Tom Morris of St Andrews, page 14
The Chartists, the forerunners of the trades union movement, were gaining ground in society at large and the question of privilege as a birthright was one of the intensely debated issues of the day. Tommy and his friends in Prestwick were ambitious. Witnessing the ‘good life’ at first hand every day in school and on the links must have made them even more so. His childhood friend and sister’s beau, James Hunter, for instance, certainly coupled hard work and determination with ambition, making him a very wealthy man. Tommy was naturally flamboyant but he clearly had a similar drive and determination to better himself. It was most probably this, as much as his lifestyle, that brought him into conflict with his father and which was much commented upon at the time.
Unlike his father, Tommy not only welcomed challenges but also issued them. He was not prepared to leave the rewards for his play to the whims of benefactors and often played and partnered for an agreed sum. The pots and spin-offs from the bets were secondary. He simply revolutionized the game as it then was, and every professional golfer who followed after him benefited.
Tommy may have come into the golfing public’s eye as a boy in Perth in 1864, but it was at Carnoustie in September 1867 that he showed his true mettle. Tommy Morris, at the age of sixteen, won his first tournament. Against a field made up of the best from St Andrews, Musselburgh, Perth and Prestwick, after three rounds of the 10-hole course, he was tied for the lead with Willie Park and Bob Andrews on a score of 140. The subsequent one-round play-off was reported by the Dundee Advertiser to have created much interest and ‘a great number of spectators accompanied them round the Links’. The newspaper also noted that ‘Morris headed his opponents from the first, and kept and improved his lead to the end, coming in the winner with a splendid score of 42’, which was four strokes ahead of Bob Andrews, Willie Park having retired when he ‘had the misfortune to send his ball into the Burn’. The newspaper also reported that Tommy’s score ‘was the theme of admiration of both professionals and amateurs, and three hearty cheers were given for the youthful champion when he “holed” his last shot’. The Earl of Dalhousie had put up the £20 cash professional prize money and Tommy had won half of it, and no doubt the approbation of his father who had thought little of his chances in the play-off, remarking, ‘He’s ower young’.
A post-tournament match took place between Willie Park and Tommy for £5. The young contender thrashed the champion over three rounds by 8 up and 7 to play. His play at Carnoustie that week was a portent of what was to come.
Tommy’s fast-growing friendship with Davie Strath, Andrew’s youngest brother, was put to the test on the Links at St Andrews after the 1866 Spring Meeting. The gentlemen collected together a sum of £20 (the local paper suggested) and the two boys played two rounds of the course for it. Tommy triumphed, but only just. Against Davie Strath in a post-tournament match watched by a large crowd, however, he lost on the last green when Davie holed a long putt. The two would be matched again and again throughout the years, sometimes head-to-head, sometimes in foursomes play with a gentleman partner when the odds had to be bargained.
Tommy’s headgear marked the stages in his life. He went from being a boy wearing the traditional round cheesecutter cap with a shiny polished leather peak, to a youth with a felt cap, until he arrived at manhood with his defining blue glengarry bonnet.
There can be little doubt that Tommy was a flamboyant figure who played to the crowd. As his headgear changed so did his attire, imitating the dandy of the day with Beau Brummell lapels and waistcoat piping. His swing, always fast, took on a flourish that ‘near spun him off his feet’, and sent the glengarry flying from his head, to be returned to him from a scramble of admirers.
But if his game was flashy it was also effective. In 1866 Willie Park won the Champion’s Belt, two strokes clear of his brother David. Tommy was a long way down the field, nine strokes behind his father and nearly twenty behind Willie Park. In 1867 Tom had his last victory for the Belt, with Tommy five strokes away, placed fourth behind Willie Park and Andrew Strath. The signs were already there; Tommy was learning and learning fast. If Tom Morris and Willie Park were not aware then, it would not be long before they realised that their period of supremacy was drawing to an end.
It is not difficult to explain Tommy’s ascent. Maturity and increasing physical strength, the ability to know when, and when not, to take risks, how to make strokes and how to save them, turned Tommy into the complete golfer. But development of the competitive edge was also important. Johnny Allan had come through from Prestwick to work at the club maker’s bench for a year in 1865. Johnny brought the strength he had developed in his father’s stonemason’s yard to the game and he, together with Davie Strath and young Bob Kirk, made the going in St Andrews far from easy. But two other already established players were coming to prominence. In St Andrews there was Jamie Anderson, and in Musselburgh, Bob Ferguson was making an impression on Willie Park.
