Tommy's Honor (6 page)

“Forty thousand pounds!” said Fairlie, waving his cigar. Such a fortune would pay Tom’s salary for a thousand years. At least Fairlie had gotten some good out of it. He won the rescheduled joust as well as the favor of the tournament’s Queen of Beauty, who went on to become Mrs. James Ogilvie Fairlie.

Tom, ever the agreeable partner, would nod and smile while the Earl and Colonel laughed. Then it was back to business. “Carry on, Tom,” said Eglinton.

Tom Morris was born to carry on. Determined to spend the club’s money wisely, he would pioneer a handful of greenkeeping techniques, including several that were widely imitated and more than one that became universal.

Many of Prestwick’s bunkers had walls that were crumbling, falling inward. Tom could have shored them up with sod, but that would be expensive. Railway ties, however, cost nothing. The Glasgow and South Western Railway that ran past the course left old railway ties in a heap beside the rail station; they were rubbish to everyone but Tom. He carted them away and used them to bulwark his bunkers, creating a shot that was new to the game, the near-miss that caromed crazily to parts unknown.

He shored up bunkers and dug new ones. He scythed heather, trimmed greens and cut neat-edged holes in the greens. By the end of his first year in Prestwick the course was a fair challenge for Tom’s own game but equally fair to Mister Sampson McInnes, a Prestwick member who was odds-on to leave any shot in his own shadow, and to the Earl, who seldom finished twelve holes in fewer than eighty strokes. Tom gave the links’ landmarks colorful names: the dunes were called Alps and Himalayas; a valley was Purgatory; a sand pit was called Pandemonium. Some of the names were traditional, some he coined himself. He promoted them all with a wink, a smile, and endless repetition. And at the tenth hole he made a discovery that changed greenkeeping forever. The putting-green there had been in worse shape than the Hole o’ Shell green at St. Andrews. Tom moved that green to a new spot a few yards away—backbreaking work that took weeks. One day he spilled a wheelbarrow full of sand on the putting-green. When spring came he found hundreds of yellow-green shoots of grass sprouting on the sandy part of the green, while other spots lay bare. He filled his handkerchief with sand from a bunker, sprinkled the bare spots and kept returning to the bunker until the whole green was dusted with sand. Club members complained: Did the tenth hole have a putting-green or a bunker with a hole in it? But the greenkeeper carried the day: By summer that putting-green was as smooth as a billiard table. Tom Morris had introduced top-dressing, a way to cultivate greens that golf-course workers still employ. From then on his refrain was “More sand, more sand!” When golfers grumbled, he said, “Tut-tut, sand’s the life of a green, like meat to a man.”

As the course shaped up he settled into his other duties as golf professional. Tom caddied for Fairlie, Eglinton, and other gentlemen. He taught lessons. He played rounds with club members, a chore that earned him three shillings per round. Tom also had the delicate task of handicapping the club members. Over several months he took each of them out on the links and observed each man’s swing, making notes in a cloth-bound book. Then he posted the members’ handicaps. Even Fairlie was handicapped fairly, which was all the Colonel expected, knowing that Tom wouldn’t fudge a stroke to save his soul. But other club men were miffed. “Who is this caddie,” they asked, “to rank a gentleman?” Tom’s cause was aided by Eglinton, whose stabby putter was as deadly as Lancelot’s lance—deadly to his score. After the Earl accepted an unflattering double-digit handicap with his usual what-a-fine-day-to-be-me smile, the others accepted theirs as well.

Soon the keenness of Tom’s eye was apparent to all. Matches stayed tight to the end; he knew the golfers’ skills better than they did. By the end of his first year, club men were congratulating Fairlie for recruiting this greenkeeper. Some went so far as to shake Tom’s hand.

The first autumn meeting of the Prestwick Golf Club was a feast for the palate and the eye. There were platters of meat, fish, and duck; gallons of claret, gin, and champagne; garlands of flowers; hours of singing and dancing. Fairlie wore a tartan cravat that cascaded down his chin, posing a hazard to his soup. He and the other club members sported brass-buttoned jackets. Their jeweled ladies wore gowns festooned with silk ribbons and bows. Tom, dressed in his best Sunday tweed, stood at the festivities’ edge where a hired man belonged. After midnight the last of the food gave way to drink and more merry drink, with toasts and speeches lulling the moon to its cradle behind the Isle of Arran. At last the Earl of Eglinton stood up. Silverware tap-tapped on wine glasses; the ballroom went quiet. The Earl’s gaze swept the room and found Tom.

