With his graying beard and forward-leaning gait, walking with one hand in his pocket and the other under the bowl of his pipe, Tom was one of St. Andrews’ best-known figures. Good old Tom Morris was never too busy to stop and chat, to doff his cap to a lady or (with a wink) to a little girl, or to ruff a lad’s hair and ask to hear a favorite Bible verse. But he wouldn’t tarry long. Tom always had work to do. On Sundays it was God’s work: Bible reading before and after church, handing ’round the bag for collections during services, walking his family to the cemetery, Bible reading in the evening. On other days he did his own work: inspecting caddies, uprooting whins, top-dressing greens, hammering and painting gutties, winning bets.

By 1867, three years after returning from Prestwick, Tom had won praise from all quarters for refurbishing the links. He had also matched Allan Robertson’s most famous feat by shooting 79 there. Only he and Robertson had visited the low side of 80. Yet for all his titles, the Custodier of the Links and King of Clubs was still a caddie when his social superiors crooked their fingers his way. He often carried for Colonel Fairlie and occasionally for R&A officers and visiting dignitaries. When the English novelist Anthony Trollope came to town and tried his hand at the Scottish game, Tom teed up his swings and misses. As Holy Trinity pastor A.K.H. Boyd recalled in his memoir Twenty-Five Years of St. Andrews, Trollope cursed like a sailor but was gracious when asked about a literary rival, Charles Dickens, saying, “The little fellow has the real spark of genius.” After one topped shot the theatrical Trollope feigned a swoon. “[H]aving made a somewhat worse stroke than usual, he fainted with grief, and fell down upon the green,” wrote Boyd. “He had not adverted to the fact that he had a golf-ball in his pocket, and falling upon that ball he started up with a yell of agony, quite unfeigned.” From that day on, Trollope called golf a dangerous game.

Watching his father kneel to tee up another man’s ball set Tommy’s teeth on edge. Tom, unbothered, said there was an art to making a sand tee just the right height for a golfer’s swing, and applying a drop of spit to the ball so that a few grains of sand stuck to it, adding backspin when it landed. There was no shame in kneeling, he said. Had not our Savior told his followers to render unto Caesar? After all, Tom said, it was not his immortal soul that bent, only his knee.

On the days he caddied for Fairlie, Tom would start by fetching the Colonel’s sticks from the R&A clubhouse, where they were kept in a wooden locker the size and shape of a small coffin. He readied them for play in the time-honored fashion, by rubbing them up. He rubbed cleeks with emery paper, applying a good shine to the edges of the blade while leaving the middle of the clubface a darker gray. A darker sweet spot, he said, “helps the eye be easily caught when aiming.” After finishing the cleeks he rubbed Fairlie’s wooden clubs with a rabbit’s foot, dipping it first into a pot of linseed oil, then buffing the shafts and clubheads with the oily rabbit’s foot, giving the wood a waterproof coating as slick as an otter’s back.

After the clubs were rubbed up he stuck them under his arm and went to meet his man at the teeing-ground. It would be twenty years before anyone thought to put golf clubs in a bag that the caddie could sling over his shoulder. If Tom was partnering Fairlie in a foursomes match that day, he left his own clubs behind. When a caddie and his man played as a team, both of them used the gentleman’s clubs—a custom that played a part in the 1867 Open.

Taking his dip in the Firth of Clyde on the morning of the Open, Tom watched fast-moving clouds and felt a freshening wind that blew gulls sideways down the shore. He remembered a black, flat-faced wood that Colonel Fairlie employed to hit low drives under the wind. A driving putter, it was called. Tom thought the Colonel’s club might help him get the Belt back.

Willie Park had the same thought on the same morning, but for once Park was not bold enough. By the time he found Fairlie and asked to borrow the driving putter, Tom had the club tucked under his arm.

Through two rounds on Prestwick’s up-and-down links, Tom led Park and Bob “The Rook” Andrew by two shots. Willie Dunn, who would finish last in a field of ten, must have wished he had spared himself the long trip north from Blackheath. For all his brilliance in match play, he was undone by stroke play and would never come close to winning an Open. Perhaps Dunn bought a pint that night for another of fate’s victims, the Rook, who fell apart yet again in the late going.

Afternoon winds hummed and then paused as if holding their breath, daring the golfers to swing. Tom, wielding the black driving putter, led most of the day but could not shake Park, who kept hammering drives and knocking in putts, pressing the issue as he had throughout their ten-year duel.

“No competition excites more interest among the lovers of the grand national pastime,” intoned the Fifeshire Journal, than one between “the two most distinguished professionals,” Morris and Park. The gruff Fairlie followed along, clenching his fist each time Tom smacked another low-hanging drive. After the first two rounds, which was all the Prestwick scorecards could accommodate, the scorekeepers turned their cards over, as they did in all the early Opens, and recorded the third and final round on the cards’ blank backs. In the end it was Park who missed a crucial putt, and forty-six-year-old Tom was the champion again—the oldest Open champion yet. That was no great distinction after only eight Opens, but even today, after 135 Open Championships, no other winner has been as old as Old Tom was in 1867. He earned a year’s possession of the Belt and £7, while Park, who now trailed his rival four Opens to three, won £5 for finishing second. Andrew Strath got £3 for third place. That left the last pound of the £16 purse for the fourth-place golfer, sixteen-year-old Tom Morris Jr., who came in five shots behind his father.

