Tommy's Honor (5 page)

Allan liked to joke about the Dunns: “Keep your eye on ’em, or Willie might hit every shot.” The tall twins often dressed alike, but at Musselburgh they did their opponents and spectators a favor by wearing different ties, Willie’s blue and Jamie’s gray. They went on to play identically well, outdriving the St. Andrews duo, alternating shots with dead aim. To the cheers of their home-course supporters, the twins routed Allan and Tom. The day’s scheduled thirty-six holes ended after only twenty-four, the Dunns leading by thirteen holes with twelve to play. It was a bitter defeat for the St. Andreans. Matters worsened a week later at St. Andrews, where the ballyhooed showdown looked to be a bust, a mismatch. Allan kept missing putts—“funking,” it was called, which meant choking. Then, late in the day, the twins faltered. Tom led a rally over the last nine holes and he and Allan squeaked by with a victory on the Home Hole. Now the sides were dead even. Had the contest been scored by holes rather than courses, Tom and Allan would have been twelve holes behind, needing a miracle on the last day. As it was, all they needed was one good afternoon.

On the morning of the final thirty-six holes, a special train carted crowds of so-called “golf-fanatics” to the quirky little North Berwick links below Berwick Law, a dead volcano. The squat, round-topped mountain had once spat fire but had been worn down through the millennia to a nub that schoolboys climbed. At its foot, crowds gathered near the first teeing-ground at the edge of a red sandstone town that had never seen anything like this.

Rain fell in sheets that morning, sluicing into the weedy old quarry beside the first fairway. The torrent peaked just as dozens of Allan and Tom’s supporters were crossing the Forth on the Burntisland ferry. By the time they reached the course they were clammy and miserable and outnumbered ten to one by the Dunns’ supporters. One observer, Tom Peter, remembered a glum morning: “On meeting Allan I said I had come to see him win. He replied that he hoped so, but he had a dejected look.” The rain moved offshore, leaving clean sky and a breeze that blew several spectators’ hats down the fairway. Allan and Tom had the honor, which meant that Allan did. Before teeing off he took a moment to look around at the huge, still-growing crowd around him, a throng that stretched along the fairway almost to the green. There were more than a thousand people watching. So many faces, all silent for one long moment before he sent the ball on its way.

Allan’s drive was straight, but short. Willie Dunn’s drive flew past it. Willie held his driver high on the follow-through, waving it forward as if to chase the ball farther. The Dunns’ backers cheered and shook their coal-stained fists. “I never saw a match where such vehement party spirit was displayed,” Tom Peter wrote in his memoir,
Reminiscences of Golf
. “So great was the keenness and anxiety to see whose ball had the best lie, that no sooner were the shots played than off the whole crowd ran, helter-skelter.” The Dunn twins’ power awed Peter: “They went sweeping over hazards which the St. Andrews men had to play short of.” With twenty-six holes played and eight to go, the Dunns were four holes ahead. Gamblers in the crowd raised their hands and shouted offers: Fifteen to one against Robertson and Morris. Twenty to one!

Allan had been useless all day, hitting crooked drives and funking putts. Tom Peter heard a catcall from the crowd: “That wee body in the red jacket canno’ play golf!” That yell may have been the spur the proud Robertson needed. A minute later he sank his first putt of consequence in more than a week. He and Tom took that hole and the next one, too. They halved the one after that and won two of the following three in what one report would call “a most extraordinary run of surprises.” Suddenly the match was even with two holes to play. Two holes for £400. The Dunns wore identical frowns. The crowd pushed close enough to hear the whisk of Allan’s swing as he drove his and Tom’s ball into one of the worst spots in sight, a patch of shin-high grass a hundred and thirty yards out. The ball hopped once and disappeared.

Tom slashed it out, but two shots later he and Allan lay four in a greenside bunker. The Dunns lay two only twenty yards away. But their ball had come to rest against a paving stone bordering a path near the green. “They wished the stone removed, and called for someone to go for a spade,” Peter recalled, “but Sir David Baird would not sanction its removal, because it was off the course and a fixture.” Referee Baird was the same Baird who’d given Allan the eponymous club he was using. Musselburgh fanatics hissed him, but the ruling was correct. The Dunns slapped at their ball three times before it popped loose, costing them their two-shot advantage and one more. Peter watched them unravel: “Both men had by this time lost all judgment and nerve, and played most recklessly.” The most pivotal hole of the century’s first half went to Robertson and Morris, who took the final hole as well. Their backers were delirious, and £400 richer. Tom and Allan got a beggar’s cut of that, plus their end of several side bets, and for weeks after returning to St. Andrews they enjoyed free meals and free pints. Tom was his hometown’s particular hero—hadn’t he downed the Dunns almost in spite of Allan? Following “the Famous Foursome,” Tom Morris’s health was toasted so often that it seemed he would surely live to be a hundred.

