Tommy's Honor (10 page)

In Prestwick, a west wind was blowing all the flags toward St. Andrews. Tommy, now twelve, was nearing the end of his studies at Ayr Academy. Nancy longed for her hometown and Tom did, too, though he said no such thing to the R&A men who visited Prestwick. Instead he hinted that he might look favorably on an offer of £50 per year. When that number was met with sputters of disbelief, Tom took a southbound train to Devonshire to lay out a course called Westward Ho, England’s first seaside links. Tom Morris was a hero there. He was King of Clubs and builder of the twelve holes at Prestwick, the best new links in a century. When he joked that there was a dire need for new courses in England, “for nearly as many men play golf there on Sunday as go to church,” they loved him all the more. Tom would make many trips to Westward Ho; on one he met a boy named Johnny Taylor—the future five-time Open champion J.H. Taylor, who would remember the encounter all his life. Young Taylor saw Tom come through a door with the sun behind him, and perhaps because of the reverence with which grown men approached the bearded visitor, or perhaps because someone mentioned the town Tom was born in, the boy believed he was looking at Saint Andrew himself.

Tom enjoyed his days at Westward Ho. He knew what the R&A officers knew—that there was nothing to keep him from taking a greenkeeper’s job in England. Nothing but the absolute impossibility in his own mind of Tom Morris’s becoming even temporarily, even momentarily, English. But then the R&A officers didn’t know that.

Tommy was growing like a spring weed. He excelled at the academy, but to his mother’s dismay he would drop his books at home and race out to play golf. He swung the same for any shot—hard—and always took the straight way to the target. If the Cardinal Bunker yawned ahead of him, he challenged it. If his ball failed to clear the bunker he would jump down into the sand, swing hard one or two or six or seven times and then emerge with a wave. His father kept pointing out better, safer routes around the links he had built when Tommy was a baby. “It’s point A to B to C, son,” Tom said. “Do they not teach Euclid at your academy?”

Tommy’s answer, in a word, was “Fore.” Alone among Prestwick golfers, he ignored Tom Morris.

By his last year at the academy Tommy was bigger than most boys his age. Now he ran up and down dunes not for fun, but to strengthen his legs. He practiced even more scientifically than Tom had done while training for his marathon with Willie Park. Tommy would hit the same shot different ways with different clubs. Nancy clucked and worried—was this how an academy scholar behaves? But Tom saw that his son possessed a sort of genius. He saw it the first time Tommy checked his aggression, thought twice and played around a bunker, floating a pitch shot to the only flat part of a slanting green. The boy was thinking two or three shots ahead. He was learning to see a round of golf as an interlocking set of options, like the shards of glass in a favorite toy, his kaleidoscope. Most golfers saw only one way to play a hole, but Tommy could picture a dozen, and as he grew he gained the strength to hit the shots he imagined. One contemporary saw the physical source of Tommy’s power: “Though a delicate youth, with blue eyes and light brown hair, Tommy had amazingly strong and supple wrists.” But it was his academy-trained mind that helped Tommy see new ways to go from A to C, to find a better route than the straight-to-target line, a route the next century’s golfers would call the line of charm.

On the twelfth of April, 1864, Scotland’s leading professionals convened at the Rook’s home course in Perth for one of the richest tournaments yet. The purse was £18, with £10 for the winner—enough for a man to live like a prince for a month. The Rook led early but funked late, taking four swings to escape a vile lie in a bunker. Tom Morris and Willie Park tied for top honors. The sun was sinking fast during their playoff when Park tried for a killing shot, a long spoon over a hazard that Tom lacked the power to clear. But Park’s ball fell short—avarice punished again. After several long, ugly minutes he recorded a 10 on the hole and Tom was £10 richer. Oddly enough, the winner of an amateur tournament on the same course the next day received the same prize money. Major Robert Boothby of St. Andrews won his £10 with a score that would have embarrassed the cracks. He did it without losing his amateur status because he was a gentleman. As a gentleman, Boothby was presumptively exempt from greed—never mind that many members of the gentry were chronically strapped for cash. The chasm in class between Major Boothby and a commoner like Tom Morris allowed both to win £10 without making Boothby less respectable or Tom more so.

