Tommy's Honor Part 1

Tommy's Honor.

by Kevin Cook.

PROLOGUE.

"Wake, Tommy"

The wind came off the North Sea, pushing sand and bits of straw over gra.s.s-covered dunes to the links. The wind smelled of seaweed. It hurried past the sandstone clubhouse and ran uphill to the Morris house, where it slipped under the door and stirred the embers of last night's fire.

Tom Morris gave his son a mild kick on the backside. "Wake, Tommy."

The boy twitched. He was thirteen and slept like a paving stone. After another kick he stretched and yawned. "What time is it?"

"Tea time." His father, the early riser, had already rekindled the fire, boiled water, and filled two cups. Tommy was stretching and rubbing his eyes as the old man put a cup and saucer in his hands. Outside, a c.o.c.k crowed. Tommy sat up and sipped his black tea. It was bitter and scalding, hot enough to numb the tip of his tongue. Next came a chunk of oatcake, dropped onto the saucer as his father bustled past.

Tom Morris threw open the door to the street. His reddish-brown side-whiskers caught the day's first light. He was forty-three years old, with teeth the color of pale ale and a dusting of white in his beard. He rubbed his callused, veiny hands together as the breeze tossed motes of ash around the room, dropping ash on the Championship Belt on the mantel and on Mum's untouchable china dishes in their rack on the wall. "Chilly," he said. "We'll have stingin' hands today. Stingin' hands."

Tommy smiled. His father loved to say things twice, as if repeating something could double its import. "Aye, aye," he said, amusing himself. "Stingin' hands." His father didn't hear a word. He'd pulled his cap on and stepped into the wind, leaving the door flapping open behind him.

"Wait," Tommy said. But the old man would not wait. Tommy gulped his tea, pulled his boots and jacket on, stuck the oatcake in a pocket, and clattered out the door with his father's clubs under his arm.

His footfalls echoed down Golf Place, a double row of dark stone houses. No one else was awake. Any caddie or gentleman golfer who was up at this hour would be hung over, cradling his headache in his hands and wishing he had died at birth. The links were empty except for gulls, crows, rabbits, a mule tethered to a post by the stationmaster's garden, and Tom Morris, now joined by his panting son.

Tom examined his six clubs-driver, spoon, two niblicks, a rut iron, and a wooden putter-and selected the driver. He took a pinch of damp sand from a wooden box by the teeing-ground and built a small sand hill-a tee-for his ball to sit on. He took his stance and waggled his club at the ball as if to threaten it. "Far and sure," he said.

Tommy had heard the old motto a thousand times. He was supposed to repeat it, to say "Far and sure" before the first swing just as golfers had done on this spot for centuries. He was tempted to try something new, to blurt "Long and strong," or "High and mighty!" But he held back. His father might take offense, might turn into one of those stern Old Testament fathers he was starting to resemble. So Tommy mumbled "far'n'sher" and watched the old man draw back the driver to start the slow, clockwork swing that all St. Andrews golfers knew, laying the hickory shaft almost flat across his shoulders at the top, starting down slow as honey and then whipping the head of the club through the ball, which took off toward the white flag in the distance.

Tom squinted as he followed its flight. Nodding, he reached into his jacket for his pipe and pouch. He tapped a few tobacco leaves into the pipe's bowl, lit a match, and breathed blue smoke. Mum detested that smoke but Tommy loved it, the sweet reek of his father. Tom stood five foot seven, a bit above average for a Scotsman of his time, but in Tommy's eyes he loomed larger. Tom Morris was the Champion Golfer of Scotland. He was the hero of St. Andrews, the only man who could beat the golfing brutes of Musselburgh. He was official keeper of these famous four miles of turf, the links of St. Andrews. Beloved by all men-excepting jealous golf professionals, several red-coated gentlemen of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, and the Musselburgh brutes-he was a pious churchman who was not above joking and drinking with foul-smelling caddies. Tom Morris was these great things and one more: He was the one golfer Tommy was dying to beat.

Not to humble him, never that, but to be more like him. Not as a rival, but more like an equal. More like a man. Tommy was nearly as tall as his father, and suspected he would soon be stronger. And the more he grew, the more he believed that a boy needs to make his own name in the world. He needs to be more than his father's caddie.

With such thoughts in his head and the scent of tobacco in his nose, Tommy took the driver from his father's hand. He took a pinch of sand from the box, knelt to make a sand tee for his ball, and then stood tall, waving the driver back and forth. His swing was short and fast: Bang! Tommy's drives didn't always go straight, but a few went farther than his father's. This one sailed past the other ball before it bounced near Swilcan Burn, the brook that curled past the putting-green.

Tommy was thrilled. How many lads could hit a ball so far? How many grown men could?

His father was less impressed. Long or short didn't matter so much to Tom Morris. Position mattered. Tommy's drive was long, but too far to the left. Tom checked his pocket watch as he set off toward the green. A minute later he was. .h.i.tting again. Without a word he took the wooden niblick from Tommy and slapped a low approach that the wind could not catch. His ball cleared the burn by a safe five yards and rolled to the back of the green.

Tommy faced a harder shot. There was no easy play from the left side. The only way to stop the ball near the hole would be a high, soft pitch, the opposite of the usual approach. But no one attempted such shots with the shallow-faced clubs of the day. Tommy had tried hitting shots from flat ground with his rut iron, a lofted club made for lifting a ball out of cart or wheelbarrow ruts. He found that he could make the ball drop and stop. Not every time-you had to strike it just right or you'd foozle the shot. But when it worked, the ball came down like a snowflake.

