Tommy's Honor Part 2

They would call the baby Jack, and would soon find that there was something wrong with his legs.

Tommy and his sister Lizzie spent the last morning of the year, called Hogmanay or Cake Day, racing other children to Prestwick merchants' doors, chanting, "Ma feet's cauld, ma shoe's thin, gi'e me cakes and let me rin!" Given shortbread, a penny or an orange, they would "rin" at top speed to the next door. The adults' fun came that evening, Old Year's Night, when pipers and drummers played in the streets, men and women danced, and at midnight they all sang "Auld Lang Syne." Many of the men would start New Year's Day, called Ne'erday, with a hangover. Not Tom, who limited his drinking to blackstrap beer and an occasional nip of whisky. Tom began 1860 the way he began every day. He woke, pulled on his bathing long johns and took a dip in the bone-chilling Firth of Clyde. Afterward, s.h.i.+vering as he climbed the beach to the links and his cottage beyond, he felt strong, washed clean.

His wife hoped the new year would take them home to St. Andrews. With Allan gone, the way was clear for Tom. Nancy and Tom both had family there, and family mattered most in troubled times. Nancy was worried about baby Jack, who grew but did not kick or crawl. Tom, though, was in no hurry to flit back to Fife-he wanted no one saying he had rushed to fill Allan's place. He said it was better to bide in Prestwick for now, and if baby Jack would not walk just yet, Tom was glad to carry him around the house.

Tom and Colonel Fairlie saw the new decade as a time for Prestwick to rise in the golf world. Fairlie and Lord Eglinton had already run a Grand National Interclub tournament for amateurs in 1857. Eglinton provided the trophy for that event, just as he had given a silver Eglinton Jug to Ayrs.h.i.+re's curling champions, another jug to its lawn bowlers, and a golden belt for Irvine's archers to shoot for. Now he proposed to outdo himself with a Champions.h.i.+p Belt for the world's best professional golfer. Fairlie tried to persuade other clubs to share sponsors.h.i.+p duties and expenses, and got a collective yawn for his trouble, so he and Eglinton agreed to go it alone. They reasoned that a tournament for the cracks could promote Prestwick as a golf hub and establish Tom Morris as the new King of Clubs. The Earl would preside over the event, smiling and waving, weakening the knees of women of all cla.s.ses, while Fairlie handled the details.

Fairlie and Lord Colville, another officer of the Prestwick Club, dashed off letters to eleven of the thirty-five golf clubs then in existence-those that were large and important enough to have likely contenders for a professional champions.h.i.+p. Knowing that many of the cracks were uncouth, Prestwick's officers took precautions. "I have just been talking to Lord Eglinton in regard to the entry of players," Fairlie noted, writing to club secretaries from Eglinton Castle, "and to avoid having any objectionable characters we think that the plan is to write to the Secretaries of all golfing societies requesting them to name & send their two best professional players two best professional players-depending on them for their Characters." Having the clubs vouch for their entrants, he believed, would make the contest "quite safe."

The Prestwick officers made up invitations, written in blue ink on pale blue paper, and posted them to St. Andrews, Musselburgh, Perth, Aberdeen and six other Scottish towns, plus Blackheath in England. But not all of their blue notes were well received. Didn't Eglinton and Fairlie know what sort of crowd they were inviting? Prestwick's own professional might be an upstanding fellow, but the common crack was, in Hutchison's words, "a f.e.c.kless, reckless creature.... His sole loves are golf and whisky." These glorified caddies might embarra.s.s everyone with their drinking and cursing. They might cheat. What right-minded gentleman would vouch for them?

In the end only eight professionals turned up for what would become the first Open Champions.h.i.+p, the world's oldest and greatest golf tournament. Even so, the one-day event threatened to overshadow the autumn meeting of the Prestwick Club that followed a day later. One newspaper writer came up with a more dignified name for the cracks: they were "golfing celebrities." Still they kept their hosts improvising to the last minute. During practice rounds in the days before the tournament the professionals offended club members and their wives with ragged dress and worse manners. One was said to have spent a night in the town's drunk tank. Fairlie found a way to improve the players' dress if not their morals: He gave each golfer a lumberman's jacket to play in-black-and-green tartans, the kind worn by laborers on Eglinton's estates. Seen from a distance, the players in their checkered jackets resembled a lost team of woodsmen, searching in vain for a tree to cut down.

The Champions.h.i.+p Belt they would vie for was made by Edinburgh silversmiths James & Walter Marshall for the news-making sum of 25. Fas.h.i.+oned of Morocco leather festooned with silver plates showing golf scenes and the Burgh of Prestwick's coat of arms, it featured a wide, gleaming buckle, minutely filigreed, that showed a golfer teeing off. Bizarrely, the little golfer on the buckle swung a shaft without a clubhead-an oversight that escaped notice at first. The Belt was lauded as "the finest thing ever competed for." It was so valuable that the winner, who would gain possession of it for a year in lieu of prize money, would have to leave a security deposit before taking it home. Eglinton and Fairlie added spice to the fight by announcing that the tournament would be an annual event, and any player who won three times in a row would own the Belt forever.

