He walked the links with a crowd behind him—schoolboys and red-coated gentlemen, gamblers waving money, curious townspeople, travelers on holiday, lace-and ribbon-decked ladies and their blushing daughters, all craning for a look at the Belt-winner. Some handed him slips of paper and asked for what they called his autograph. That puzzled him. What use was his signature? Tommy shrugged and signed with the loops and flourishes he had learned from Laurence Anderson, the hard-eyed old Writing Master at Ayr Academy, who would cuff you if your pen hand slipped. Tommy chatted with the autograph-seekers. He was handsome and polite, this bonny braw lad who played the old game better than his elders. He had grown a fuller mustache—more manly, he thought—that drooped around the corners of his smile.

When Tommy came home to St. Andrews with the Belt, his return was greeted with church bells. Allan Robertson and Tom Morris had been local celebrities after winning the Famous Foursome of 1849, but the hubbub around Tommy’s three-Open sweep was something new. The Fifeshire Journal described a gathering at the Golf Inn, near the links: “Mr. Denham, London, who proposed the champion’s health, said the feat he had performed had never been done before, and in all probability would never be repeated. By it he had brought the highest honour which any golfer could confer upon the ancient city and on all interested in the national game of golf.” The champion stood to acknowledge his supporters’ applause, nodding to his Rose Club friends as well as to his father and his brothers Jimmy and Jack, the latter sitting on his wooden trolley on the floor. The Journal scribe took down his words: “Thank you for this highly complimentary demonstration,” Tommy said. “Three years ago, I determined to become proprietor of the Belt. As you all know, I had the satisfaction of realizing that goal last Thursday at Prestwick.” Amid loud cheers, he lifted his glass to toast to another golfer. “To Tom Morris Senior!” he said.

The applause went on, led by Tommy, until his father stood up. After apologizing for being a poor speaker, Tom cleared his throat. “Seven years ago, I almost succeeded in making that Belt my own,” he said, “having held it for two years and lost it in the third by a very little. I feel proud, however, that my successful rival, the ultimate winner of the Belt, is my son.”

Each year’s Open winner earned a year’s reign as “Champion Golfer of Scotland.” By carrying the Belt off for all time, Tommy made that title forever his as well, at least in the popular mind. According to one of the first published histories of the game, “a new star rose in the golfing firmament, one before which all others had to pale their ineffectual fires. This was Young Tom Morris, who soon proved himself quite a royal and ancient Samson by metaphorically standing head and shoulders above his compeers of the green.” Any towering on Tommy’s part was indeed metaphoric, since he stood five foot eight, a jot more than his father but well short of Fergusson and Dunn, the gangly Musselburgh men. Still he overshadowed them and every other golfer, and his popularity changed professional sport for good. Before Tommy won the Belt, the only respectable sportsmen were country gentlemen whose wealth bankrolled their amusements. The word sport reeked of decadence; as a verb it still suggested sex. For a tradesman’s son to make a career as a sportsman and hold his head high was unthinkable, and yet here he was, the academy-trained son of a greenkeeper, drawing a crowd to the links. His brother Jimmy, now fifteen, was only one of the boys who trailed Tommy the way gulls chase a fishing boat. Andra Kirkaldy was another. Ten years old in 1870, Kirkaldy recalled his boyhood hero in his 1921 book Fifty Years of Golf. Tommy Morris, he wrote, had “the gift of golf…. We were all his worshippers.”

Part of Tommy’s appeal was the way he exuded pleasure in motion. The Scots word is kithe, for express or reveal. The exhilaration of the boy who raced up and down dunes was kithed in the young man as what golfer J.R. Gairdner called Tommy’s “easy confidence and perfect optimism.” It took optimism to swing hard at a solid rubber ball with a nineteenth-century driver, a thick-handled hickory switch with a concave head that measured less than an inch from top to bottom. Still the Champion Golfer made perfect contact more often than not. You could tell from the billiard-ball clack at impact, ever so slightly louder when he swung all-out. Everard noted how easily Tommy added “just another half-ounce of pith where something extra was required…the enemy were never safe with him.”

