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Seeing few black players at the top levels, the sport banks on youth programs.
By BRUCE LOWITT
© St. Petersburg Times, published July 9, 2000
Professional golf at the premier level remains as white today as it was half a century ago, whiter even than a generation ago, when black players Calvin Peete, Lee Elder, Pete Brown, Jim Dent and Charlie Sifford were on the PGA Tour.
Today there is Tiger Woods.
"In some ways, golf is where football, basketball and baseball were 50, 60 years ago, when the color barriers were coming down -- or at least it's still perceived that way," said Bill Dickey, founder and president of the National Minority Junior Golf Scholarship Association.
And headed in the wrong direction, Sifford wrote two years ago in Sports Illustrated Golf Plus:
"I doubt we'll see many more blacks on the Tour any time soon because so much is working against them. Caddying used to give black kids a way into the game, but now golf carts have taken over. There used to be affordable, accessible public courses, but today's public courses are crowded and expensive. There was a black tour, the United Golf Association, the proving ground for players like Lee Elder and me, but the UGA is gone. Things are going backward, and it disappoints the hell out of me."
The trickle of desegregation that began with Kenny Washington and Woody Strode in the NFL, Earl Lloyd, Charles Cooper and Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton in the NBA, and Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby in major-league baseball soon became a deluge.
Inroads continue to be made in the mostly Caucasian NHL, which has about two dozen black players on its rosters.
And in golf there is Woods, the self-described "Cablinasian" whose father is black and mother is Thai. And there is LaRee Sugg, the lone black player on the LPGA circuit.
"The thing is, Tiger and myself slipped through the cracks," Sugg told the Dayton Daily News. "We're exceptions. We were groomed for this. We were both fortunate that our parents played golf, that they recognized our talent and gave us the kind of opportunities we needed."
The Senior PGA Tour has Sifford, Elder, Dent, Peete, Walter Morgan, Jim Thorpe and Bobby Stroble. That brings the total number of black players on the three major tours to nine. The men's and women's golf versions of baseball's top minor leagues have one black player each -- Lewis Chitengwa on the PGA's Buy.com Tour and Nakia Davis playing sporadically on the LPGA's Futures Tour.
"I'm not proud of the fact that right now, on all three tours, there are fewer black players than there are in the NHL," LPGA commissioner Ty Votaw said. "I think that at the top of the game, ... we do have a responsibility, and we've done that, to take the initiative with programs (to attract and teach minority youngsters). It also takes efforts on a lot of different people's parts at the grass-roots level."
PGA commissioner Tim Finchem said that a variety of programs opening doors for minorities "means gradually, the sport, from a participation standpoint -- and the tour itself -- will gradually look like the rest of America."
"We have grown to the point that we are in a much better position to compete with other sports for the better athletes," Finchem said. "The kid who's a pretty good second baseman and a pretty good golfer and is looking at which sport to concentrate on -- and he's looking at those multiyear guaranteed contracts in major-league baseball -- five or six years ago he wasn't paying any attention to golf. That's starting to change."
Before Dwight Eisenhower, before Arnold Palmer, golf was almost exclusively for the elite. Ike was known as much for his love of the game as for virtually anything he did during his presidency. Palmer was the everyman. Eisenhower was the former general. Arnie assembled an army.
In the 1950s they helped escort golf out of the country club and turn it into a game for the masses.
The white masses.
Blacks then were as unwelcome on country-club courses (except as caddies, groundskeepers and servants) as they were in much of the rest of America.
In the 1940s and '50s, Ted Rhodes won 150 United Golf Association tournaments, the sport's version of baseball's Negro Leagues. He had learned the game as a 12-year-old caddy, the way many youngsters -- black and white -- learned it then. As a 34-year-old pro in 1948, Rhodes and several other golfers sued the PGA, alleging civil rights violations because its rules contained a whites-only clause.
The PGA dodged this by changing its tournaments to an invitation-only format, continuing to exclude blacks by leaving the decision to invite them up to tournament sponsors. The PGA's "Caucasian clause" was not eliminated until 1961. As recently as 1990, Shoal Creek Country Club, then an all-white club in Birmingham, Ala., chosen to host the PGA Championship, ignited a firestorm when its founder said the club would not be pressured into accepting blacks as members. (It quickly changed its attitude, and the PGA held its championship there).
Racism still exists.
Andia Winslow, 17, is a blossoming black golfer from suburban Seattle, winner of the junior division of the Washington State Women's Public Links championship. Her father is a physician, her mother the diversity coordinator at University Prep, the private school Andia attended. Yale recruited her to play golf. She will enter this year on an academic scholarship. (Ivy League schools do not offer athletic scholarships.)
"Last fall, I was playing in an American Junior Golf Association tournament in Arizona," she told the Seattle Times, "and kids at the registration table asked, "Do you play golf?' Their tone was as if I had been looking for a basketball tournament and got lost."