He waggled the rut iron. His father looked surprised-Tommy liked seeing that. He drew the club back, keeping his hands high, then yanked them straight down, chopping the rut iron's heavy head into the turf. He grunted; dirt flew.

The ball squirted along the ground, bouncing before it splished into the burn. He dropped the rut iron. d.a.m.ned useless stick. He lost the hole.

His father moved to the second teeing-ground a few yards away. There was no sandbox here; you fished a bit of sand from the bottom of the hole in the first green. Tom Morris fashioned his sand tee, then pulled his driver back over his shoulder-tick-and whipped it smoothly to the ball-tock. But this ball flew low. It was a scalded cat, a near-miss that skipped along the ground. On dry days a scalded cat would run out of sight, but this one kicked up dew and stopped only 120 yards out.

Tommy took his pinch of sand from the bottom of the first hole, made a perch for his ball. His father watched him take his stance. Was he aiming for Cheape's Bunker? No sane golfer tried to clear that crater, not without a gale at his back, and the wind was across. Tom shook his head-the boy was his own worst enemy.

But Tommy had a plan, and a picture in his mind. He remembered all the rounds he had played with his father, not the friendly foursomes but the singles, one against one. They were all losses. At home the old man was kind, even tender. He tucked Tommy into bed every night and they prayed together. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. But there was no kindness on the links, where Tommy was beaten again and again, leaving him to dream of the day he would win at last. A day when he told the ball to duck into the hole and down it went. A day when he willed the ball to curve in flight and it curved. Now he used that dream image to picture his next shot. Pulling the driver back with his right elbow high, he brought it down and sent his drive on a beeline for Cheape's. In mid-flight the ball curved to the right as if it knew where to go. But there was no kindness on the links, where Tommy was beaten again and again, leaving him to dream of the day he would win at last. A day when he told the ball to duck into the hole and down it went. A day when he willed the ball to curve in flight and it curved. Now he used that dream image to picture his next shot. Pulling the driver back with his right elbow high, he brought it down and sent his drive on a beeline for Cheape's. In mid-flight the ball curved to the right as if it knew where to go.

Sheer willpower may have helped, but so did something more tangible: the spin Tommy applied with a swing that went from high and away from his body to low and closer, toward his left foot. That sidespin gave the ball a gentle arc from left to right, and his drive landed safely to the right of Cheape's Bunker, leaving him a clear shot to the green.

"Well played," his father said.

Praise from Tom Morris! That alone made this a good day. And it might get better yet, for Tommy had a secret: He was learning to make the ball curve at will.

They played fast, as always, with Tom checking his pocket watch. He hated spending more than two hours to play eighteen holes. As he marched down the fairway he would reach over and take a club from Tommy, who carried the clubs under his armpit. Within seconds of reaching his ball Tom began his clockwork swing and dispatched the ball on a low, straight line. He knew every cranny of the links and always took the safe route, trusting opponents to make more mistakes than he did.

Tommy played a bolder game. He was strong-the only boy his age in town who could topple a full-grown cow, not that his father would allow mischief like cow-tipping if he knew of it. On the links, Tommy swung hard and took chances. If a high-risk shot failed, he would try again. And again. He was more than fearless. He was a joyful golfer, a boy who could laugh at a terrible shot and swing harder at the next.

His ball had found a level lie near Cheape's Bunker. The ball was a dull white gutty, made of gutta-percha, the sap of a gum tree in Malaysia, a far corner of the Queen's vast empire. Hard as rock, it made a loud click at impact, like a billiard ball hitting another. This one clicked and climbed like a rocket as he slammed it toward the putting-green. With a chip and a putt, he won the second hole. The match was even, one hole apiece. This was match play, the usual way of keeping score. Total strokes didn't matter; each hole was a separate contest, and whoever won the most holes won the day.

They halved the next two as the wind picked up, humming in their ears. Neither golfer spoke much. Tommy won the fifth hole when his father left a three-pace putt a yard short. Everyone knew how Tom Morris struggled with short putts. "You'd be a fine putter, Father," Tommy needled, "if the hole was always a yard closer."

Tom smiled. The boy had spirit. But the boy was a long way from winning the day. In fact this was golf the way Tom liked it. Outdriven and outplayed for five holes, he was only one behind with miles to go.

Gray clouds turned red as the sun climbed over the sea. When a low cloud began drizzling, Tommy reached into a jacket pocket, where he kept a lump of pine tar to aid his grip. He found the tar as well as a slick, blackened oatcake, the breakfast he had stuck in the wrong pocket. He tossed the oatcake over his shoulder for the crows to gag on.

At the sixth hole, called "Heathery" due to its rough, weedy putting-green, both players lay two and had thoughts of chipping in for three. Tommy often joked that this green was more brown than green. In spots you could see bits of the seash.e.l.ls that gave the hole its traditional name, "Hole o' Sh.e.l.l." On a windless day you could hear sh.e.l.ls crunch under your boots. Putts didn't roll here, they bounced. Tom had no trouble b.u.mp-and-running his way to a four while Tommy two-putted for a frustrating five, the same five any club man could make with four gouty swings and a lucky putt.

