Tommy's Honor (12 page)

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

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

E
RECTED
BY

T
HOMAS
M
ORRIS AND
A
GNES
B
AYNE
IN
M
EMORY OF THEIR
B
ELOVED SON

THOMAS

WHO DIED 9TH
A
PRIL
1850, A
GED 4 YEARS

I
N THE SILENT
T
OMB WE LEAVE HIM

T
ILL THE
R
ESURRECTION
M
ORN

W
HEN HIS
S
AVIOUR WILL
R
ECEIVE HIM

A
ND
R
ESTORE HIS LOVELY
F
ORM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’ll see what for,” said Tom. “You’ll see.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The heart of any golf shop was a sturdy workbench. According to J.H. Taylor, the English golfer and clubmaker, a proper workbench “must be strongly built, and should not be more than thirty-three inches high.” This was the same Taylor who as a boy caught a glimpse of Tom Morris and thought Tom was Saint Andrew. Taylor, whose clubmaking was as precise as his golf, listed the items on his workbench: a vice with a 3½-inch jaw; a 14-inch bow saw; a 12-inch tenon saw; a 14-inch half-round wood rasp; a 14-inch half-round cabinet rasp; a 14-inch half-round cabinet file; a 3/
₈
-inch gouge; a 1-inch chisel; a medium hammer; a brace; a lead ladle; a 3/
₁₆
-inch twist drill; a small bit; a 12-inch screwdriver; a scraper; a screw for leads; a steel-bottom plane; a glue-pot; an oil-stone; an oilcan; a pair of scales; and weights up to eight ounces. Tom’s shop held all that as well as a spherical iron mold for making gutties, Tom’s primary business. Each gutty went into the mold as warm putty and came out as a near-perfect sphere that was hammered all over to make it fly better; given two coats of white paint and then set aside for three months to cure before it was sold. Each ball was stamped with the same letters emblazoned on the sign over the workshop door:
T. MORRIS
A name that meant probity and good golf, if not good putting.

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

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

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