Twenty years earlier he would have been a minor, local figure. It was Tommy’s good fortune to arrive as the machine age began churning out one of its most important products, leisure time, without which there would have been no golf boom. Workdays were getting shorter in the 1860s—for many in the middle and working classes, the Sabbath rest day was now preceded by free afternoon called the Saturday half-holiday. That afternoon off was a first step toward the work-free weekend of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It gave people time to make railway trips to the seaside, particularly when the occasional Monday off for a local or national holiday followed the Sabbath. Traditionally, however, seaside towns had little to offer but muddy beaches and shallows that smelled faintly of sewage. Music halls were urban diversions. Circuses and fairs might come around once a year. Ladies and gentlemen spent their resort holidays promenading in their holiday finery, the men tipping their black silk top hats, the women averting their eyes from passersby because a lady did not acknowledge anyone to whom she had not been introduced. Children ran to the beach to build sand castles and climb aboard what passed for thrill rides—donkeys that trudged up and down the sands. Another prime recreation was bathing, which meant wading. Seawater was thought to promote circulation and digestion, so bathers made a point to swallow a few mouthfuls. One joke told of a bumpkin who treated his wife and daughters to a fortnight in St. Andrews. He left them there at high tide, went home to work the farm and returned when the tide was out, the beach dry for a quarter-mile. “Good Lord,” he cried, “they must ha’ drunken well!”

Professional golf provided drama that donkey rides and wading couldn’t match. Men bet on it; boys hailed their towns’ heroes and dreamed of emulating them, and even women were intrigued by the deeds of a young hero who swung so hard that his hat flew off. Golf became a spectator sport in the 1870s as hundreds and then thousands of spectators came out to follow professional matches and tournaments. Like the soccer and rugby lovers of the time, they were called fanatics, a term that was later shortened to “fans.”

Now that Tommy owned the Belt, professionals had little to play for but money. There was seldom much of it. He was the only golfer in the Open who didn’t need to caddie during Prestwick’s autumn meeting to cover his expenses. But the money was improving: Research by Peter Lewis of the British Golf Museum turned up two dozen professional tournaments in the 1860s, with an average purse of £12.92. There would be twice as many in the 1870s, when the typical purse nearly doubled to £23.87, with an average first prize of about £10. Fatter purses were one of the first signs of the late-century phenomenon Bernard Darwin would call the golf boom. This first boomlet did not make anyone rich, but it did vastly improve the lot of one member of the Young Men’s Improvement Society of St. Andrews: By winning more often than anyone else, Tommy put more than £200 into his bank account before he turned twenty. Two hundred pounds was a bonny penny, equal to about £15,000 today, and by some measures his savings were still more impressive. Houses and horses, for example, were far cheaper then. With £200 he could have bought a respectable house and put a horse in every room. Of the 1.4 million workers in Scotland in 1870, fewer than half of one percent had incomes of £1,000 per year. Tommy was not yet at their level, but then he was only nineteen.

He made much of his money in foursomes matches. When an R&A member and a professional played against another member-professional duo, the club men bet with each other and gave the cracks a fee. Occasionally Tommy partnered a member against two professionals—a tall order in foursomes, in which his amateur partner hit half their side’s shots. All these professional-amateur games were for the amusement of the gentlemen, who would give their professional partners what amounted to a gratuity at the end of the match. A gentleman who had won might give his professional ten or even twenty percent of the bet; one who had lost might give his professional less, or give him nothing if he thought the cur had cost him the match.

The most sought-after player dared to change the ground rules. To the surprise of R&A members and the consternation of his father, Tommy demanded payment upfront: a fair fee for his time. And being Tommy, he got it.

His spirit was infectious. Even nervous jabbers like Maitland-Dougall made braver strokes when they teamed with the Champion Golfer. It was hard to fuss and fidget when he was rolling putts and then pointing at the ball, ordering it to “Duck in!” Even his father made more short putts when he played with Tommy. “Rap it, Da,” Tulloch heard Tommy say. “The hole’s not coming to you!”

