“This was not the first act that affected the links—in 1457, King James II issued an edict that banned the playing of golf.”

The Old Course may have been laid out, but it was not designed in any traditional sense. Naturally firm sand glazed with short grass is inherent to the linksland and ideally suited to a game where one swings a sick at a projectile, attempts to retrieve it, and then hits it again. The earliest bunkers were not built but rather formed, most likely by whipping winds and burrowing animals seeking shelter from said winds. Tees were dollops of sand, and holes were just that: pocks in the turf. And so it was until Old Tom returned home.

orn in St. Andrews in 1821, Tom Morris grew up just up the street from the Old Course and started in the business as an apprentice club and feather ball maker. His mentor was Allan Robertson, widely regarded as the father of professional golf. Robertson’s gift for making golf equipment was outdone only by his ability to make use of it. A hustler who was not above a wee sandbagging to better his odds on a match, Robertson talked a good game and had the featheries to back it up: in 1858 he carded a 79 on the Old Course, acknowledged to be the first round under 80. Robertson also dabbled in course design, fashioning the original layout at Carnoustie in 1850, later upgraded by Morris. Like his boss, Old Tom wielded a mighty brassie. He placed second in the inaugural Open Championship in 1860 and won top honors in 1861, 1862, 1864, and 1867.

B

(His son, Young Tom, matched the old man by reeling off the next four Open titles.) Morris Sr. was living on the west coast of Scotland and working at Prestwick, a course of his own design, when in 1864, the Royal & Ancient hoped to lure him back to St. Andrews to serve as the keeper of the green at the links. The offer: an annual salary of £50, a wheelbarrow, a shovel and a helper two days a week. Old Tom took the job and kept it for nearly forty years before retiring at the tender age of eighty-two. Among his contributions to the links were the addition of the putting greens now played at the first and last holes, the clearing of forests of gorse (no small feat with a shovel), the removal of cattle in favor of sheep (much more efficient grazers and fertilizers), the placing of metal cups in the golf holes, the use of heavy rollers to smooth the greens, and the introduction of the invention that above all others revolutionized the game forever: the lawn mower. Golfers everywhere have Edwin Beard Budding to thank for this brainchild. The Gloucestershire, England native envisioned a contraption that would trap blades of grass between blades of metal, and in 1830 he patented his idea. In partnership with the Phoenix Iron Works, Budding engineered a nineteen-inch cast-iron mower that operated much the same way scissors do. Within a decade, more than a thousand Budding lawn mowers had been sold, forcing flocks of sheep to look for a new line of work.

The development of the railways toward the end of the 19th century also stoked the wildfire popularity of golf. According to the British Golf Museum, 1,500 miles of train tracks crisscrossed Britain in 1837. By 1870 that figure jumped to 15,620 miles, and by 1890 it was up over 20,000. The splendor of St. Andrews, its golf and its beaches, became increasingly accessible from hither and yon. However, with but one golf course that all comers could play for free, congestion fermented into frustration on the links until the town council and the R&A swung a deal to acquire additional linksland adjacent to the Old Course from the laird of Strathtyrum (who, no dummy, wrangled free golf for his family and any visiting friends on all existing and future St. Andrews courses, as well as the prerogative to dig seashells by the seashore

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