Tommy’s Honour: The Extraordinary Story of Golf’s Founding Father and Son. Kevin Cook
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 130 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,’ Tom Peter recalled, ‘but Sir David Baird would not sanction its removal, because it was off the course and a fixture.’ The match referee was the same Baird who’d given Allan the eponymous club he was using. Musselburgh fanatics hissed at 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 judgement 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’ health was toasted so often that it seemed he would surely live to be 100 years old.
Almost before the cheers died down, his luck went south. The coming months would test Tom’s 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 mould into a ball and was more durable than leather and feathers. It was 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 half a crown for a feathery ball. When Gourlay, the Musselburgh feathery-maker, got his hands on one of the first gutties, he saw the future coming.
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 grey orb bouncing from England via 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 they 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 Tom went out for a friendly match with a prominent club member, the preeningly handsome Mr 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 Mr 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 towards them, shouting. 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 25,000 golf balls made of leather and feathers and sweat, Tom was fired. When he tried again to explain, Allan turned his back. But Tom also had his pride. He would not 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 towards the links, dark green 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.
The child was sicker. The doctor called it baby fever, though Wee Tom 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 curtains 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 9 April 1850. Tom, with Nancy beside him, wrapped the little body in 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 about him. What would Tom do? The answer came from an R&A member who found him a job as golf professional 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 he and Nancy prepared to leave home she was plump and happy, with a new life kicking inside her.
THE SUN OVER Prestwick moved backwards. It rose over inland hills, not the grey water that meant east to Tom, and set behind a mountain in an unfamiliar sea. Tom knew this water was no proper sea but the broad Firth of Clyde. He knew 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, after the boy 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 parlour. The cottage sat across a rutted road from the Red Lion Inn, where on 2 July 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 was much to rebuild. What Tom found was fifty-odd acres of dunes, brush and ragged grasses