How golf's greatest talent died of his broken heart
Hoodude
KEVIN COOK
http://images.scotsman.com/2007/07/15/MORB.jpg
Father and son: Old Tom Morris was the game's first real superstar,
but his son Young Tom was even better, winning four Opens on the
bounce until tragedy struck and the wife his parents despised died in
childbirth. Four months later his father found his son motionless in
his bed; he had died of a broken heart. Photograph: Phil Sheldon Golf
Picture Library & Getty Images
A CENTURY and a half ago, Tom Morris of St Andrews laid out a 12-hole
course on golf's western frontier at Prestwick, where he helped found
the tournament that became the Open Championship. Tom won four of the
first seven Opens, but by 1867 he suspected that his son, Tom Jr,
might soon surpass him.
By then Old Tom, as he was known, was 46 years old, with stiffening
joints and the first flecks of grey in his beard. He played position
golf, lacing careful shots from point to point, trusting opponents to
make more mistakes than he did. His son, called Tommy, played a bolder
game. Only 16, the boy swung hard and took chances, gunning for a
score no one else could match. Young Tommy was so strong that he
sometimes snapped a hickory-shafted club with his pre-swing waggle. He
was headstrong, too, dying to test himself against his father and the
rest of Scotland's golf professionals.
In 1867, father and son rode the train from St Andrews to Leuchars and
from there to Carnoustie to play in a tournament. Tom had helped his
mentor Allan Robertson lay out the 10-hole Carnoustie course 20 years
earlier. The Morrises were nearing the links when they met Willie
Park, the reigning Open champion.
"Tom," said Park, "what have you brought this laddie here for?"
"You'll see what for," Tom said.
That day Tommy outplayed 31 professionals, including his father and
Park, to claim the first prize of £8. The following year, on the
course his father built at Prestwick, Tommy won his first Open. His
triumph earned him £6 and a year's possession of the Championship
Belt, a wide band of red Morocco leather festooned with clanking
silver medals. A photo of Tommy wearing the belt shows him with his
fist on his hip, a jaunty-looking pose necessitated by the belt's lack
of clamps or notches. Slim Tommy had to press the belt to his waist to
keep it from falling off.
He defended his title in 1869, winning by 11 strokes. At the 166-yard
Station Hole, the eighth of Prestwick's 12, Tommy knocked his tee shot
into the cup. Spectators tossed their hats and shouted his name,
celebrating golf's first recorded hole-in-one. His back-to-back Open
victories gave him a chance to leave another indelible mark on the
game's history: by the rules of the Open, any golfer who won three
consecutive Opens could keep the belt forever.
On September 15, 1870, Tommy smacked his gutta-percha ball off
Prestwick's first tee and the hunt was on. Prestwick's opening hole
was a monster, nearly 600 yards at a time when a powerful drive went
180. The professionals hoped to make five on Tom's monster and happily
settled for six. The hole was so famously long that golfers had
measured it down to the inch: it was 578 yards, one foot and seven
inches long. Those last few inches would matter in 1870, when Tommy
began his title defence with a drive and a long spoon second shot that
left him an uphill third of about 190 yards. He swung hard. His ball
cleared the Cardinal Bunker, bounced on the green and dived into the
hole. A three!
One old sport who had bet against Tommy turned away in disgust. "It's
no' golf at all," he said, "just miracles."
Tommy walked the St Andrews links with a crowd behind him - schoolboys
and red-coated gentlemen, gamblers waving money, travellers on
holiday, lace- and ribbon-decked ladies and their blushing daughters -
all craning for a look at the three-time champion who had made the
belt his personal property. He was handsome and polite, this
19-year-old who played the ancient game better than his elders. He had
grown a moustache that drooped around the corner of his smile.
