George Morris he earned the next best thing, a big-money match against Tom, who stepped up to defend the Morris family’s honour.
Their scrap would be Willie Park’s debut on the national stage. The betting favoured Tom, who was thirty-three years old and at the height of his powers. But he too fell to Park in a one-sided match that ended with the boyish victor mobbed by Musselburgh fans chanting a clamorous call and response:
‘Where’s the man who beat Tom Morris?’
‘He’s not a man, only a laddie without whiskers!’
A week later, at North Berwick, Tom and Park played again. Colonel Fairlie went along to provide moral and financial backing. He bet heavily on Tom. But Tom’s precise drives and iffy putting proved no match for the strength and pinpoint short game of Park, who won by nine holes. ‘Park,’ wrote Hutchison, ‘was now the rising, or rather the risen, sun.’
On 4 November 1854, readers of the Edinburgh News saw a notice that revealed itself in the second paragraph to be a dare:
A GREAT MATCH at GOLF was Played at St Andrews Links on the 19th October by THOMAS MORRIS, servant of the Prestwick Golf Club (late of St Andrews) and William Park, Golf-Ball Maker, Musselburgh. This was played at St Andrews, North Berwick, and Musselburgh – Three Rounds on each Green – WILLIAM PARK leading Morris Nine Holes at the conclusion of the game.
WILLIAM PARK Challenges Allan Robertson of St Andrews, or William Dunn, servant of the Blackheath Golf Club, London or Thomas Morris, for Fifty Pounds, on the same Greens as formerly. Money Ready.
WILLIAM PARK, Golf-Ball Maker
A St Andrews newspaper deplored the cheek of ‘this braggart’. A less biased source called Park ‘a golfing crack of the first water, young and wiry, with immense driving powers; cool as a cucumber’. According to Hutchison, ‘So strong a player had he become that money in abundance was forthcoming to back him against Allan Robertson, but the latter could not be induced to play.’ Like the heavyweight boxing champions of later eras, Allan was more than happy to let the contenders beat each other up.
Tom Morris and Willie Park would swing away at each other for the better part of a decade. Tom won a match to restore his good name, lost another when his putter betrayed him, then regained the upper hand when Park’s hell-bent playing style got him into trouble. After his stellar debut in ’54, Park endured a partial eclipse (an ‘obnubilation’, Hutchison called it), not because his talent waned but because Tom got better. In the next five years the two of them squared off more than twenty times, usually for £100 or more, only to prove that they were as evenly matched as two boots. Those battles spurred the growth of professional golf. Newspapers dispatched reporters to the latest ‘great match’ between the two. Bettors shouted odds while vendors hawked lemonade and ginger beer to spectators. Before long there were dozens of challenge matches pitting local heroes against the best golfers from other towns, with civic honour at stake. Park was Musselburgh’s warrior; Bob Andrew was Perth’s; and Tom played for Prestwick, though St Andrews claimed him too. Meanwhile Allan Robertson stayed above the fray while occasionally trumping them all. After Tom set a scoring record by shooting 82 in a match at St Andrews, Allan made that look like small beer with a 79 of his own. He was forty-three years old, past his prime, and his magical score came in a casual round, a quick eighteen with an R&A member. Still, he and his supporters had no doubt that it was the finest performance ever.
Tom rode the train east to play matches at St Andrews and dreamed of going home to stay, but as long as Allan reigned there, the town had no need for another professional. So Tom made the best of life in Prestwick. He carved and trimmed the links, taught lessons, recalibrated the members’ handicaps and refereed their disputes. He supervised the caddies and slipped the poorest ones a shilling when they went hungry. He set up a small shop where he made gutta-percha balls, cooking the rubber and moulding it into a ball while the rubber was still hot – a simpler task than stuffing featheries. He kept up his old habit of sleeping by a window and leaving it open several inches, even in winter, a habit that drove Nancy to take little Tommy to another bed near the fire.