Almost before the cheers died down, Tom’s luck went south. The coming months would test his courage and even his faith.

It began with a new ball. In the late 1840s, a few golfers in England began using balls made of rubber. The stuff was called gutta-percha. Made from the sap of a Malaysian rubber tree, it was easy to mold into a ball and more durable than leather and feathers. Cheaper, too. A gutta-percha ball resisted rain better than a feathery, which tended to split at the seams in wet weather, and the “gutty” cost less than half as much—a mere shilling versus a half-crown for a feather ball. When Gourlay, the Musselburgh feathery-maker, got his hands on one of the first gutties, he saw the future coming. He had a standing order to send featheries to Sir David Baird, the Famous Foursome referee, an avid amateur who wore a top hat while he played because he thought it helped his balance. Gourlay promptly sent Baird the balance of his inventory: six dozen feather balls. A year or so later Sir David—still trying to get his money’s worth—would be one of the last golfers hitting a feathery.

Allan Robertson was frantic. He had always said that nothing good ever came from the south. Now here came a threat to his livelihood in the form of a gray orb bouncing from England to Musselburgh to the St. Andrews links his father and grandfather had stocked with featheries. Allan could not even bring himself to pronounce “gutta-percha.” He called the new balls “the filth.” Playing with them was “no’ golf.” He paid boys pennies to hunt down gutties and bring them to his house, where the boys watched Allan burn the balls in the kitchen fire. These public burnings filled the room with acrid blue-black smoke. Tom and Lang Willie, stuffing and sewing featheries in a fog that made their eyes itch, had to swear they would never play golf with the filth.

The Famous Foursome had lifted Tom’s standing with the gentleman golfers of the R&A, who now insisted on getting him as a caddie or partner. One morning he went out for a friendly match with a prominent club member, the preeningly handsome John Campbell, a man another member described as “magnificent and pompous.” On the inward nine, Tom ran out of golf balls. Campbell gave him one of his own gutties to finish the round. Tom thought nothing of it; he couldn’t leave Mister Campbell out there alone. Over a hole or two he found the rubber ball nothing special—easier to putt than a feathery, since it was seamless and a little heavier, but shorter off the tee. They were nearing the Home Hole when Allan, playing the outward nine, came storming toward them, shouting. Allan was furious. His own Tom, playing that filth! Despite his vow! Tom tried to defend himself, but Allan was beyond reason. As Tom would recall half a century later, “Allan in such a temper cried out to me never to show face again.”

Just like that. After more than ten years of working side by side, ten years and some twenty-five thousand golf balls made of leather and feathers and sweat, Tom was fired. When he tried again to explain what had happened, Allan turned his back. And Tom, who also had his pride, was not about to beg. He would take up the loom first. He would take his wife and child and leave his hometown before he begged.

Just like that a life changes forever. Heading home, Tom may have looked back toward the links, dark green and gray in late-day sun, to see golfers gathered at the first teeing-ground. He did not want to leave home, and surely did not relish the thought of giving his wife the news. He might believe, might
know
that God closes no door without opening another, but Nancy was prone to gloomy spells. She had fretted and wept over Wee Tom’s latest illness, though the doctor said it was nothing. How much would she fret over a jobless husband? Tom steeled himself as he kicked his boots clean at their door.

Wee Tom was sicker. The doctor called it baby fever, though the child was four years old, no baby. Four-year-olds were thought to be safe from the thousand things that pulled babies underground. But the boy wheezed and grew hotter. The doctor said they should keep the drapes drawn and let the child rest. A day later he said they should pray. Tom sat and prayed with Nancy, each of them holding one of Wee Tom’s hands, hands that were small and too hot. The child’s hair was wet with sweat, his eyes glazed.

Thomas Morris Junior died on the ninth of April, 1850. Tom, with Nancy beside him, wrapped the little body in a mort cloth, a sheet of spotless linen. He lifted Wee Tom and placed him in a box of yellow elm, the wood so fresh that it wept sap. Later that week they put the box in the ground in the cemetery at the east end of town, beside the ruins of St. Andrews Cathedral.

Tom Morris, so recently St. Andrews’ hero, walked the town in a daze. His friends worried: What would Tom do? The answer came from an R&A member who found him a job as greenkeeper at a brand new club in Prestwick, on the far side of Scotland. Tom agreed to pack up his golf clubs, his wife, and his sorrow and go west to Prestwick.