When Tommy brought the belt home to St Andrews, church bells greeted
his return. The Fifeshire Journal described a gathering at the Golf
Inn, near the links: "Mr Denham, London, who proposed the champion's
health, said the feat he had performed had never been done before, and
in all probability would never be repeated. By it he had brought the
highest honour which any golfer could confer upon the ancient city and
on all interested in the national game of golf."
The young champion stood up. "Three years ago," he said, "I determined
to become proprietor of the belt. As you all know, I had the
satisfaction of realising that goal last Thursday at Prestwick." Amid
loud cheers, he saluted another golfer: "To Tom Morris Senior!" he said.
The applause went on, led by Tommy, until his father stood. After
apologising for being a poor speaker, Tom cleared his throat. "Seven
years ago, I almost succeeded in making that belt my own," he said. "I
feel proud, however, that my successful rival, the ultimate winner of
the belt, is my son."
But with the belt now Tommy's forever, Scotland's best golfers had
nothing to play for. The Prestwick Golf Club, the Royal & Ancient and
the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers bickered over the price of
a new trophy, and the 1871 Open, which the gentlemen saw as less
important than their club championships, was cancelled. A year later
the three clubs finally agreed to share the tournament and the £30
cost of a new trophy, the Claret Jug. To no one's surprise, Tommy won
the next Open. Even today, 135 years later, he is still the only
golfer to claim four consecutive Opens. His is the first name engraved
on the Jug, Tiger Woods the latest.
Tommy lost the next Open when storms flooded the St Andrews links,
turning fairways into ponds dotted with ducks. The 1873 Open went to
Tom Kidd, a long-driving dandy who spent the eve of the tournament
scratching grooves into the faces of his irons. His tactic worked. The
next morning, Kidd's backspinning approach shots hopped and stopped on
the links' soggy greens. He beat Tommy to win a year's custody of the
Claret Jug, £11 and a gold medal that he promptly sold to pay for a
long-awaited celebration: Kidd's wedding to his fiancee, Eliza.
Tommy had his own affairs to think about. He spent much of that winter
courting a woman from a squalid coal-mining town, a woman with a past.
Margaret.
To his mother's chagrin, Tommy Morris wasn't the type to fall in love
with any of the shy, piano-playing virgins of St Andrews. Instead he
fell for Margaret Drinnen, who was tall enough and bold enough to look
him straight in the eye. She had fled the coal pits and slag heaps of
Whitburn to find work as a maid in St Andrews, where few knew her
secret: she'd had a child out of wedlock a while back, a daughter who
died. Tommy didn't care about that, but his parents surely did. When
he married Margaret Drinnen on November 25, 1874, his parents stayed home.
The newlyweds settled into a two-storey house at 2 Playfair Place. The
rent was £27 a year. Some St Andrews folk thought the house a trifle
ostentatious for a greenkeeper's son, though Tommy could have afforded
a bigger one. Now his wife, a former maid, had a maid of her own.
According to one friend, Tommy was an ardent husband, "united, both in
the bonds of affection and wedlock, to a young woman for whom he had
the strongest love."
Yet he still felt bonds of love and duty to his father, who was his
partner in the foursomes matches that drew raucous crowds to the
links. Tom had once been Scotland's "King of Clubs," a feared opponent
who won the Open four times between 1861 and 1867.
But by 1875 Old Tom was no longer his old self. As the golf chronicler
Horace Hutchison wrote, "[A] spell of the most utter bad play, lasting
four or five years, took possession of him: and this was the more
provoking, as it occurred when his son Tommy was at the very zenith of
his powers."
Still Tommy partnered his father in alternate-shot matches against
other professionals. If 54-year-old Tom cost them a hole or two, his
son would reel off a string of shots that turned the deficit into an
unlikely - and lucrative - victory. No one played with more dash or
half as much confidence. Tommy would strike a putt and walk off the
green while it was still rolling, telling his caddie: "Pick it out the
hole, laddie."
