Tommy's Honor by Kevin Cook Read Free Book Online Page B

one, too. They halved the one after that and won two of the following three in what one report would call “a most extraordinary run of surprises.” Suddenly the match was even with two holes to play. Two holes for £400. The Dunns wore identical frowns. The crowd pushed close enough to hear the whisk of Allan’s swing as he drove his and Tom’s ball into one of the worst spots in sight, a patch of shin-high grass a hundred and thirty yards out. The ball hopped once and disappeared.
    Tom slashed it out, but two shots later he and Allan lay four in a greenside bunker. The Dunns lay two only twenty yards away. But their ball had come to rest against a paving stone bordering a path near the green. “They wished the stone removed, and called for someone to go for a spade,” Peter recalled, “but Sir David Baird would not sanction its removal, because it was off the course and a fixture.” Referee Baird was the same Baird who’d given Allan the eponymous club he was using. Musselburgh fanatics hissed him, but the ruling was correct. The Dunns slapped at their ball three times before it popped loose, costing them their two-shot advantage and one more. Peter watched them unravel: “Both men had by this time lost all judgment and nerve, and played most recklessly.” The most pivotal hole of the century’s first half went to Robertson and Morris, who took the final hole as well. Their backers were delirious, and £400 richer. Tom and Allan got a beggar’s cut of that, plus their end of several side bets, and for weeks after returning to St. Andrews they enjoyed free meals and free pints. Tom was his hometown’s particular hero—hadn’t he downed the Dunns almost in spite of Allan? Following “the Famous Foursome,” Tom Morris’s health was toasted so often that it seemed he would surely live to be a hundred.

     

    Almost before the cheers died down, Tom’s luck went south. The coming months would test his courage and even his faith.
    It began with a new ball. In the late 1840s, a few golfers in England began using balls made of rubber. The stuff was called gutta-percha. Made from the sap of a Malaysian rubber tree, it was easy to mold into a ball and more durable than leather and feathers. Cheaper, too. A gutta-percha ball resisted rain better than a feathery, which tended to split at the seams in wet weather, and the “gutty” cost less than half as much—a mere shilling versus a half-crown for a feather ball. When Gourlay, the Musselburgh feathery-maker, got his hands on one of the first gutties, he saw the future coming. He had a standing order to send featheries to Sir David Baird, the Famous Foursome referee, an avid amateur who wore a top hat while he played because he thought it helped his balance. Gourlay promptly sent Baird the balance of his inventory: six dozen feather balls. A year or so later Sir David—still trying to get his money’s worth—would be one of the last golfers hitting a feathery.
    Allan Robertson was frantic. He had always said that nothing good ever came from the south. Now here came a threat to his livelihood in the form of a gray orb bouncing from England to Musselburgh to the St. Andrews links his father and grandfather had stocked with featheries. Allan could not even bring himself to pronounce “gutta-percha.” He called the new balls “the filth.” Playing with them was “no’ golf.” He paid boys pennies to hunt down gutties and bring them to his house, where the boys watched Allan burn the balls in the kitchen fire. These public burnings filled the room with acrid blue-black smoke. Tom and Lang Willie, stuffing and sewing featheries in a fog that made their eyes itch, had to swear they would never play golf with the filth.
    The Famous Foursome had lifted Tom’s standing with the gentleman golfers of the R&A, who now insisted on getting him as a caddie or partner. One morning he went out for a friendly match with a prominent club member, the preeningly handsome John