has fallen to the lot of an outsider. Mungo Park, a golfer previously unknown beyond his own green, has stepped forward and carried off the trophy." The feud between the Morrises and the Musselburgh boys, which had seemed settled in St. Andrews' favor, was a hot war again. put it, "the blue ribbon of the golfing green has fallen to the lot of an outsider. Mungo Park, a golfer previously unknown beyond his own green, has stepped forward and carried off the trophy." The feud between the Morrises and the Musselburgh boys, which had seemed settled in St. Andrews' favor, was a hot war again.

A month later Tommy tested his supremacy on his father's links. He agreed to play Davie Strath at St. Andrews during the R&A's Spring Meeting. The whins were in bloom, the old course in such pristine condition that the St. Andrews Gazette St. Andrews Gazette judged Tom's work priceless. "We suppose it is for the interest of Old Tom to keep the links in proper order," the judged Tom's work priceless. "We suppose it is for the interest of Old Tom to keep the links in proper order," the Gazette Gazette allowed, "but allowed, "but con amore con amore he does more for it than can be compensated by any pecuniary reward." Tommy, still stung by losing the Open at Musselburgh, showed his Rose Club friend no camaraderie that day. A match set for eighteen holes ended on the thirteenth with Strath routed, 6 and 5. he does more for it than can be compensated by any pecuniary reward." Tommy, still stung by losing the Open at Musselburgh, showed his Rose Club friend no camaraderie that day. A match set for eighteen holes ended on the thirteenth with Strath routed, 6 and 5.

During the humdrum summer that followed, the St. Andrews Citizen St. Andrews Citizen complained that there had been "no important golf matches" in 1874. One reason was the gap between Tommy and the other professionals. He may have lost the last two Opens, but Mungo Park and Tom Kidd, the champions, were still supporting players. Few bettors would back either man against Tommy without getting odds or strokes. The same went for Strath, who had not lived up to his dazzling play of '73 and seemed content with the lucrative role of Tommy's foil, the worthy adversary and second-best St. Andrean. complained that there had been "no important golf matches" in 1874. One reason was the gap between Tommy and the other professionals. He may have lost the last two Opens, but Mungo Park and Tom Kidd, the champions, were still supporting players. Few bettors would back either man against Tommy without getting odds or strokes. The same went for Strath, who had not lived up to his dazzling play of '73 and seemed content with the lucrative role of Tommy's foil, the worthy adversary and second-best St. Andrean.

Another reason for slackening interest in golf was the calendar: With the Open at Musselburgh played in the spring, there wouldn't be another Open until the fall of 1875. Yet another reason, if you credit local gossip, was Tommy's rising interest in Margaret Drinnen, for he seemed to be spending as much time courting the pretty housemaid as he spent playing golf.

In small towns like St. Andrews, courting consisted mostly of going for walks. The young couple was always supervised by a chaperone, in this case one of Tommy's aunts or another married relative. He and Margaret made a handsome couple, with Tommy in his trim, expensive suit, checking the time on the pocket watch his father gave him, and Margaret in a sensible dress over crinolines and a corset that cinched her already-thin waist to twenty inches. Some girls fainted after too many hours in their corsets, but she was both thin and strong. Soon he would be calling her Meg, the nickname for most Margarets in West Lothian. Meg wore spotless gloves over hands that Tommy touched every chance he got, earning him smacks on the wrist from their chaperone.

Like most courting couples they would stroll the East Sands toward Crail, stopping at the moss-crusted basalt formation called the Rock and Spindle. A longer walk, one that would get their chaperone grumbling and give them a chance to outdistance her, took them through a countryside splashed with irises, daisies, celandines, and meadow rue to Drumcarrow Hill, four miles from town. Looking south from the hilltop they could see blunt-topped Berwick Law in the distance beyond the green and yellow fields of Fife. To the north was the sea, with the links in the foreground, flat green land threaded with whins, golfers creeping antlike between the whin bushes. There were red ants and brown ants-red-jacketed R&A golfers and other players in plain tweeds.

Tommy and Meg also wandered St. Andrews. While there wasn't much territory to explore in a town a mile long and half a mile wide, what little there was came with no end of baroque, b.l.o.o.d.y history. Tommy had never much cared for the lore of the town his father so loved, but he found that it meant more to him now that he was sharing it with Meg, whose hometown had coal and iron instead of history.

Pa.s.sing Queen Mary's House on South Street, he told Meg about Chastelard, the French poet who spied on the Queen of Scots while she undressed. Walking east from there, the courting couple pa.s.sed through the walls of the ruined Cathedral. Gra.s.s grew where stone floors had once felt the boots of King Robert the Bruce, who consecrated the Cathedral in 1318. Tommy had often walked to the Cathedral cemetery with his family to visit the grave of the brother who died before Tommy was born. Now he showed Meg the tall white stone with its report of Wee Tom's brief life:

DIED 9TH A APRIL 1850,.

AGED 4 YEARS.

