Tommy's Honor by Kevin Cook Read Free Book Online

buried in a bunker. He swung twice with no luck. “Pick it up,” the Captain said.
    Tom said, “No, I might hole it.”
    “Ha! If you do, I’ll give you fifty pounds.”
    “Done.”
    Tom’s biographer W. W. Tulloch told the story sixty years later. According to Tulloch, Tom “had another shot at it, eye on ball and perhaps on the fair Nancy. By some million-to-one chance the ball did actually go into the hole. ‘That will make a nice nest-egg for me to put in the bank,’ said the young fellow.” But the next day, when the Captain brought the money, Tom surprised him by turning it down. There was no debt, he said—he had been joking. As Tulloch noted, “No doubt the Captain remembered this when the marriage day came around.”
    Tom Morris married Nancy Bayne on June 21, 1844. The vows were read by the Reverend Principal Haldane of Holy Trinity Church, who had christened baby Tom twenty-three years before. After the vows Captain Broughton, who had given the bride and groom a wedding gift of precisely fifty pounds, led toasts to his favorite caddie and his former maid, who would do her scrubbing, dusting, and cooking for Tom Morris from that day on.
    Life was moving faster. In a year Nancy was pregnant, though no one in her time and place would use that indelicate word. People said she was in a family way, or “no longer unwell,” meaning that her monthly flow of blood had ceased. In the summer of 1846 Nancy reached the last stage of being no longer unwell—her confinement, when her husband was banished to a far room while women from both their families and then at last a midwife clustered around Nancy as she howled in her labor. Soon the midwife showed Tom the glad result: a healthy son. He and Nancy named the baby Thomas Morris Junior and called him Wee Tom.
    If the child was meant to be a golfer, he was born at a good time. After Allan Robertson’s grand battle with Willie Dunn, other professionals began making their names in the game. Dunn and his twin brother Jamie were Musselburgh’s champions. Bob Andrew was Perth’s. Amateur competitions at the R&A and other clubs were still the main events on golf’s calendar, but people had now seen enough of the “cracks,” as crack-shot caddies were called, to know that amateur medalists were not in their league. Golf talk revolved around the cracks: Who was the best of them? Could Dunn win a rematch against Robertson? Which town could field the best foursomes pair? By mid-century bettors from various clubs were risking weighty sums to find out. To their surprise, hundreds and even thousands of ordinary citizens were curious about this new craze, the professional golf match. Soon a great foursomes match was arranged, a duel between the Dunns of Musselburgh and those two noted sticks from St. Andrews, Allan Robertson and Tom Morris.
    Sportsmen on both sides of the Forth pooled their cash. Each side came up with £200, which meant that the cracks would play for the staggering sum of £400. It wasn’t the players’ money; they would perform for the benefit of the bettors who put up the stakes. Still, news of the record-setting stakes catalyzed a reaction that fed on itself—more crucial than the prize money was its power to keep people talking about it, to keep the small but growing world of golf abuzz for weeks before the match. This was hype Victorian style. News may have traveled at a walking pace, in weekly newspapers and by word of mouth, but as the match approached it seemed half of Scotland knew about it. The players, who would get a piece of the £400 if they won—ten percent was customary—made side bets of their own. They rubbed up their clubs as the first day of play dawned clear and cool. The format was two out of three, with three matches of thirty-six holes each to be played first at Musselburgh, then at St. Andrews, and finally on the supposedly neutral links at North Berwick, near Edinburgh. Everyone expected Allan Robertson and Willie Dunn to