Tommy's Honor (4 page)

By his sixteenth birthday, Tom Morris could have beaten most of the gentleman golfers. “Don’t let on,” Allan said. “They’ll find out soon enough.” Tom caddied for many of the club members, and when his advice and encouragement helped his man win a bet, Tom might get more than the usual shilling at the end of the round. He might find a crown in his palm—five shillings. One day he got a five-pound note! On that day he was wealthy. He could give half to his parents, buy a pair of warm socks, dine at the Golf Inn, and still have enough to tithe to the church on Sunday morning.

In 1839, after four years of apprenticeship, Tom began his five-year term as a journeyman, living in rented rooms nearby but still working in Allan’s kitchen. He now stood two inches taller than Allan (though half a foot less than Lang Willie) and was ten to twenty yards longer off the tee. He could not help shaking his head at the getups his employer wore, including a different color of waistcoat and cap for every day of the week. Sepia photos would preserve Allan Robertson in tasteful black and tan, but that dark cap was likely to be purple, matching his tie, while the waistcoat under his red jacket might be orange or lime green. Watching this peacock bustle to the first teeing-ground, Tom knew that plain brown tweed was right for him.

Allan’s red jacket might have seemed lacking in tact, too forward for a commoner, had he not been known and liked by the gentlemen. If his colorful clothes outsparkled theirs, if his quoting Homer or Shakespeare overreached, he knew his place. It was Allan who knelt to tee up his master’s ball. Scotland’s best golfer then waited at a respectful distance while the man topped his ball or sliced it into the whins.

When club members played matches, Allan, Tom, Lang Willie, and the other caddies carried their clubs. Sometimes a club man hired a caddie to lug his clubs and be his partner against another member-caddie pair in foursomes—each two-man team playing a single ball, taking turns hitting it. If the gentleman drove off the tee, the caddie hit the next shot, and so on. At the end of the round the caddie on the losing side got the usual fee, but the one who helped his man win could expect a bonus. Tom earned most of his money this way. If his team won he’d get silver in his palm and eat meat and potatoes that night at the Golf Inn, the Cross Keys, or the Black Bull. If not, it was porridge in Allan’s kitchen.

Soon Tom was playing matches of a different kind. Two caddies would play two others for a small bet, or two caddies would team against a pair of club members, spotting the gentlemen strokes. Tom found himself getting released from work to play as Allan’s partner. He relished those matches, not only for the golf but for the fun of seeing his boss in action. Allan was a born performer, fully in character from the moment he reached the teeing-ground, gave a little bow, and doffed his cap to the gentlemen. Tom liked to watch him rehearse his swing as if he needed practice. Allan might make a clumsy practice swipe, digging up turf, then wince and say his back ached. That could be worth a stroke as the match was arranged.

Once the teams and strokes were set, Allan waited for any gentlemen in the group to hit. Then he stepped forward to tee up his own ball. He spat in his hands. A quick waggle triggered his swing, the clubhead gliding in a perfect circle around his small, bullish frame. His clubs had quirky names—his flat-bladed bunker iron, a forerunner of the sand wedge, was called the Frying Pan; another club was the Doctor; another was Sir David Baird, named for the R& A medalist who gave it to him. He held them all high on the handle, a fingerygrip that helped him flip the clubface open or closed at the last instant. No golfer had better touch, or more tricks.

Tom called Allan “the cunningest player.” It was a polite way of saying that he was a hustler. If an opponent had the honor in a singles match, Allan would mutter aloud about the wind even if there was no wind. If Allan had the honor he might pretend to swing all-out, grunting for effect, but hold off a bit at impact so that his ball stopped just short of a bunker. The opponent, believing the trap was out of range, would drive straight into it—and end up smiling as Allan praised his Herculean power. When teamed with a weak club member in an alternate-shot foursomes match, Allan had other ways to work the angles: If his partner faced a long carry over a hazard, he would make the man swallow his pride and putt their ball to the hazard’s brink, making Allan’s next shot easier. Sometimes he told a partner to swing and miss on purpose. “Well done, sir,” he’d say, then step up and hit the ball past all trouble to the flag.

Some of his tactics indulged a bent for mischief. According to Stewart Hackney’s
Bygone Days on the Old Course
, Allan liked to hoodwink one half-blind R& A member: “He used for fun to plant a green hairpin secretly in front of the hole, and gloat over the poor old fellow’s perplexity and dismay.” He also displayed a schadenfreude few golfers admit to: “It was amusing to see Allan chuckle when an opponent was bunkered. ‘It appeals to the higher feelings of humanity to see your rival in a bunker,’ he used to say. ‘Such a calamity could be devoutly wished.” Allan may have lacked the quality of mercy, but he knew his Shakespeare well enough to paraphrase Hamlet.