After the Belt ceremony there was still enough light for one more round. Tommy found Park and dared him to play a money match. The Musselburgh man smiled. Willie Park, who had yet to duck a challenge in his thirty-four years, nodded and headed for the first teeing-ground. The match prompted spirited betting and drew a curious crowd to what often appeared to be a duel to see which golfer could swing harder. Tommy may have led by that measure, but despite fighting Willie down to the final tee he was humbled, 2 and 1.

Once again the Belt went up over the mantel in the Morris place. This was a new mantel in a new house beside the St. Andrews links, a tall stone house at number 6 Pilmour Links Road. Tom had bought it the year before. The doorsill sported a big black “6,” a poor omen for golfers. Occasional snows between Martinmas and May Day piled up like white icing on the flat roof, until the town’s sooty air turned the snow as gray as the house.

It was a gossiped-about house. One cause for talk was the fact that Tom had bought it. Victorian Scotland was a rental society; not one in ten Scotsmen owned his home. It was curious, too, that the previous owner, a clubmaker and part-time crack named G.D. Brown, had agreed to sell his house so soon after Tom came home from Prestwick. Brown was a dapper, coarse-talking cockney who had married money; his wife was the daughter of a rich London ale-seller. Brown was never a good fit for St. Andrews—too loud, too English—but he hadn’t talked about leaving. Then, just when Tom Morris needs a house by the links, Brown picks up stakes, packs up his ale heiress, and disappears, leaving behind an eight-room house in a prime spot and a shop full of golf clubs waiting to be sold. Why?

There was a hidden hand in the sale. As part of the deal that brought the Morrises home from Prestwick, town officials agreed to help Tom find just such a place. They pressured G.D. Brown to sell, and seven months after taking up his shovel and barrow as St. Andrews’ greenkeeper, Tom received a loan from town provost Thomas Milton for £500—the exact amount it took to pry Brown out of his house. The town was betting that Tom Morris would help make St. Andrews the undisputed capital of golf. But that £500 and the house it bought were both a boon and a burden to Tom, who took on a debt that was ten times his annual salary.

The Morris children peeked out from the windows at 6 Pilmour Links Road while their mother filled the house with respectable things, herself included. It was a sign of respectability that Nancy did not work outside the home, performing instead the still-new role of stay-at-home wife, the so-called “angel of the household.” Such a woman personified the values of a nascent middle class. Rather than milk cows, gut herring, or clean another woman’s rooms, she stocked her own with table linen from Dunfermline, carpets from Kilmarnock, upholstered chairs, and a grandfather clock. She put a potted fern on either side of the fireplace. She bought a blue-and-white china teapot that never held tea but only sat, dry and haughty, on a shelf with Nancy’s cups, saucers, stone-ware mugs, and her favorite nutcracker.

The man of the house, whose paternal authority came straight down from heaven, gladly ceded rule over pots, pans, and linens to Nancy while spending every day but Sunday on the links or in the shop. Every morning after his dip in the bay he returned, still wet, and changed into dry tweeds. Walking past the sitting room, kitchen, and scullery, he went out the back door to a small garden between the house and the shop. Nancy grew roses, turnips, and onions in the garden. The light was poor, with direct sun only for the hours around noon, and her vegetables grew small and sickly. Her roses were hardier, particularly those near the family’s dry-hole privy, a shed that spiders haunted in the summer. Nancy’s rose bushes climbed well up the privy’s paint-chipped walls.

A gravel path led through the garden. Tom would clomp down the path on his way from the house to the shop, with little Jack not far behind. Eight years old, Jack had strong hands and wrists, thickened by years of dragging himself around on his wheeled trolley. Cripples did not go to school, so Jack stayed home and helped his father in the shop. He got around the house, garden, and workshop by pulling himself along on railings that Tom had built into the walls at knee level, giving Jack a hand-hold wherever he was. The boy would grab a rail at the back door and yank himself into the garden, where the gravel path ran downhill; he would zoom through the garden, pebbles flying behind him, and barrel into the shop.

Jack did finishing work on new clubs. He polished the heads of spoons, as fairway woods were called, and drivers. He tightened the whipping that bound clubheads to shafts. He worked beside James Foulis, a young carpenter Tom had hired to help in the shop. They made quite a trio—graying Tom and the bony, hollow-cheeked Foulis on the workbench, with fleshy Jack sitting below them, gripping the head of a driver in his fists, rubbing it up until its surface gleamed like glass.