While the champion’s iron play was “uniformly magnificent,” in Darwin’s words, “by all accounts it was his putting that, as it were, put the coping stone on the rest of his game, and gave him that inside turn against all his rivals and particularly his nearest competitor, Davie Strath.” As a foursomes team Tommy and Strath were practically unbeatable, with Davie’s elegant game complementing his Rose Club friend’s bold strokes. But though he and Strath were friends, Tommy turned more often to his father when he chose a foursomes partner. Newspaper accounts of money matches in the early 1870s are peppered with references to the team of “Tom Jr” or “Young Tom” and the golfer now known as “Old Tom.” But filial loyalty had its costs. It cost Tommy money and injured his father’s self-respect, for this loyalty was also a form of charity. As Hutchison wrote, Tom hurt his son’s chances: “[A] spell of the most utter bad play, lasting four or five years, took possession of him: and this was the more provoking, inasmuch as it occurred when his son Tommy was at the very zenith of his powers, and father and son were in the habit of playing other professionals.” To use Hutchison’s five damning words, Tom was “a drag upon his son.”

Tommy was willing to be dragged. He carried his father in dozens of foursomes matches, knowing that the money match—the thrill of the hunt on the links—was in his father’s blood. Like many sportsmen before and since, Tom felt most alive when a wager hung in the balance. Tommy, who played more for self-kithing, was shrewd enough to see that his father’s decades of winning bets, paying bills, and wrestling with whins had given him, Tommy, the chance to play for love and money. This was the luxury of being a striver’s son. “During these years of phenomenal success he lived with his father at St. Andrews, and many a great match they played,” wrote fulsome Tulloch. “Often, too, they would be out on the links at the same time, playing in different matches with some of the members of the Royal and Ancient Club and their visitors, who were proud to enjoy alike their play, their talk and their friendship. And at night father and son would talk over their matches…. The father was proud of his son, and the son was full of affection and reverence for the father, though he could chaff him when he missed one of the short putts that would have been easy of negotiation to the lad.”

Tom needed no help in his roles as greenkeeper, shopkeeper, husband, and father. His greens were as smooth as suede after he spent £8 for the game’s first lawn-mowing machine in 1872. In the shop, where the smoke from his pipe mixed with steam and sawdust, Tom oversaw Jimmy, who was always dying to run out to follow his big brother Tommy, and Jack, whose sandbag legs grew fat but whose eleven-year-old arms and hands were so strong that he won Indian-wrestling bouts with Tom’s assistant James Foulis. The four of them and a crew of hired men made gutties and clubs, using shafts and clubheads that came from clubmaker Robert Forgan’s shop next door. Forgan was the white-bearded nephew of Hugh Philp, the woodworking Stradivarius who made niblicks, spoons, drivers, putters, lockers, and even a wheel barrow for his R&A patrons. In 2005 a Philp putter would sell at auction in Edinburgh for £70,000. Before his death in 1856 Philp passed his secrets down to Forgan, who was a better clubmaker than his neighbor Tom Morris but less famous, which led to an uneasy alliance: Tom paid Forgan for half-finished clubs, which Tom’s workers assembled, polished and stamped TOM MORRIS, the one name that was known wherever golf was played. One day an order came from Bombay, where British colonists had founded a golfing society: Send 180 sets of golf clubs. Tom hired extra men who worked in shifts around the clock until 1,440 clubs were finished, stamped, and packed into 180 boxes that went by horse-drawn cart, train and clipper ship to India.

Forgan was said to envy Tom Morris’s fame, and Tom may have felt a little guilty about their arrangement. The only side of his house without a window was the one facing Forgan’s shop.

On the links, Tom contended with weeds, heather, divots, grass-killing salt spray, and drunken caddies. Most of all he fought whins. The thorny shrubs were pretty in spring when they were garbed in yellow flowers, but in the summer they sprouted hairy black seed pods. One shrub could produced 10,000 seeds in a year; seeds that could lie dormant for forty years before springing to life. In his seventh and eighth year as keeper of the St. Andrews links, Tom was still coming home with scrapes on his arms and whin thorns in his jacket and beard. Eighteen-year-old Lizzie plucked out the thorns for her father. Nancy, fifty-five years old, was often ill. Her heart raced, her stomach ached, and she suffered from a stiffness that the doctor called congestion of the spine. She lay in bed with the curtains drawn to protect her from miasmas, the palls of bad air that were thought to carry illness. At night, Tom would sit by her bed reading the Bible aloud until she fell asleep.

Tom was devout, dutiful, successful. But a nagging disquiet was growing in him. The former King of Clubs wasn’t ready to settle for keeping the green, paying bills, and playing the occasional £20 foursomes match. All he needed, he thought, was a big-money match to prove there was still some life in Old Tom. He got his wish when Willie Park offered him a sucker bet.