On the clear, windy morning of October 17, 1860, the players gathered in front of the Red Lion Inn, the hotel where Eglinton and Fairlie had founded the Prestwick Golf Club nine years before. Milling about in their lumber jackets, rubbing their hands to keep warm, Tom Morris, Willie Park, Bob Andrew and five others were told the event's particulars: They would go around Prestwick's twelve-hole course three times for a total of thirty-six holes; the rules of the Prestwick Golf Club would apply; the winner by fewest strokes would keep the Belt for a year; and each pair of compet.i.tors would be accompanied by a club member who would ensure that there was no cheating. The professionals were required to sign a form affirming that they accepted these conditions. Some were illiterate, so they signed with Xs.

At half-past eleven the golfers walked to the first teeing-ground beside the twelfth hole's putting-green. About a hundred spectators followed them-gentlemen golfers leading their wives and children, Prestwickers of all cla.s.ses and occupations. Fairlie scanned the horizon, seeking omens in the weather. Tall, smiling Eglinton stood nearby, his hair flowing in the wind. Nine-year-old Tommy Morris slipped between gentlemen's jackets and ladies' frills to get a clear view of his father. As the home-club professional, Tom had the honor of teeing off first. He was favored to win. After all, he had built the course. He stood a few club lengths from the twelfth hole's knee-high flag and waited while his caddie teed up a ball on a lump of wet sand. Tom took a last look at the fairway ahead-his Herculean first hole, well over a quarter-mile of turf-and began his tick-tock swing, the first swing in the history of major champions.h.i.+p golf. At that moment, according to one account, a gust sent his tie up over his chin and momentarily blinded him. He managed to strike the ball soundly, but missed his target. He would struggle with his aim for most of the day.

Bob Andrew played next. The lanky, glum-faced crack Andrew was known as "The Rook" for his beady-eyed resemblance to a crow. He was second choice in the day's betting. The Rook's backers were delighted to take him at three-to-one odds. Andrew hit a low, skimming drive, then followed Tom past Goosedubs swamp along with their caddies and most of the spectators, including the gentleman marker who would keep their scores. Spectators in those days tracked their favorites from hole to hole rather than staying put and letting the golfers pa.s.s by. They tromped across putting-greens and often stood in bunkers if that helped them see the putting. No one raked bunkers during play; that would have seemed like cheating.

According to Prestwick's club history, "generally there was a feeling that the Champions.h.i.+p lay between Morris and Andrew." Willie Park, the second pairing's featured player, disagreed with the general feeling. Park made a slew of side bets, backing himself. Now twenty-seven years old, he had not mellowed since his spitfire days of challenging Allan and Tom in newspaper ads. A hero back home in Musselburgh, he was hissed in Gullane, near Edinburgh, the site of many future Opens held on the Muirfield links. Arriving in Gullane one day and finding no one willing to bet against him, Park took on the town's best golfer in a money match while hopping on one leg. He won, then won another one-legged match while swinging one-handed, and strode out of town on both legs, counting his money with both hands. Yet he was only the bettors' third choice at Prestwick; the smart money figured that Willie's reckless style would hurt him in a medal-play event in which one wild spell or one unlucky hole could cost him the belt. Park got off to a strong start, launching a drive that one writer described as sounding "as if it had been shot from some rocket apparatus."

On Tom's epic first hole and the long uphill second, Park's power tipped the balance in his favor. "At the commencement of the game the interest was concentrated in Tom Morris and the Rook, who were paired together," the Ayr Advertiser Ayr Advertiser reported, "but it very soon had become apparent that the struggle for supremacy would be betwixt Park and Tom Morris. Park made the best start, 4 ahead of Tom in the first two holes. At the end of the first round Park had scored 55, and Tom 58." Both men shot 59 in the second round, leaving Park three strokes ahead. By then it was a two-man tournament. The Rook, a traditionalist who liked the feel of wood on ball-his irons had wooden inserts in their faces-faded fast. The low, skimming spoon shots he preferred were useless in Prestwick's humps and hollows. Shots that would have earned him applause at Perth or St. Andrews struck dunes and rolled backward. The Rook would finish seventeen strokes behind. reported, "but it very soon had become apparent that the struggle for supremacy would be betwixt Park and Tom Morris. Park made the best start, 4 ahead of Tom in the first two holes. At the end of the first round Park had scored 55, and Tom 58." Both men shot 59 in the second round, leaving Park three strokes ahead. By then it was a two-man tournament. The Rook, a traditionalist who liked the feel of wood on ball-his irons had wooden inserts in their faces-faded fast. The low, skimming spoon shots he preferred were useless in Prestwick's humps and hollows. Shots that would have earned him applause at Perth or St. Andrews struck dunes and rolled backward. The Rook would finish seventeen strokes behind.

As the final round unfolded, Park made a tidy four at Prestwick's 400-yard fourth hole, where a stone wall crowded the back of the green. Tom, playing a minute ahead of his rival, kept finding his ball in the bunkers he had sh.o.r.ed up with railway ties. "At this crisis the excitement waxed most intense," one observer noted, adding that "frequenters of the Links will admit that in all their experience of Morris they never saw him come to grief so often." But Tom kept grinding out fours and fives, whittling a stroke off Park's lead, then another.

