used them to bulwark his bunkers, creating a shot that was new to the game, the near-miss that caromed crazily to parts unknown.
He shored up bunkers and dug new ones. He scythed heather, trimmed greens and cut neat-edged holes in the greens. By the end of his first year in Prestwick the course was a fair challenge for Tom’s own game, but equally fair to Mr Sampson McInnes, a Prestwick member who was odds-on to leave any shot in his own shadow, and to the earl, who seldom finished twelve holes in fewer than eighty strokes. Tom gave the links’ landmarks colourful names: the dunes were called Alps and Himalayas; a patch of trouble was known as Purgatory; a sand pit was called Pandemonium. Some of the names were traditional, others he coined himself. He promoted them all with a wink, a smile and endless repetition. And, at the tenth hole, he made a discovery that changed greenkeeping forever. The putting-green there had been in worse shape than the Hole o’ Shell green at St Andrews. Tom moved the green to a new spot a few yards away – back-breaking work that took weeks. One day he spilled a wheelbarrow full of sand on the putting-green. When spring came he found hundreds of yellow-green shoots of grass sprouting on the sandy part of the green, while other spots lay bare. He filled his handkerchief with sand from a bunker, sprinkled the bare spots and kept returning to the bunker until the whole green was dusted with sand. Club members complained: did the tenth hole have a putting-green or a bunker with a hole in it? But the greenkeeper carried the day: by summer that putting-green was as smooth as a billiard table. Tom Morris had introduced top-dressing, a way to cultivate greens that golf-course workers still employ. From then on his refrain was ‘More sand!’ When golfers grumbled, Tom said, ‘Tut-tut, sand’s the life of a green, like meat to a man.’
As the course shaped up he settled into his other duties as golf professional. Tom caddied for Fairlie, Eglinton and other gentlemen. He taught lessons. He played rounds with club members, a chore that earned him three shillings per round. Tom also had the delicate task of handicapping the club members. Over several months he took each of them out on the links and observed each man’s swing, making notes in a cloth-bound book. Then he posted the members’ handicaps. Even Fairlie was handicapped fairly, which was all the colonel expected, knowing that Tom wouldn’t fudge a stroke to save his soul. But other club men were miffed. ‘Who is this caddie,’ they asked, ‘to rank a gentleman?’ Tom’s cause was aided by Eglinton, whose stabby putter was as deadly as Lancelot’s lance – deadly to his score. After the earl accepted an unflattering double-figure handicap with his usual what-a-fine-day-to-be-me smile, the others accepted theirs as well.
Soon the keenness of Tom’s eye was apparent to all. Matches stayed tight to the end; he knew the golfers’ skills better than they did. By the end of his first year, club men were congratulating Fairlie for recruiting this greenkeeper. Some went so far as to shake Tom’s hand.
The first autumn meeting of the Prestwick Golf Club was a feast for the palate and the eye. There were platters of meat, fish and duck; gallons of claret, gin and champagne; garlands of flowers; hours of singing and dancing. Fairlie wore a tartan cravat that cascaded down his chin, posing a hazard to his soup. He and the other club members sported brass-buttoned suits. Their jewelled ladies wore gowns festooned with silk ribbons and bows. Tom, dressed in his best Sunday tweed, stood at the festivities’ edge where a hired man belonged. After midnight the last of the food gave way to drink and more merry drink, with toasts and speeches lulling the moon into its cradle behind the Isle of Arran. At last the Earl of Eglinton stood up. Silverware tap-tapped on wine glasses; the ballroom went quiet. The earl’s gaze swept the room and found Tom.
Nodding towards the links outside, Eglinton announced that the course, their course, was ‘a wonder of our new golfing age’. To applause and calls of ‘Hear hear’, he raised his glass. His hand was smooth and pink, his teeth as white as perfect health.
‘To Tom Morris,’ he said. ‘Our perfect pioneer!’
As a player Tom was famous but not perfect. In 1851 he lost a match to Willie Dunn on the final 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.