Walking toward the bay they reached St. Andrews Castle, once the palace of b.l.o.o.d.y Cardinal Beaton, who so enjoyed burning Protestant leaders at the stake that he would lean from his window high up the castle wall, clapping his hands while they burned, before returning to bed with his mistress. In 1546 seven Protestant spies sneaked into the castle when its drawbridge was down and surprised Beaton in his sleep. They gutted him and dragged him to the castle wall while alarms sounded and townspeople gathered outside. "Incontinent they brought the cardinal dead to the wall," reads a contemporary account, "and hang him over the wall by the arm and foot, and so bade the people see their G.o.d."

St. Andreans recalled b.l.o.o.d.y Beaton with disdain. Pastor Boyd wrote of a dinner party at which a visitor asked where Cardinal Beaton had lived. "He lived at the Castle," another guest replied. "In a quite literal sense, he hung-out there!"

Pastor Boyd's church, Holy Trinity, was the site of the 1559 sermon by Protestant reformer John Knox that called down the wrath of heaven on Roman idolatry. When he finished the congregation poured out onto South Street, ran two blocks east and set upon the Cathedral with hammers, pickaxes and bare hands, tearing up tombs and stripping bishops' bones of gold and jewels. The Cathedral that had been the seat of Scottish Catholicism for 250 years was destroyed in a day. A year later Scotland was a Protestant country.

Below the ruined Cathedral a long stone pier jutted into the bay. The pier was made of stones salvaged from the Cathedral. On Sundays the students of St. Andrews University, the nation's oldest, walked to the end of the pier in their crimson robes, looking like a procession of cardinals. Or gentleman golfers. Uphill from there was the corner of town called Ladyhead, where fisher-folk lived six and seven to a room in a warren of tenements and shabby gardens. Everything here smelled of herring, the "silver darlings" that oiled the town's economy. Seagulls harried cl.u.s.ters of tanned fishwives who gossiped and sang while they gutted the fish. The fishwives would nod politely to Tommy Morris and his la.s.s as they went by. St. Andrews's hundred or so fisher families were scorned by many gentlefolk but not by the Morrises. Some of these women's husbands worked as caddies when the boats were idle, so they knew and revered Tommy's father. Whenever Tom came down to Ladyhead the men vied to buy him a blackstrap at the Auld Hoose or Bell Rock Tavern, the fishermen's pubs where the men drank and sang chanteys while their women worked. Fishermen risked their lives at sea and tended to pickle their livers onsh.o.r.e, while fishwives spent every morning walking two miles from Ladybank to the mouth of the Eden to gather bait in the mud flats, filling four-foot wicker creels with mussels and lugging the heavy creels home on their backs. They used the mussels to bait lines for fis.h.i.+ng boats. The lines were 200 yards long, hung with hooks sharp enough to bite through your hand. After the lines were baited the fishwives gathered driftwood, winkles, limpets, lobsters, and clams. They could even get eggs from a rabbit. Knowing that rabbits stole eggs from wild ducks' nests, the fishwives would find a rabbit burrow, reach in and pull out two or three duck eggs.

From Ladybank, Tommy and Meg walked west to St. Salvator's Chapel and Tower. The tower's top had been flat in 1547, when the Catholic Earl of Arran installed cannons on the roof and fired hundred-yard shots at the Protestant-occupied castle. Two centuries later, architect James Craig was hired to renovate the roof. Finding it too st.u.r.dy to remodel, Craig cut it free, sending a hundred-ton slab of rock straight down with a crash that shook windows, walls, cows, and even flagsticks.

A left turn led to Holy Trinity Church, where pastor A.K.H. Boyd carried on the tradition of Knox by giving sermons that seemed three days long. It was here that Tommy took his first holy communion in June of 1874. His younger siblings Lizzie and Jimmy had already had their first communions; his late acceptance of the sacrament signaled a change in Tommy, who was not particularly devout. Taking communion was a concession to propriety, probably for Meg's sake. It was a step toward a church marriage. He might not give a whit about ritual, but she did. She had proved it back in Whit-burn, where Margaret Drinnen learned that church members.h.i.+p was not a right but a privilege, the hard-won reward of a redeemed sinner.

The gossips were right about one thing: Margaret Drinnen was no innocent. She was what they called a woman with a past.

In Whitburn, where her father's pit-bull fighting dogs tore up live rabbits and rats for practice, she grew up cold and hungry. Coal bings-black heaps of mining waste as tall as the town church-blocked the horizon. Snow falling through sooty air turned gray before it reached the ground. The niceties of middle-cla.s.s propriety had little to do with Whitburn, where Margaret's sisters nursed the b.a.s.t.a.r.d sons they'd had by local miners.

Meg did somewhat better. At age twenty-five, she got pregnant by a Coltness mine official named James Stark.

Stark would not marry Margaret (or perhaps it was the reverse), and so she faced a choice: Have the baby or abort it. Many girls chose abortion, a hazardous internal stabbing with a whalebone speculum. But Margaret chose to have her baby. Her daughter, Helen Stark Drinnen, was born in 1866, six years before Meg appeared in St. Andrews. That hard choice led to another, for if an illegitimate child was to be baptized, the mother must do public penance for the sin of fornication. Naming and shaming, the rite was called.

