Free Tommy's Honor by Kevin Cook

cradle behind the Isle of Arran. At last the Earl of Eglinton stood up. Silverware tap-tapped on wine glasses; the ballroom went quiet. The Earl’s gaze swept the room and found Tom.
    Nodding toward the links outside, Eglinton announced that the course, their course, was “a wonder of our new golfing age.” To applause and calls of “Hear! Hear!” he raised his glass. His hand was smooth and pink, his teeth as white as perfect health.
    “To Tom Morris,” he said. “Our perfect pioneer!”

     

    As a player Tom was famous but not perfect. In 1851 he lost a match to Willie Dunn on the final hole. After his last putt missed, “Tom gave his ball a kick in disgust,” wrote Hutchison, “while Dunn took a snuff with great gusto and smiled satisfactorily.” Tom turned the tables the following year when the golf world descended on St. Andrews for the R&A’s autumn meeting. In one foursomes duel he and Colonel Fairlie pipped Dunn and another Musselburgh golfer, the expert amateur Sir Robert Hay, who had “challenged the world” with Dunn as his partner. Then Tom delighted his hometown by teaming with none other than Allan Robertson, who had “forgiven” Tom—Allan’s word—and now made gutta-percha balls in his kitchen by the old links. The reunited Invincibles gave Hay and Dunn odds of two to one. Tom made side bets, giving as much as five to one. “The betting was extreme in this important piece of golfing warfare,” reported the Fifeshire Journal , “this all-absorbing trial of dexterity betwixt St. Andrews and Mussel burgh…. The match was witnessed by doctors, lawyers and divines (young ones at least of the latter profession), professors, bankers, railway directors, merchants’ clerks, tradesmen, workmen…as well as a goodly sprinkling of general idlers.” As at North Berwick three years before, Allan and Tom were outdriven by taller, stronger foes. Worse yet was Tom’s putting. He kept missing short putts, a fault that would dog him for most of his life. According to the Journal , “Tom, it was insinuated, was at his old trade of ‘funking.’” But in another late reversal, the Invincibles stormed back. On one eventful hole Allan wound up and slugged a drive that “shot far ahead of Mr. Hay’s corresponding one; indeed, one could hardly conceive how Allan’s little body could propel a ball so far.” Tom sank a crucial putt; he and Allan won in a walk. “In the progress inward, some boys removed the flags…and held them aloft in the procession, giving it the appearance of a triumphal entry,” the Journal story concluded, calling Robertson and Morris “the cocks o’ the green. Long may they hold that honourable elevation. St. Andrews for ever!”
    That account was too negative for one St. Andrean, who fired off a letter to the editor. “[Y]our correspondent says that at one stage of it he was afraid Tom was at his ‘ old trade of funking ’—that is, showing a want of nerve,” wrote “A Golfer,” who claimed that the match’s outcome “ought to dissipate every doubt—should any really exist—as to Tom’s pluck.”
    Another dispatch lent weight to the charge that Tom Morris was a short-range funker. When an R&A member mailed a postcard addressed to THE MISSER OF SHORT PUTTS, PRESTWICK , the postman took it straight to Tom, who might have torn it apart or hidden it in his pocket. Instead he laughed and showed the card to half the town.
    In the 1850s the Invincibles swept aside challengers in St. Andrews, Prestwick, Perth, Musselburgh, and half a dozen other Scottish towns. Though they were seen as shady characters by members of polite society, the golf professionals played honorably, developing a code of conduct unique to their sport. Part of the code had to do with supporting one’s partner in foursomes. After Allan hit a tee shot that left Tom with a horrid lie in a bunker during one duel with the Dunns, Tom scraped the ball out and Allan bounced a five-yard putt over sandy