The sun fell toward the Isle of Arran, painting the sky purple and orange. At the last putting-green, Park had his chance to win or lose. His ball lay ten b.u.mpy yards from the hole. Get it down in two and he would claim the Belt. But take three putts-a likely result from that distance-and he and Tom would play another round to break the tie. Now Tom, Fairlie, Eglinton, Lord Colville, the Rook, Tommy Morris and scores of others went silent as Park drew back his putter and sent his gutty on its way.

There were shouts and then cheers as the ball rolled, bounced and dived into the cup. The Belt went to Willie Park.

Tommy couldn't believe it. The bad man had won.

The entire three-round event had taken five hours. In a brief ceremony afterward, the Earl of Eglinton presented the Belt to the champion. Tom Morris, standing a few paces away, applauded. He had lost fair and square.

Later that fall Park posed for his official photograph as the Champion Golfer of Scotland, wearing a satin bow tie and a houndstooth suit, one jaunty thumb under his lapel: Willie the Conqueror.

Tom's nemesis Willie Park, winner of the first Open Champions.h.i.+p.

THREE.

The Belt, the Ball, and the Juvenile Celebrity.

Tommy loved to run. Down the beach he ran and up to the links, over and around the dunes, moving in and out of shadow and sun until he fell in a heap in the gra.s.s. He was the nemesis of the fat partridges and squawking, long-elbowed blue herons he flushed from the reeds that lined Pow Burn. Lying still where he fell, catching his breath, he smelled heather and salt air. He listened to bees. He heard birds carry on their girlish conversations, clicking and whistling in the weeds. He watched gulls ride air currents, peering down with their black pellet eyes. He watched clouds whose gray edges turned silver when the sun moved behind them, mile-high clouds shaped like sea monsters and s.h.i.+ps' sails, sheep and puffs of smoke from his father's briar pipe. Springing to his feet, he chased rabbits that scooted to safety, their white tails zipping into high gra.s.s like bad golf shots.

Prestwick was his playground. The dunes were mountains and the bunkers were dungeons, black as night when the sun was low. When a train from Glasgow appeared behind the Tunnel Hole green, trailing a plume of white smoke, it looked like a toy. Now and then he knocked a scuffed golf ball around with the half-club his father had made for him. Golf was hatefully hard for a ten-year-old whose best shot went a hundred yards, but as he grew he got better and his father made him a set of cut-down clubs. At the age of eleven Tommy could chip and putt better than most of the club members who employed his father. Golf was hard but far more fun than playing with his sister, who could not skip or run in her knee-high boots, petticoats, and scratchy dresses. In any case Lizzie had household ch.o.r.es to do. As a girl of ten, she spent most of her day helping Mum cook and clean, picking up after Tommy and their little brother Jimmy, was.h.i.+ng and folding the boys' clothes and blacking their Sunday shoes. The boys' only ch.o.r.e was reading Bible stories. Tommy did his Bible reading, then escaped.

On his links jaunts he ran up the lofty, gra.s.s-covered dunes called the Alps. Reaching the top he kicked sand out behind him like a buck rabbit. Better yet was the downhill. Every boy in town liked to lie sideways and roll down gra.s.sy hills, but running was more daring. From the top of the Alps he would lope down the path toward the first putting-green, gaining speed with every step. At the point where he reached top speed there was a spot where he could turn down a still-steeper hill. The pitch of this slope was almost forty degrees. He often fell on the way down, but in the brief stretch of time between running and falling, he felt he was flying.

His way home led from the links to cobbled streets. Tommy saw horses pulling coaches while dogs, goats, and ducks skipped out of the way. Laborers moved stones in wheelbarrows. Late in the day the air carried warm smells of biscuits, meat pies, and fish soup, as well as those of mud and horse dung. The greenkeeper's son rounded a corner and faced the Red Lion Inn, a stone box with four chimney pots on top and a scarlet lion painted on one corner. The dragon-tailed beast stood upright, scratching air-the Lion Rampant of Scotland. Tommy remembered his father's saying that the lion symbolized both Scotland and England, but the English lion was a carrion-eater.

The Red Lion's double doors dwarfed a boy Tommy's age. Poking his head inside, he could see gentlemen handing their hats, coats, and canes to a valet. The smoke of their cigars drifted to the door along with the scents of b.u.t.tered beefsteak, meat pudding, and pies.

The Morris house was a minute's run away. The Prestwick Golf Club paid five pounds a month to rent this cottage for its greenkeeper and his family. There were no beefsteaks cooking inside, but Nancy's table was respectably stocked with fish and mutton, boiled turkey, carrots, and turnips. If Tommy was lucky there were stovies, too-potatoes and onions mixed with fat-or apple fritters. He would arrive to find his mother instructing Lizzie, whose job it was to help with plates and table settings while her younger brothers Jimmy and little Jack, the crippled one, watched. Five-year-old Jimmy might shout a greeting to Tommy and draw a stern look from their father, who sat beside an oil lamp reading his Bible. Tom Morris owned many books but read only two, his Bible and his Burns, and Robert Burns's poems ran a distant second to the black book with its frayed ribbon and crackling, threadbare spine. Each evening Tom read Bible verses aloud to the rest of them. Let us be worthy Let us be worthy, he prayed before dinner. Worthy of what? Tommy wondered. Was two-year-old Jack unworthy? Was that why he couldn't walk or stand, but only pull himself along the ground with his arms? It was hard to fathom a G.o.d who would punish little Jack.