The heart of any golf shop was a sturdy workbench. According to J.H. Taylor, the English golfer and clubmaker, a proper workbench “must be strongly built, and should not be more than thirty-three inches high.” This was the same Taylor who as a boy caught a glimpse of Tom Morris and thought Tom was Saint Andrew. Taylor, whose clubmaking was as precise as his golf, listed the items on his workbench: a vice with a 3½-inch jaw; a 14-inch bow saw; a 12-inch tenon saw; a 14-inch half-round wood rasp; a 14-inch half-round cabinet rasp; a 14-inch half-round cabinet file; a 3/₈-inch gouge; a 1-inch chisel; a medium hammer; a brace; a lead ladle; a 3/₁₆-inch twist drill; a small bit; a 12-inch screwdriver; a scraper; a screw for leads; a steel-bottom plane; a glue-pot; an oil-stone; an oilcan; a pair of scales; and weights up to eight ounces. Tom’s shop held all that as well as a spherical iron mold for making gutties, Tom’s primary business. Each gutty went into the mold as warm putty and came out as a near-perfect sphere that was hammered all over to make it fly better; given two coats of white paint and then set aside for three months to cure before it was sold. Each ball was stamped with the same letters emblazoned on the sign over the workshop door: T. MORRIS A name that meant probity and good golf, if not good putting.

Outside the shop lay the broad, green links. Four years of ax-and spadework had turned narrow trails through bramble into outward and inward nines, side by side. The putting-greens Allan Robertson had doubled grew still bigger under Tom, who seeded, sanded and broomed them until their piebald turf was soft and true. R&A men joked that Tom was making the greens so smooth that even Tom could make four-foot putts. Balfour and other old-timers complained that the course was now six shots simpler. Tom said no, it was fairer, and he had numbers on his side. In his first five years as greenkeeper the winning score in the R&A’s annual medal competition ranged from 92 to 98. Lesser medals went to gentlemen shooting no worse than 99 and no better than 96. If the course was getting easy, the difference was hard to detect. Of more than five hundred R&A members, only a handful ever broke 100.

Tom knew better than the members that the Old Lady, as he sometimes called the course, had many ways to defend her virtue. Tom had not stilled the wind. He had not warned golfers about the invisible breaks on several greens. If St. Andrews’s links lacked the myriad blind shots found at Prestwick, optical illusions were at work here, too. At St. Andrews the grass itself was deceptive: More than forty varieties of bent and fescue grasses ranged in color from near yellow to the deepest forest green, making it hard to judge where the ground undulated and where it only appeared to.

Somehow the old course changed but did not change. That was a trait it shared with golf, a game that owes much of its character to its fields of play, no two alike. Bernard Darwin called golf “something of a new belief founded on old holes. How these old holes attained the form in which we know them no one can tell. Assuredly it was not owing to the genius of some one heaven-sent designer.” Instead, Darwin saw a force that his grandfather had discerned in nature: “It was rather through good fortune and a gradual process of evolution. The holes changed their forms many times according as whins grew or were hacked away, according as the wind silted up sand here or blew it away there, according as the instruments of the game changed so that men could hit farther and essay short cuts and new roads. Yet they possessed some indestructible virtue, so that, however they changed superficially, golfers united in praising them and loved to play them, gaining from the playing of them some pleasing emotion that other holes could not afford. To define that emotion and the cause of it was really to make a discovery, and to proclaim the discovery was to proclaim a new faith.”

A case in point was the new first hole at St. Andrews.

When Tom became Custodier of the Links, the ground in front of the clubhouse was often underwater, swamped by high tides. Storms sent saltwater sloshing up the clubhouse steps. It took a visionary politician and a pair of poetry lovers to beat back the tides.

The politician was Hugh Lyon Playfair, the most famous St. Andrean since the mythical jumble of bones that was Saint Andrew. Born in 1786, Playfair served Her Majesty’s Army in India, where he marched in formation and played golf. Playfair was a founder of the Dum Dum Club, the first golf club outside the British Isles, laid out on a stretch of scorched grass that is now the site of Calcutta’s international airport. Like other gentleman soldiers with room in their luggage for Indian gold, rubies, and emeralds, Playfair came home a wealthy man. Sporting the whiskers and jowls of a white walrus, he paraded around town in a top hat, silk tie, and black greatcoat. As provost of St. Andrews he launched a modernization campaign. “The new broom,” Playfair called himself, and his twenty-year rule swept dunghills and horse carcasses from muddy streets that were soon paved for the first time. Provost Playfair brought the rail link from Leuchars. He brought the telegraph that clicked news at lightning speed from Edinburgh, London, and the world. It was he who saw the town’s future as a tourist center, with golf its prime attraction. An avid golfer, he was elected captain of the R&A in 1856, the year he turned seventy and went to London to be knighted by Queen Victoria. After that he had his clubs engraved with a line to foil pilferers: THIS WAS STOLEN FROM SIR HUGH LYON PLAYFAIR.

Affronted by the tides that swamped parts of his home links, Playfair envisioned a breakwater between the course and the beach. He dispatched workmen to bury old boat hulls at the top of the beach. When the sea crept over and around the buried hulls, Playfair ordered more wrecks buried, and in time the land in front of the clubhouse was reclaimed from the sea. Playfair’s project would be relaunched decades later by Tom Morris and George Bruce, a builder who followed Playfair in the chain of town provosts and followed Tom into meetings of the town’s Burns Society.

If golf was Scotland’s game, Robert Burns was Scotland’s muse. In 1859 the poet’s centenary was celebrated in every town. Those events evolved into the Burns Suppers still held every January to mark the poet’s birthday. At Burns Suppers in St. Andrews, Tom Morris and George Bruce would share steaming haggis—sheep’s entrails, oatmeal, and spices cooked in the sheep’s stomach—the dish Burns called “Great chief-tan of the puddin’-race!” They would rise to recite “To a Mouse” (“Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie”) or, grinningly, “Green Grow the Rashes, O” (“The sweetest hours that e’er I spend/Are spent among the lasses, O”) or, hearts rising, “Scots Wha Hae” (“Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,/ Scots wham Bruce has aften led,/Welcome to your gory bed/Or to victorie”).