The High Hole was where Tom loved to tell of the Great Storm of 1860. Waving his arm toward the beach, he relaunched the tale of Captain Maitland-Dougall, recalling the day when the Captain stood poised to compete for the medals of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club. But a tempest rose up! Winds and five-yard waves capsized a ship in the bay. Ten men dragged the town's lifeboat across the links to the raging surf, but who would lead them? Captain Maitland-Dougall! Dropping his clubs, he left his fellow golfers behind and leaped into the lifeboat, taking the stroke oar himself. A dozen sailors were saved that day, many pulled from the maelstrom by Maitland-Dougall himself. When the Captain had rowed the lifeboat safe to sh.o.r.e, he returned to the links. Wet as an otter, his arms like lead weights, he took up his clubs and won the gold medal with a score of 112.

Finishing his story, Tom Morris looked as proud as if his own niblick were the stroke oar.

Tommy was, as ever, amazed by this story. A hundred and twelve? That was worse than straight sixes. He was no admirer of his father's bosses, the club men in their red golfing jackets, calling themselves Captain this and Major that, wagering tens and scores of pounds and then swinging and missing. "G.o.d save Captain Maitland-Dougall," he said, shaking his head at a winning score of 112.

Tommy won the High Hole but lost the eighth when his father rolled in a putt for a deuce (and tipped his cap). The eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh holes were where the course reached the top of its shepherd's-crook shape and doubled back toward town. On the evil eleventh, Tommy's tee shot met a sudden gust of wind, struck the face of the Hill Bunker, and slid straight down. No one could save three from there. But his father took three putts (and Tommy tipped his cap). They halved the hole. The boy was still two holes ahead.

From the twelfth teeing-ground they could see the town's old towers. To the west was the Eden Brae, a gra.s.sy slope that leaned down to the mudflats where the River Eden fed into the sea. Fisher-women toiled down there, moving through acres of mussel-scalps a hundred yards out, gathering mussels for their men to use as bait. A wrack-picker shoved a wheel-barrow along the sand, heading for the corner where the tides brought great tangles of wrack-seaweed-that would fertilize gardens all over town. As a rule, the golfer and the wrack-picker eyed each other warily, each thinking the other a fool for doing the world's dullest ch.o.r.e. But like everyone in town, this straggle-bearded wrack-gatherer knew Tom Morris. He looked up and waved.

Tom waved back. He took a deep, bracing breath of salt air and turned from the brae to the work at hand. He tossed a blade of gra.s.s to gauge the wind, then hit a modest drive, straight as a telegraph wire. It was easy to spend strokes on the way in. He spent carefully, tacking his way through the next three holes, giving Tommy every chance to stumble. Which Tommy did on the long fourteenth, hitting a spoon that rolled into the h.e.l.l Bunker. Three swings later he rose from h.e.l.l with his face pink, hot with shame. His advantage cut to one hole, he was dying to make up for his blunder. And so, after a clean four on the fifteenth hole, he did exactly what his father expected at the sixteenth: He took the bold line off the tee, smacking his drive up the right side along the railway tracks. It was the wrong play. You could make three that way-or seven or eight. But sometimes the wrong play works. Tommy's drive landed two hundred yards out, hopped, and stopped just shy of the tracks. Safe by the length of a thumb. From there he hit a spoon to two-putt distance and the hole was his. That made him dormy: Leading by two holes with two to play, he could not lose. His father's only hope was to win both of the last two holes to salvage a half, a draw.

Tommy had the honor at the Road Hole. He knocked his drive over the railway sheds to the right, but turned his wrists a hair too soon. The ball hooked into knee-high gra.s.s. Three swings later he lay four in the greenside bunker, with Tom lying three on the edge of the green. Tommy sc.r.a.ped out of the sand and now lay five, forty feet from the flag. He shrugged and picked up his ball, conceding the hole. He was one hole up with one to play.

The Home Hole was short, less than three hundred yards. Tom's drive wasn't long, but it was straight. By now there were golfers milling around the clubhouse-club members in red jackets. A few spectators, early-rising townsmen, stood near a mudpile behind the Home green. Two shovels jutted up from the mudpile, which was roped off with wood stakes and fishing line. Tom was building a new green up there, above and behind the current one. To reach it, future golfers would have to play over or through the hollow where the green was now. He had been casting about for a name for that hollow, a memorable name to fit with the old reliable h.e.l.l Bunker and Elysian Fields-"Shady Acre" or "Slough of Despond," something like that.

Teeing up, Tommy spat on his fingers. If he won or halved the last hole, he would carry the day. He took his stance and gave the ball a swat. His drive climbed toward the clouds over the town, blue-gray clouds split by shafts of sunlight. He lost sight of the ball, but the spectators watched it bounce thirty yards past his father's ball. Tommy heard shouts and clapping as he crossed the old stone bridge over Swilcan Burn, and he couldn't help himself-he waved.

All this time, Tom Morris was busy playing golf. He b.u.mped his ball to the hollow, just hard enough to send it running toward the flag. Would it fall for a deuce? There was applause, then a groan as the ball slipped past the hole. Still, Tom's three was a sure thing. Tommy had two strokes left to win the match.

He had thirty yards to the flag. A twenty-yard b.u.mp and ten yards of roll. But there was a patch of ankle-high gra.s.s just short of the green. He would have to clear that gra.s.s by an inch or two.

As he circled his ball, studying his lie, a pair of red-coated club men came to stand behind him. "I'd putt it," one said.

Tommy's chip cleared the ankle-high gra.s.s, but by too much. It ran three paces past the hole. The redcoats were quiet. The whole town was quiet. Except for Tom Morris, who nodded at the ball and said, "You're still away, son."

The putt was uphill. It would go left, but if Tommy aimed for the right-hand edge of the hole and hit it hard, it would fall. He drew back his putter and rapped the ball, hard.