The Morris house and its contents were valued at 80 by the Scottish Union Insurance Company. Each spring the treasurer of the Prestwick Golf Club paid fifteen s.h.i.+llings to insure the cottage and its "furniture, bed and table linen, wearing apparel...golf clubs, bra.s.s tools and such like things." The insurance agent didn't measure the looking gla.s.s over the mantel, which was taller than it was wide, a sign of the good taste Nancy had acquired working in Captain Broughton's house. The mantelpiece held flowers and a clock covered by a bell jar to protect it from the soot in the air. Tommy thought the mantelpiece would be a fine place to put the Champions.h.i.+p Belt once his father won it away from Willie Park.

Tom's next chance to win the Belt came in 1861. That year's tournament was the first true Open: It was "open to all the world," cracks and gentlemen alike. Eight amateur golfers, unimpressed with Park's winning score the previous year, reckoned they could give the cracks a run for the Belt. The amateurs included Colonel J.O. Fairlie, a fact that brought Tommy close to a sort of blasphemy: speaking ill of the Colonel. "He thinks he can beat you, Da!" But Tom only smiled. If he couldn't beat the Colonel over three rounds on a course he had built himself, he said, then the world was surely upside down.

The event's growing fame led the Dunn twins, Willie and Jamie, to make the two-day trip from Blackheath, near London, where Jamie had gone to work with his brother. On arrival they encountered the Earl of Eglinton, fresh off his second term of running Ireland for Queen Victoria as her Lord Lieutenant in Dublin. The jovial Eglinton spotted Willie and said, "Jamie, how are you?"

"I'm not Jamie, m'lord. I'm Willie."

"Confound you fellows! You're alike as two peas."

Autumn rains drenched the links on the day of the Open, leaving the players to splash through puddles in Tom's fairways. Markers again followed Tom, Willie Park, Bob "The Rook" Andrew, the Dunns, and the other cracks to make sure they didn't cheat, while the eight amateurs were trusted to keep score on their own.

In less than an hour it was clear that the gentlemen were no match for the cracks. Fairlie would post the lowest score by an amateur-twenty-one shots behind the Belt-winner. The Dunns, too, fell back in a hurry. For all his brilliance in match play, Willie Dunn could not last thirty-six holes of stroke play without stumbling, not at his age. Dunn, a decade older than Tom, finished seventeen strokes off the lead. As for the Rook, he hung close for two rounds but could not hit the ball high enough to make up strokes on Prestwick's uphill holes. He came in fourth, shaking his head.

By midafternoon several hundred spectators had abandoned other groups to follow the leaders, Park and Morris. The previous day Park had gone to the treasurer of the Prestwick Golf Club and handed over the clanking silver and red-leather Champions.h.i.+p Belt, as he was bound to do or else pay a 25 penalty. The treasurer placed the Belt on the long table in Prestwick's clubhouse, where it dared the professionals to claim it. Park boasted that he would take it back to Musselburgh, and for most of the day he looked as good as his word. With twelve holes to play, Park led by three shots while Tom stayed close in second place, tacking his way from one safe spot to the next. Then Park reached the second hole of the final round, the treacherous Alps Hole, where Tommy liked to run and tumble downhill. With his usual brio, Park tried to clear the hole's mountainous dunes in two. To succeed he had to go 385 yards in two clouts of a gutta-percha ball that might fly two hundred yards if Hercules. .h.i.t it. According to the Fifes.h.i.+re Journal Fifes.h.i.+re Journal, "a daring attempt to 'cross the Alps' in two brought Park's ball into one of the worst hazards on the green, and cost him three strokes-by no means the first occasion on which he has been severely punished for similar avarice and temerity."

While Park's hopes sank in the huge Sahara Bunker, Morris tick-tocked his way home and reached the last hole with a cozy lead. Or so it seemed. The Journal Journal reporter saw him "driving a magnificent ball from the teeing-ground towards home." But the shot was unlucky, landing "in a bed of fog at the edge of a pool of water.... spectators thought that Tom would pick out the ball and forfeit a stroke." Instead he courted disaster. The most careful of golfers found his ball, gave it a wallop and "with a self-reliance rising to the emergency, he dexterously sent it bounding into the air." reporter saw him "driving a magnificent ball from the teeing-ground towards home." But the shot was unlucky, landing "in a bed of fog at the edge of a pool of water.... spectators thought that Tom would pick out the ball and forfeit a stroke." Instead he courted disaster. The most careful of golfers found his ball, gave it a wallop and "with a self-reliance rising to the emergency, he dexterously sent it bounding into the air."

Tom won by four strokes. His score of 163 was eleven shots better than Park's winning total the year before. That score put paid to the notion that amateur golfers might be as skillful as the cracks. At its highest level, golf was already a game for professionals.