On the course, the job was to contain what Burns called the “roar o’sea.” What Playfair began, George Bruce would finish by using construction debris as a breakwater. Hundreds of cartloads of rocky soil, rubbish, and cement were dumped into wrecked fishing boats. Bruce directed the horse-drawn carts of rubbish and the sweating laborers who unloaded the carts and buried the hulls. He and Tom Morris looked on while the workmen overturned a cement-laden sloop, pressing their shoulders to the hull until the splintering husk gave up and rolled into place. Victory!

The breakwater called the Bruce Embankment would create a dry mile north and east of the first teeing-ground. Along with Playfair’s work, it remade the seaward side of town. Tom used a quarter-mile of reclaimed land to build a new first hole in front of the clubhouse. He re-turfed the widest fairway in Scotland and built a green on the far brink of Swilcan Burn, so near the stream that a golfer’s power was neutralized. Tom’s new first hole was a finesse player’s hole. A gimmick hole, some would say. Still it has a thought behind it: The first hole at St. Andrews is a good Presbyterian hole, one that rewards those with the good sense to play it humbly. Hit your second shot to the back of the green, two-putt and move on.

Not that the greenkeeper’s son played it that way. Tommy wanted to make three. While his father made four after four after four on the hole, Tommy would loft a daring approach inches over the burn in hopes of getting his ball close to the flag. As a result he made threes, fours, fives, and sixes. But that is what makes a good hole: You can disagree on how to play it, and no answer is right every time.

The adjacent eighteenth was a forgettable thing, its fairway crossed by Granny Clark’s Wynd, a dirt path that led to the beach. Golfers stood waiting while men on horseback clopped across the path. They also waited for mule-carts, dogs, wrack-gatherers, and courting couples. They waited for the town’s volunteer lifeboat crew to drag a thirty-foot lifeboat to the beach for lifesaving drills. The boat and the carts left deep ruts that golf balls dived into. And the patchy little putting-green beyond Granny Clark’s Wynd was not much better. It lay in a dark hollow where grass refused to grow. So Tom set to work digging another hollow, the Valley of Sin. He and his men used the earth they dug from the Valley of Sin to build a new putting-green for the Home Hole at the southeast corner of the links, a broad green that sloped from right to left and back to front. Tom said that greens on plateaus kept the golfer looking toward heaven. But this one had an unholy beginning. “In the course of the work,” wrote Andra Kirkaldy, whose father helped Tom build the Home green, “human bones were exhumed.” The workers struck a shallow burial pit that had been dug during the cholera out-break of 1832. Tom, who had turned eleven that year, remembered the fear that gripped the town. Now his workmen were affrighted by the sight of human bones. He could have left this green-site to the ghosts but he forged ahead, telling the men that they would dig if they wanted to be paid. After all, a man with a shovel could strike bone all over town.

St. Andrews was built on bones, from the Apostle’s tooth and kneecap to the families stacked ten-deep in the Cathedral cemetery to a hill called Witch Howe, where women accused of sorcery were thrown into the sea. Before the death penalty for witchcraft was abolished in 1735, accused witches, whose crime was often no more than being old and friendless, had been bound in the shape of an X, with their left thumbs tied to their right feet and their right thumbs tied to their left feet. Their binding was a tribute to Saint Andrew, who according to legend was crucified with his limbs outstretched in the shape of an X—the X-shaped cross that became Scotland’s flag. Thus X’d, the accused witch was cast from the bluffs into the sea. If she drowned, the bishop pronounced her innocent. If she swam, her escape artistry proved guilt. Those who swam were dragged up the beach to be burned at the stake, and later buried who knew where. When a storm sent a chunk of Witch Howe tumbling to the beach in 1856, arm and leg bones hung from the broken earth.

The burial ground at the east end of the links was reburied as Tom’s new Home green took shape. Even Balfour, grumbling that the eighteenth was “quite changed by the formation of an artificial table-land,” called it “a beautiful green.” Few modern players or spectators would guess that every champion who has won at St. Andrews, from Bobby Jones to Jack Nicklaus to Tiger Woods, has walked over the Valley of Sin to stand on an old boneyard as he finished his round.

The course was improving, but Tom’s own game was stale. He knew that if he didn’t play better he would lose the Belt—perhaps to his namesake, who made no secret of his hunger to win the clanking old thing for himself.

The Championship Belt was part of the furniture of Tommy’s youth, like the mirror, Mum’s china, and the grandfather clock. It was no mere symbol but a thing with heft and texture, its red leather darkening with age, smooth to the touch but shot through with hairline cracks. Its silver buckle, showing tarnish, was slightly ridiculous with its engraver’s error, the little silver golfer swinging a headless club. Still the Belt meant more than any other trophy a golf professional could win. Its winner was the Champion Golfer of Scotland.