In it went. The redcoats whooped. Tom Morris nodded again. He walked past the hole and offered a handshake, and in that moment Tommy was so happy that he didn't want to blink. He didn't want to move from this spot. He leaned back and flung his putter straight up at the sky. The club rose, turning like the wheels in G.o.d's pocket watch.

Early professionals including Allan Robertson (crouching, third from right) and Tom Morris (fourth from right) watch Willie Dunn putt.

Born in Scotland.

The game the Morrises played was already ancient. It was in the kingdom of Fife on Scotland's east coast that medieval shepherds used their crooks to knock stones at rabbit holes. They were at it within a century or two of King Macbeth's death in 1057. In time the shepherds' sons and their sons' sons whittled b.a.l.l.s of wood to whack around the links, coastal wastelands where no trees or crops grew. They dug holes in flat places and planted sticks in the holes-targets for a game they called gowf gowf or or golfe golfe. Over the centuries the game would be called many other things, some printable, including "this human frustration," "a good walk spoiled," and "a weird combination of snooker and karate."

Other countries had similar sports. One was chole chole, a Flemish pastime in which a team of players got three swings to advance a ball toward a goal that might be half a mile away. Then their opponents played defense, hitting the ball toward the nearest bog. The Dutch played a golflike game on ice, and it is fashionable in some circles to say that golf began in Holland. But if you ask a Scotsman if he owes his national game to some Amsterdammers on ice skates, he may shoot back, "That's not golf." In fact the Scots' claim to the sport is simple and correct: They invented the game with the hole in the ground.

But they borrowed its name. "Golf" is probably a corruption of kolf kolf, a Dutch word for club. And as the game spread it corrupted its players-or so thought Scotland's King James II, who banned it. The king was sick of seeing his soldiers wasting time on the links, neglecting their archery practice. No wee wooden ball would pierce armor and kill the d.a.m.ned English. In 1457, in the first recorded reference to the game, King James II decreed that "the golfe be utterly cryit doune and not usit." Golfers ignored him.

His grandson, James IV, kept up the family tradition by calling the game "ridiculous...requiring neither strength nor skill." Then he tried playing it. During a lull between wars with England, the young monarch emerged from Holyrood Palace with a brand-new driver in his hand. He greeted several lords and ladies gathered to mark the occasion, stepped up to the ball and-whiff! He missed. He tried again, whiffed again, threw down his club, and stalked back to the palace. That might have been the end of royal golf, but to his credit James IV practiced in secret until he could lace his drives more than fifty yards. He became the first royal golf nut and first royal golf gambler. In 1504, after the king lost a two-guinea bet to the Earl of Bothwell, the debt was added to the nation's tax bill.

A love of golf often pa.s.ses from father to son. In the middle of the sixteenth century it went from father to son to daughter. Mary Stuart, better known as Mary Queen of Scots, was the only child of King James V, the golfing son of James IV. Mary ascended to the throne after her father died in 1542. She was six days old. When the news reached London, the gluttonous wife-killer Henry VIII, a tennis player, saw a chance to expand his empire. In a series of invasions called the "rough wooing," he tried to force a royal marriage between his son, Prince Edward, and Scotland's child queen. Mary was shipped to safety in France, where she grew into a striking beauty, six feet tall. Upon returning to Scotland the seventeen-year-old queen took up the national game and gave it a new word: She called the boy who lugged her clubs a cadet cadet, which the Scots heard as "caddie." Mary went on to become a golfing widow, hitting the links the same week her husband, Lord Darnley, was murdered. That faux pas gave her cousin, England's Queen Elizabeth, an excuse to charge Mary with crimes against G.o.d, nature, and good government. Mary Queen of Scots would lose a few more golf b.a.l.l.s in Scotland and later, in England, her head.

By then a dozen generations of golfers had walked the four-mile loop of the links at St. Andrews, over Swilcan Burn to the mouth of the River Eden and then back toward town, aiming for rooftops and the crumbling twelfth-century cathedral where ghosts were said to guard the remains of Saint Andrew, supposedly brought here by a monk in the year 345: three of the apostle's finger bones, an arm bone, a tooth, and a kneecap. No man designed the golf course a mile west of town. The course was an accident. The fairways were narrow paths through thickets of scrub: th.o.r.n.y whin bushes, which the rest of the world called gorse, as well as heather, nettles, brambles, ground elder, dogtail, c.o.c.ksfoot, and chickweed. The putting-greens were clearings where players' boots and the nibblings of rabbits and sheep kept the gra.s.s down. During storms the sheep huddled behind hillocks, where they scuffed and nibbled the gra.s.s and clover to the roots, leaving bare spots that eroded into sand bunkers. Other bunkers were carved by golfers slashing the turf in hollows where bad shots collected.

Golfers and sheep vied for s.p.a.ce on the links with fishermen drying their nets, women beating rugs or bleaching clothes, dogs chasing rabbits, cows and goats grazing, larks darting in and out of the whins, children playing hide-and-seek, and even the occasional citizen soldier doing his duty by old James II, practicing his archery. Still, it was a golf town. In the seventeenth-century sermons of Robert Blair, minister of the town church, Reverend Blair likened the bond between G.o.d and the Church of Scotland to that of shaft and clubhead. Remote, wind-blistered St. Andrews may have been shrinking as Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dundee grew, but its sway in golf never shrank. Courses in Perth, Edinburgh, Kirkcaldy, Montrose, and Musselburgh ranged from five to twenty-five holes, but after St. Andrewsrejiggered its twenty-two-hole course to make it tougher, the "St. Andrews standard" of eighteen became everyone's standard. Scottish sportsmen played the game by thirteen rules adopted in 1754 by the Society of St. Andrews Golfers. Some of those rules sound reasonable enough today ("If a ball is stop'd by any person, horse, dog or any thing else, the ball so stop'd must be played where it lyes"), while others sound puzzling ("Your tee must be upon the ground"). One timeless feature of the game was already clear to a St. Andrews writer: "How in the evening each dilates on his own wonderful strokes, and the singular chances that befell him-all under the pleasurable delusion that every listener is as interested in his game as he himself is."