Before they left, he and Nancy bought a tall white stone for Wee Tom’s grave. They paid a stonecutter to etch the child’s name and his birth and death dates on the slab, along with a verse that looked forward to Resurrection Day.

Their departure was put off until 1851. There were details to iron out. Where would they live in Prestwick? Who would join the new golf club there? The Prestwick course was another matter: Tom would have to build one. But for every trouble, he thought, the Good Lord provides a reason to rejoice. As Tom and his wife prepared to leave home she was plump and happy, a new life kicking inside her.

T
he sun over Prestwick moved backward. It rose over inland hills, not the gray water that meant east to Tom, and set behind a mountain in an unfamiliar sea. Tom knew that this water was no proper sea but the broad Firth of Clyde. He knew that the mountain in the water, Goat Fell, was part of the Isle of Arran, a twenty-mile rock that rose from the firth. He knew he was on Scotland’s west coast, so far west that to go much farther you would need gills. But knowing his location on a map did nothing to ease Tom’s sense of dislocation. He was homesick.

Not that he complained. His wife was homesick, too, tired and fretful, and Nancy had other worries—a house to furnish, a child to clothe and feed. Their second baby, another son, had been born that spring, just before they left St. Andrews. “An extra gift from God,” she called him. They named the boy Thomas Morris Junior, same as the one they had lost. It was common when a son died young to give his name to the next son. It kept the father’s name alive. But they never called this boy Wee Tom. This one was Tommy. Loud and hungry from the start, he seemed to have life enough for two.

The Morrises lived in a tidy cottage provided by the Prestwick Golf Club. Members kept their golf clubs in wooden lock-boxes in the Morris cottage and held their meetings in the parlor. The cottage sat across a rutted road from the Red Lion Inn, where on July 2, 1851, the Earl of Eglinton and forty-nine other gentlemen had founded the club over dinner and drinks. It was Lord Eglinton’s friend Colonel James Ogilvie Fairlie, one of the R&A’s most prominent members, who convinced Tom to bring his wife and son to the world’s edge and rebuild Prestwick’s golf course. There wasn’t much to rebuild. What Tom found was fifty-odd acres of dunes, brush and ragged grasses with knee-high flagsticks scattered here and there. Some Prestwick golfers played randomly, aiming for any flag they could spot from wherever they found a ball. They clambered up and down towering dunes, slipping on sandy pathways, shouting “Fore” and “Bloody hell!” This was the thimble of turf where Tom was supposed to build the best links in the west.

That fall he walked the links until he knew every acre. As Keeper of the Green, Tom was charged with teaching lessons and supervising caddies, but his prime task was maintaining the links, known collectively as “the green.” Prestwick’s threadbare green was a funnel-shaped patch of straw-colored dunes, tan and purple heather, red poppies and wind-whipped bentgrass, the last of which was at least green. To the west was the beach. On the inland side ran a muddy stream, the Pow Burn, and the railway to Ayr and Glasgow, with the vine-covered ruins of a church beyond the railway. A rough road marked the links’ southern border; the northern edge, 770 yards away, was a low stone wall. Sheep roamed the dunes and dells, keeping the grass down and leaving their droppings on half-bare putting-greens. There were rabbit scrapes everywhere—oval depressions where buck rabbits shat and then rolled in their scat, marking their turf. Tom marked his territory with sticks, pacing off distances, imagining and reimagining these dunes and hollows in a hundred configurations. Suppose he put a putting-green here and dug a bunker beside it—where would the next hole be? Suppose he filled in a bunker, grew grass on top and made it a putting-green?

Tom had helped Allan lay out a few holes at Carnoustie, across the Firth of Tay from St. Andrews, but this would be the first course he built himself. Sitting on a dune that cast a fifty-yard shadow, he looked out over the Firth of Clyde to Arran, the long island on the western horizon. Sunsets made Arran appear to be on fire. The shore swept south toward hazy cliffs called the Heads of Ayr. Between Arran and the cliffs a little gray bump called Ailsa Craig poked out of the water. Ailsa Craig was home to countless gannets, sea geese that dove straight down like knives from the sky, catching fish that swam too close to the surface. Prestwickers had another name for Ailsa Craig: They called it Paddy’s Milestone, because it marked the midway point between Belfast and Glasgow, a crossing that thousands of starved Irish had made and were still making in their coffin ships only to find the potatoes blighted here, too. The only work for them, the lucky ones who found work, was slaving in mines or feeding coal to the blast-furnaces that made Glasgow thrum all day and glow reddish brown at night.