The Morrises would have first encountered Bob Ferguson as a youth of eighteen at the Leith Tournament in 1867. He was the surprise winner of the £10 purse on offer then and, as a result of this famous victory, Sir Charles Tennant was prepared to back him against all-comers over the links at Musselburgh. It is clear that Bob regarded Tommy with great affection and held him in some esteem. The two played many money and exhibition matches in the Lothians and Fife and it is from Bob’s reminiscences that we have the best overall account of Tommy’s play, particularly his devastating putting. Bob insisted that Tommy was the greatest player in the world and the finest golfer that he ever played against. After suffering a heavy defeat at Luffness, Bob remarked that he had never seen golf played like it. ‘Time and again,’ he said, ‘Tommy would make his putt and watch the ball progress towards the hole with the words to his caddy, “Pick it out the hole, laddie”.’
Jamie Anderson was already a part of their every day lives in St Andrews and although nine years older, he was one of Tommy’s regular playing partners. The Andersons, as neighbours and family friends, were particularly close to the Morris family. Tom had made feathery balls with Da’, Jamie’s father, in Allan Robertson’s front room and Jof, when still a boy, carried Jamie’s clubs and was his frequent playing partner as a man. Jamie Anderson partnered and opposed Tommy in foursomes matches but there is no record of them challenging for a large sum of money. Jamie left no record of his impressions either of Tommy or of golf in his time. Like his father, Jamie was a retiring person: unlike him, he enjoyed the drink a little too much, which eventually led to his downfall.
17 The Finest Rounds Ever Played
In 1868, Tommy won his first Champion’s Belt with the phenomenal score of 154, eight strokes better than the previous best of Andrew Strath in 1865. His father took second place, three strokes adrift, with Bob Andrew from Perth in third place and Willie Park in fourth.1
The outcome of this championship is remarkable. For the first and, almost certainly, the last time, a son and his father took first and second places respectively in the Open. Tommy was only 17 and his father was 47 years old.
When the time came round again for the 1869 Autumn Meeting of the Prestwick Club and the Challenge Belt competition, Tommy was ready.
David Strath entered the field for the first time that year, having just left his secure job at a clerk’s desk to make a life in golf. Tom was not playing particularly well and one can only surmise that the pressure of laying out courses and work on the Links of St Andrews were taking their toll. For whatever reason, his play was indifferent in the event, and for that matter, anywhere else, that year.
Tommy was at his best, however, and was to remain at his best. He won the Challenge Belt again in 1869 with the remarkable score of 157, eleven strokes ahead of Bob Kirk in second place, with Davie Strath third and Jamie Anderson fourth. Neither Willie Park nor Bob Andrew showed up at Prestwick that year and the field was small. This may well have been due to the acceptance of Tommy’s invincibility, for the talk in every golfing howf in the land was about the play in St Andrews. Firstly Jamie Anderson and then, only weeks later, Tommy, on two successive occasions that summer, had equalled Allan Robertson’s record 79 strokes over the St Andrews Links. Tommy had also swept all before him at Burntisland and North Berwick where he had won every prize on offer over the two-day meetings.
In that year’s Open, the excitement at Prestwick was undoubtedly about Tommy’s hole in one in the first round at the 8th, the 166-yard Station Hole. It was the first recorded at Prestwick and the first in the Open Championship. Tommy was breaking new ground in every respect.
Jamie Anderson’s first attempt at the Belt came in 1869, while Bob Ferguson of Musselburgh had already made an appearance the previous year, creditably finishing in 5th place. Both were Tommy’s seniors by several years and both were established winners. The reason for their absence from the earlier championships could not have been penury because Jamie had been prepared to travel to Montrose, Perth and Leith to play. Bob Ferguson had made the same journeys as well as to St Andrews. Lack of self-belief seems to have been the problem. Both probably considered Willie Park and Tom Morris to have a stranglehold on the Championship. The emergence of young Tommy and the fact that both had beaten the Park and Morris old brigade, seems to have broken down psychological barriers. Bob Ferguson had clearly eclipsed Willie Park at Musselburgh and, at St Andrews, Jamie Anderson had created a stir on 19 August 1869 by setting a new course record with a round of 77. When Tommy recorded the same score in May 1870, the newspapers made much of it and Jamie Anderson had to take it upon himself to write to the editor of the Fifeshire Journal to remind him of his precedence.