The men who made the rules and played most of the golf were gentlemen: well-to-do landowners who didn't need to work. The game was technically open to all, and the St. Andrews links, like most links, occupied public land. But few workingmen could afford to play in an age when whole families, including both parents as well as children as young as five or six, toiled six days a week to earn what a gentleman spent to buy a single golf ball. Golf evolved as a rich man's game partly because the feathery b.a.l.l.s of the 1700s and early 1800s, leather pouches packed with goose feathers, were expensive. Men who could afford them met in town halls and taverns to drink, joke, argue, and arrange challenge matches, and as the game grew they formed local clubs and played for trophies. In 1744, after tabling discussion of taxes, prost.i.tution, and the latest cholera outbreak, Edinburgh's town council approved the purchase of a silver loving cup, to be played for each year by the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers. That move seemed to establish the gentlemen of the capital, who played in satin breeches and silk-lined jackets, as the game's ruling body. But the golfers of Fife would have something to say about that.

The "twenty-two n.o.blemen and gentlemen" of the Society of St. Andrews Golfers played in red hunting jackets, a look borrowed from the Fife Fox and Hounds Club. Some wore hiking boots that had tacks driven through the soles-the first golf spikes. After forming the Society of St. Andrews Golfers in 1754, they commissioned a trophy of their own, a silver golf club. They also played for gold and silver medals, and these medal compet.i.tions led to a new way of keeping score. Since a round-robin of one-on-one matches could take forever, the Society came up with a more efficient format: "[W]hoever puts in the ball at the fewest strokes...shall be declared and sustained victor." The new style was called medal play. In time it would eclipse the old way of playing. Medal play is what Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, and almost everyone else in modern golf play 99 percent of the time. Often called "stroke play," it is our definition of golf: Whoever takes the fewest strokes wins. But for more than a century, golf was a match-play game between players who challenged each other to man-to-man contests (singles) or two-man battles (foursomes). In match play, you can take ten swings in a bunker or even pick up your ball and surrender; you lose only that one hole. Whoever wins the most holes holes wins the match. wins the match.

"Challenge matches are the life of golf," Andra Kirkaldy of St. Andrews would write, looking back on the game as it was played in his youth. "Man against man, pocket against pocket, in deadly earnest is the thing."

Stroke play might win you the honor of a club medal once or twice a year, but the rest of the calendar was for match play. That meant bets and more bets. Many wagers were for a few shillings, but there were plenty of five-and ten-pound matches. Some gentlemen thought nothing of playing for 50-more than enough to buy a fine pony like the one Sir John Low rode around the links, dismounting when it was his turn to hit. In Scotland in 1820 the average annual income was less than 15, a sum Sir John might bet on one putt.

Some matches were for territorial pride as well as cash. In 1681 a pair of English n.o.blemen told the Duke of York that golf began in England. Any Scot who claimed otherwise, they said, was a liar! The duke, a Scotsman who would be king of both countries, agreed to a challenge match to settle the matter. For his partner he chose John Patersone, a cobbler who was said to be the best golfer in Edinburgh. The shoemaker arrived with his clubs tucked under his arm, trembling to be in such exalted company. After the other men hit their tee shots he steeled himself, swung from the heels, and belted a drive that dropped their jaws. With Patersone leading the way, the Scots routed the English pair. The duke was so pleased that he split his winnings with Patersone, who used the money to build a house on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, a fine stone house with the old golf motto etched above the front door: Far and Sure Far and Sure.

By the 1800s, with seven golf societies scattered across Scotland and England, the game was respectable enough to seek royal patronage. In 1833 the officers of the upstart Perth Golfing Society irked golfers in Edinburgh and St. Andrews by jumping the queue, securing the sponsorship of King William IV. The Perth club became "Royal Perth" despite being only nine years old, while Edinburgh's Honourable Company was eighty-nine years old and the Society of St. Andrews Golfers seventy-nine. Royal Perth! Royal Perth! The sound of it soured all the claret in St. Andrews. In 1834 a politically connected R& A member, Colonel John Murray Belshes, wrote to the king urging him to restore the old town's prestige. When the monarch ignored his plea, Belshes reminded King William that among his many t.i.tles was one that warmed the hearts of St. Andreans, for His Majesty was also the Duke of St. Andrews. How fallible he would appear if he forgot the town that was part of his birthright! The sound of it soured all the claret in St. Andrews. In 1834 a politically connected R& A member, Colonel John Murray Belshes, wrote to the king urging him to restore the old town's prestige. When the monarch ignored his plea, Belshes reminded King William that among his many t.i.tles was one that warmed the hearts of St. Andreans, for His Majesty was also the Duke of St. Andrews. How fallible he would appear if he forgot the town that was part of his birthright!