Twenty-one miles as the rook flies, the distance from St. Andrews to Musselburgh was far greater by rail and ferry. There was no straight way over the sheep-dotted fields of Fife and the wide gray Firth of Forth. The trip could take half a day. Musselburgh was a weathered, Roman-built port five miles east of Edinburgh, where the links shared space with a horse-racing track and a dirt path that coal miners took on their way to the pits. The Musselburgh links were also home to the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, a fact that made for some clashes of manners. Once, when an Honourable Company player in his golfing jacket and leather breeches drove a ball that conked a passing miner, the victim charged the golfer, waving his fist.

“But my dear fellow,” the gentleman explained, “I shouted ‘Fore.’”

“Then five,” said the miner, dropping him with one punch.

Musselburgh had been a hub of golf for a century, but the Morrises had lately moved the focus northward. This insult lodged in Willie Park’s craw. Park was often described as “his own man,” being too cussedly independent to serve as anyone’s greenkeeper or lesson-teacher. Like every other Musselburgh loyalist he believed that he, Willie, was a better golfer than Tom Morris, and he was right. Park was longer off the tee than Tom, stronger if less accurate with his cleeks, and a far better putter. Over the years he had beaten Tom more often than Tom had beaten him. Still St. Andrews had cast a pall over Musselburgh ever since Tom swore off tobacco and topped Willie in their marathon of 1862, almost a decade ago. Now Musselburgh’s golf-fanatics were riveted by talk of a rematch between the warhorses—single combat over four greens for £100. The stakes, as usual, were put up by gentleman, with the winning player expecting a cut of ten percent, plus any side bets he won. As the stakes rose to £125 and then £150, Tom’s pulse quickened.

There were several gloomy auguries for Tom, who had publicly sworn off marathon matches back in ’62: The thirty-seven-year-old Park was in his prime while Tom was in his fiftieth year; Park seldom missed a short putt while Tom had days when he couldn’t make one; and plans for the 144-hole match called for the last thirty-six to be at Park’s home links at Musselburgh, the lion’s den. Still, Tom’s yearning for a restorative victory was so strong that not even Tommy’s warnings about finishing on “Willie’s dunghill” could sway him. When the stakes reached £200, he said yes.

In London, the editors of The Field framed the issue: “During the past 14 years the two players who have stood forth most prominently in the golfing world are Tom Morris, the custodian of the links at St. Andrews, and Willie Park, the professional at Musselburgh. The great question as to who is the best player has never been definitely settled.” The fact that Tommy Morris was now golf’s best player may have dampened interest in the opening rounds between his father and Park, who took a 1-up lead during the first day’s play before a small gallery at St. Andrews. The contest resumed three days later at Prestwick, where Tom’s putter regained the flash it had shown in his youth. He made everything under three paces and sent one long sidewinder bounding and curling more than thirty feet until in hopped into the hole. “Morris, driving in great style and playing both his quarter-strokes and his putts with beautiful precision, drew ahead of Willie,” read the next issue of the The Field. “A very lucky but withal well-played long putt turned the tables.” Winning the day by two holes put Tom a hole ahead at the marathon’s halfway point. But when his Prestwick cronies said he had seized the advantage, Tom shook his head. Were he in Park’s boots, he said, he’d be delighted to be one-down after seventy-two holes on Tom Morris’s two home courses, heading east to decide the matter at North Berwick and Musselburgh.

North Berwick was technically neutral, but the briny resort on the Forth’s south bank was half an hour by train from Musselburgh. Three days after Tom’s victory at Prestwick, a host of Park-backers applauded his demolition at North Berwick. Park won six of the first nine holes to go five ahead overall. By then he was walking like a hunter stalking a wounded deer, hurrying forward. Tom responded by slowing his pace. He paused to tamp a dollop of tobacco into his pipe. He lit it, breathed blue smoke and only then followed Park through the throng to the next teeing-ground. In the following hour Tom ground out fours and fives, inching his way back into the match, looping pinpoint drives while Park swung ever harder. Tom whittled Willie’s lead down to sawdust and then, while spectators whistled and hissed at him, took the last hole to regain the lead. With 108 holes in the books and thirty-six to play, he was one hole ahead. The train from North Berwick took him toward the setting sun, toward Musselburgh.