Willie Park went home empty-handed while Tom took the Belt uphill to his cottage, a journey of a few hundred yards, and put it on his mantelpiece under the looking gla.s.s. The Earl of Eglinton took the train from Prestwick to St. Andrews, where he was joined on the links by R&A members, including James Balfour. As Balfour wrote in his Reminiscences of Golf on St. Andrews Links Reminiscences of Golf on St. Andrews Links, "Lord Eglinton.... expressed his delight with the scenery at the High Hole-and indeed he frequently admired the whole landscape, as the descending sun lengthened our shadows on that October afternoon." After dinner the Earl felt ill, but soon found his usual good humor and said he was right as rain, but "while the butler was helping him on with his great-coat, he fell down in a fit of apoplexy, was carried to a bedroom, never spoke again, and died two days after." The thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, dead at forty-nine, was honored with a statue that still stands in the west-coast town of Ayr, just south of Prestwick. Friends including Napoleon III of France and the heartbroken Colonel Fairlie chipped in to pay for the statue, which shows Eglinton holding a scroll, looking stone-faced out to sea. It is a more reverent monument than the Eglinton statue the Irish built in Dublin. The one in Dublin, blown up by the IRA in the 1950s, showed the sporty earl with a deck of cards in his hand.

Not far from Scotland's Eglinton Statue stood a school called Ayr Academy. Founded in 1794 as a warren of schoolrooms under a thatched roof, the academy could trace its roots to a school founded in 1233. It secured a royal charter and in 1810 moved to a building that cost a princely 300. Half a century later its students included Colonel Fairlie's sons, the children of other gentlemen, and a contingent of lower-and middle-cla.s.s youngsters. One of the latter was Tommy Morris, who on school days-Monday through Sat.u.r.day-traded his little-boy sailor suit for the jacket and tie of an academy scholar.

Tommy knew he was fortunate to be going to school with the Fairlie boys. If he forgot, his father could remind him that lads his age worked hand looms from sunup till dark and thanked the Lord for the work. Other boys sweated through twelve-hour s.h.i.+fts in smoky factories. One government report found a young nail-maker paying a high price for doing shoddy work: "Somebody in the warehouse took him and put his head down on an iron counter and hammered a nail through his ear, and the boy has made good nails ever since." Five-year-old chimney sweeps toughened their skin by rubbing it with strong brine and holding their arms and legs to the flames of a roaring fire; if they flinched, their bosses, who were often their fathers, stood ready to beat them. It was illegal for boys of five and six to work as sweeps, creeping up narrow, filthy chimneys, but the law was often ignored. Older boys would stand below the youngsters, "encouraging" them to climb by holding lit matches to their bare feet.

In the 1860s only one in 140 Scots attended secondary school. A tradesman's son who succeeded at one of the country's handful of "famous academies" would be thought of as a "lad o' pairts" whose virtues offset his lack of social standing. The rise of the clever, industrious lad o' pairts was as mythical as that of plucky American boys in Horatio Alger's tales of the same time-for every bright lad who rose from rags to riches, tens of thousands lived and died in rags. Yet here was young Tommy Morris, bypa.s.sing the Prestwick Burgh School by the links, a lesser school, to make the three-mile trip to Ayr, a port town bisected by a muddy river dotted with swans. Here a boy could study navigation, astronomy, and bookkeeping as well as Latin, mathematics, and science, which was then called natural philosophy. Cla.s.ses began at seven in the morning. Discipline was strict, with schoolmasters beating and flogging students who got out of line. One spirited boy endured fifty lashes before he spun around and bit his teacher's leg.

Tom Morris scrimped to pay the school's fees of twelve to fifteen pounds a year, and six mornings a week Tommy made his way three miles down the coast to the academy. He may have hitched a ride on a delivery wagon to get there, bouncing down the firthside road along with milk cans or jostling heaps of turnips. He may have walked for an hour. Either way he reached the destination his father and mother wanted him to reach: At the age of twelve, Tommy was better educated than either of them. They joked about how he could chatter about Ajax and Alexander, Hector and Achilles as if they were golfers from the next town. Their son would not have to be a caddie and greenkeeper. He wouldn't need to be a crack, living on wagers. Tommy Morris could be what he chose to be.

Still, the boy had to eat. He needed food, shoes, jacket and tie, pencils and schoolbooks in addition to his academy fees, and he was but one of six Morrises in the cottage across from the Red Lion Inn. The task of feeding and outfitting them all fell to Tom, who was now in his early forties, flecks of gray in his hair. A Scotsman of his era had a life expectancy of forty-one, but Tom showed no sign of slowing down. Every dawn he rose from his bed beside the cracked-open window and dressed for his morning ablutions. He padded down the links to the sh.o.r.e, where he removed his coat and hat and placed them on high ground. Under the coat he wore a long-sleeved bathing costume of dark blue linen with nine b.u.t.tons up the front. It weighed twenty pounds when wet, which it soon was. Without hesitation Tom plunged into the Firth of Clyde, which was cold even in July. In January and February the shallows froze over and he had to walk across ice to reach frosty water. A Prestwick memoirist wrote, "We recollect a gentleman staying in a cottage shouting out one cold, frosty morning that there was 'a man on the beach trying hard to drown himself.' It was only Tom Morris breaking the ice to enjoy his usual morning dip in the sea." Tom emerged s.h.i.+vering, hungry, and eager to do a long day's work.

He had half a dozen duties: cutting holes and sweeping rabbit droppings off putting-greens; tr.i.m.m.i.n.g back heather and other weeds; overseeing caddies; teaching lessons; keeping club members' handicaps and arranging their matches; and playing rounds with some of them, a task that called for infinite patience but now paid four s.h.i.+llings a round. He also settled disputes. One match turned when a Prestwick golfer swung too far under his ball and sent it straight up into his own beard, where it perched and would not budge. Tom's ruling: loss of hole.