With the speed of the latest laboratory fluid, electricity, the king gave his patronage to the Society of St. Andrews Golfers, which got a new name including two words to remind Royal Perth of its youth: the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. Three summers later, King William sent the club "a Gold Medal, with Green Ribband...which His Majesty wishes should be challenged and played for annually." The Royal and Ancient had taken a step toward its destiny as the ruling body of a game that would be played not only on rough town greens but all over the world, and not only for crowns and shillings and the occasional 50, but for millions.

For the moment, though, golf still belonged to three or four hundred men in hunting jackets. Like the hunt, golf was a pursuit for prosperous fellows who wanted to stretch their muscles a bit before they fell into overstuffed chairs in chandeliered rooms to eat duck, pheasant, mutton, and beef and drink claret and gin while they smoked and told stories. As some writers had noted, the game was an abstract of the primordial hunt: A pack of men journeys into perilous land, avoiding dangers, tracking first one target and then another, getting home safely by nightfall to gather by the fire.

Golf also shared something important with such popular sports as c.o.c.kfighting and bare-knuckle boxing: It was easy to bet on. Every morning but Sunday the gentleman golfers of St. Andrews would meet near the first teeing-ground to arrange their singles and foursomes matches, haggling over odds and strokes given. They slapped their first shots toward the rail station and marched after them, their caddies following a few respectful steps behind. The caddies were a threadbare lot, boys as young as seven jostling for work beside toothless men of eighty. They called the golfer "Mister" unless he held a still-more-exalted t.i.tle such as Captain or Major. The occasional golfer of high rank, like the sports-mad Earl of Eglinton, was called "M'lord." Caddies were lucky to get a shilling per round, and lucky if their gentlemen didn't smack them as well as the ball. A golfer who got bad advice from his caddie, or detected laziness or cheek in him, was within his rights to backhand the caddie full in the face, or take a club and whip him with it. Like the vast and growing empire that some of them had served in India, Africa, or the Holy Land, the men of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club held firm to the belief that they ruled by right with G.o.d's approval. Never mind that revolt was in the air from teeming India to b.l.o.o.d.y Europe to distant America, or that the land these country gentlemen ruled was being literally turned upside down, farmland torn into quarries and mines as the industrial revolution gained steam by the hour. Scotland's gentleman golfers could escape the cities' sooty air, blast furnaces, and hungry rabble by spending the day on the links. If the rest of the world was hurtling forward at breakneck speed, they told themselves, at least the old game was safe from revolution.

They were wrong.

Here is the Royal and Ancient golfer in 1830: Dressed in a tan golfing frock, matching breeches, silk-lined waistcoat, and red jacket, with a high collar and a black top hat, he crosses muddy North Street on his way to the links. His pink nose, with ruby veins hinting at rivers of claret and gin, wrinkles at the scents of p.i.s.s and dung. The gutter steams with the emptyings of chanty-pots. Pigs snuffle weeds in the rutted, unpaved street. The golfer dodges horses pulling coaches, donkeys pulling carts, ducks, chickens. Now a cork comes flying through the air, just missing him. The cork, punctured with short nails to give it weight, lands with a plunk. He turns to see who hit it-a boy of eight or nine, trying to hide a cut-down golf club behind his back.

"Sillybodkins," the golfer says, smiling. He'd played that game himself on this very street, long ago.

Sillybodkins was the pretend golf of boys who cadged broken or discarded clubs and knocked corks up and down St. Andrews' streets, aiming for targets of opportunity: lampposts, doorways, sleeping dogs. Real golf b.a.l.l.s were impossibly expensive, but claret and champagne corks were plentiful; a properly weighted cork might carry a hundred yards. It might go farther than that if struck by nine-year-old Tom Morris, the sillybodkins king of North Street.

Tom Morris was born in 1821, the year a member of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club bought the town's links. Ordinary men like John Morris, Tom's father, were allowed on the course when the R& A men weren't playing. John got in an occasional round with a second-hand ball, but he had little time for golf. He worked six days a week as a hand-loom weaver, doubling as a postman when the weaving trade went slack. He spent Sundays reading the Bible and shepherding his wife and seven children to morning and afternoon services at the town church.

Tom was the family's second-youngest child. Born in a time when disease killed one in five children by the age of three, he had a life expectancy of forty-one. He ran the streets barefoot but didn't go hungry. His father's labors put porridge, potatoes, and turnips on the table along with fish, fowl, and sometimes beef. Tom got enough schooling to read, sign his name, and do simple sums, but what he loved was golf, and to his everlasting delight, golf's holy land was two clouts of a cork from North Street.

In its medieval heyday, St. Andrews had been the center of Scottish Catholicism. The legendary bones of Andrew the apostle, housed in St. Andrews Cathedral according to the old story, brought pilgrims from all over Europe. But after Scotland became a Protestant country in 1560, the town began a long decline. St. Andrews' population fell from about 14,000 in the early 1500s to 2,854 in 1793. In Tom's youth there were no more than 4,000 souls in a town whose landmarks were the towers of a ruined cathedral, a crumbling castle, and the busy links. Creaking sloops carried grain and potatoes out of the harbor and returned with coal, timber, slate, and salt. Many St. Andreans still lived in wooden houses with thatched roofs covered with sod from the links, dried sod that periodically caught fire and burned down three or four houses. Each day a runner jogged eleven miles from nearby Crail, toting the daily mail for Tom's father and other postmen to distribute. The first regular stagecoach service, going twice a week to Dundee and once a week to Cupar, began when Tom was seven.