Tommy had begged his father to let him play in the tournament at Perth. The cracks might all be taller than he was, but Tommy could out-drive some of them and he was brilliantly deft around the putting-greens. He begged until Tom relented, and the two Tom Morrises went to Perth together. Once there, however, they got bad news. The Perthers would not let Tommy play. They said he was too young—who had ever heard of a schoolboy crack?

Yet his trip was not in vain. As a consolation, the gentlemen of Royal Perth arranged a match between Tommy and another lad without whiskers, a prodigy the newspapers called “Master William Grieg of Perth, juvenile golfing celebrity.” Club members passed a hat and came up with a £5 prize for the boys’ match, the same sum Park earned for second place in the twenty-eight-man main event.

At the first teeing-ground, Tommy shook hands with Grieg, the young hero of Perth Academy, a rival of Tommy’s elite school. A curious crowd followed the boys. Many had bets down on Grieg, who was known for pinpoint accuracy and was as meticulous as ever that day, striking his gutty with what a witness called “astonishing neatness and precision.” Imagine the boy’s puzzlement, then, as he lost hole after hole after hole. Tommy’s man-sized drives and canny short game overwhelmed young Grieg, who looked more childlike as his defeat dragged on. “It was very funny to see the boys followed by hundreds of deeply-interested and anxious spectators,” read a news account. “Master Morris seems to have been both born and bred to golf. He has been cast in the very mould of a golfer, and plays with all the steadiness and certainty in embryo of his father.”

A photograph from that week in Perth survives. It shows eleven of the cracks posing in front of a stone wall. To the right stands the Rook with half a smirk on his face. To the left is second-place professional Willie Park, looking irked, and beside him a stoic Tom Morris. And there on a step behind Tom, one hand resting on his father’s shoulder, is Tommy. A week shy of his thirteenth birthday, dressed in his little-boy sailor suit and cap, he could pass for ten or eleven years old. Looking straight at the camera, he seems to know that he belongs among these men two and three times his age, the best golfers of the 1860s. He certainly knows one thing that the newspapers failed to notice: His score in the boys’ match would have won the professional tournament.

T
he fourth of May, 1864, was a shining, windy Wednesday. The whins hid their thorns under yellow blossoms that wreathed the links like garlands. In a long, wood-paneled room in the Royal and Ancient clubhouse, ruddy men smoked, laughed, and argued while servants moved among them carrying food and drink on silver platters. After luncheon Major Robert Boothby called for the attention of his fellow members, some of whom knew what was coming.

“I move that Tom Morris of Prestwick, formerly of St. Andrews, be brought here as a professional golfer at a salary of fifty pounds a year,” he said.

“Second the motion,” called Captain William Maitland-Dougall, lifeboat-rescue hero of the Storm of ’60.

The patrician John Whyte-Melville, his mustache and side-whiskers as silver as money, rose to object. Whyte-Melville would not hear of paying a greenkeeper fifty pounds. Did no one else recall what they had paid Allan Robertson for the same work? Nothing! Were they now to be held hostage by Allan’s apprentice, the son of John Morris the weaver? Whyte-Melville and several other members called for a vote. But Major Boothby, whose prestige may have risen a notch with his amateur victory at Perth three weeks before, had picked the right man as well as the right moment, and his motion passed. The club’s official offer to Tom was an annual £50 plus £20 for expenses. According to an R&A historian “the invitation…will have doubtless filled him with pride and awe.”