As Allan’s journeyman, Tom was less than a junior partner but better than a cousin, having long since surpassed Lang Willie at work by being more efficient and much easier to wake up in the morning. It was the same on the links, where Lang Willie played but was so loosely strung together that his golf swing reminded Tom of a man falling down stairs. Lang Willie knew he was no golfer. He joked that when he swung, his elbows kept trying to switch places with his knees. Meanwhile Tom kept improving. By the time he turned twenty, Tom was the second-best golfer in St. Andrews. After years of getting strokes from Allan—nine strokes at first, then six, four, and finally two—they played even. In 1842, when club members put up a few pounds to sponsor a tournament for the caddies (all caddies but Allan, barred because he was thought to be unbeatable), Tom took home the purse.

Allan Robertson became the town’s hero in 1843, when he beat Willie Dunn, the long-hitting champion from Musselburgh. The match was a novel idea: more than a week of single combat between the best players from towns whose golfers couldn’t stand each other. Musselburgh was the golf hub of the south side of the Firth of Forth, the Edinburgh side, while St. Andrews was the game’s cradle and Robertson his hometown’s hero. With grit, clutch putting, and a trick or two, Allan edged Dunn over twenty rounds while dozens of bettors, newspaper reporters, and other spectators walked along with the players. The match moved a St. Andrews poet to write, “Ten days they were fighting, ten days, ten days/ Complete at their weapons, always, always/With club, cleek and putter, my Muse cannot utter/A millionth part of their praise, their praise!”

It was in this heady time that Tom won his first match against Allan. They played for a short-waisted red jacket offered as a prize by an R&A member. There were no spectators or reporters that day, but Tom felt like shouting when he sank the winning putt. Allan shrugged and said he hadn’t been trying because he didn’t like the jacket. “The wee coatie would fit Tom better,” he said. But Tom knew something had changed that day. He had stepped up a rung. Over the next year Allan began giving Tom a small share of his golf-ball sales and a growing share of the bets they won as foursomes partners. Before that, the boss had put up their portion of the stakes when he and Tom played a money match. Allan covered any losses and, fittingly, kept almost all of what they won. If Tom played well the boss might give him ten percent; if not, a token penny told him what losers are worth. But now they were sharing risk and reward, with Allan haggling over odds and strokes at the first tee and Tom surprising rivals with his maturing game. And here was the answer to the question Tom had turned over in his head since he was fourteen: Why had the great Robertson chosen Tom Morris as his apprentice? Because he had seen him swing. The game’s keenest eye had watched a boy knocking spoon shots down an open fairway, sometimes with a cracked feathery, sometimes with a cork. That eye had spotted Tom’s talent. Allan, who did nothing without a reason that served Allan, had needed a reliable foursomes partner. Now he had one.

Lying on his cot late at night, cold wind on his face, Tom may have wondered what God thought of all this. Here he was, still a journeyman, earning more money than his father ever had, most of it in wagers. Of course his luck could vanish in a breath—a broken bone, a plague of cholera, a new golfer who could beat him and Allan both. But for now he had reason to be cautiously happy. If not yet prosperous, he was settled enough to think about settling down. If not quite respectable, he was close enough to smell the roast beef in Captain Broughton’s house.

Captain Broughton, one of the R&A’s leading players, lived in a columned mansion at 91 North Street. The beef in the Captain’s kitchen was clean and bloody, not tinged with pepper, ginger, and charcoal like the rank meat in alehouses and inns and Allan’s kitchen. Tom shut his eyes and breathed its scent into his nostrils. A working-man like him could not set foot anywhere but in the kitchen of such a house, nor would he want to. In the hush of the parlor, with its grand piano, gold-framed mirror, and leather-trimmed chairs around a table so perfectly polished that it shone like the mirror, he would have felt like a thief, a trespasser. It was better to stay in the kitchen, picking a scrap of fat off a platter of beef carried by Nancy Bayne, the maid.

