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Starred Review The tale of Tom Morris, winner of golf's first Open Championship in Scotland in 1860, and his son, Tommy Morris, who won the Open three years in a row, is not only one of sport's great stories but also a compelling saga of near-Homeric proportions. Like Mark Frost in The Greatest Game Ever Played (2002), about Francis Quimet's unlikely triumph in the 1913 U.S. Open, Cook tells the story of Tom Sr and Tom Jr. with his eyes on multiple balls: golf history, personal drama, and the larger societal concerns that the young game reflected. The son of a weaver and a maid, Tom Morris went from apprentice golf-ball maker to the Grand Old Man of St. Andrews, the home of golf. Along the way, he won the Open Championship four times and fathered a son, known as Young Tom, who broke all his father's records yet died in his twenties at the height of his fame and only a few months after his wife died in childbirth. Golf history claims Young Tom died of a broken heart, and while Cook sets the record straight on that point, the heartbreaking essence of the story will not be reduced to pulmonary embolisms. Beyond telling a tragic story of supreme athletic accomplishment and premature death, Cook shows how golf, though quickly claimed by the aristocracy, had its roots in the working classes. Golf history at its absolute best. Bill Ott
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Review
Tommy's Honor is a book filled with stylish writing and the best kind of nostalgia. It tells as much about the game of life as the game of golf-it's moving, engaging, and deeply satisfying. The best of human values rise up out of its stories of fathers and sons, wives and children, and games of honor and pathos. -- _Thomas Moore, author of _Dark Nights of the Soul
A stirring tale of tragedy, triumph, faith and perseverance. Kevin Cook reveals Old Tom Morris as golf’s first hero, a paragon who worked to make St. Andrews the symbol of the game’s enduring greatness. Every golfer should read Tommy’s Honor. -- Ben Crenshaw, Two-Time Masters Winner
A wonderful story of Scottish golf history. -- Pete Dye, world-renowned course architect
Among the countless graces bestowed on the game of golf, none surpass its fostering by the Morrises during the years of its modern birth at St. Andrews. Old Tom and Young Tom will always be intimately and wondrously present at the Course. Tommy’s Honor brings them closer than ever before, with the joy, the heartache, the tears, and the pride we feel for them. -- _Michael Murphy, author of _Golf in the Kingdom
The true and heartbreaking story of Old and Young Tom Morris has been a tale cloaked in too much mysticism and romance—until now. Tommy’s Honor puts real flesh on the bones of two fascinating men whose triumphs and tragedies helped shape the game we know and love today. It’s a fine and elegiac story you won’t soon forget. -- _JamesDodson, author of _Final Rounds