Walking the wall of dunes between the beach and the links, Tom watched steamers and clipper ships going to and from Glasgow, thirty miles northeast. Closer to shore, brown seals broke the water. Still closer were knee-high waves, seaweed, driftwood, foam, and gray sand. When golfers appeared on the links he turned to watch them, but sheep almost always outnumbered the golfers. One day the Earl of Eglinton’s greyhounds came streaking across the links, training for a race.

Tom learned to enjoy Prestwick’s weather, less raw but no less fickle than Fife’s. Low clouds rolled in to pelt the coast with rain that turned to long white darts of sleet. Then the sky would relent as the land held its breath. The light changed in these lulls. It might turn yellow, purple, or gray. Next might come drizzle, hard rain, or diffident sun, or sometimes a mist that moved inland like a curtain, bright sunshine behind it, endless sky over water so clear that you could see fish in it.

At night, sitting up by an open window while Nancy and the baby slept, Tom made pencil sketches of the links on landscaper’s paper. He drew holes and combinations of holes, with arrows showing the line of play. The arrows started out sensibly enough, then tangled like seaweed. It was a maddening exercise—there wasn’t room for eighteen holes. But each night he also read his Bible.
Ask the Lord to bless your plans…
Pacing, thinking, hearing the surf at the foot of the links, he might walk to the room where his wife and son slept, Nancy with her worries and Tommy with his chestnut curls and long lashes. What man hearing the sleeping breaths of his wife and child could fail to take courage into the next day?

Tom saw what he should do. His course would be twelve holes, not eighteen. It would start with a long, unforgettable monster. The second hole would climb over towering dunes to a putting-green guarded by a huge, hungry bunker. Golfers who made it that far without surrendering would forgive him the zigzags ahead.

The club paid several laborers to help, but Tom did much of the digging and carting himself, using shovels, wheelbarrows and his bare hands. His opening hole was the longest in golf, measuring 578 yards at a time when a two-hundred-yard drive was a long poke. The drive had to clear a swamp, the Goosedubs, staying clear of the humpbacked dunes to the left, and from there it was three solid clouts to the putting-green. The second hole, called Alps, led golfers up dunes that presented an optical illusion: They appeared to be mountains much farther away. Tom planted surprises all over the links, turning the shaggy ground’s limitations to his advantage with deceptions that rewarded local knowledge. Club members who knew the course’s tricks would have an edge. The approach to the Alps Hole, for instance, called for a shot from a hollow called Purgatory. The shot had to clear towering dunes. Those dunes were so steep that caddies sometimes lost their footing and tumbled backward on the way up. But clearing the dunes was not enough. A ball that summited the Alps could fall into a vast, deep, putting-green-sized bunker called Sahara. Only by clearing both the Alps and the Sahara Bunker could the golfer reach a green that sat in a grassy bowl, welcoming shots that were strong enough to find it. “The course went dodging in and out amongst lofty sand-hills,” wrote the amateur champion and golf historian Horace Hutchison half a century later. “The holes were, for the most part, out of sight when one took the iron in hand for the approach, for they lay in deep dells among those sand-hills, and you lofted over the intervening mountain of sand, and there was all the fascinating excitement, as you climbed to the top of it, of seeing how near to the hole your ball may have happened to roll.”

With so little acreage to work with, Tom had no choice but to let holes crisscross. That was a minor defect at a time when a dozen rounds might complete a day’s play. Still it could be unnerving to stroke a putt on the fifth green while someone’s second shot on the first hole zipped under your chin.

“Fore!”

“Bloody hell!”

While working on the course, Tom played it every day but the Sabbath. He was dead-set on knowing every inch, every shot his course could ruin or create. Often he played with his patron, Colonel Fairlie, who was as near to being Tom’s friend as a gentleman could be to a hireling. The gruff, clever Fairlie was forty-two, twelve years older than Tom, with a high forehead and a high, starched collar. Sporting a black, bristly mustache that curved down to meet his sidewhiskers over a clean-shaven chin, he had the look of a sea captain, scanning the horizon with squinted eyes, seeking his next challenge. Colonel James Ogilvie Fairlie came by his title by serving the Queen as an officer of the Ayrshire Yeomanry Cavalry, a reserve unit that marched in formation on the village green on holidays, striking fear into any seals or hungry Irishmen intent on attacking the coast. But while he was no warrior the Colonel was an accomplished sportsman, a cricketer who had played for the home side in Scotland-England matches and who now purchased racehorses as casually as Tom bought hiking boots. Fairlie had taken up golf late in life but had made the most of his frequent trips to St. Andrews from his home near Prestwick. With Tom’s help he became one of the best of the R&A’s gentleman players. He had never taken to the cocksure Allan Robertson, preferring Tom’s calm competence, and after bringing Tom west he was determined to see him succeed. Fairlie and Tom would sit on the grass near the twelfth green, watching golfers finish their rounds while Fairlie smoked a cigar. Soon Tom had a new gift from his benefactor: a lifelong habit. “The Colonel would often give me a cigar. Then one day, I well remember, he gave me a pipe,” Tom recalled, “and after that I was a smoker for life. I had never smoked at all when I was a boy, and I would not now advise boys to smoke, young boys at least. But if I did not smoke until I was well on in life, I think I have made up for it.”