When the Morrises' rivals from Musselburgh, Willie and Mungo Park,
proposed a grudge match that summer, Tom welcomed the challenge. A £25
match against the Park brothers might be one contest among many for
Tommy, but for Tom it was a shot at redemption. The Parks had beaten
them the previous fall, due in part to Tom's horrible putting. Like
many ageing athletes, Old Tom was sure he could play as well as ever
on a given day. All he needed was the chance.
But Tommy was torn. Margaret was pregnant, with their child due any
day. A tournament in North Berwick, followed by the match against the
Parks, would take him away for three days. Margaret may well have
encouraged him to go; still it was Tommy's decision. He chose to
honour his pledge to play with his father.
The journey took more than six hours. The Morris men rode the train
from St Andrews to Leuchars and from there to the ferry at
Burntisland. They crossed the Firth of Forth and boarded a train to
Edinburgh, where they switched to one that rolled through humpbacked
fields to the end of the line.
North Berwick's town fathers billed their seaside resort as "the
Biarritz of the North". The caddies there were known for what one
writer called "superfluous dress and infinite capacity for fiery
liquors," but that was true of caddies everywhere, except for the
superfluous dress. On the fourth of September, 1875, Tom and Tommy
ambled to the links at the foot of Berwick Law to meet the Park
brothers. Newspapers were calling it "the Morrises' Return". They
would go four times around North Berwick's quirky nine-hole course,
where two stone walls angling through the links sent low approach
shots pinging backwards. The golfers teed off at 11, surrounded by "a
very large number of spectators ... whose numbers were, despite the
use of a long rope behind which they were kept, at times rather
difficult to manage".
In the second round, Tom found a bit of old music in his putter. He
rolled in what one reporter, using the old-fashioned spelling, called
"a clever long put". He and Tommy had a two-hole edge. Meanwhile Mungo
Park, the 1874 Open champion, kept knocking his side's ball into
bunkers, leaving his fuming brother Willie to slash it out. After two
nine-hole rounds - the midpoint of the match - the Morrises led by
four holes. Tom had already contributed more to the cause than in a
dozen other tries as Tommy's partner. As Hutchison wrote, "never but
on one occasion at North Berwick was old Tom much better than a drag
upon his son." That occasion was this day.
In the last go-round, the Parks drew within two holes with four to
play. "The excitement among the onlookers was now intense," The
Scotsman reported, "and it was doubly increased at the next hole,
where Willie holed from fully a dozen yards' distance, making the
match 'all even'."
The Parks' supporters hooted and threw their hats. The duel of the
year was deadlocked with two holes to play. As the crowd bubbled
around the golfers on North Berwick's eighth hole, a messenger from
the telegraph office pushed his way through.
The messenger held a slip of paper, a telegram from St Andrews. He
handed it to Tom, who read it while the others were playing.
Tommy was about to try a long putt to win the penultimate hole. His
father chose not to interrupt him. There would be time, soon enough,
to give Tommy the news that would change their lives forever.
Tommy's wife was in labour, and her labour was going badly. He and his
father raced to the harbour and sailed home, a journey that took most
of the night. But they were too late. Margaret and her baby were dead.
Four months later, on Christmas morning, 1875, Tom Morris found his
son dead in bed. According to legend, Tommy died of a broken heart.
The true cause may have been a pulmonary embolism. Having won his
first Open at 17, Tommy was dead at just 24. Old Tom gave his son a
hero's burial and spent the rest of his life telling tales of the
greatest golfer ever - his son, Tommy.
Related topic
* The 2007 Open
http://sport.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=1614
This article: http://sport.scotsman.com/golf.cfm?id=1102762007
Last updated: 15-Jul-07 01:57 BST
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DEAD GILMER
Too long. Boring.
Bob Feigel
magnanimously proffered:
>
>Too long. Boring.
So why the fuck didn't you snip it before you posted your comments?
--
"It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." - Woody Allen
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Wax-up and drop-in of Surfing's Golden Years: <http://www.surfwriter.net>
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