At a tournament in Georgia, Winslow said, an aunt was watching her play and "the father of the girl I was playing walked up to her and said, "It's unfortunate the kind of people Tiger Woods has attracted to the game, don't you think?' Then he smiled and walked away."
On July 16, 1952, when it was announced that Rhodes would be the first black man to compete for the Seagram Golf Cup (then the Canadian Open trophy), the Winnipeg Free Press quoted him as saying: "Golf is catching on fast among the Negroes. It's new to them, so naturally there's (sic) only about four in the whole country who have developed sufficiently to play tournament golf."
When Woods followed his explosive 1996 professional debut by running away with the 1997 Masters, commentators predicted Tigermania would reach into the inner city and pull countless black youngsters into golf.
It hasn't turned out that way.
Avenues do exist for youths who want to become the next Tiger Woods or LaRee Sugg.
The World Golf Foundation's First Tee program is geared toward suburban youngsters who have difficulty getting access to the game because of geography or economics. Hillsborough County's Babe Zaharias, Rocky Point and Rogers Park municipal courses are participants.
Urban Junior Golf in Tampa works with youth agencies to expose youngsters to the sport and make it more affordable for them.
The National Minority Golf Foundation matches talented young minority golfers with junior programs and golf-related business and scholarship information.
The National Minority Junior Golf Scholarship Association awards college scholarships.
The LPGA Urban Youth Golf Program provides year-round extended instruction and opportunities for inner-city youths in Los Angeles; Portland, Ore.; Detroit; Atlantic City; and Wilmington, Del. More sites are planned.
The Multicultural Golf Association of America has a junior program that makes golf available and accessible to inner-city youngsters and children at risk. It hopes to establish a national network for inner-city clinics.
The Tiger Woods Foundation conducts children's clinics by Woods, raises money to advance the sport in the black community, funds scholarships and promotes parental responsibility.
Many national organizations, such as the American Junior Golf Association, have programs to attract and assist blacks, Hispanics, American Indians and other minorities.
Having these resources and using them are different things.
According to the National Golf Foundation, the United States has 26.4-million golfers. The percentage of minority players has remained at about 3.3 percent since 1991, in juniors (ages 12-17) and all golfers (12 and up). The overall number of junior players dropped from 2.4-million in 1997 to 2-million last year.
"I've seen a slight increase here and there," said Mike Cooper, director of Urban Junior Golf, "but it's definitely not widespread. It's simply pockets (of increased participation by blacks). ... Golf is not a core sport in the inner city. I don't know if it ever will be in those neighborhoods. It doesn't roll off the tongue, "Hey, let's go play golf.' You don't hear that in neighborhoods where African-Americans grow up as much as you'd hear, "Hey, let's go shoot some hoops.' "
Golf is perceived as a sport for the wealthy. The perception is close to reality.
Clubs, a bag in which to put them, a (fee-charging) place to hit balls in practice or a match, special shoes -- all are necessities for anyone who takes the game seriously. It adds up to a lot more than the cost of scaring up a pickup game of baseball, basketball or football.
"You need more than ability. You also need financial support," Winslow, the junior golfer, said. "Traveling to tournaments to be ranked, playing in tournaments to gain tournament skills, you need money for all of that, and a lot of people, African-Americans and others, don't have it. ... They say, "Tiger's bringing all these people into the game.' That's very good. But once they're into the game, where do they go after they're at the beginning level?"
Cooper said his Urban Junior Golf and other programs run into the hurdle of "charging $400 for a driver, $400 for a putter. So one side is saying, "We're making it affordable,' and the other side is saying, "Even if you get interested, you can't get the equipment for less than $1,500.' ... It's still a sport whose professionals are predominantly country-clubbers."
Minority youngsters who do have the resources and talent, even those playing for as long as a decade, probably are still a long way from making it as touring pros, said Barbara Douglas, president of the National Minority Golf Foundation.
"Seeing more minority people on the PGA or LPGA tours, or even on an American Junior Golf Association tour, is not going to happen overnight," she said. "You don't start playing golf as a teenager and wake up one morning and you're a star ready for the tour. It takes years of working, developing, grooming."
Elder, honored in April at the Masters on the 25th anniversary of him becoming the first black to compete in the tournament, said then that he was dismayed by the lack of black players on the PGA Tour. "I would love to see more here today. But it just so happens that we don't have any that are in a position to qualify here. ... I think it's going to take some time."
Still, Cooper said, Woods has at least made playing golf more "acceptable and realistic" to the black community. "They see Tiger playing and think, "Okay, maybe I do want to try this,' " he said. "Whereas before Tiger, it mostly wasn't even considered an option. ... I've seen it turn almost into a cool thing to do."