As a boy he never expected to roam much past Dundee. He was sure to be a weaver, sitting at a loom all day, and perhaps a part-time postman, too. But Tom's head was full of golf. He could take dead aim at a lamppost and hit it from ten paces. On the links he moved through the whins and tall gra.s.s like a hound, sniffing out lost b.a.l.l.s. Each feathery ball was a treasure, even a misshapen, waterlogged one. He would play a few holes in the morning, before the red-coats came out, or at dusk when they were done, or race out between foursomes to hit a ball and chase it to the putting-green.

In 1835, Tom's schooling ended. He was fourteen. His father lacked the money and social standing to send his sons to university; it was time for Tom to apprentice himself to a tradesman. Through a family connection, John arranged a meeting with Allan Robertson, the golf-ball maker who caddied for R& A worthies and even partnered with them in foursomes. A short, bull-necked fellow who sported filigreed waistcoats and bright-colored caps, Robertson was the first man to parlay caddying, ball-making, and playing into something like a full-time job. If his trade was a bit disreputable, at least it offered steady work. Tom's mother might fret about her son's working for a man who consorted with gamblers, drunkards, cheats, and low-livers, but what could she say? Her husband was for it. John Morris contracted his son to Allan Robertson for a term of four years as apprentice, to be followed by five years as a Robertson's journeyman. On the morning his boyhood ended, fourteen-year-old Tom gathered his few belongings, left his parents' house, and walked a quarter-mile to a stone cottage that would be his new home.

Allan Robertson would prove easy to know, if not always easy to work for. Loud, c.o.c.ky, full of mirth and wrath that could switch places in a blink, he was a grinning, muscular elf. Not quite five and a half feet tall, Robertson had mutton-chop sidewhiskers, an off-kilter smile, and the wrists and arms of a blacksmith. His strength and pickpocket's touch helped make him the best golfer of his generation. In an era when anyone who made it around the links in a hundred strokes had something to celebrate, the pint-sized Robertson often broke a hundred and once shot eighty-seven. Still, he was not a golfer by trade. No such career existed. So Robertson made and sold golf b.a.l.l.s and caddied for the gentleman of the R& A. As the town's keenest eye for golf talent he also set the club members' handicaps and played matchmaker, pairing them up in fair or interesting or mischievous ways.

Tom worked in Robertson's golf-ball factory-a grand term for the kitchen in his little stone cottage at the corner of Golf Place and Links Road. The cramped kitchen had stone walls and a floor of wood planks. A pot kept water boiling over the fire. A long, st.u.r.dy work table sat under an oil lamp that cast a wan light specked with feather dust. Three men worked here: Allan Robertson, his cousin Lang Willie Robertson, and Tom Morris. Allan and Lang Willie were Tom's teachers in ball-making, a craft that was equal parts science and upholstery.

To make a feather ball, you start with a wide strip of cowhide. Take a straight razor and cut three thin sections of hide, then soften the sections in water and alum. Trim the largest piece to the shape of an hourgla.s.s; this will be the middle of the ball. The other two pieces should be round. They are for the top and bottom. Sew the pieces together with waxed thread, forming a ball with a small hole at one end. Turn the ball inside-out so that the st.i.tches are hidden on the inside. Now you're ready for the gruntwork.

After boiling enough goose feathers to fill the standard measuring device-a top hat-pull a thick leather cuff over the hand that will hold the empty ball. Grab a handful of boiled goosedown, as soft as warm sand, and use a finger-length poker to push the down through the hole into the ball. Repeat until you need a short, T-shaped iron awl to stuff more and more feathers through that little hole. After twenty minutes of this, the short awl won't be weapon enough. To drive one last handful of down into the jam-packed, unyielding ball, you need to wear a wood-and-leather harness. The harness straps around your chest. It has buckles up the sides, a wooden panel in front, and a slot at the crux of your ribcage. Place the b.u.t.t end of a long awl into the slot and lean forward with all your weight, forcing the last feathers through the hole. When the top hat is empty and the ball is finally full, sew the hole shut as fast as you can.

The last stage of ball-stuffing was dangerous. If the awl slipped, the ball-maker could break a rib or impale himself. Lang Willie Robertson liked to tell about a ball-maker who pushed so hard that his workbench split in two, sending him tumbling forward in a whirl of awls, calipers, paint, waxed thread, and knitting needles as the ball bounced away, squirting feathers. As Allan's cousin and a.s.sistant, Lang Willie outranked Tom in the Robertson kitchen, but he never acted superior. Six foot two, with rheumy eyes and whisky breath, he was older than Allan-almost forty. Lang Willie told the new apprentice all about the Robertsons, including a fore-bear who caddied for decades and "died in harness," dropping dead in a clatter of clubs on the Burn Hole. That caddie left behind a son, David Robertson-Allan's father, Lang Willie's uncle-a caddie and golf hustler immortalized in a poem called "Golfiana": "Davie, oldest of the cads/Gives half-one to unsuspicious lads/When he might give them two or even more/And win, perhaps, three matches out of four!" David Robertson sold golf equipment, too. That sideline came about when a clubmaker from Musselburgh grew weary of taking a ship across the Firth of Forth to Kirkcaldy, then shouldering his wares and hiking twenty miles to St. Andrews. To spare himself the trek, the clubmaker hired David Robertson as his salesman in the old town. Both men prospered, and upon his death David left his son, Allan, an estate worth 92, including two pounds' worth of feathery golf b.a.l.l.s.

