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bullish frame. His clubs had quirky names—his flat-bladed bunker iron, a forerunner of the sand wedge, was called the Frying Pan; another club was the Doctor; another was Sir David Baird, named for the R& A medalist who gave it to him. He held them all high on the handle, a fingerygrip that helped him flip the clubface open or closed at the last instant. No golfer had better touch, or more tricks.
    Tom called Allan “the cunningest player.” It was a polite way of saying that he was a hustler. If an opponent had the honor in a singles match, Allan would mutter aloud about the wind even if there was no wind. If Allan had the honor he might pretend to swing all-out, grunting for effect, but hold off a bit at impact so that his ball stopped just short of a bunker. The opponent, believing the trap was out of range, would drive straight into it—and end up smiling as Allan praised his Herculean power. When teamed with a weak club member in an alternate-shot foursomes match, Allan had other ways to work the angles: If his partner faced a long carry over a hazard, he would make the man swallow his pride and putt their ball to the hazard’s brink, making Allan’s next shot easier. Sometimes he told a partner to swing and miss on purpose. “Well done, sir,” he’d say, then step up and hit the ball past all trouble to the flag.
    Some of his tactics indulged a bent for mischief. According to Stewart Hackney’s Bygone Days on the Old Course , Allan liked to hoodwink one half-blind R& A member: “He used for fun to plant a green hairpin secretly in front of the hole, and gloat over the poor old fellow’s perplexity and dismay.” He also displayed a schadenfreude few golfers admit to: “It was amusing to see Allan chuckle when an opponent was bunkered. ‘It appeals to the higher feelings of humanity to see your rival in a bunker,’ he used to say. ‘Such a calamity could be devoutly wished.” Allan may have lacked the quality of mercy, but he knew his Shakespeare well enough to paraphrase Hamlet.
    As Allan’s journeyman, Tom was less than a junior partner but better than a cousin, having long since surpassed Lang Willie at work by being more efficient and much easier to wake up in the morning. It was the same on the links, where Lang Willie played but was so loosely strung together that his golf swing reminded Tom of a man falling down stairs. Lang Willie knew he was no golfer. He joked that when he swung, his elbows kept trying to switch places with his knees. Meanwhile Tom kept improving. By the time he turned twenty, Tom was the second-best golfer in St. Andrews. After years of getting strokes from Allan—nine strokes at first, then six, four, and finally two—they played even. In 1842, when club members put up a few pounds to sponsor a tournament for the caddies (all caddies but Allan, barred because he was thought to be unbeatable), Tom took home the purse.
    Allan Robertson became the town’s hero in 1843, when he beat Willie Dunn, the long-hitting champion from Musselburgh. The match was a novel idea: more than a week of single combat between the best players from towns whose golfers couldn’t stand each other. Musselburgh was the golf hub of the south side of the Firth of Forth, the Edinburgh side, while St. Andrews was the game’s cradle and Robertson his hometown’s hero. With grit, clutch putting, and a trick or two, Allan edged Dunn over twenty rounds while dozens of bettors, newspaper reporters, and other spectators walked along with the players. The match moved a St. Andrews poet to write, “Ten days they were fighting, ten days, ten days/ Complete at their weapons, always, always/With club, cleek and putter, my Muse cannot utter/A millionth part of their praise, their praise!”
    It was in this heady time that Tom won his first match against Allan. They played for a short-waisted red jacket offered as a prize by an R&A member. There were no spectators or reporters that day, but Tom felt like