The greenkeeper also spent long hours in his workshop, surrounded by the props and paints that preceded each day's dramatics on the links: blocks of wood; wood shavings; sheets of leather and sheepskin; glue; rubber; rags; strips of wool; chunks of black iron; jars of paint; hammers, chisels and saws; the odd, disembodied horn of a ram. When a Prestwick golfer brought him a driver with a grip that was worn or unraveled, Tom would strip off the old grip. He would wrap the hickory shaft with a wool rind, then wrap a strip of leather over the wool, then glue and tack the leather to the shaft. In those days golf-club grips could be as thick as the grips on modern tennis racquets. A fat grip helped absorb the shock of striking a rock-hard gutta-percha ball; it also suited the then-universal practice of holding the club in the palms of the hands rather than gripping it with the fingers, as later generations would.

In addition to repairing grips, Tom mended cracked shafts and clubheads. He strengthened wooden clubheads by s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g a thin plate of boiled ram's horn to the sole. Clubheads needed such armor to survive impact with the hard gutta-percha ball. Back in the age of the feathery, clubheads had been made of thornwood or occasionally of fruitwoods from apple and pear trees. But gutties were stony enough to crack such brittle woods. The gutty era called for a clubhead with some give to it, and by the 1860s beech had supplanted thorn and fruitwoods. Clubmakers found that beechwood from trees grown in rich soil was too soft, but the wood was durable and pliable-perfect-if the trees grew in thin soil where high winds whipped the trees. Tom used to say that good beechwood, like good men, had suffered a bit.

To make a club he spliced a clubhead to a shaft and bound them together with waxed twine and animal glue. Tom used glue made from rendered cowhides, not the inferior kind made from bones. The shaft was a club's crucial component. He had grown up swinging clubs with shafts of blond, whippy ash. Then hickory replaced ash; it was stiffer and twice as strong. Lumber s.h.i.+ps carried tons of the reddish wood from Tennessee's "hickory belt" for use in axe handles and pit props, the beams that kept coal pits from collapsing. As with beech, the wood's quality depended on the tree it came from. Lowland or "swamp hickory" was soft, while high-country wood was too brittle. Hickory from the middle alt.i.tudes was just right, but it was not always available in the early 1860s, when the lumbermen of Tennessee were dropping their axes and picking up muskets, going to fight under the hickories at s.h.i.+loh, Chattanooga, and other battlegrounds of the American Civil War.

Scotland's best golfers were connoisseurs of hickory. Willie Park's son Willie Jr., who would go on to win two Opens, set down the standard in his 1896 book The Game of Golf The Game of Golf: "The grain must run straight down the stick; it must be supple and yet not wobbly and have a fine steely spring without being too stiff." Tom Morris, whose painstaking swing relied even more on timing and torque, had a word for what he wanted in a hickory shaft. The perfect shaft, he said, felt like music.

Clubs with iron heads were fairly new. Generically called cleeks cleeks, an old word for grappling hooks, they had been rare in the feathery age because they cut featheries to ribbons. But gutties clanged merrily off cleeks. By the time Tom set up shop in Prestwick in 1851, many golfers featured two or three irons in their sets of nine to twelve clubs. (There was no limit; you could play with thirty clubs if your caddie was willing.) Tom got iron clubheads from a Prestwick blacksmith who forged and hammered them as a sideline. They were heavy and black, like fire irons. Older players tended not to like cleeks but younger men loved them-a generational difference one young golfer would soon exploit to great effect. By the 1860s cleeks were a growing portion of Tom's clubmaking work, but clubmaking was only a fraction of his business. He was above all a ball-maker.

After his feud with Allan Robertson, Tom had become the leading producer of gutta-percha b.a.l.l.s. There must have been some satisfaction in that-the ball that had cost him his seat in Allan's kitchen now put food on Tom's table. Making gutties was far simpler than making featheries. A skilled worker could turn a lump of rubber into a finished ball in two and a half minutes. Gutties sold for only a s.h.i.+lling apiece, the price of a jar of jam or two pints of ale. That spurred an arithmetic Tom understood: Instead of making four featheries in a day and selling them at four s.h.i.+llings each for a total of sixteen s.h.i.+llings-not even a pound-he could make six dozen gutties, sell them at a s.h.i.+lling apiece and rake in three pounds twelve. The difference would make him a prosperous man.

Gutties had their shortcomings, the most notable being that they didn't go very far. A well-made feather ball might fly 200 yards off the tee and roll another twenty, while a gutty struck with the same force went about 180 yards and landed with a plop. But featheries were wildly inconsistent. A poorly made feather ball was liable to explode on contact and go nowhere. Gutties sometimes fractured, particularly on cold days-it happened often enough that there was a rule to cover it: Play the biggest chunk. But while a ruptured feather ball was ruined, a busted gutty was like Lazarus: Just pick up the pieces and heat them-you could do it by rubbing them between your hands-and you could remake your ball.