Allan's kitchen crew made or repaired an occasional club, but the trade was mainly featheries. The feather ball had been standard since the 1600s. It was expensive-up to two shillings and sixpence each, enough to buy a new driver-because making the thing was so difficult. Even after you stuffed a ball and sewed it shut, there was work to do. You gave it a light knocking with a thin-headed hammer to even out any b.u.mps. You gave it three coats of white paint and a stamp that showed who made it. (b.a.l.l.s from Allan's kitchen were stamped simply ALLAN ALLAN.) Then you put the ball aside for two days. As it dried, the feathers inside expanded, pushing the cover to its limit. A feathery might sound soft, but a new one was like hardwood-hard enough to kill a man. Tom knew of two people who had died after being felled by flying golf b.a.l.l.s, a schoolboy hit in the head and a grown man struck in the chest.

Feathery b.a.l.l.s were so precious that one of Allan's rivals, the Musselburgh ball-maker Douglas Gourlay, put one in the collection plate at the Episcopal Church in Bruntsfield one Sunday. If you were to find that ball today, you could sell it for thousands of dollars.

A skilled ball-maker could stuff, sew, paint, and stamp three b.a.l.l.s in a day. An adept could make four. Allowing for misfortune (torn leather, bruised ribs, needle-p.r.i.c.ked fingers), three men could make fifty or more featheries in a week, enough for Allan to keep up his household, pay Lang Willie, and feed apprentice Tom, who worked for room, board, and training. One year Allan Robertson's kitchen-table factory produced 2,456 b.a.l.l.s. All the while Allan barked at Lang Willie and Tom to work harder, faster. Laggards and dullards, he called them. Or worse, Irish Irish laggards and dullards, which only amused Lang Willie and Tom, neither of whom had been much closer to Ireland than the Eden Brae at the end of the links. laggards and dullards, which only amused Lang Willie and Tom, neither of whom had been much closer to Ireland than the Eden Brae at the end of the links.

Lang Willie, sitting with his endless legs bent under him, made the time pa.s.s with jokes like the one about the caddie who died and found himself at the bottom of a ladder that stretched into the clouds. "Greetings, my son," said Saint Peter, handing the man a piece of chalk. The saint informed the caddie that as he climbed to heaven he must write his sins on the ladder, one per rung. So up the caddie went. "Took the Lord's name in vain. Step Step," said Lang Willie, narrating the ascent. "Impure thoughts. Step Step," he said. "Drank to excess. Step. Step. Step. Step Step. Step. Step. Step." This went on until the man was miles above the earth. And then, to his astonishment, he saw another caddie-his own long-dead grandfather-climbing down the ladder out of the clouds. When asked why, the grandfather-caddie cried: "More chalk!"

Tom learned more than ball-making and old stories in Allan's house. He learned that a man can have multiple aims. Tom, like his father, was a straightforward character, striving to serve G.o.d and family by working hard, speaking plainly, deceiving no one. But the more he knew of ball-making the more clearly he saw that it took no great skill to stuff and sew golf b.a.l.l.s. Why then should the great Robertson have chosen Tom Morris to be his apprentice? They weren't cousins. Of all the lads who could use a leg up into a thriving trade, why Tom?

From the week Tom went to live in the Robertson cottage, fifty paces from the links, Allan schooled him in the game as well as the trade: how to grip the club for more control, how to hit shots high or low to suit the weather, how to flip the ball out of sand. On summer evenings when the sun stayed up past ten o'clock, they played match after match of two or three or nine holes, with Allan giving Tom strokes and beating him anyway. There was always a bet. Playing without betting, Allan said, was "no' golf." After Tom had lost the few pennies Allan had given him that week, they played for plucks-winner gets to keep one of the loser's clubs. This made no sense, since both of them played with Allan's clubs, but the boss didn't mind as long as he won. Tom didn't mind, either. He welcomed any chance to leave the sweaty kitchen for the great green links. Boss and apprentice spent long hours out there, hours of thunder and wind, much of which came from Allan's mouth. He loved to sound off on things he had read in The Scotsman The Scotsman and and Chambers' Edinburgh Journal Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, from politics and art to the price of good leather. Tom, straining to hear as the wind blew the words down the fairway, gathered that good leather cost too much, India was a powder keg, Lord Palmerston was not to be trusted, and some mad Englishman had dug up a Grecian Venus that had no arms.

Tom listened harder when the subject was golf. He heard about the weaknesses of gentlemen like Sir David Baird, who might be the R& A's best ball-striker but could not play in rain. Monsieur Messieux, the Frenchman, could hit the ball a mile but was merde merde on the putting-green. There were other secrets: an invisible break on the eighth green; a spot to the right of the twelfth green that would kick a ball straight left. Each night, lying on his straw mattress, Tom pictured the golf course in his mind's eye, as if from above, and imagined different ways to play each hole. He would leave the window open a few inches even on cold nights, to test his strength even while he slept. The chill never woke him. He slept like a stone. When he woke he was alert right away but kept his eyes shut for a moment as he prayed, smelling salt air redo-lent of sand, mud, and turf, the scent of the links. on the putting-green. There were other secrets: an invisible break on the eighth green; a spot to the right of the twelfth green that would kick a ball straight left. Each night, lying on his straw mattress, Tom pictured the golf course in his mind's eye, as if from above, and imagined different ways to play each hole. He would leave the window open a few inches even on cold nights, to test his strength even while he slept. The chill never woke him. He slept like a stone. When he woke he was alert right away but kept his eyes shut for a moment as he prayed, smelling salt air redo-lent of sand, mud, and turf, the scent of the links.

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

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

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

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

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