Fairlie had a short, graceless swing, but he was strong enough to rise on his toes and hit the ball as far as Tom did. The two of them played crown-and-shilling matches, a shilling per hole and a crown on the round, with the Colonel getting strokes. Fairlie marched ahead with Tom following, carrying the clubs. After a morning round the Colonel sometimes hurried to Prestwick’s railway station for a trip to Ayr or Glasgow, returning in time for another round before dark. As he liked to say, the world was running faster these days, running on steam. The rails were changing everything from golf (a fellow could play at Prestwick and Musselburgh the same day) to food (fresh beef from Aberdeen!) to time itself. Until the 1840s every town and village had kept its own time, but railway schedules required them to synchronize their clocks. By 1855 all of England, Scotland, and Wales followed Greenwich Mean Time, or “railway time,” transmitted by telegraph in periodic updates from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Still there were some things the machine age could not change, like a nobleman’s power to stop a train with his bare hand. To Fairlie’s great amusement his friend the Earl of Eglinton, who owned half the region, had the right to flag down any train that passed through his lands. The Earl would walk out from Eglinton Castle to the railway, lift his hand and create an unscheduled stop on the Ayr-Glasgow line. He rode free of charge and named his destination by saying, “Stop here.” Sometimes he hopped off within hailing distance of a Prestwick caddie or, better yet, his man Fairlie and the new greenkeeper.

Fairlie would wave and shout hello to the man he called “Lord E.” Tom would turn and see a man in spotless white breeches and a cape, dark hair spilling to his shoulders. Archibald Montgomerie, Thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, was western Scotland’s leading sportsman. His stable of racehorses featured Flying Dutchman, winner of the 1849 Derby at Epsom. Eglinton raced greyhounds and sponsored archery, curling, and lawn-bowling clubs. Tall and almost pretty with his heroic hair parted in the middle, he could have played Sir Lancelot in a pageant—or tested the knight in a joust.

“Hullo, Jof,” said Eglinton, using J. O. Fairlie’s nickname, “and Tom Morris!”

“M’lord,” said Tom, doffing his cap.

The smiling Earl was always full of questions about the course. How good would it be? When could they hold a first-rate event on it? Fairlie explained Tom’s latest plans to build a prodigious first hole, to trick the eye at the second, to move a green or two or three and possibly shoot several hundred sheep. Tom was happy to let Fairlie do the talking. He was not certain how to speak or even stand in the presence of this Eton-educated noble who lived in a castle. Should he keep his shadow off Eglinton’s boots? Would it be improper to turn his back to the Earl? Fairlie wasn’t shy around Eglinton, thumping the Earl’s noble shoulder and speaking of horses and hounds, club dues, prospective members—Mister This and Sir That—and the upcoming season. Eglinton nodded winningly. “Jolly good! Well done, well done.”

Fairlie said Prestwick’s links would do the Earl more honor than “the Mudbath of ’39.” Mention of the Mudbath made them both laugh. Fairlie had told Tom the story: In 1839 the world went mad for medieval nostalgia. There were pageants, parades and minstrel shows in every corner of the empire, but the Camelot craze found its greatest proponent in Eglinton Castle. There the Earl, who could trace his lineage twenty-four generations to the wellsprings of chivalry, decided to stage an event that would make history live again. And on the twenty-ninth of August, 1839, nearly 5,000 spectators came from all over Scotland and England to witness the chivalric spectacle of the century. Thirteen armored knights on armored steeds paraded from the castle to a newly built arena to reenact the jousts of old. One of the knights was Napoleon III, prince of France. Another was James Ogilvie Fairlie, canned in a suit of armor that had cost him £400. The parade of knights and their retinues stretched for half a mile. As it neared the arena, the skies opened. A downpour turned the castle grounds to fast-flowing mud. Spectators tumbled under skidding, kicking horses; squires ran for dear life; knights dropped their lances, tumbled into the mud and lay there like turtles, weighed down by their armor. The Great Medieval Tournament was a debacle that cost Eglinton £40,000.