He watched his family grow. Each birth was a terror to Nancy, borne down as she was by thoughts of fever and death. Her birth pains grew worse. She was sure she would die, but out came Elizabeth in 1852, as strong and healthy as Tommy. By the time Nancy entered her next confinement four years later, a numbing substance called chloroform had spared Queen Victoria the pain of her most recent labour. Yet many doctors were reluctant to tell women about the chloroform, country doctors most of all. Their reservations were religious, not medical. Had not the Lord cursed Eve, saying, ‘In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children’? Should medicine nullify Genesis? The doctors thought not, so women went on suffering the old way and most had a glad result, as Nancy did in 1856 with the birth of her fourth child and second surviving son, James Ogilvie Fairlie Morris, named after the colonel.
With three healthy children and a husband to fret about, Nancy was as content as she would ever be. She greeted neighbours, sang out in church. She smiled most of all on Tommy, her first answered prayer, a bold, happy boy who chased dogs and birds on the links and played soldier by parading behind the Ayrshire Yeomanry Cavalry. Townspeople noticed the Morrises’ eldest child. Tommy seemed to have some spark that was not like Tom or Nancy or some mix of the two of them but something of his own, some force that made the boy think he could outrun a greyhound or leap and pull a gull out of the sky.
Tommy was waist-high to his father when he took his first swings at Prestwick, whacking old gutties with a cut-down club. Tom taught the boy how to grip the club in the palms of his hands and pull it back, keeping his right elbow high, until the shaft was almost flat against the back of his neck – the old St Andrews swing. Tommy showed no great talent at first, but he had heart. Teeing up an old gutty on the beach, he would aim seaward, knock his ball into the surf, wait for it to wash back up and smack it again, trying to drive it across twenty miles of water to the Isle of Arran.
Tommy turned eight years old in the spring of 1859. Nancy often dressed him in a sailor’s togs and cap, the boys’ fashion of the time. That autumn he noticed that his mother moved more heavily as she dressed him. She was pregnant again, plump, flush and happy. But soon there was unsettling news from St Andrews.
‘Allan Robertson is dead,’ Tom said. ‘Dead of jaundice.’ Allan had been forty-four, only six years older than Tom.
Golfers mourned the great Robertson. He was remembered as ‘a giant, a titan … pleasant, fearless, just, gentle and invincible’. Tom could have disputed ‘invincible’ and Willie Park ‘fearless’. Both could have quibbled with ‘just’. But, of course, they held their tongues. Tom never uttered a word against the man who had hired and fired him, though he may have allowed himself a smile when one eulogist invoked Allan’s ‘great grit’ by telling how ‘the little giant would roll up his shirt-sleeves before playing an important drive’. Tom knew the shirt-sleeves tactic wasn’t grit. It was a trick. Before a crucial shot, Allan would pause and hand his jacket to his caddie. He would pace the teeing-ground, roll up his sleeves and spit in his hands – not to bolster himself but to unnerve his opponent, to slow the crucial moment, giving the other fellow time to lose his nerve.
Allan Robertson was buried in the cathedral cemetery at St Andrews, a hundred paces from Wee Tom’s grave, in the warm September of 1859. Three weeks later Nancy Morris gave birth to another son, John, in the cottage at Prestwick. They would call the baby Jack, and would soon find there was something wrong with his legs.
Tom began 1860 the way he began every day. On New Year’s Day he woke, pulled on his bathing longjohns and took a dip in the bone-chilling Firth of Clyde. Afterwards, shivering as he climbed the beach to the links and his cottage beyond, he felt strong, washed clean.
His wife hoped the new year would take them home to St Andrews. With Allan gone, the way was clear for Tom. Nancy and Tom both had family there. Family mattered most in troubled times. Nancy was worried about baby Jack, who grew but who did not kick or crawl. Tom, though, was in no hurry to flit back to Fife. He wanted no one saying he had rushed to fill Allan’s place. He said it was better to bide in Prestwick for now, and if baby Jack