After losing to Park in their singles match after the 1867 Open, Tommy got even in a rematch. Park was longer off the tee, though the gap was shrinking, but Tommy could hit shots no one else had imagined. He didn’t need a driving putter to keep the ball under the wind. He naturally hit a low ball, and could smack chin-high screamers by closing the clubface at impact. Such a shot took exquisite timing—just as club met ball he turned his right wrist as if he were turning a door key from right to left.

Bernard Darwin wrote of a money match in which Tommy showed off a new use for the niblick, a cleek that had the loft of a modern eight-iron and a face not much bigger than a large coin: “Young Tommy Morris astonished the spectators by taking his niblick, a club that in those days had the face of a half-crown, wherewith to play a pitch on the green. Till that historic moment no one had ever dreamed of a niblick being used for anything but ordinary spadework.” In Tommy’s hands a club made for flipping the ball out of divots and rabbit scrapes launched high approaches that dropped and stopped. From shorter range he did the same with his rut-iron. While veteran professionals bumped long, low pitches that bounced and rolled to the hole, he was inventing what twentieth-century course designers would call target golf.

He had ambitions beyond golf, but they would wait. His mother might dream of seeing him in a business office, but Tommy had no yearning to push a steel-nibbed pen down columns of numbers day after humdrum day. He relished the slight stickiness of a tacky suede grip; the powerful shifting of forces at the top of the backswing; the crack of impact and the sight of the ball in the air, hanging for an instant before it fell to a thudding bounce on the putting-green, a fine flat thud that sounds nothing like a ball landing on longer grass. And then there was the crackle of a ten-pound note between his fingers, the texture of victory.

By the spring of 1868, seventeen-year-old Tommy and forty-seven-year-old Tom were making real money in foursomes matches. Ten, twenty, fifty pounds in a day. No office job paid that much.

One money match pitted them against another talented pair, former Open winner Andrew Strath and pug-nosed Bob Kirk, the son of Tom’s longtime caddie, now grown and winning bets left and right. According to the Fifeshire Journal, “either party considered themselves lucky if they got a single hole ahead, and when they did so, it was generally to be brought down the next one to ‘all square.’” They were all square at the Home Hole in the first of two rounds. Tom could have won the hole with a long putt—still called a ‘put’ in the Journal—but left it so far short that the Morrises’ backers moaned. After Strath missed, it was Tommy’s turn to hit his side’s ball. He paced between the ball and the hole, studying the mess his father had left him. A three-yard putt, side-hill. Settling over it, he pictured the ball curving to the hole and rapped it hard enough to diminish the curve. By the time the ball felt gravity’s pull it was nearly to the hole. When it fell, Tom breathed again.

“On coming back the second round, father and son gained the match by three holes and two to play,” the Journal reported. “Young Tom played a splendid game, and was admired by the large concourse of spectators as a youth of great promise. A good deal of betting was on this match.”

Sometimes the Morrises teamed against a pair of R&A golfers, spotting them a handful of strokes or generous odds. Sometimes Tom and Tommy split up, each taking a club member as his partner, with the members betting each other. Tommy came to know dozens of the gentlemen his father worked for. A few were soldiers who had fought in the Crimean War of 1854–56 or the Indian Mutiny of 1857–59. Captain Maitland-Dougall had joined the Royal Navy at age thirteen as plain old William Maitland. He served in Persia and China, where the Chinese fractured his skull but couldn’t kill him, and came home in time to rescue those shipwrecked sailors in the Storm of ’60. As progressive as he was brave, he added the name of his wife, the former Miss Dougall, to his own name when they married. Oddly enough the heroic Maitland-Dougall was a nervous, twitchy golfer, but Tommy liked him.

Other R&A golfers were men of leisure who had no careers beyond spending their family fortunes. They hunted fox and grouse, played golf and whist, drank, smoked, and filled their bellies with more good meat in a fortnight than a factory worker’s family got in a year. One was Mister Cathcart, a fop whose motif was citrus. He traipsed the links in his lime-green jacket and yellow neckerchief. Two other gentlemen anticipated the age of golf carts by riding ponies between shots. One of the pony riders, Sir John Low, employed three caddies at a time: Lang Willie to lug his clubs, a second caddie to lead the cream-colored pony, which left loose impediments on the greens, and a third who carried a stool that he planted on the green so that Sir John could rest his knightly bottom while he waited to putt.

Tommy was polite to the gentlemen, lowering his eyes and tipping his cap, for they were his father’s employers. But he didn’t have to like them. Some called themselves golfers but were only playing dress-up in their leather breeches and red golfing jackets. Butchers who worked the way these golfers played would have no fingers. And they looked down their noses at Tom Morris! “See here, Tom,” Mister This or Major That would say. “Fetch me my putter, Tom.” At the end of a round the nabob dropped a coin into Tom’s upturned hat. Still the gentlemen said they loved Tom Morris as one of their own. Tommy heard that very phrase from one of them. “Good old Tom,” the man said, “I think of him almost as one of my own…” Then came the next word: “…servants.”

Tommy preferred the caddies. The renowned caddies of St. Andrews were “no’ saints,” as they gleefully admitted. They were poor, unshaven, often drunk, occasionally insolent. One R&A man called them “gentlemen of leisure, who for a consideration will consent to sneer at you for a whole round.”