It is worth reflecting on these two rounds of golf, for they were an achievement that is probably unsurpassed in the game. The heads of the wooden clubs were, by today’s standards, not at all conducive to sending the ball a long way and the irons had no markings on the face, so backspin was virtually impossible. The performance of the hand-hammered gutta ball was substantially less than the revolutionary rubber-cored ball introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century, and a world away from the today’s high-technology balls.
It is the consideration of the course that they played that confounds and amazes. Even with the availability of the horse-drawn mower, the fair-ways were little more than rough tracks of grass interspersed with whin bushes on both sides. Bunkers were natural sandy scrapes, or sometimes simply huge sand dunes, pitted with rabbit holes, completely unkempt and untended in any way. The greens were in general no better than today’s fairways and would be derided by today’s golfers. From a combination of maps and contemporary accounts, we can put together a picture of how the course appeared in 1870. What we cannot do, however, is describe the accuracy or the power and dexterity required to play the course at St Andrews in 77 strokes at that time.2
It was the 1870 competition for the Belt that was Tommy’s greatest challenge because, if he became victorious, he would win the trophy outright. He certainly prepared well for the task. He travelled the length and breadth of the country playing competitive golf, and his progress was extensively covered in the press. He went down to Westward Ho! in Devon, playing against Johnny Allan and Bob Kirk, then to London at Blackheath where he was matched against Bob Kirk again. On his way north, he went next to the Liverpool Golf Club at Hoylake, the course that Tommy’s uncle George had laid out the year before and that his cousin, Jack Morris, had been left to look after.3
It is clear from contemporary newspaper accounts that Tommy had achieved sporting celebrity status. His play filled many column inches and when, on 3 May 1870, he went round the St Andrews Links in 77 strokes, his supremacy was widely noted. After this time, every national newspaper carried the results of golfing events in the Sporting Intelligence columns.
There can be no doubting that Tommy’s travels and the newspaper coverage he was attracting were responsible for the increase in the size of the 1870 field for the Champion’s Belt. He may also have been responsible for James Hunter, his boyhood friend from the Red Lion at Prestwick, entering the fray. James had already established a reputation as a player at Prestwick, as well as at St Andrews, where he was a frequent visitor with Tom’s daughter, Lizzie Morris, their childhood friendship having flowered into courtship and a promise of betrothal.
The Ayr Advertiser named the entries for the Belt that year but also devoted a full column to Tommy. It is clear that Prestwick considered him a favourite son and equally clear that Tommy relished his popularity there. The crowd that flocked to see the competition for the Belt was huge, the like of which would not be seen again for many years. Complaints about the spectators were many and vociferous. The newspapers opined that the majority were ‘clearly completely new to the sport’, and were ‘decidedly unruly in most part’.
If the crowd was unruly, it did not affect Tommy in the slightest. Indeed, he must have been inspired by it. His first round of twelve holes in 47 strokes, taking into account the clubs, the gutta ball and the rudimentary greenkeeping of the day, is arguably the greatest ever played. It was certainly the lowest for Prestwick and therefore for the Championship; Tommy’s score was never bettered for as long as the gutta ball was in use. If his play at many of the holes merits a eulogy, then his three at the opening hole, a mighty five hundred and ten yards generally held to be the equivalent of a par six with hickory clubs and gutta ball, deserves an anthem. That Tommy holed his third shot with a cleek was stupendous. Even walking the links as they are today, one is left awe-struck and doubting.
Tommy built on his first-round lead, producing the three lowest rounds played in the Championship, 47, 51 and 51, for a total of 149 to win by a margin of 12 strokes, leaving the press of the day, as well as the rest of the field, stunned. Davie Strath and Bob Kirk were joint runners up on 161, with Tom in fourth place on 162; Willie Park was a further eleven shots behind Tom. It was Tommy’s finest hour and certainly a great day for all the Morris family and their friends in Prestwick, as well as their cohorts from St Andrews. Tommy had won the Challenge Belt for the last time; indeed it was the last time that anybody would win it. His third successive win made the Belt his personal property.