Spectators arrived in force on Saturday, the last day. After an early rain the sky cleared enough to let silver-white bolts of sun fall through the clouds. Spectators paced, gossiped, laughed. Some sipped from pocket flasks. Some were there not only to cheer Park and hoot at Morris but to bat Tom’s ball out of the air if they got a chance. Interference by spectators was a growing problem, most of all at Musselburgh. Andra Kirkaldy called Musselburgh’s rowdy crowds “unruly bullocks” and “damned miners.”

Every important match had a referee who could declare one golfer the winner if spectators misbehaved, but the referee who ruled against a hometown player might trigger a riot. So players often dealt with interference as a rub of the green, a twist of fortune that was part of the game. A rub of the green could be good fortune—a crow snaps up your ball and drops it into the hole—or bad. At Musselburgh, golfers from St. Andrews could count on getting rubbed the wrong way.

The nine-hole Musselburgh course erupted in hoots and cheers when the golfers appeared. Willie Park was joined by his brother David and Bob Fergusson, while Charlie Hunter and Bob Kirk stood on Tom’s side. Hunter, one of Tom’s Prestwick cronies, had been greenkeeper there since Andrew Strath died. Kirk, the son of Tom’s longtime caddie and one of the game’s leading players, would act as Tom’s caddie today. A peppery fellow with a short fuse, Kirk watched with mounting annoyance as the spectators pressed in around Tom. They pushed so close that Tom’s first backswing nearly ruffled one Park-backer’s beard. Tom stopped his swing and stepped away from his ball. Referee Robert Chambers, an Edinburgh publisher and R&A man, waved the crowd back. Tom took a breath, then hit a low fade into the widest part of the first fairway. The next sound was applause, but it wasn’t for him. It was for Park, stepping up to take a practice swing.

“The weather was showery,” The Field’s report began, “and a high wind interfered with play. Eight thousand spectators were present, and crowded in on the players, there being great excitement over the game.” Over twenty-seven holes, neither golfer gave in inch. With nine holes to play, Tom still led by one. By then the town’s artisans had gotten off work—Saturday was a half day. They dashed to the course. Many had already placed bets on the match; others made last-minute wagers as the final nine began. The crowd was feverish—men and boys charging onto greens before approach shots landed. Park stood whispering with the tall, quiet Fergusson while men in the crowd shouted, “We’re with you, Willie” and “Musselburgh forever!” One writer called the multitude “disgraceful…the players were pressed in upon in a very rude manner, and were scarcely allowed room to use their clubs freely.” Kirk, Tom’s caddie, irked the crowd by shouting, “Keep back, keep back!” Park could have calmed his followers but left that task to the referee, who called in vain for order while spectators pressed so close that they could have picked the tobacco out of Tom’s jacket pocket. On the second hole a man kicked Tom’s ball sideways. Tom played it as it lay and lost the hole. Soon another spectator kicked Tom’s ball into high grass. Then, 138 holes into the 144-hole contest, the golf devolved into farce. Tom missed a short putt. Spectators laughed and cheered. Referee Chambers, raising his hands, appealed to the crowd’s sense of fair play. He looked to Park for help, but Willie was on his way to the next tee with a 1-up lead.

Tom stood watching Park’s boosters crowding the green. Some waved to him. Some swung their feet to show what they’d like to do to his next shot. “The crowd, anxious for their favourite, the local man, to win, transgressed all rules of fair play,” Hutchison wrote, “and repeatedly injured the position of Tom Morris’s ball, to such an extent that the latter declined to continue.”

Tom had longed for a victory over his old enemy, but this was chaos, not golf. He walked past his ball and kept going, past the bellowing spectators, past the putting-green and through the door of the nearest pub, Mrs. Forman’s Public House, where he found a chair and sat puffing his pipe while referee Chambers faced down the jeering crowd. “The match is postponed,” Chambers declared. “We will finish tomorrow.” He was threatened, spat at.

Willie Park said no, the match was still on. According to The Field, Park maintained “that the referee had only to do with disputes as to holes, and could not postpone the play.” So Park went on. With his brother and a pained-looking Fergusson walking behind him, he played the last six holes alone and claimed victory. The stake-holder, a gentleman named Dudgeon whose role was to hang onto the backers’ money until there was an official winner, was nowhere to be found. He was holding at least £200; some reports suggest that late betting by the gentlemen sponsoring the match boosted the stakes to £500. Given the customary 10 percent share for the winning golfer, Tom or Willie stood to have a career day.