After watching his man take a smooth practice swing before chunking a drive, one caddie said, “Ye hit the ball best when it’s no’ there.” There had been a time when he could have been backhanded full in the face for such cheek, or beaten to his knees with a golf club. But there were no beatings after Tom Morris came from Prestwick to supervise the caddies.

Caddies were “bronzed like Arabs” from their days in the sun, wrote Andra Kirkaldy, who joined their ranks as a boy. Each morning they gathered at the corner of the links by the Golf Hotel, waiting for loops that paid a shilling apiece. They saw that corner as their own property, “consecrated by the expectoration of tobacco-juice,” Kirkaldy wrote, “and the fumes of 3-penny cut.” They chewed the same tobacco that they smoked. They lit matches on their stubbled chins. Some drank on the job, sneaking sips from flasks called pocket pistols, and swore they weren’t breaking Tom’s rule against caddying drunk because they could hold their liquor. Their thirst was such that when the gentlemen put on a tournament for caddies, with a turkey for first place and a bottle of whisky for second, the finalists kept missing putts on purpose, trying to lose.

They loved Tom, their supervisor, who always had a few pennies for the poorest. In the winter, when there was hardly any work, he’d give a needy man five shillings. “Take this and buy meat,” he said. “Don’t drink the little that I’m able to give you.” Tommy saw the money go from his father’s hand to the paw of some poor wretch, money that could have put meat on the Morrises’ own table, and he loved his father more.

Tommy never cared who carried his clubs—he sought no advice on the links—but he liked to gab with the caddies and hear their stories. There was one about a fishwife who bit off a piece of her husband’s nose. When the magistrate ordered her to “keep the peace,” the crone said, “I canna—I fed it to the cat.” Another tall tale concerned a golfer whose playing partner dropped dead on the High Hole. Unwilling to leave his friend behind, he carried the poor bugger to the clubhouse, where a gentleman said, “What a fine Christian thing you’ve done!”

“Aye,” the golfer said. “The worst bit was layin’ him down and pickin’ him up between shots.”

Some of the caddies’ tales were even true. One concerned Auld Daw Anderson, the white-haired fellow who lived in an upstairs apartment next door to the Morris house. Every morning Auld Daw pushed his wicker cart across Granny Clark’s Wynd and then west to his post beside the End Hole, the ninth, where he sold ginger beer and lemonade. He also kept a flask of sterner stuff for those who knew to ask for it. Handing over the flask, he always said the same thing: “A wee nip for the inner man.”

Auld Daw’s father had been a forger and smuggler. “A daring old daftie he was, Daw’s Da,” said one caddie.

“That he was,” another said. “Kept his loot in a secret closet in his mother’s house. And quite a closet it was, for—”

“Th’ authorities break into his mother’s closet and what do they find? A chest o’ drawers, a four-poster bed and thirty-eight gallons o’ whisky! So they sent him to Oz—Australia—on a convict ship, leavin’ Daw to a still worse fate—”

“Aye, worse. Become a caddie, he did.”

The caddie called Hole-in-’is-Pocket made sure his man never lost a ball. If the ball was in the whins he dropped another down his pantleg and cried, “Here ’tis, and no’ such a bad lie!” His opposite was Trap Door Johnson, who wore a boot with a hinged, hollow sole. When Trap Door stepped on a ball the sole opened and the ball vanished—until the next day, when he sold it.

A caddie named Mathy Gorum, who won bets by driving balls off the lip of a ginger-beer bottle, dabbled in phrenology. Mathy would read your future by rubbing the bumps on your head. “Och, you’ll be comin’ into a fortune, sir,” he’d say, showing you his empty palm. Half-blind Archibald Stump, also called Stumpie Eye, wasn’t much of a caddie. “Watch your own ball,” he said, “for I can barely see the sun.” Stumpie Eye played a yearly match with his wild-eyed sidekick Donal Blue, in which they danced between shots, let local lads pelt them with divots and dirt clods while they swung, and at the end dove into Swilcan Burn.

One caddie towered over the rest. By 1868 Lang Willie, Tom’s colleague at the workbench in Allan Robertson’s kitchen, had trod the links for sixty years. He still wore his trademark blue swallow-tailed jacket, white moleskin trousers and wrinkled black top hat. While other caddies taunted the R&A men or angled for tips by praising them—“Well struck, sir; a bonny lick!”—Lang Willie did neither. Asked how his man was doing, he always gave the same reply. “Just surprisin’,” he said.

One nearsighted golfer always asked for Lang Willie. This man’s eyes were worse than Stumpie Eye’s; he’d knock a ball into the whins and peer forward, squinting, asking how he lay.

“Ye’re in a capital situation, sire,” said Lang Willie, who had paid a boy a penny to run ahead, find the man’s ball and toss it to a safe spot. According to H.S.C. Everard’s account, the boy often ran ahead and dropped the ball two hundred or more yards from the tee, “further than mortal man had ever driven before.” The nearsighted golfer swore that he played like a champion when Lang Willie caddied.

One evening Lang Willie was toting the voluminous luggage of Sir Alexander Kinloch to the railway station when his feet got tangled at the edge of Swilcan Bridge. He spilled everything into the water—golf clubs, golf balls, gun case, portmanteau, hat box, and kilt. “You damned fool!” said Kinloch. The towering caddie turned and said, “Do no’ make such a song, Sir Alexander. The bags are no’ in the Bay of Biscay. They’re damned easy to get.” Giving a sharp salute, he leaped into the burn.

