Free Tommy's Honor by Kevin Cook Page B

grew strong and bullish. After winning enough bets to buy a set of real golf clubs, he beat every caddie in sight. He went into business making the new gutta-percha balls, which he carried in the deep pockets of a long coat he wore around the links. But Willie Park made his name as a player, and in 1854 he did what strong young men are born to do. He went looking for older men to fight.
    Whether you played Park for crowns and shillings, for £20 or for a pie, he left no doubt that he wanted to kill you on the links. He claimed he had never played a round of golf for pleasure. For the better part of a year he issued challenges to Allan Robertson, the living legend he planned to debunk, daring the King of Clubs to play him. Park challenged Allan in messages sent through other golfers and finally in a newspaper advertisement. The response from St. Andrews was silence. But if Robertson thought Willie Park would take no answer for an answer, he was wrong. In 1854 Park bought a rail ticket to Robertson’s town. The young tough was twenty years old on the day he stepped off the train in St. Andrews. As a Musselburgh man he was allergic to the staid old snoot-in-the-air town. He began playing practice rounds alone, smacking booming, parabolic drives that sent caddies hurrying to Allan’s door with news of the stranger’s arrival. Park, with his slightly open stance and fierce downswing, made contact so clean that his drives sounded like pistol shots. His drives carried to places where R&A members often found their second shots.
    After one such exhibition Park strutted to Allan’s cottage at Golf Place and Links Road. He introduced himself and demanded a match.
    Allan was amused. He admired pluck. But he was not about to risk his crown playing a potentially dangerous upstart. So he accepted the challenge with a proviso: Young Willie would have to earn his shot at Allan by beating another St. Andrews professonal.
    With Tom Morris far away in Prestwick, they agreed that Park would play Tom’s older brother George. George Morris was smaller and darker than Tom. A passable golfer who could make his way around the links in a hundred strokes or fewer, George played in a white cap that made him look from a distance like a button mushroom. Park proceeded to pound him into paste. After losing the first eight holes in a row poor George cried, “For the love of God, man, give us a half!” Allan, an interested spectator, allowed that “Willie frightens us with his long driving.” Park would not get his shot at Allan anytime soon, but by demolishing George Morris he earned the next best thing, a big-money match against Tom, who stepped up to defend the Morris family’s honor. Their scrap would be Willie Park’s debut on the national stage. The betting favored Tom, who was thirty-three years old, at the height of his powers. But he too fell to Park in a one-sided match that ended with the boyish victor mobbed by Musselburgh fans chanting a clamorous call and response:
    “Where’s the man who beat Tom Morris?”
    “He’s not a man, only a laddie without whiskers!”
    A week later, at North Berwick, Tom and Park played again. Colonel Fairlie went along to provide moral and financial backing. He bet heavily on Tom. But Tom’s precise drives and iffy putting proved no match for the strength and pinpoint short game of Park, who won by nine holes. “Park,” wrote Hutchison, “was now the rising, or rather the risen, sun.”
    On November 4, 1854, readers of the Edinburgh News saw a notice that revealed itself to be a dare:
A GREAT MATCH at GOLF was Played at St Andrews Links on the 19th October by THOMAS MORRIS, servant of the Prestwick Golf Club (late of St Andrews) and William Park, Golf Ball Maker, Musselburgh. This was played at St Andrews, North Berwick, and Musselburgh—Three Rounds on each Green—WILLIAM PARK leading Morris Nine Holes at the conclusion of the game.
    WILLIAM PARK Challenges Allan Robertson of St Andrews, or