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Old Tom Morris was golf's first true professional—the most famous player of the 1800s. But his son was even better. Students of golf know the lad as Young Tom, though in his day everyone called him Tommy. In this excerpt from Kevin Cook's new book, Tommy's Honor, the younger Morris makes his first appearance in the game's history. Twelve-year-old Tommy was growing like a spring weed. He excelled at the Ayr Academy, but to his mother's dismay he would drop his books at home and race out to play golf. He swung the same for any shot—hard—and always took the straight way to the target. If the Cardinal Bunker yawned ahead of him, he challenged it. If his ball failed to clear the bunker he would jump down into the sand, swing hard one or two or six or seven times and then emerge with a wave. His father kept pointing out better, safer routes around the links he had built when Tommy was a baby. “It's point A to B to C, son,” Tom said. “Do they not teach Euclid at your academy?” Tommy's answer, in a word, was “Fore.” Alone among golfers, he ignored Tom Morris.  Old Tom Morris was golf's first true professional—the most famous player of the 1800s. But his son was even better. By his last year at the academy Tommy was bigger than most boys his age. He was strong enough to hit the same shot different ways with different clubs. Nancy clucked and worried—was this how an academy scholar behaves? But Tom could see that his son possessed a sort of genius. He saw it the first time Tommy checked his aggression, thought twice and played around a bunker, floating a pitch shot to the only flat part of a slanting green. The boy was starting to think two or three shots ahead. He was learning to see a round of golf as an interlocking set of options, like the shards of glass in a favorite toy, his kaleidoscope. Most golfers saw only one way to play a hole, but Tommy could picture a dozen, and as he grew he gained the strength to hit the shots he imagined. One contemporary saw the physical source of Tommy's growing power: “Though a delicate youth, with blue eyes and light brown hair, Tommy had amazingly strong and supple wrists.” But it was his academy-trained mind that helped Tommy see new ways to go from A to C, to scan a hole and find a better route than the straight-to-target line, a route that the next century's golfers would call the line of charm. On the twelfth of April, 1864, Scotland's leading professionals convened at Royal Perth for one of the richest tournaments yet. The purse was £18, with £10 for the winner—enough for a man to live like a prince for a month. Tom Morris and Willie Park tied for top honors, and they tied again in a playoff round. The sun was sinking fast during a second playoff when Park tried for a killing shot, a long spoon over a hazard that Tom lacked the power to clear. But Park's ball fell just short—avarice punished. After several long, ugly minutes he recorded a 10 on the hole and Tom was ten pounds richer. Oddly enough, the winner of an amateur tournament on the same course the next day received the same prize money. The gentleman amateurs saw no paradox in that. Major Robert Boothby of St. Andrews won his £10 with a score that would have embarrassed the professionals. He did it without losing his amateur status because he was a gentleman. The chasm in class between swells like Major Boothby and commoners like Tom Morris allowed both to win £10 without making Boothby less respectable or Tom more so.
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