The £25 belt whose small print cancelled the 1871 Open

Twenty-five pounds bought Prestwick Golf Club the prize for its first professional championship. It was a belt of red morocco leather with a silver buckle and silver panels showing golfing scenes, made by the Edinburgh silversmiths James & Walter Marshall. The competition was played on Wednesday 17 October 1860 and is counted as the first Open. Under its conditions, a player who won it three years in succession would keep it.

Prestwick, 17 October 1860

The championship was meant to find a successor to Allan Robertson, the St Andrews professional regarded as the finest player in Scotland, who had died the year before. Clubs in Scotland and England were invited to send up to three of their best professionals. Each had to bring a certificate of respectability from his club. Eight played.

They played three rounds of Prestwick’s 12-hole, 3,799-yard links in one day. The first hole, Back of Cardinal, was 578 yards. Tom Morris, Prestwick’s Keeper of the Green and later known as Old Tom, hit the first tee shot. Willie Park of Musselburgh led after the first round and won with 55, 59 and 60 for 174. The R&A’s history of the championship says he holed from 30 feet on the last green. Morris finished two behind. Park took the belt; there was no prize money.

Seven wins in eight years

Park and Morris won seven of the first eight Opens between them: Park in 1860, 1863 and 1866; Morris in 1861, 1862, 1864 and 1867. Andrew Strath, in 1865, was the only other winner. Neither won three in a row. Morris came closest, winning in 1861 and 1862, before Park took the belt back in 1863.

In 1861 the committee decided, the evening before play, that the event should be “open to all the world”, and amateurs were admitted. Prize money was introduced in 1863: £5 for second, £3 for third and £2 for fourth, but nothing for the winner. Morris’s win in 1864 came with £6 in cash, according to Prestwick’s timeline. Official scorecards were used for the first time in 1865, the year his son, Tom Morris Jnr, known as Young Tom, played his first Open, aged 14.

Young Tom Morris wearing the Challenge Belt, about 1873. Photo: James Hardie / Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Young Tom’s three

Young Tom won in 1868, aged 17 years and 156 days, and remains the youngest Open champion. In 1869 he made the championship’s first hole-in-one, at the 8th, and won again. In 1870 he played the 578-yard 1st in three: after two shots he was 200 yards short of a blind green, and his third carried the Cardinal bunker, hit the flagstick and dropped in. He went round in 47, 51 and 51 for 149 and a 12-shot win. His winning margins across the three championships added up to 26 strokes.

Prestwick’s timeline records that Young Tom “becomes the permanent holder of the Challenge Belt”.

No Open in 1871

With no trophy left to play for, there was no Open in 1871. It returned in 1872, run jointly by Prestwick, the R&A and the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, who shared the £30 cost of a silver claret jug. The jug was not ready in time. Young Tom won the 1872 Open at Prestwick, his fourth in a row, and Prestwick’s timeline records that he was given a gold medal instead. Tom Kidd, the 1873 champion at St Andrews, was the first player presented with the Claret Jug.

Young Tom died on Christmas Day 1875, aged 24, a few months after his wife and baby died in childbirth. The belt passed to his father, and the R&A took possession of it after Old Tom died in 1908. It is on display in the R&A Clubhouse; replicas are at the golf museum in St Andrews and in the Cardinal Room of the Prestwick clubhouse. A stone cairn west of the clubhouse marks where Old Tom hit the first tee shot on 17 October 1860.

Sources

• The Open: 1st Open, Prestwick 1860
• The Open: The story of the 1st Open on its 158th birthday
• The Open: Decades of The Open, the 1860s
• The Open: 1870, Prestwick
• The Open: Young Tom Morris profile
• Prestwick Golf Club: interactive timeline
• Prestwick Golf Club: 1861–1863
• World Golf Hall of Fame: Before the Claret Jug, there was the Challenge Belt
• Scottish Golf History: Prestwick, 1851
• Wikipedia: 1860 Open Championship
• Wikipedia: Challenge Belt