“They may toll the bells and shut up their shops at St. Andrews, for their greatest is gone,” somebody said when he died. He had golfed all his life from the time when he first knew that he was alive. His father and grandfather were golfers, and the first things that he played with as a child were golf clubs that were made for him.
Surely we must account old Tom Morris as one of the wonders of the sporting world, as he is indubitably in that relation to the world of golf. How many times have we heard that the light of that long and happy life was flickering towards its extinction, but the rumour has no sooner been spread than Tom comes forward in some activity to give it full denial. Long may he continue to do so; every time that we hear he is sick upon his bed may a telegram come to us from St. Andrews to say that again he is sitting in the chair outside his shop, watching the couples as they come forward in their turn to hole out on that beloved eighteenth putting green, which, with the clubhouse of the Royal and Ancient beyond it, has during recent times comprised almost the entire circle of his daily vision. Each time I go to St. Andrews I find him still cheery, and indeed it seems to me a little cheerier than the last time that I saw him taking the sun in his chair. There is the cheery respectful greeting and the felicitous remark that it is “a gran’ day for a roond,” and in the next moment he turns his head to mutter a grumble towards those “boys,” who are idling away a few spare minutes outside Forgan’s shop, and are giving evidence of the freshness of the life that is in them, to which Tom, a stickler for decorum in all connected with golf, however humbly or indirectly, demurs. Like most others who are running up the score of their life’s round towards the ninety mark, he is prone to tell you that times have much changed, and that the boys were more sedate in the days when he was one of them. That is as it may be. But despite all the antics of the boys, and the little irritations that they give to old Tom, he remains a cheery Tom to the last, just as he has always been. His life throughout has been imbued with an optimism which has always been the most attractive feature of his character. Every good golfer is an optimist. I deny that it is possible to be a good golfer in the best sense and not be an out-and-out optimist.