Nodding toward the links outside, Eglinton announced that the course, their course, was “a wonder of our new golfing age.” To applause and calls of “Hear! Hear!” he raised his glass. His hand was smooth and pink, his teeth as white as perfect health.

“To Tom Morris,” he said. “Our perfect pioneer!”

As a player Tom was famous but not perfect. In 1851 he lost a match to Willie Dunn on the final hole. After his last putt missed, “Tom gave his ball a kick in disgust,” wrote Hutchison, “while Dunn took a snuff with great gusto and smiled satisfactorily.” Tom turned the tables the following year when the golf world descended on St. Andrews for the R&A’s autumn meeting. In one foursomes duel he and Colonel Fairlie pipped Dunn and another Musselburgh golfer, the expert amateur Sir Robert Hay, who had “challenged the world” with Dunn as his partner. Then Tom delighted his hometown by teaming with none other than Allan Robertson, who had “forgiven” Tom—Allan’s word—and now made gutta-percha balls in his kitchen by the old links. The reunited Invincibles gave Hay and Dunn odds of two to one. Tom made side bets, giving as much as five to one. “The betting was extreme in this important piece of golfing warfare,” reported the
Fifeshire Journal
, “this all-absorbing trial of dexterity betwixt St. Andrews and Mussel burgh…. The match was witnessed by doctors, lawyers and divines (young ones at least of the latter profession), professors, bankers, railway directors, merchants’ clerks, tradesmen, workmen…as well as a goodly sprinkling of general idlers.” As at North Berwick three years before, Allan and Tom were outdriven by taller, stronger foes. Worse yet was Tom’s putting. He kept missing short putts, a fault that would dog him for most of his life. According to the
Journal
, “Tom, it was insinuated, was at his old trade of ‘funking.’” But in another late reversal, the Invincibles stormed back. On one eventful hole Allan wound up and slugged a drive that “shot far ahead of Mr. Hay’s corresponding one; indeed, one could hardly conceive how Allan’s little body could propel a ball so far.” Tom sank a crucial putt; he and Allan won in a walk. “In the progress inward, some boys removed the flags…and held them aloft in the procession, giving it the appearance of a triumphal entry,” the
Journal
story concluded, calling Robertson and Morris “the cocks o’ the green. Long may they hold that honourable elevation. St. Andrews for ever!”

That account was too negative for one St. Andrean, who fired off a letter to the editor. “[Y]our correspondent says that at one stage of it he was afraid Tom was at his ‘
old trade of funking
’—that is, showing a want of nerve,” wrote “A Golfer,” who claimed that the match’s outcome “ought to dissipate every doubt—should any really exist—as to Tom’s pluck.”

Another dispatch lent weight to the charge that Tom Morris was a short-range funker. When an R&A member mailed a postcard addressed to
THE MISSER OF SHORT PUTTS, PRESTWICK
, the postman took it straight to Tom, who might have torn it apart or hidden it in his pocket. Instead he laughed and showed the card to half the town.

In the 1850s the Invincibles swept aside challengers in St. Andrews, Prestwick, Perth, Musselburgh, and half a dozen other Scottish towns. Though they were seen as shady characters by members of polite society, the golf professionals played honorably, developing a code of conduct unique to their sport. Part of the code had to do with supporting one’s partner in foursomes. After Allan hit a tee shot that left Tom with a horrid lie in a bunker during one duel with the Dunns, Tom scraped the ball out and Allan bounced a five-yard putt over sandy ground into the cup. Tom Peter recalled the shot in his
Reminiscences
: “I said, ‘My man, Allan, you never had a nearer squeak in your life.’ ‘Man,’ he said, ‘I had to do it. You see I put Tom in the bunker.’” The professionals’ code also called for champions to accept any legitimate challenge, but there was leeway in this area that Allan pushed to the limit.