Caddies who reached forty often looked sixty and lost some of their skills if not their wits. Old Mathy Gorum kept betting that he could drive balls off ginger-beer bottles long after his nerves were gone. He would smash bottle after bottle until he was standing there weeping while the boy caddies laughed. But Lang Willie, due perhaps to some miracle of alcohol’s preservative power, reached the Biblical age of threescore and ten. Then he sat down to porridge with his sister one morning. She said his face looked crooked. “Non-sense,” he said, but the word came out blurred.

The town doctor said it was a stroke. Lang Willie said it was “just surprisin’.” Later strokes clouded his eyes and put a quaver in his step, and by 1868 his mouth moved only on one side. By then Lang Willie walked with such a stoop that his top hat sometimes fell off. There were days when no golfer hired him. At the end of such a day Tom would clasp his hand and there would be a coin in the handshake.

That July, Lang Willie was lugging a gentleman’s clubs at the Corner of the Dyke Hole when he fell like a chopped tree. The undertaker had to make an extra-long coffin. After the funeral, Tom, Tommy, and the other caddies drank toasts and told Lang Willie stories in a haze of threepenny smoke. The men wondered who would be next to climb the ladder to heaven. None expected to see threescore and ten. Tom, who was forty-seven, had read a story in the newspaper saying that the average Scot had a life expectancy of forty-one. “Lads,” he said, “it seems I’ve been dead for six years.”

That fall he and Tommy rode the train past Stirling Castle and the shoulders of the Campsie Fells and the smudged air of Glasgow and weedy Paisley to Prestwick. Father and son made their way to the clubhouse through a scrum of players, caddies, spectators, and gentleman golfers. Many of the gentlemen were there to play in the Prestwick Golf Club’s medal competition, which they considered the main attraction of the week. The professionals playing in the eighth Open Championship would serve as caddies in the medal event—except for Tommy, who was nobody’s caddie.

A new stone clubhouse stood beside the links. It had cost the club £758, an imposing sum offset in part by the £170 the old Morris cottage fetched when the club sold it. Tom admired the long windows and black tile roof of the new clubhouse, but noted that the ground around it was uneven. Little Jack would have faced an uphill climb from the clubhouse to the village. This would be no place for a child who got around on a homemade trolley.

Tom took the Championship Belt to the clubhouse, surrendered it to the treasurer and reclaimed the money he had left the year before. Not even he was trusted to keep the Belt without paying a security deposit.

At 11 A.M. on Wednesday, September 23, 1868, the first group teed off under fast-moving clouds. Bettors in the crowd called out their offers.

“Two five-pound notes to one on Tom Morris.” Tom and Willie Park were the gamblers’ choices, with Bob “The Rook” Andrew available at longer odds.

“The Rook at five to one!”

A pound on Tommy would fetch seven or eight. Bettors knew the teenager had talent, but what had he won? A tournament in the wind at Carnoustie. The Open favored seasoned professionals who could endure three circuits of the course under ever-mounting pressure. Open pressure had undone the Rook and turned the once-feared Willie Dunn into a last-place finisher. And now that the 1865 winner Andrew Strath had succumbed to tuberculosis, only two proven champions remained. Tom Morris and Willie Park had won the Belt seven times; no other living golfer had won even once.

Park looked north from the first teeing-ground toward the green almost 600 yards away. His open stance gave his muscled arms room for a forceful swipe at the ball. Picking his driver almost straight up, he shifted forward and brought the club down hard, sending his ball on a high line over the waving reeds of Goosedubs swamp. Tom poked a shorter drive and the hunt was on.

There was no “par” on Prestwick’s prodigious opening hole, or on any hole. Along with birdie and bogey the term had not yet been coined. Still there was a number the professionals expected to make on each hole. In that sense the idea of par existed, and in that sense the 578-yard first at Prestwick was a par six. In a quickening breeze off the firth, Park nearly reached the green in three. Chipping on and two-putting for his six, he tipped his cap to his backers. Tom and the Rook matched Park’s work on that hole and the Alps Hole that followed.

Back at the first teeing-ground, Tommy walloped his drive past the swamp. Next he swung his long spoon, a graceful, goose-necked fairway wood, and it got him within sight of the green. He tracked it down and stood over it again, waggling the club almost hard enough to snap its neck. Setting up with the ball forward in his stance, almost even with his left foot, he swung, opening the clubface a hair at impact, and watched as the wind carried his third shot high over the rise in front of the green, over the edge of the Cardinal Bunker. The ball bounced on the green with a fine thud. He nearly made four, settled for five.

The second hole, Alps, was where he used to race the wind downhill. His drive cleared the huge dune ahead, his approach skirted the immense Sahara Bunker and his putt cut the hole in half. He was the early leader, listening for the others golfers’ fates in the cheers and groans of their supporters. A golf gallery was a living thing, moving and breathing, stretching here and thinning there, letting out sounds of joy and dismay.