At eleven the next morning, Tom and Chambers returned to the fourth hole. Park was there, too—without his clubs. Chambers invited him to play, but Willie refused. “I finished yesterday,” he said. He watched Tom play alone, taking twenty-six strokes over the last six holes, four more than Park had taken on the same holes the day before. After Tom putted out on the final green, referee Chambers declared him the victor. The crowd hissed and booed. Backers of both players claimed victory. There were lawyers among the backers on both sides, and stakes-holder Dudgeon was soon served a court order instructing him to keep the money safe pending legal action.

Finally, six months later, the courts declared that neither Tom nor Willie had won. The riotous Musselburgh match was nullified. The backers got their money back and neither player won a penny. By then, poor Dudgeon had suffered a nervous breakdown. After eight rounds of golf and more than a thousand swings the only winner was Mrs. Forman, whose pub became famous as the spot where Old Tom Morris nursed a blackstrap while crowds outside sang for his hide.

The game was in constant flux, inventing itself on the fly. In 1871 the Edinburgh University professor Peter Tait had a brainstorm: Night golf! Rather than illuminate the course with lanterns, Tait proposed to paint golf balls with glowing phosphorus. He headed for St. Andrews along with two colleagues: Thomas Huxley, the biologist whose grandsons included Aldous, the writer, and Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Andrew Huxley; and the famed German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz. Joined by Tait’s brother-in-law, the chemist Alexander Crum Brown, the scientists teed off in the dark and watched their drives rise and fall like shooting stars. They cleared Swilcan Burn with glowing approach shots. “The idea is a success; the balls glisten in the grass,” wrote Sir John Low of the R&A, who got off his pony long enough to record the event. “All goes well until the burn is passed, and Professor Crum Brown’s hand is found to be aflame; with difficulty his burning hand is unbuttoned, and the saddened group return to the Professor’s rooms, where Huxley dresses the wounds.”

Golf grew despite being limited to daylight hours. Within days of Tommy’s victory in the 1870 Open, the Fifeshire Journal was looking toward the future: “As Young Tom carries off the Belt to St. Andrews and retains it, a new champion trophy will require to be furnished…. We understand that it is the intention of the Prestwick Golf Club to order another Belt, but we have not learnt what the design will be, or the probable cost.”

Time was short. If the next Open was to coincide with the autumn meeting of the Prestwick Golf Club, like previous Opens, it had to be organized by the spring of 1871. There was talk of allowing the R&A and the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers to share the tournament with Prestwick, with the three clubs splitting expenses and the Open rotating among their home links. Perhaps North Berwick and the English club Westward Ho would join in as well. Gilbert Mitchell Innes, a prominent Prestwick member, said his club would be foolish to pay for a new Belt or other trophy before such matters were resolved. He proposed a motion at Prestwick’s spring meeting in April, 1871: “In contemplation of St. Andrews, Musselburgh and other Clubs joining in the purchase of a belt to be played for over four or more greens, it is not expedient for the Club to provide a belt to be played for solely at Prestwick.” Why drain Prestwick’s coffers when other clubs might split the cost?

Harry Hart could not believe what he was hearing. The diminutive secretary of the Prestwick Club said it would be foolish to cede control of the Open to save fifteen or twenty pounds. Feisty as a terrier and not much taller, Hart countered Innes with a motion calling for the club to go forward alone. But he was wasting his time. For many Prestwick members the Open was a trifle, far less urgent than their own medal competitions. Stuck in a smoky room after the long winter of 1870-71 had finally thawed into April, they were dying to get out on the links. Their vote was quick and decisive: Innes’s motion passed. For the price of a horse, Prestwick gave up control of the Open.

Where would Tommy Morris defend his title? One day the likely site was Prestwick, another day St. Andrews or North Berwick. After their spring meeting the Prestwick members scattered to their homes and estates. They could vote on Open matters only at their spring and autumn meetings or by returning for what was called an Extraordinary General Meeting. The fate of the Open was not deemed critical enough to warrant such a meeting. Spring and summer passed; the hourglass ran out. The Open Championship of 1871 was canceled.

