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 that, ‘Willie frightens us with his long driving.’ Park would not get his shot at Allan anytime soon, but by demolishing 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