At the seventh, Green Hollow, Tommy peered 140 yards to a green perched sideways in the Alps’ grassy foothills. With the sun straight overhead he hit a niblick shot that kicked hard to the right, toward the knee-high flag. The ball spun and stopped. His three at Green Hollow began a stretch of near-perfect golf as he closed the first round 3-4-4-4-3-4. With the first of three rounds complete, he was alone in first place.

“Young Morris has shot fifty-one!” a man said. It was the lowest score yet in an Open.

Tommy played more like a boy in the second round, losing the lead to his father, whose course-record 50 said Take that. Two rounds, two new scoring records on Tom’s obstacle course. Around they came for a third and final tilt, with the sun leaning toward the Isle of Arran. Tom had a stroke on his son while Park lurked four behind. Willie Dunn, twenty strokes behind, would finish last again.

Park took chances in the last round and bunkered too many balls on his way to a fourth-place finish. The Rook, however, was in full flight, hitting the ball higher than he had in the first seven Opens, sailing through the Alps Hole where his low sweepers had always struck the dunes and fallen back. His doomy countenance lightened, and when a last putt fell and his backers sang “Hoorah for the Rook, the Belt to the Rook!” he gave them a smile full of whisky-colored teeth. He finished at 159, three strokes better than Strath’s record total in 1865.

News moved fitfully around the links. With no scoreboards, players’ positions were a matter of rumor. No one was sure who had won until all the scorecards were turned in and totaled. Even so it was soon clear that the Rook’s only Open victory would be a moral victory. He hadn’t funked, but he had waited too long to play the best golf of his life. Both Morrises were coming in with lower scores.

Tom defended his title with guile. He was not about to make an error that would cost him two or three strokes, as Park had done. As Tommy was likely to do. So Tom gentled his ball up, over and around the dunes, protecting his narrow lead. He did nothing very wrong, but left several putts short and yielded the advantage midway through the round, when his son made his third consecutive three at Green Hollow. From there Tommy went 3-5-3-3 on the next four holes, a stretch where amateur champions like Colonel Fairlie made sixes and cracks hoped for fours. Still Tom would not give in. When Tommy fired a three at him, Tom matched it. Each time the famous Misser of Short Putts faced one that might sink him, he steeled his nerves and knocked it in. He stayed close, giving the boy a chance to stop and think, to let doubt enter his mind, to look around at all the people looking at him: the haughty Earl of Stair and several other noblemen, gentleman golfers with their ladies, bettors with scores of pounds riding on the outcome, professionals including Park and the Rook, newspaper reporters and curious Prestwickers—all watching to see if a seventeen-year-old boy could outplay the King of Clubs, his father.

Ten years before, lying on this turf after a pell-mell run down the Alps, Tommy had looked up and seen white dragons and sailing ships crossing the sky. Today they were only clouds. They were the vapor of water, as he knew from his natural philosophy classes at Ayr Academy. Clouds were the seas’ breath drawn into the sky to fall as rain that flowed through rivers and burns, mills, distilleries, and our own bodies until it found its way back to the seas. The more he knew of the world, the more he believed that a world without magic could still be full of wonders.

He turned to his father. “Far and sure, Da,” he said.

Tom nodded. “Far and sure.”

They both knew the last hole by heart: 417 paces, wind right to left, dunes to the right and Goosedubs Swamp to the left. One hole for the Belt. Tommy had the honor.

He waggled. He pulled his driver back behind his head, twisting until his left shoulder touched his chin and the driver’s shaft brushed the hairs on the back of his neck. At the top of his swing he was coiled so far to the right that he nearly lost sight of the ball. Then he uncoiled, his right elbow digging into his side, his hips and shoulders turning, pulling the clubhead through an arc that blurred into a sound. Crack! The ball long gone already, long and straight.

Spectators ran after it. Someone shouted that Tommy had won.

Not yet. A misfire could still cost him two or three strokes, enough to give his father a last putt to force a playoff. Tommy would win if he played the last hole the safe way, knocking a niblick to a broad part of the fairway a hundred yards short of the putting-green, then another niblick to the green, where he could take two putts, make his five and claim the Belt. But five was not a number that Tommy cared to shoot for. He had a long spoon in his hands and a flag a bit more than 200 yards away. He would try to make three.

It was all Tom could have hoped for. Not even Willie Park tried for threes when fives would win. It was a foolish choice, the only choice that could still cost Tommy the Open.

Tommy’s second shot took off on a low line, cutting through the wind. For a second it looked bound for the Goosedubs, but the ball held its line against the wind, safely to the right. It was still in the air when Tom nodded as if to say Good for you. Tommy’s ball was headed for the green, and the tournament was clinched. His backers shouted. Young Morris has done it!

Young Tommy—

Tom Junior—

The boy has won!

He chipped close and made four. His third-round score was 49, yet another course record. Spectators, bettors, and golfers gathered round to see the Earl of Stair present the Belt to the new champion. Tommy held the Belt up for all to see, spurring the loudest cheers of the day.

Seventeen-year-old Tommy had smashed the Open record by eight strokes. The Ayrshire Express noted that “the winner of the Belt was the youngest competitor on the Links,” a distinction he won even more handily than he won the Belt, for he was the youngest by ten years. His victory made golf-watchers think Tommy might win two or three Opens in a row. Who would stop him?