One of the oldest traditions in professional sports started with Tom Morris picking up his wooden-shaft club to make the first drive at Scotland’s Prestwick Golf Club on an October day in 1860.
Legend has it the wind howled so hard for that first British Open it blew the hat off Mr. Morris, the host professional, but barely affected the potency’s of the game’s top players. “We have no hesitation in saying that the game of golf was never seen in such perfection as on the memorable 17th,” The Ayrshire Advertiser reported 149 years ago. The Glasgow Herald, meanwhile, noted the surprising competition at professional golf’s first major championship, where eight golfers battled through three rounds of 12 holes in hopes of winning a red leather belt with ornate silver clasps.
“At the commencement of the game the interest was concentrated in Tom Morris and the Rook, who were paired together,” the Herald reported, using the nickname of Perth golf club’s Bob Andrew, so-named the Rook for his prominent nose. “But it very soon had become apparent that the struggle for supremacy would be betwixt [William] Park and Tom Morris.”
The world’s top golfers returned this week to Scotland’s west coast, where they will tee off in the first round of the 138th Open Championship on Thursday morning at Turnberry, a mere 15 miles south of that first Open. Allowing for time off for wars and a snag in 1871, when the local golf clubs couldn’t raise the necessary funds for a proper first-place trophy, the British Open remains one of the oldest continuously contested professional sporting events.
Certain horse races date to the 1700s. The Oxford-Cambridge rowing regatta, known as the Boat Race, date to the early 19th century. But professional baseball and soccer wouldn’t take shape until the mid-1860s. Wimbeldon, the first modern tennis championship, didn’t begin until 1877. Dr. James Naismith didn’t even invent basketball until 1891.
Indeed, professional sports as they are constituted today in large part began with that first tournament set up exclusively for men who made their living off the game of golf. Amateurs would be invited the following year, but rarely won. By the 1870s the pros would be barnstorming the British Isles for paychecks.
“You’ve got this gazillion-dollar industry, and in many ways you can trace it all back to right there on that day,” said Kevin Cook, author of “Tommy’s Honor,” a book about the early years of the British Open, Old Tom Morris, and his son, Young Tom.
Like nearly everything else in modern golf, from course architecture, to greenskeeping, to the number of holes in a round, the story of the British Open begins with a certain poorly educated club pro with a scraggly beard. Born in St. Andrews in 1821, Mr. Morris came to Prestwick in 1851 to become the “Keeper of the Green, Ball and Club Maker,” as well as the chief caddie for the 57 members who founded the club on the firth of Clyde.
“It was through him that they sent out the invitations” to a dozen golf clubs throughout England and Scotland, said Ian Bunch, secretary of Prestwick. The invites requested the clubs send no more than three of their so-called “crack players.” These were uneducated common folk who managed the golf courses but weren’t allowed in the clubhouses. Yet they were also the pride of the gentlemen who ran the establishments, and relished betting on their challenge matches. (“As might have been anticipated, a top deal of money changed hands on the event,” the Ayrshire Advertiser wrote of the first Open).
According to golf historians, Mr. Morris and some of Prestwick’s leading members wanted to determine the best of the crack players and decided a stroke-play tournament would be the most effective—and quickest—way to do it. Prestwick’s members put up ₤25 to purchase the Challenge Belt, made of red Morrocan leather with the silver clasps for first prize. They decided that if any player won the tournament and the belt three consecutive years, he could keep it. Cash purses would come later. The Claret Jug was purchased for ₤30 in 1872 to replace the belt Young Tom Morris took home after his third consecutive win in 1870.
Fearing the professionals wouldn’t have the proper clothes for a game played by gentlemen in coats and ties, the members also picked up checkered lumberjack jackets for the players, so they would appear respectable on the links.
With the attire and the prize set, the eight players gathered on the first hole near midday on Oct. 17, 1860, and heralded golf’s modern era in front of a few hundred spectators who followed them around the course and stood in the bunkers to watch them putt. There were no golf bags. The players carried their “play club,” known today as a driver, and their various irons, such as their “cleeks” and “rutirons,” under their arms.
There were no tee boxes. Each hole began a few feet from where the last one ended. And there were no tees. The players took fistfulls of wet sand to build a little hill to elevate their balls made of gutta percha, a material from the rubbery dried sap of sapodilla trees. It was over, all 36 holes, by late afternoon, with Mr. Park of Musselburgh scoring the upset with a 174, two better than Mr. Morris.
“It’s the pivotal period in the professional game,” Mr. Cook said of the the British Open’s first years. “Sport was not very highly thought of. It was something for rich gentlemen to bet on and it grew largely because the national game of Scotland was starting to become bigger and bigger.”
Plenty has changed since then, but the initial spirit and set-up of the British Open remain. Prestwick’s remodelled course includes three holes that are virtually the same as they were a century and a half ago. The old No. 2 is now the 17th, the old No. 5 is now the 13th, and the old No. 4 in now the third.
The club shares a boundary with Royal Troon Golf Club, site of the Championship in 2004, and on Sunday night, when the field produces its next champion, he will lift a Claret Jug.
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