Margaret submitted. Whatever the congregation thought of her, she was determined to keep her child sinless in the eyes of G.o.d and the church. And there was no time to lose. The stub of the child's umbilical cord had gotten infected; baby Helen was in danger of dying unbaptized.

Three consecutive Sundays she sat on a stool in Whitburn Parish Church, facing the congregation, sickly child in her arms. Sunday after Sunday after Sunday the minister spoke Margaret Drinnen's name and the name of her sin. She bowed her head and nodded to the term the minister used, admitting that she was a "fornicatrix."

Yet even in her shame, there was something special about Watty Drinnen's third daughter. "There can be no doubting that Margaret Drinnen was an exceptional woman," insists Malcolm, who found an entry dated July 8, 1866, in the parish's minute book: "Margaret Drinnen residing at Crofthead compeared before the session acknowledging guilt of fornication and was very affectionately rebuked and exhorted to walk worthy of her spiritual vocation, her child was at the same time baptized."

Affectionate rebuke and immediate baptism were a rare sequel to naming and shaming. This was clearly someone who made a memorable impression. Reverend Boyd of St. Andrews, Meg's next pastor, would call her "a remarkably handsome and healthy young woman: most lovable in every way."

Less than a month later the baby died of septicemia. Soon after that Meg fled Whitburn for Edinburgh and, later, St. Andrews.

The old seaside town was paradise by comparison to Whitburn-a meadow dotted with wildflowers and golf b.a.l.l.s. Its residents tended to live out their Biblical span of threescore and ten rather than dying at forty or fifty. By the time Margaret met Tommy Morris her father Watty, too ill to work, was stuck in his bed, wheezing and spitting black phlegm, while Tommy's father still splashed in the bay every morning and worked six days a week on the links, merrily smoking his pipe and joining his son in golf matches. When she arrived in St. Andrews, Meg knew little about golf, a game that seemed to consist largely of men cursing and handing Tommy money. But like almost everyone in St. Andrews, she soon knew all about it.

In 1874, the year Tommy and Meg began discussing marriage, the Times Times of London looked north to Scotland and saw a nation falling in love with golf: "There are districts and burghs where every second inhabitant is a golfer. It is the game of the country gentry, of the busy professional man, of the bourgeoisie of flouris.h.i.+ng centers of trade, of many of the artisans, and even of the roughs.... It is the one amus.e.m.e.nt which any 'douce' man may pursue...and lose neither respect nor social consideration." If Tommy lost social consideration by courting a woman of doubtful repute, his standing as golf's leading figure was secure. No one saw Davie Strath or any other golfer as his equal. Still he was vulnerable in foursomes, stubbornly teaming with his father. In August, after Willie and Mungo Park challenged the Morrises to a match for 25, Tom and Tommy made a half-day trip by train and ferry to a North Berwick links swarming with Park lovers from nearby Musselburgh. Tom's putter sputtered as usual that day. "Willie and Mungo...played a fine game," of London looked north to Scotland and saw a nation falling in love with golf: "There are districts and burghs where every second inhabitant is a golfer. It is the game of the country gentry, of the busy professional man, of the bourgeoisie of flouris.h.i.+ng centers of trade, of many of the artisans, and even of the roughs.... It is the one amus.e.m.e.nt which any 'douce' man may pursue...and lose neither respect nor social consideration." If Tommy lost social consideration by courting a woman of doubtful repute, his standing as golf's leading figure was secure. No one saw Davie Strath or any other golfer as his equal. Still he was vulnerable in foursomes, stubbornly teaming with his father. In August, after Willie and Mungo Park challenged the Morrises to a match for 25, Tom and Tommy made a half-day trip by train and ferry to a North Berwick links swarming with Park lovers from nearby Musselburgh. Tom's putter sputtered as usual that day. "Willie and Mungo...played a fine game," The Field The Field reported, "as likewise did Young Tom; but the senior Morris was not in his usual fettle." In fact he was-missing putts left and right. Tom shook his heavy head as the Parks closed out the match on the sixteenth green and the umpire, a gentleman named Mr. Virtue, called for applause for both sides. Tommy looked around at the cheering Musselburgh rowdies, who could now claim that their boys held both the Claret Jug and the unofficial foursomes t.i.tle. reported, "as likewise did Young Tom; but the senior Morris was not in his usual fettle." In fact he was-missing putts left and right. Tom shook his heavy head as the Parks closed out the match on the sixteenth green and the umpire, a gentleman named Mr. Virtue, called for applause for both sides. Tommy looked around at the cheering Musselburgh rowdies, who could now claim that their boys held both the Claret Jug and the unofficial foursomes t.i.tle.

This was too much losing for him to stomach. Tommy challenged Willie Park to play singles for 25. Willie, never one to turn down a bet, agreed.