The rubber ball was cheaper, more durable, and more consistent than the feathery. It was also easier to putt because, unlike the slightly egg-shaped feather ball, a gutty was round. By the time Tom and Willie Park met in the first Open in 1860, the old ball was as dead as its feathered contemporary the dodo. Featheries from Allan's kitchen were displayed as curiosities, hidebound relics of another age.

Gutta-percha-the sap of a gnarled Asian evergreen that grows up to a hundred feet high. After a British explorer discovered it in 1842, hundreds of thousands of gutta trees were stripped of their bark and bled for milky sap that Malay workers collected in coconut sh.e.l.ls. The rubber had myriad uses: Dentists filled cavities with it; chilly-footed matrons slept with hot-water bottles made of it; and in 1858 gutta-percha was used to insulate the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, which ran along the ocean floor from Ireland to Newfoundland, and which promptly snapped. In shredded chunks the rubber cus.h.i.+oned goods in transit, and it was in this form-as a packing material-that a St. Andrews divinity student named Robert Paterson encountered the stuff. Paterson claimed he had received a crate from Asia holding a statue of the Hindu G.o.d Vishnu. Chunks of gutta-percha fell out; he heated the rubber, molded it and...Eureka! A golf ball. Upon leaving Scotland years later to save souls in America, Paterson wrote, "I quit St. Andrews for a louder call, and left to golfers all I had, a ball." But his creation ditty shouldn't be taken literally. There are earlier accounts of gutties reaching Scotland by way of the Blackheath Club in England-disproving the Scottish claim that nothing good ever comes from the south.

Tom Morris didn't care where gutta-percha came from as long as it kept coming. It came in dirty pink bricks that in warm weather were soft enough to hold a thumbprint. Tom cut strips from the bricks and softened the strips in hot water. When the rubber was warm he rolled it between his callused hands until it was as soft as dough, rolling it into a ball so close to perfectly round that it looked flawless. Then he dropped it into cold water to harden. He nudged and turned the ball as it bobbed to make it harden evenly, for if one part stayed above the surface too long it would swell and ruin the ball. When the ball was hard he dried it and tapped it all over with a sharp-nosed hammer, leaving scores of dents that resembled the dimples on a modern ball, dents that would help the ball slip through the air.

Hammering the b.a.l.l.s was a recent innovation. The first gutties had been smooth, and they flew like shot birds: crazily and not far. Before long golfers noticed that gutties performed better after they had been nicked and scuffed. This was golf's first lesson in aerodynamics. A smooth sphere fights its way through the air, but a scuffed one scratches the air just enough to tunnel its way through. Feathery b.a.l.l.s, which whizzed audibly in flight, had been aerodynamic by accident: Their seams worked like the raised seams of a baseball, helping them cut through the air. Gutties had no seams, but wear and tear served the same purpose. In later years Tom would make gutties in an iron mold that stamped dimples into them, but in his early days as a ball-maker he was still using a hammer, tapping each new ball like a woodp.e.c.k.e.r.

While Tommy was off at school, second son Jimmy often joined Tom in the workshop. So did Jack, who was talking now but not walking. The youngest Morris would never walk. He got around by pulling himself along on a wheeled trolley Tom had made for him. He would sit on his trolley in a corner of the workshop, watching Tom hammer a ball or rub up a clubhead. "Da," he might say, calling Tom by the name all the children used, "What're you makin', Da?"

Tom would smile at such a question. "Money."

In 1862 the defending Open champion lapped the field by thirteen strokes, a margin of victory that has never been equaled. But Tom Morris earned not a penny for his second Open win. While Willie Park, now described in the Fifes.h.i.+re Journal Fifes.h.i.+re Journal as "the ex-champion golfer," got 5 for finis.h.i.+ng second, another year's possession of the Belt was thought to be reward enough for the champion. Less than a week later a hopping-mad Park challenged Tom to a marathon match for 100, and Tom took the dare. The duel of the year would open with two rounds at Musselburgh, Park's territory, followed by two rounds at Prestwick, two more at North Berwick and finally two at St. Andrews. as "the ex-champion golfer," got 5 for finis.h.i.+ng second, another year's possession of the Belt was thought to be reward enough for the champion. Less than a week later a hopping-mad Park challenged Tom to a marathon match for 100, and Tom took the dare. The duel of the year would open with two rounds at Musselburgh, Park's territory, followed by two rounds at Prestwick, two more at North Berwick and finally two at St. Andrews.

In the weeks leading up to the match, Tom prepared like a modern athlete: He went into training, playing round after round and giving up "the divine weed," his pipe tobacco. Over four Sat.u.r.days in November and December of 1862 he beat Willie by two holes at Musselburgh; by five at Prestwick; and sealed his triumph with a four-hole victory at North Berwick. A Fifes.h.i.+re Journal Fifes.h.i.+re Journal writer wired an account that saddled Park "with the heavy incubus of being eleven holes behind." Surrounded by a final-day crowd of more than 300, Tom built his lead to fourteen holes, knocking his drives ten yards past those of Park, who trudged with his head down. Willie's supporters said he had to be ill. writer wired an account that saddled Park "with the heavy incubus of being eleven holes behind." Surrounded by a final-day crowd of more than 300, Tom built his lead to fourteen holes, knocking his drives ten yards past those of Park, who trudged with his head down. Willie's supporters said he had to be ill.