In fact the gentlemen of St. Andrews needed Tom more than he needed them. A greedy man would have held out for more money, reckoning that the gentleman golfers could easily double that £50 out of their pockets on any given afternoon. Tom also knew that accepting their offer carried risk as well as reward. If a blight struck his putting-greens next year he could be fired like Watty Alexander. And he would not be his own boss. The new greenkeeper’s job would be “to keep the putting-greens in good order, to repair when necessary. For heavy work, carting, etc., he was to be allowed assistance at the rate of one man’s labour for two days in the week, and it was understood that he was to work under the Green Committee.” The last clause emphasized that Tom needed to please the club’s officers, who would be looking over his shoulder. J.B. Salmond’s
The Story of the R&A
paints the scene on the day Tom took the job he would hold for forty-four years: “Thomas Morris was called in to a full meeting of members in the Club House, was given a detailed account of his duties, was told that he could employ one man’s labour two days a week for heavy work such as carting and was solemnly handed the implements of his craft—a barrow, a spade and a shovel.”

Prestwick golfers took their loss in stride. They gave Tom a rousing sendoff in the town’s Burgh Council Room, where fiddlers and pipers moved through a festive crowd that ate, drank and sang until long past midnight. The
Ayrshire Express
described the scene: The event’s chairman opened by praising the “professional pioneer” who had built a golf course famous for its “compactness and variety of hazards.” The golfers cheered. Tom’s departure, the chairman announced, was no shame to Prestwick, for “the ties of an earlier and stronger affection drew him Fife-wards to re-settle in his native county at St. Andrews, known over the world as the headquarters of the grand old national pastime.” After several more minutes of chairmanly harrumphing, the host offered a toast: “To Tom Morris, with all the honours!”

The room went white as shouting men waved their handkerchiefs over their heads. Tom waited for the noise to die down, but the noise grew until he had no choice but to stand and speak. “I am no orator,” he began. An awkward silence proved his point. “When I first arrived in Prestwick, thirteen years ago, I thought I had made a mistake,” he said. Seeing the barren links hemmed in by a wall to the north, a road to the south, railway and beach on the other sides, he had wished he’d never left Fife for this frontier. But Prestwick surprised him, proving to be fertile ground for golf. “I leave with regret,” he said. “My feelings will not allow me to say more. But if you will take the will for the deed, I will offer my best thanks for the honour you have paid me, an honour which I will never forget.”

The golfers stood and cheered.

On the Monday before Christmas, 1864, Tom and Nancy brought their well-bundled children to Prestwick Station to await the day’s first train to Glasgow. The train rolled into Prestwick just after seven. It would leave at 7:18, so there wasn’t much time to load children and luggage into the second-class compartment and cast last looks over the links, the firth, and the rocky peaks of the Isle of Arran, snowcapped in winter. Five-year-old Jack, sitting on the platform amid a jumble of hurrying legs, could not climb onto the train without help. Tom hoisted him up and they were on their way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sixty-seven-year-old Lang Willie and other caddies pitched in during Tom’s early labors, but few could keep up with him. He rose early for a dip in St. Andrews Bay even when there was ice on the shallows. His sun-and windburned skin stayed red all winter as he took up the work of mending and modernizing the old course, work that Allan Robertson had started eight winters before. Back in the cold months of 1857–58, the R&A had paid Robertson a one-time fee of £25 to enlarge most of the putting-greens so that two holes could be cut into the greens. Before then, golfers had gone outward to the Eden for nine holes and then played the homeward nine on the same narrow path, using the same putting-greens. In his
Reminiscences of Golf on St. Andrews Links
, Balfour recalled fairways “no wider than a good, broad street,” with thick whin bushes on both sides. A large bunker could fill most of the space between. It was no wonder that players of Tom’s generation learned to sacrifice distance for accuracy. As J. Gordon McPherson marveled in his 1891 book
Golf and Golfers
, “what skill was needed—especially with a side-wind—to avoid the Scylla of the whins without being caught by the Charybdis of the bunker!”

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