Tommy’s Honour: The Extraordinary Story of Golf’s Founding Father and Son. Kevin Cook

played randomly, aiming for any flag they could spot from wherever they found a ball. They clambered up and down towering dunes, slipping on sandy pathways, shouting ‘Fore’ and ‘Bloody hell!’ This was the thimble of turf where Tom was supposed to build the best links in the west.

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

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

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

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

      At night, sitting up by an open window while Nancy and the baby slept, Tom made pencil sketches of the links on landscaper’s paper. He drew holes and combinations of holes, with arrows showing the line of play. The arrows started out sensibly enough, then tangled like seaweed. It was a maddening exercise – there wasn’t room for eighteen holes. But each night he also read his Bible: Ask the Lord to bless your plans …

      Pacing, thinking, hearing the surf at the foot of the links, he might walk to the room where his wife and son slept, Nancy with her worries and Tommy with his chestnut curls and long lashes. What man hearing the sleeping breaths of his wife and child, could fail to take courage into the next day?

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

      The club paid several labourers to help, but Tom did much of the digging and carting himself, using shovels, wheelbarrows and his bare hands. His opening hole was the longest in golf, measuring 578 yards at a time when a 200-yard drive was a long poke. The drive had to clear a swamp, the Goosedubs, staying clear of the humpbacked dunes to the left, and from there it was three solid clouts to the putting-green. The second hole, called Alps, led golfers up dunes that presented an optical illusion: they appeared to be mountains much further away. Tom planted surprises all over the links, turning the shaggy ground’s limitations to his advantage with deceptions that rewarded local knowledge. Club members who knew the course’s tricks would have an edge. The approach to the Alps Hole, for instance, called for a shot from a hollow called Purgatory. The shot had to clear towering dunes. Those dunes were so steep that caddies sometimes lost their footing and tumbled backwards on the way up. But clearing the dunes was not enough. A ball that summited the Alps could fall into a vast, deep, putting-green-sized bunker called Sahara. Only by clearing both the Alps and the Sahara Bunker could the golfer reach a green that sat in a grassy bowl, welcoming shots that were strong enough to find it. ‘The course went dodging in and out among lofty sand-hills,’ wrote the amateur champion and golf historian Horace Hutchison half a century later. ‘The holes were, for the most part, out of sight when one took the iron in hand for the approach, for they lay in deep dells among those sand-hills, and you lofted over the intervening mountain of sand, and there was all the fascinating excitement, as you climbed to the top of it, of seeing how near to the hole your ball may have happened to roll.’

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

      While working on the course Tom played it every day but the Sabbath. He was dead-set on knowing every inch, every shot his course could ruin or create. Often he played with his patron, Colonel Fairlie, who was as near to being Tom’s friend as a gentleman could be to a hireling. The gruff, clever Fairlie was forty-two, twelve years older than Tom, with a high forehead and a high, starched collar. Sporting a black, bristly moustache that curved down to meet his side-whiskers over a clean-shaven chin, he had the look of a sea-captain, scanning the horizon with squinted eyes, seeking his next challenge.

      Colonel James Ogilvie Fairlie came by his title by serving the Queen as an officer of the Ayrshire Yeomanry Cavalry, a reserve unit that marched in formation on the village green on holidays, striking fear into any seals or hungry Irishmen intent on attacking the coast. But while he was no warrior the colonel was an accomplished sportsman, a cricketer who had played for the home side in Scotland – England matches and who now purchased racehorses as casually as Tom bought hiking boots. Fairlie had taken up golf late in life but had made the most of his frequent trips to St Andrews from his home near Prestwick. With Tom’s help he became one of the best of the R&A’s gentleman players. He had never taken to the cocksure Allan Robertson, preferring Tom’s calm competence, and after bringing Tom west he was determined to see him succeed. Fairlie and Tom would sit on the grass near the twelfth green, watching golfers finish their rounds while Fairlie smoked a cigar. Soon Tom had a new gift from his benefactor: a lifelong habit. ‘The colonel would often give me a cigar. Then one day, I well remember, he gave me a pipe,’ Tom recalled decades later, ‘and after that I was a smoker for life. I had never smoked at all when I was a boy, and I would not now advise boys to smoke, young boys at least. But if I did not smoke until I was well on in life, I think I have made up for it.’

      Fairlie had a short, graceless swing, but he was strong enough to rise on his toes and hit the ball as far as Tom did. The two of them played crown-and-shilling matches, with the colonel getting strokes. Fairlie marched ahead with Tom following, carrying the clubs. After a morning round the colonel sometimes hurried to Prestwick’s railway station for a trip to Ayr or Glasgow, returning in time for another round before dark. As he liked to say, the world was running faster these days, running on steam.

      The rails were changing everything from golf (a fellow could play at Prestwick and Musselburgh in the same day) to