The national newspaper The Scotsman The Scotsman called Tom's seventeen-hole margin "unparalleled in the annals of golfing." At a banquet celebrating Tom's victory, Prestwick golfers applauded and called his name until at last he stood up. "I would prefer playing Park to making a speech," said Tom, whose blus.h.i.+ng proved his point. "There is no disguising the fact that William Park is as good a golfer as ever lifted a club, and it was my great good fortune to defeat such a formidable opponent on all the four greens." He announced that he was swearing off eight-round marathon matches because training for this one had cost him valuable time in his workshop. It had also cost him "one of the great pleasures the Good Lord allows us," he said, and with a flourish he fired up his pipe. called Tom's seventeen-hole margin "unparalleled in the annals of golfing." At a banquet celebrating Tom's victory, Prestwick golfers applauded and called his name until at last he stood up. "I would prefer playing Park to making a speech," said Tom, whose blus.h.i.+ng proved his point. "There is no disguising the fact that William Park is as good a golfer as ever lifted a club, and it was my great good fortune to defeat such a formidable opponent on all the four greens." He announced that he was swearing off eight-round marathon matches because training for this one had cost him valuable time in his workshop. It had also cost him "one of the great pleasures the Good Lord allows us," he said, and with a flourish he fired up his pipe.

Tom could have made the Belt his property by winning a third straight Open in 1863. He played well enough through rain and hat-grabbing winds, but a familiar figure stood in his way. Park was in top form again, clouting long parabolas, his chin leading the way as he marched to a two-stroke victory. That left Morris and Park with two Opens each, while the rest of the golfing population had none. Park carried the Belt back to his workshop beside the Musselburgh links, leaving Nancy Morris with an empty s.p.a.ce on the mantel at 40 High Street in Prestwick, where the Morrises now lived. This second cottage was farther from the links than their first, closer to the center of town. It sat on a paved street that little Jack could get about on his homemade trolley. And though the Morrises had moved to a better home on a better street, there was talk in town that the club wanted Tom to move his brood back to the links. What good was a greenkeeper who lived far from the green? A gentleman golfer should be able to knock on the keeper's door at any hour. The club's officers were planning to build a new clubhouse on the links; perhaps Tom could be persuaded to move his family there. The officers were not pressing the issue, at least not yet, because another strain of gossip was coursing through town: People said that the R&A wanted to hire Tom away.

In the mid-1850s the Royal and Ancient had hired a pair of greenkeepers named Watty Alexander and Alexander Herd. Under the two Alexanders, who were paid a combined 6 a year, the putting-greens at St. Andrews grew ragged. Fairways sprouted gouges dug by golfers swinging cleeks. The minutes of an R&A meeting reported that the faces of bunkers were crumbling, "much breached by frequent visitations." After the Fifes.h.i.+re Journal Fifes.h.i.+re Journal described a course that was "sorely cut up...execrable," the club's powerful green committee fired Watty Alexander, leaving Herd to wage a lonely war against the elements. Poor Herd. If he seeded a green, the seed died. If he pushed a wheelbarrow to the beach, filled it with sand and brought it back to fill rabbit holes in a bunker, the clouds chose that moment to burst and flood the bunker, undoing his work, leaving him bailing rainwater with a bucket while seagulls and club members cackled. Such a job can change a man, if only from drunken b.a.s.t.a.r.d to poor miserable drunken b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Herd quit in 1863. described a course that was "sorely cut up...execrable," the club's powerful green committee fired Watty Alexander, leaving Herd to wage a lonely war against the elements. Poor Herd. If he seeded a green, the seed died. If he pushed a wheelbarrow to the beach, filled it with sand and brought it back to fill rabbit holes in a bunker, the clouds chose that moment to burst and flood the bunker, undoing his work, leaving him bailing rainwater with a bucket while seagulls and club members cackled. Such a job can change a man, if only from drunken b.a.s.t.a.r.d to poor miserable drunken b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Herd quit in 1863.

Inside the R&A clubhouse, a sandstone strongbox looming over the first teeing-ground, one question became imperative: What would it take to bring back Tom Morris? When the clubhouse was built in 1854 it was pale brown, but a decade of wind and rain had leached its color. Tom wasn't the first to observe that sandstone and golfers both started tan and weathered to gray. To the graying men inside, the need for a greenkeeper multiplied when Edward, Prince of Wales, eldest son of Queen Victoria and future king, agreed to become the club's patron and first royal captain. With the prince's year-long captaincy to begin in the fall of '63, the more-royal-than-ever Royal and Ancient could not make its home on a second-rate green. And so the question of Morris's return became more urgent. The Prestwick Golf Club paid Tom 39 per year. No other greenkeeper made nearly as much, and many R&A members believed he would race back to St. Andrews for the same amount.

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 Devons.h.i.+re 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 gla.s.s 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 embarra.s.sed 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 "astonis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.s 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.

The golfers at Perth in 1864, with the Rook at right, Andrew Strath (below center), Willie Park (seated, middle row, second from left), and Tommy in his sailor suit with his hand on his father's shoulder.

Return to St. Andrews.

The fourth of May, 1864, was a s.h.i.+ning, 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 pa.s.sed. 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 a.s.sistance 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 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." 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 Ayrs.h.i.+re Express Ayrs.h.i.+re 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!" 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-cla.s.s 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.