Tommys Honor [Hardcover]

If you're a golf history nut, or just interested in late 1800's-early 1900's, you'll love this book. If you just like to know more about the great game of golf, this is your book. Kevin Cook brings the world of St. Andrews and Scotland to life. You can just about smell the oil lamps burning on the streets or the low tide blowing in from the North Sea. Oh, and the history of Tom Morris and his son, Tommy, is just amazing. I felt like I was reading a novel but is was true! If you love golf or know someone that loves the game you must get this book. It's a classic.

Kevin Cook's poignant biography of the Morrises brings Tom and Tommy alive for his readers. It's much more than a story of their lives. It's about fathers and sons, families, social classes, golf, and the birth of the touring golf professional.

Tom's story gives us a keen insight into golf and a golfer's life in the second half of the 19th century. Many aspects of golf have changed over the years and, surprisingly, many have remained exactly as they were 150 years ago.

The reason for the seemingly strange title is revealed in the final sentence of the book.

This book should be on every golfer's Best-Sellers list.

If I were to recommend a single book to read about the famous Morris family, it would be Kevin Cook's Tommy's Honor: The Story of Old Tom Morris and Young Tom Morris, Golf's Founding Father and Son. Many of us know the familiar history of these men - of Old Tom's falling out with famous ball maker and player Allan Robertson, and of Young Tom dying of a broken heart on Christmas Day. This book goes beyond that and reveals fascinating layers of their lives previously unexamined.

This work is a wonderfully crafted narrative along the lines of Mark Frost's The Greatest Game Ever Played. It draws on facts gleaned from numerous sources, including contemporary newspaper accounts, and creates a compelling story of father and son. We are taken inside their lives in equal measure. We can feel the cold water of St. Andrews Bay as Old Tom goes for his morning swim, we are inside Allan Robertson's kitchen as Tom makes feathery balls for him. We witness his big money matches, we move with Tom, wife Nancy and baby Tommy to Prestwick, we win Opens with him and then return to St. Andrews and follow Young Tom's ascendency to golf immortality.

The enduring impact Old Tom had as Keeper of the Green at St. Andrews and his lasting legacy on the game of golf is developed quite thoroughly. Cook even touches on the class differences between Tom and the men of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews he served. Old Tom is portrayed as a man with great dedication to his family and profession. Beyond that, he also possessed a steady, dignified grace. The following passages are illustrative of both Cook's scholarship and expressive style:

"For greens other than the one at the wet High Hole he used clay pipes as hole liners. The pipes, made in nearby Kincaple, happened to be four and a quarter inches in diameter. Due to a quirk of the Kincaple brickworks, four and a half inches became the standard diameter of the cup on every green. While Tom mended the course, his son hit balls. Tommy's swing would be imitated by a generation of golfers who saw themselves as his apostles."

"Watching his father kneel to tee up another man's ball set Tommy's teeth on edge. Tom, unbothered, said there was an art to making a sand tee just the right height for a golfer's swing, and applying a drop of spit to the back of the ball so that a few grains of sand stuck to it, adding backspin when it landed. There was no shame in kneeling, he said. Had not our Savior told his followers to render unto Caesar? After all, Tom said, it was not his immortal soul that bent, only his knee."

Cook's research is impressive and thorough, as he weaves together such diverse subjects as ball and club making with the development of the Old Course itself and the players who challenged the Morris's for golfing supremacy. This is done seamlessly and leaves the reader wanting to learn more about these wonderful characters.

Of special interest are new insights concerning Tommy's wife Margaret Drinnen, a "woman with a past," as the Victorian standards of the day would have labeled her. She bore an illegitimate child before moving to St. Andrews and marrying Young Tom. Less than a year later she died during childbirth, and Tommy tragically succumbed three months later of a pulmonary embolism. His early death has frozen in time our romanticized image of him.

Old Tom Morris carried on, survivor that he was. As he once said late in life, "I've had my troubles and my trials...and with the help of my God and of golf, I've gotten through somehow or another." His beloved wife Nancy, already an invalid, died just seventeen days after Tommy. Son Jack, who had been born with deformed legs, died in 1893; daughter Elizabeth passed away suddenly in 1898; and his son Jamie in 1906. Tom survived them all.

Cook has done a great service with this book. One can read Tulloch's Life of Tom Morris and come away with a better knowledge of the lives of Old and Young Tom, but it is a dry book written a century ago. Like David Joy's Scrapbook of Old Tom Morris (2001), Tommy's Honor offers a fresh look at a familiar subject.

Bob Furgeson, British Open champion (1880-82) once said that nerve, enthusiasm, and practice were the three essentials to succeed in golf. But to be great requires the gift. Tommy Morris had a gift for golf, and Kevin Cook has helped us understand the nature of that gift and the human and spiritual elements that fostered it.

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