Allan claimed never to have lost in single combat—despite his “wee coatie” match with Tom and other losses he considered unofficial. As the decade progressed he defended his “perfect” record with Jesuitical zeal. Singles mattered more after Willie Dunn moved south to be greenkeeper at Blackheath, near London, where he earned ten shillings a week—about £25 per year—for serving Englishmen like the peevish Lord Starmont, who broke two sets of clubs over his knee during his first round of golf and pronounced himself satisfied with the day’s exercise. Dunn’s departure left Scotland to Allan Robertson and Tom Morris, only one of whom could be the country’s King of Clubs—a title the east-coast newspapers gave to Allan. The king’s crown would be hard to dislodge. On one visit to St. Andrews, Tom played his old boss and beat him. Allan called it a casual, unofficial match, though bets had been laid and paid. The west-coast
Ayr Observer
, loyal to Tom, crowed, “The palm of victory, which has so long reposed in quiescence in the somber shade of St. Rule, is gracefully waving in the westering breezes.” But the
Fifeshire Journal
defended the rule of St. Rule’s, the tallest cathedral tower in St. Andrews, by sniffing, “Who would have conceived aught so preposterous as that insignificant match should be seized and a claim to the championship constructed upon it by anyone conversant with the usages of golf?” Or, more simply put: Frontiersman, go hang.

The newspaper war escalated, with the
Observer
denouncing the
Journal
’s “treasonable discourses” and claiming, “Tom is ‘the King of Scotland,’ and reflects the highest credit on Prestwick.” To which the
Journal
shot back: “The Prestwick colony is in open revolt against the lord liege of golfers—the ‘bona fide’ king of clubs—Allan.”

The problem was that no one had found a way to identify the best golfer. Most clubs held annual and semiannual tournaments, but the cracks were not allowed to play; instead they caddied for the gentlemen. The cracks had their challenge matches, which made for much amusing betting among the gentlemen but could not crown a true King of Clubs for two reasons. First, there was no way to say which of many matches was
the
match, the big one. Second, a ranking based on challenge matches could be stymied by a king who would not risk his crown.

“I prefer having Tom as a partner,” said Allan, royally coy.

Fairlie and Eglinton urged Tom to issue a loud, once-and-for-all challenge, but Tom would not shame Allan into playing him. Still he let his patrons know that if they arranged a £100 match, he would show up. But Allan declined repeated offers and Tom let the matter drop, leaving the nascent sport of professional golf in uneasy equilibrium, tippingly balanced between east and west, Robertson and Morris, a balance that would hold until a new player barged onstage to send everything ass-over-teapot.

His name was Willie Park. The son of a farmer who scraped up a living by pushing a plow for a Musselburgh landowner, Willie grew up with seven brothers and sisters in a cottage on the high road that passed the links just east of Edinburgh. As a gaunt, hungry lad Willie caddied for members of the Musselburgh Golf Club. He learned to play the game on summer evenings after the gentlemen went into the clubhouse for dinner and drinks. He started out with one club, a hooked stick he’d whittled down from a tree root. Thanks in part to a handy source of calories—a baker who played the local boys for pies—the caddie with the whittled stick grew strong and bullish. After winning enough bets to buy a set of real golf clubs, he beat every caddie in sight. He went into business making the new gutta-percha balls, which he carried in the deep pockets of a long coat he wore around the links. But Willie Park made his name as a player, and in 1854 he did what strong young men are born to do. He went looking for older men to fight.

Whether you played Park for crowns and shillings, for £20 or for a pie, he left no doubt that he wanted to kill you on the links. He claimed he had never played a round of golf for pleasure. For the better part of a year he issued challenges to Allan Robertson, the living legend he planned to debunk, daring the King of Clubs to play him. Park challenged Allan in messages sent through other golfers and finally in a newspaper advertisement. The response from St. Andrews was silence. But if Robertson thought Willie Park would take no answer for an answer, he was wrong. In 1854 Park bought a rail ticket to Robertson’s town. The young tough was twenty years old on the day he stepped off the train in St. Andrews. As a Musselburgh man he was allergic to the staid old snoot-in-the-air town. He began playing practice rounds alone, smacking booming, parabolic drives that sent caddies hurrying to Allan’s door with news of the stranger’s arrival. Park, with his slightly open stance and fierce downswing, made contact so clean that his drives sounded like pistol shots. His drives carried to places where R&A members often found their second shots.

After one such exhibition Park strutted to Allan’s cottage at Golf Place and Links Road. He introduced himself and demanded a match.

Allan was amused. He admired pluck. But he was not about to risk his crown playing a potentially dangerous upstart. So he accepted the challenge with a proviso: Young Willie would have to earn his shot at Allan by beating another St. Andrews professonal.