Fairlie and Lord Colville, another officer of the Prestwick Club, dashed off letters to eleven of the thirty-five golf clubs then in existence – those that were large and important enough to have likely contenders for a professional championship. Knowing that many of the cracks were uncouth, Prestwick’s officers took precautions. ‘I have just been talking to Lord Eglinton in regard to the entry of players,’ Fairlie noted, writing to club secretaries from Eglinton Castle, ‘and to avoid having any objectionable characters we think that the plan is to write to the secretaries of all golfing societies requesting them to name and send their two best professional players – depending on them for their characters.’ Having the clubs vouch for their entrants, he believed, would make the contest ‘quite safe’.
The Prestwick officers made up invitations, written in blue ink on pale blue paper, and posted them to St Andrews, Musselburgh, Perth, Aberdeen and six other Scottish towns, plus Blackheath in England. But not all the blue notes were well received. Didn’t Eglinton and Fairlie know what sort of crowd they were inviting? Prestwick’s own professional might be an upstanding fellow, but the common crack was, in Hutchison’s words, ‘a feckless, reckless creature … His sole loves are golf and whisky.’ These glorified caddies might embarrass everyone with their drinking and cursing. They might cheat. What right-minded gentleman would vouch for them?
In the end only eight professionals turned up for what would become the first Open Championship, the world’s oldest and greatest golf tournament. Even so the one-day event threatened to overshadow the autumn meeting of the Prestwick Club that followed a day later. One newspaper writer came up with a more dignified name for the cracks: they were ‘golfing celebrities’. Still they kept their hosts improvising to the last minute. During practice rounds in the days before the tournament the professionals offended club members and their wives with ragged dress and worse manners. One was said to have spent a night in the town’s drunk tank. Fairlie found a way to improve the players’ dress if not their morals: he gave each golfer a lumberman’s jacket to play in. The jackets were heavy black-and-green tartans, the kind worn by labourers on Eglinton’s estates. Seen from a distance, the players in their chequered jackets resembled a lost team of woodsmen, searching in vain for a tree to cut down.
The Championship Belt they would vie for was made by Edinburgh silversmiths James & Walter Marshall for the news-making sum of twenty-five pounds. Fashioned of Morocco leather festooned with silver plates showing golf scenes and the Burgh of Prestwick’s coat of arms, it featured a wide gleaming buckle, minutely filigreed, that showed a golfer teeing off. Bizarrely, the little golfer on the buckle swung a shaft without a clubhead – an oversight that escaped notice at first. The Belt was lauded as ‘the finest thing ever competed for’. It was so valuable that the winner, who would gain possession of it for a year in lieu of prize money, would have to leave a security deposit before taking it home. Eglinton and Fairlie added spice to the fight by announcing that the tournament would be an annual event, and any player who won it three times in a row would own the Belt forever.
On the clear, windy morning of 17 October 1860, the players gathered in front of the Red Lion Inn, the hotel where Eglinton and Fairlie had founded the Prestwick Golf Club nine years before. Milling about in their lumber jackets, rubbing their hands to keep them warm, Tom Morris, Willie Park, Bob Andrew and five others were told the event’s particulars: they would go around Prestwick’s twelve-hole course three times for a total of thirty-six holes; the rules of the Prestwick Golf Club would apply; the winner by the fewest strokes would keep the Belt for a year; each pair of competitors would be accompanied by a club member who would ensure that there was no cheating. The professionals were required to sign a form affirming that they accepted these conditions. Some were illiterate, so they signed with Xs.
At half-past eleven the golfers walked to the first teeing-ground beside the twelfth hole’s putting-green. About a hundred spectators followed them – gentlemen golfers leading their wives and children, Prestwickers of all classes and occupations. Fairlie scanned the horizon, seeking omens in the weather. Tall, smiling Eglinton stood nearby, his hair flowing in the wind. Nine-year-old Tommy Morris slipped between gentlemen’s jackets and ladies’ frills to get a clear view of his father. As the home-club professional, Tom had the honour of teeing off first. He was favoured to win. After all, he had built the course. He stood a few club-lengths from the twelfth hole’s knee-high flag and waited while his caddie teed up a ball on a lump of wet sand. Tom took a last look at the fairway ahead – his Herculean first hole, well over a quarter of a mile of turf – and began his ticktock swing, the first swing in the history of major-championship golf. At that moment, according to one account, a gust sent his tie up over his chin and momentarily blinded him. He managed to strike the ball soundly, but missed his target. He would struggle with his aim for most of the day.
Bob Andrew played next. The lanky, glum-faced crack Andrew was called the Rook for his beadyeyed resemblance to a crow. He was second choice in the day’s betting. The Rook’s backers were delighted to take him at three-to-one odds. Andrew hit a low, skimming drive, then followed Tom past Goosedubs Swamp along with their caddies and most of the spectators, including the gentleman marker who would keep their scores. Spectators in those days tracked their favourites from hole to hole rather than staying put and letting the golfers pass by. They tromped across putting-greens and often stood in bunkers if that helped them see the putting. No one raked bunkers during play; that would have seemed like cheating.
According to Prestwick’s club history, ‘generally there was a feeling that the championship lay between Morris and Andrew.’ Willie Park, the second pairing’s featured player, disagreed with the general feeling. Park made a slew of side bets, backing himself. He was the bettors’ third choice at Prestwick; the smart money figured that the twenty-seven-year-old’s reckless style would hurt him in a medal-play event in which one wild spell or one unlucky hole could cost him the Belt. But Park got off to a strong start, launching a drive that one writer described as sounding ‘as if it had been shot from some rocket apparatus’.
On Tom’s epic first hole and the long uphill second, Park’s power tipped the balance in his favour. ‘At the commencement of the game the interest was concentrated in Tom Morris and the Rook, who were paired together,’ the Ayr Advertiser reported, ‘but it very soon had become apparent that the struggle for supremacy would be betwixt Park and Tom Morris. Park made the best start, four ahead of Tom in the first two holes. At the end of the first round Park had scored 55, and Tom 58.’ Both men shot 59 in the second round, leaving Park three strokes ahead. By then it was a two-man tournament.
As the final round unfolded, Park made a tidy four at Prestwick’s 400-yard fourth hole, where a stone wall crowded the back of the green. Tom, playing a minute ahead of his rival, kept finding his ball in the bunkers he had shored up with railway ties. ‘At this crisis the excitement waxed most intense,’ one observer noted, adding that, ‘frequenters of the links will also admit that in all their experience of Morris they never saw him come to grief so often.’ But Tom kept grinding out fours and fives, whittling a stroke off Park’s lead, then another.
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