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

hole. After his last putt missed, ‘Tom gave his ball a kick in disgust,’ wrote Hutchison, ‘while Dunn took a snuff with great gusto and smiled satisfactorily.’ Tom turned the tables the following year when the golf world descended on St Andrews for the R&A’s autumn meeting. In one foursomes duel he and Colonel Fairlie pipped Dunn and another Musselburgh golfer, the expert amateur Sir Robert Hay, who had ‘challenged the world’ with Dunn as his partner. Then Tom delighted his hometown by teaming with none other than Allan Robertson, who had ‘forgiven’ Tom – Allan’s word – and now made gutta-percha balls in his kitchen by the old links. The reunited Invincibles gave Hay and Dunn odds of two to one. Tom made side bets giving as much as five to one. ‘The betting was extreme in this important piece of golfing warfare,’ reported the Fifeshire Journal, ‘this all-absorbing trial of dexterity betwixt St Andrews and Musselburgh … The match was witnessed by doctors, lawyers and divines (young ones at least of the latter profession), professors, bankers, railway directors, merchants’ clerks, tradesmen, workmen … as well as a goodly sprinkling of general idlers.’

      As at North Berwick three years before, Allan and Tom were out-driven by taller, stronger foes. Worse yet was Tom’s putting. He kept missing short putts, a fault that would dog him for most of his life. According to the Journal, ‘Tom, it was insinuated, was at his old trade of “funking”.’ But, in another late reversal, the Invincibles stormed back. On one eventful hole Allan wound up and slugged a drive that ‘shot far ahead of Mr Hay’s corresponding one; indeed, one could hardly conceive how Allan’s little body could propel a ball so far.’ Tom sank a crucial putt; he and Allan won in a walk. ‘In the progress inward, some boys removed the flags … and held them aloft in the procession, giving it the appearance of a triumphal entry,’ the Journal story concluded, calling Robertson and Morris ‘the cocks o’ the green. Long may they hold that honourable elevation. St Andrews for ever!’

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

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

      In the 1850s the Invincibles swept aside challengers in St Andrews, Prestwick, Perth, Musselburgh and half a dozen other Scottish towns.

      Allan claimed never to have lost in single combat – despite his ‘wee coatie’ match with Tom and other losses he considered unofficial. As the ’50s progressed he defended his ‘perfect’ record with Jesuitical zeal. Singles mattered more after Willie Dunn moved south to be greenkeeper at Blackheath, near London, where he earned ten shillings a week – about twenty-five pounds per year – for serving Englishmen like the peevish Lord Starmont, who broke two sets of clubs over his knee during his first round of golf and pronounced himself satisfied with the day’s exercise. Dunn’s departure left Scotland to Allan Robertson and Tom Morris, only one of whom could be the country’s King of Clubs, a title the east-coast newspapers gave to Allan. The king’s crown would be hard to dislodge. On one visit to St Andrews, Tom played his old boss and beat him. Allan called it a casual, unofficial match, though bets had been laid and paid. The west-coast Ayr Observer, loyal to Tom, crowed, ‘The palm of victory, which has so long reposed in quiescence in the sombre shade of St Rule, is gracefully waving in the westering breezes.’ But the Fifeshire Journal defended the rule of St Rule’s, the tallest cathedral tower in St Andrews, by sniffing, ‘Who would have conceived aught so preposterous as that insignificant match should be seized and a claim to the championship constructed upon it by anyone conversant with the usages of golf?’ Or, more simply put: frontiersman, go hang.

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

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

      ‘I prefer having Tom as a partner,’ said Allan, royally coy.

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

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

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

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

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

      With Tom Morris far away in Prestwick, they agreed that Park would play Tom’s older brother George. George Morris was smaller and darker than Tom. A passable golfer who could make his way around the links in 100 strokes or fewer, George played in a white cap that from a distance made him look like a button mushroom. Park proceeded to pound him into paste. After losing the first eight holes in a row poor George cried, ‘For the love of God, man, give us a half!’ Allan, an interested spectator, allowed