Tommy’s Honour: The Extraordinary Story of Golf’s Founding Father and Son
The definitive account of golf’s founding father and son, Old and Young Tom Morris. For the first time, the two will be portrayed as men of flesh and blood – heroic but also ambitious, loving but sometimes confused and angry. Two men from one household, with ambitions that made them devoted partners as well as ardent foes.Tommy's Honour is a compelling story of the two Tom Morrises, father and son, both supremely talented golfers but utterly different, constituting a record-breaking golfing dynasty that has never been known before or since.Father, Old Tom Morris, grew up a stone's throw away from golf's ancestral home at St Andrews, a whisky-fuelled caddie, a wonderful 19th century character who became an Open Champion three times before running the Royal & Ancient, then sole governing body of the game. His son, Young Tom, arguably an even more prodigious talent than his father, was a golfing genius, the Tiger Woods of his era, who at 17 became the youngest player, to this day, to win the Open Championship. He then went on to win it four times in a row, an unprecedented achievement. On one occasion, father and son fought it out at the last hole of the Championship before the son finally triumphed.But then came the pivotal day that would change their lives forever, the death of Young Tom’s wife and unborn child. The cataclysmic events of that day eventually lead to Young Tom’s tragic death, aged 24, with his father living on for another 20 years in deep remorse.So on the one hand, you have the story of one of the most influential figures in the history of golf, a pioneer in the birth of the modern game and of Scottish and Open Championship golf. And on the other hand – and this is the real appeal of this book – you have an extraordinary father-and-son story. It’s for every son who ever competed with his father, and every father who has guided his son towards manhood, then found it hard to let go.
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TOMMY’S HONOUR
THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF GOLF’S
FOUNDING FATHER AND SON
KEVIN COOK
2pm
Beneath the sod poor Tommy’s laid,
Now bunkered fast for good and all;
A better golfer never played
A further or a surer ball.
A triple laurel round his brow,
The light of triumph in his eye;
He stands before us even now
As in the hour of victory.
Thrice belted knight of peerless skill,
Again we see him head the fray;
And memory loves to reckon still
The feats of Tommy in his day.
—from ‘Elegy on Tom Morris, Jr’
Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, 1876
THE WIND CAME off the North Sea, pushing sand and bits of straw over grass-covered dunes to the links. The wind smelled of seaweed. It hurried past the sandstone clubhouse and ran uphill to the Morris house, where it slipped under the door and stirred the embers of the previous night’s fire.
Tom Morris gave his son a mild kick on the backside. ‘Wake, Tommy.’
The boy twitched. He was thirteen and slept like a paving stone. After another kick he stretched and yawned. ‘What time is it?’
‘Tea time.’
His father, the early riser, had already rekindled the fire, boiled water and filled two cups. Tommy was stretching and rubbing his eyes as the old man put a cup and saucer in his hands. Outside, a cock crowed. Tommy sat up and sipped his black tea. It was bitter and scalding, hot enough to numb the tip of his tongue. Next came a chunk of oatcake, dropped onto the saucer as his father bustled past.
Tom Morris threw open the door to the street. His reddish-brown side-whiskers caught the day’s first light. He was forty-three years old, with teeth the colour of pale ale and a dusting of white in his beard. He rubbed his callused, veiny hands together as the breeze tossed motes of ash around the room, dropping ash on the Championship Belt on the mantelpiece and on Mum’s untouchable china dishes in their rack on the wall. ‘Chilly,’ he said. ‘We’ll have stingin’ hands today. Stingin’ hands.’
Tommy smiled. His father loved to say things twice, as if repeating something could double its import. ‘Aye, aye,’ he said, amusing himself. ‘Stingin’ hands.’ His father didn’t hear a word. He’d pulled on his cap and stepped into the wind, leaving the door flapping open behind him.
‘Wait,’ Tommy said. But the old man would not wait. Tommy gulped his tea, pulled his boots and jacket on, stuck the oatcake in a pocket and clattered out the door with his father’s clubs under his arm.
His footfalls echoed down Golf Place, a double row of dark stone houses. No one else was awake. Any caddie or gentleman golfer who was up at this hour would be hung over, cradling his headache in his hands and wishing he had died at birth. The links were empty except for gulls, crows, rabbits, a mule tethered to a post by the stationmaster’s garden, and Tom Morris, now joined by his panting son.
Tom examined his six clubs – driver, spoon, two niblicks, a rut iron and a wooden putter – and selected the driver. He took a pinch of damp sand from a wooden box by the teeing-ground and built a small sand-hill – a tee – for his ball to sit on. He took his stance and waggled his club at the ball as if to threaten it. ‘Far and sure,’ he said.
Tommy had heard the old motto a thousand times. He was supposed to repeat it, to say ‘Far and sure’ before the first swing, just as golfers had done on this spot for centuries. He was tempted to try something new, to blurt ‘Long and strong’, or ‘High and mighty!’ But he held back. His father might take offence, might turn into one of those stern Old Testament fathers he was starting to resemble. So Tommy mumbled ‘far’n’sher’ and watched the old man draw back the driver to start the slow, clockwork swing that all St Andrews golfers knew, laying the hickory shaft almost flat across his shoulders at the top, starting down slow as honey and then whipping the head of the club through the ball, which took off towards the white flag in the distance.
Tom squinted as he followed its flight. Nodding, he reached into his jacket for his pipe and pouch. He tapped a few tobacco leaves into the pipe’s bowl, lit a match and breathed blue smoke. Mum detested that smoke but Tommy loved it, the sweet reek of his father. Tom stood five foot seven, a bit above average for a Scotsman of his time, but in Tommy’s eyes he loomed larger. Tom Morris was the Champion Golfer of Scotland. He was the hero of St Andrews, the only man who could beat the golfing brutes of Musselburgh. He was the official keeper of these famous four miles of turf, the links of St Andrews. Beloved by all men – excepting jealous golf professionals, several red-coated gentlemen of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club, and the Musselburgh brutes – he was a pious churchman who was not above joking and drinking with foul-smelling caddies. Tom Morris was all these great things and one more: he was the one golfer Tommy was dying to beat.