It was a great day in Prestwick, but it was a bittersweet one for Tom. Colonel James Ogilvy Fairlie had died only four weeks before the Autumn Meeting and Tom would have felt keenly his absence on this great day. His great benefactor, friend, sometime partner and mentor, had not lived to see his ‘laddie’ make the Belt his own.
The celebrations of Tommy’s success in Prestwick were continued in St Andrews. By the evening of Saturday, 17 September 1870, everyone in St Andrews would have learned that Tommy Morris, and his father, Davie Strath and Bob Kirk, were all about to return from the Open Golf Championship at Prestwick. Some folk would walk down the Links and out on the Station Road behind the 17th green to meet the train as it puffed its way along the Eden estuary and across the Links into the station. Others, the womenfolk and the elderly and infirm, with perhaps a few of the gentlemen players maintaining their dignity, would simply linger about Tom Morris’s shop doorway and wait to welcome the conquerors home.
There would certainly have been little play on the Links that day, and if any player had been so out of touch as to seek a caddy for his clubs he would have got short shrift. St Andrews Links, and indeed the whole Town, was in a high state of excitement, for the news had long since spread that Young Tommy Morris had made the Belt his own. But it was not simply that he had won it that swelled the public pride, for that was near enough a foregone conclusion; it was the fact that he had won it by 12 strokes from his two close friends and rivals, young Bob Kirk and Davie Strath. More than that, his father was only a further stroke adrift and Jamie Anderson, on his first outing, was not far behind. St Andrews had virtually made a clean sweep of the great Championship at Prestwick if Bob Kirk, then resident at Blackheath but a St Andrean nonetheless, was included. More important still was the fact that neither the renowned Willie Park nor any of his tribe from Musselburgh had come close to the St Andrews brigade. Yes indeed, it was a great day for the ‘Auld Grey Toon’, and it was a great night as well. Young Tommy’s friends carried him shoulder high from the train, all the way up the Links and into Mr Leslie’s Golf Inn, where an enthusiastic reception awaited them.
A flag had flown outside Tom Morris’s shop since Thursday when the news had first come through from Prestwick. Hardly surprising then, that everyone who was anyone on the Links had gathered in the Golf Inn to celebrate Young Tommy’s success, drink a toast to his and everyone else’s health and maybe try on the Championship Belt. And if anybody was prepared to sing, recite a verse, or even feel inclined to say a few words, he would doubtless be given a receptive hearing.
James Denham took the floor to propose a toast to Tommy, saying that although no one doubted that he would do it, his achievement was nevertheless truly remarkable and one unlikely to be repeated. Tommy, in response, thanked his friends for their warm welcome home, the like of which he had never expected. He said that he had set out to make the Belt his own three years ago but, (doubtless with a nod to Davie Strath, Bobby Kirk and finally his father), his friends had not made his task easy. Then Henry Farnie of the Fifeshire Journal, who was there to record it all, made a toast to Old Tom. In reply, Tom said that he had very nearly won three in a row himself in 1863, but the Cardinal’s Bunker at Prestwick had put paid to his hopes in the second round that year.
Tom must have reflected upon a remarkable year. Not only was his son established as the undisputable Champion Golfer of his time, but Tom himself, through his own achievements and with a little reflected glory, had become something of a celebrity. For any golfer coming to St Andrews to play, or even merely to watch, whether nobility, celebrity or ordinary person, a meeting and a word with Tom Morris was an integral part of that experience. Tom had met Dr Simpson, the first man to use chloroform in anaesthesia, when a party of medical men came over from Edinburgh to watch him and Tommy take on Davie Strath and Jamie Anderson. A whole host of men of letters came to stay with Mr Blackwood, the publisher, who rented Strathtyrum House from the Cheapes. Men like Dean Stanley, Thomas Hughes, James Froude, John Everett Millais, Charles Kingsley and Anthony Trollope, names that meant little enough to Tom, but nevertheless merited a mention in the local paper and caused quite a stir in the Town and on the Links. Tom may not have been aware of it, but he and golf were emerging as topics of conversation in society. To the majority, entirely unfamiliar with the game, he and golf were synonymous.