Every ten years the Scottish government undertook a census. In the census of 1871, Thomas Morris Jr. of St. Andrews, asked to provide his occupation, answered that he was a golf-ball maker. Later a clerk in the local census office crossed out those words and wrote “Champion Golfer of Scotland.” Open or no Open, everyone knew who Tommy was.

“This youthful hero having thus effectually swept the board, matters came rather to a deadlock,” wrote Everard, “and for a year there was an interregnum.” While the officers of the Prestwick Club, the R&A, and the Honourable Company debated the Open’s future, the champion entered one of the busiest stretches of his career. Downing all comers in money matches, he found himself earning more in a good month than his father earned in a year, and when strokes and odds were no longer enough to lure challengers, he dreamed up stunts. In one match he played his own ball against the best ball of Davie Strath and Jamie Anderson, two of the best professionals in Scotland. And beat them. Later he spent a solid week playing high-stakes golf alone: He did it by backing himself—betting that he could play the St. Andrews links in 83 or better. That gaudy number enticed many R&A members. Their own Sir Robert Hay had recently won the club’s Royal Medal with a 94. All week the stakeholder’s pockets were packed with coins and banknotes the members had bet against Tommy, and each day Tommy took the money home. Playing in sunshine, wind, and rain, he won for six days in a row. After a rest day on Sunday he felt a surge of Christian charity, or so he said, and offered the bettors a chance to recoup. They were reluctant to try him again. He convinced them by dropping the number to 81, a mere four shots above his course record. That spurred a flurry of wagering. Of course he shot 80, capping what some called the first perfect week since Genesis.

The golfer and course designer C.B. Macdonald, four years younger than Tommy, would laud his hero’s “dashing style” and “unconquerable spirit.” J. Gordon McPherson, in his Golf and Golfers, wrote that only Tommy could lift his game by trying harder, a feat that was then called pressing: “Young Tom Morris was the only one we ever knew who could succeed in almost every case of pressing.” Golf fanatics swore he could “lay in the weeds” for ten or twelve or seventeen holes, then summon some last-minute magic to send his followers into glad hysterics. “[A]s for a bad lie,” another contemporary wrote, “he seemed positively to revel in it.” His father never forgot a niblick shot Tommy hit in a match at Musselburgh. He had an awkward lie, his ball below a tuft of grass in a deep divot. Another player would have been glad to advance the ball fifty yards, half the carry of a full niblick. Not Tommy Morris. As he took his stance, practically kneeling, he shot his father a look as if to say, “Watch this.” He hooded the face of his niblick and swung full out. The ball cleared the divot’s lip by an eyelash and rode a low line almost 200 yards to the green.

He must have felt invincible. Otherwise he would not have agreed to play against a man armed with a bow and arrow.

The R&A golfer James Wolfe Murray was also a member of the elite Royal Company of Archers, the queen’s ceremonial bodyguards in Scotland. He and Tommy squared off in a ballyhooed match in which the young champion hit golf balls while Wolfe Murray played true target golf, shooting arrows around the links. Dogs and boys scampered ahead of the players, the boys taking care to stay out of the bowman’s range. Golfers could only dream of hitting balls that tunneled through the wind like Wolfe Murray’s arrows, which soared on long, three-hundred-yard arcs. From closer range he could make an arrow come almost straight down, a literal bolt from the blue. He had nothing to fear from bunkers, though he looked comical standing chest-deep in a pot bunker, pulling back his bowstring and letting fly. Tommy’s sole advantage was on the greens, where his opponent found it hard to shoot an arrow into the hole from more than two or three yards. His efforts left arrowhead-divots around the hole on every green, and when he sank a “putt” it often caved in the hole on one side.

Tom Morris, walking along with the spectators, puffed his pipe and shook his head. Was this what the old game had come to—a circus act? In the half-century of Tom’s life, golf had grown from local pastime to national sport. In the past five years it had grown so swiftly that otherwise sane men were willing to bet on a match between a golfer and an archer. God only knew where the game was going next, but Tom knew one thing: It would be his job to repair the caved-in holes.

Tommy won most of the short holes, but as the match wore on and they turned to play against the wind, the bow’s power proved too much for him. Wolfe Murray pulled ahead on the inward nine, and for once Tommy was outshot.