Five years older than Tom, Nancy was one of four servants in the Captain’s house. Along with another maid and a housekeeper who outranked the maids, she scrubbed, polished, dusted, and cooked from six in the morning till after dark—all under the stern eye of the Captain’s governess. Nancy was no beauty but rather a strong, sensible girl, a “pattern girl” in the popular phrase. She knew her role in society’s pattern and played it with vigor and good humor. She already had a suitor, but after Tom Morris entered the picture the other fellow had no chance. Tom caddied for the Captain and sometimes partnered him in foursomes matches. Tom was Nancy’s favorite, too. He had a pleasing enough face, with neatly trimmed whiskers. His boots were almost new, and he took care to kick the dirt off them before he came into the Captain’s kitchen. Tom had a jacket with no frays at the sleeve or elbow, and a pocket watch with a silver chain. He had a kind eye and a bit of a spark to him, asking about Nancy’s day, offering a handshake when he took his leave. She was pleased to note that his hands were more callused than hers.

For Tom, even courtship had to do with golf. One day on the High Hole, he and Captain Broughton were playing a crown-and-shillings game—a crown on the match, a shilling per hole—when Tom found his ball buried in a bunker. He swung twice with no luck. “Pick it up,” the Captain said.

Tom said, “No, I might hole it.”

“Ha! If you do, I’ll give you fifty pounds.”

“Done.”

Tom’s biographer W. W. Tulloch told the story sixty years later. According to Tulloch, Tom “had another shot at it, eye on ball and perhaps on the fair Nancy. By some million-to-one chance the ball did actually go into the hole. ‘That will make a nice nest-egg for me to put in the bank,’ said the young fellow.” But the next day, when the Captain brought the money, Tom surprised him by turning it down. There was no debt, he said—he had been joking. As Tulloch noted, “No doubt the Captain remembered this when the marriage day came around.”

Tom Morris married Nancy Bayne on June 21, 1844. The vows were read by the Reverend Principal Haldane of Holy Trinity Church, who had christened baby Tom twenty-three years before. After the vows Captain Broughton, who had given the bride and groom a wedding gift of precisely fifty pounds, led toasts to his favorite caddie and his former maid, who would do her scrubbing, dusting, and cooking for Tom Morris from that day on.

Life was moving faster. In a year Nancy was pregnant, though no one in her time and place would use that indelicate word. People said she was in a family way, or “no longer unwell,” meaning that her monthly flow of blood had ceased. In the summer of 1846 Nancy reached the last stage of being no longer unwell—her confinement, when her husband was banished to a far room while women from both their families and then at last a midwife clustered around Nancy as she howled in her labor. Soon the midwife showed Tom the glad result: a healthy son. He and Nancy named the baby Thomas Morris Junior and called him Wee Tom.

If the child was meant to be a golfer, he was born at a good time. After Allan Robertson’s grand battle with Willie Dunn, other professionals began making their names in the game. Dunn and his twin brother Jamie were Musselburgh’s champions. Bob Andrew was Perth’s. Amateur competitions at the R&A and other clubs were still the main events on golf’s calendar, but people had now seen enough of the “cracks,” as crack-shot caddies were called, to know that amateur medalists were not in their league. Golf talk revolved around the cracks: Who was the best of them? Could Dunn win a rematch against Robertson? Which town could field the best foursomes pair? By mid-century bettors from various clubs were risking weighty sums to find out. To their surprise, hundreds and even thousands of ordinary citizens were curious about this new craze, the professional golf match. Soon a great foursomes match was arranged, a duel between the Dunns of Musselburgh and those two noted sticks from St. Andrews, Allan Robertson and Tom Morris.

Sportsmen on both sides of the Forth pooled their cash. Each side came up with £200, which meant that the cracks would play for the staggering sum of £400. It wasn’t the players’ money; they would perform for the benefit of the bettors who put up the stakes. Still, news of the record-setting stakes catalyzed a reaction that fed on itself—more crucial than the prize money was its power to keep people talking about it, to keep the small but growing world of golf abuzz for weeks before the match. This was hype Victorian style. News may have traveled at a walking pace, in weekly newspapers and by word of mouth, but as the match approached it seemed half of Scotland knew about it. The players, who would get a piece of the £400 if they won—ten percent was customary—made side bets of their own. They rubbed up their clubs as the first day of play dawned clear and cool. The format was two out of three, with three matches of thirty-six holes each to be played first at Musselburgh, then at St. Andrews, and finally on the supposedly neutral links at North Berwick, near Edinburgh. Everyone expected Allan Robertson and Willie Dunn to play stellar golf. Everyone knew that Jamie Dunn, Willie’s identical twin, was nearly his brother’s equal. The question mark was young Morris, who had never played in front of spectators and reporters.