Teeing off: history of blacks in golf - Special Section: 1994 Black Enterprise/Pepsi-Cola Golf and Tennis Challenge

Black Enterprise, Sept, 1994

On a break from the PGA Senior Tour to rest an ailing back, one of golf's greatest all-time talents shared some thoughts about the game and life.

"I look at it as a blessing," said Calvin Peete, on his God-given abilities to hit a little white ball for a living." But it just goes to show what a person can do if he asserts himself. No matter how big the foe may be, the foe will fall if you have determination."

Peete's inspirational words can easily take on double meaning. Golf is a metaphor for life, where good and bad lies don't always even out. For all his amazing success (he never picked up a golf club until the age of 23!), Peete's message could well mirror the story of African-Americans and golf--a rich and remarkable tradition in which he plays a major role.

Ever since it arrived from Scotland in the late 19th century, golf has existed in large part as the exclusive province of white America. Yet over that same period of time, a great number of black golfers have overcome racial prejudice to assimilate the game for themselves. From their ranks, a unique legacy of African-American sport would emerge.

Charlie Sifford, who spent the better part of a distinguished career battling the game's elitist conventions; Lee Elder, who's pocketed over $2,000,000 in purses and who broke the color barrier at The Masters at Augusta, Ga. along the way; Cal Peete, who, despite the late start, dominated the professional ranks in the early 1980s--these are the big names.

But there are scores of others. Teddy Rhodes, died in relative obscurity at age 53 after winning over 150 tournaments on the unofficial black tours, under the aegis of the United Golfers Association, a loosely formed federation of black golfers, and golf clubs, formed by black doctors in the 1920s in Stowe, Mass. (golf's equivalent to baseball's Negro Leagues). Bill Spiller, with Rhodes, sued the PGA for the right to play. Jim Dent has spent the last few decades out-driving Jack Nicklaus (and everybody else). There was tennis great Althea Gibson, and Renee Powell--the only black woman ever to play on the LPGA Tour. Jim Thorpe is currently the only African-American on the PGA Tour. In no other sport does the title of Arthur Ashe's celebrated history of black athletes, A Hard Road to Glory, take on such poignancy.

"You could back a million people up against the wall, white or black," said Sifford recently. "Nobody would have gone through what I did--just to be a golfer."

Now 71, super-fit, and still competing on the Senior Tour, the cigar-chomping Sifford endured random abuse to play the game he loves. In the face of harassment, discrimination, and physical threats, he defiantly strode restricted fairways for others to follow. After winning five consecutive National Negro Championships (1952-1956), he bridged two eras by becoming the first black to win a predominately white event, the Long Beach Open in 1957. He was also the first to win a major PGA event--the Hartford Open in 1967. Sifford's efforts are often credited with ushering in "open golf" and as such are frequently paralleled with those of Jackie Robinson, but he rejects the comparison, due to the recent scarcity of black golfers on the PGA Tour. "I was just strong enough to fight 'em and stay out here with 'em," he said. "My attitude was, give me a rock and a nail, and I'll beat you at your own game."

That attitude was born of an era when black golfers blossomed in the caddie yards of all-white country clubs. When they weren't sneaking on to poach a few holes in near-darkness, they swung makeshift irons towards branches stuck in the ground, dedicating themselves to mastering the game. (Winston Churchill, who complained of "clubs ill-designed to suit the purpose" obviously never compared notes with Walter Stewart, a black Baltimore professional who once fondly reminisced of a childhood spent hitting walnuts with coat-hangers strung together.)

"I found out I could smack a golf ball and make it go straight and far," wrote Sifford in his autobiography, Just Let Me Play. "And once I learned that, nothing was going to stop me from playing the game and getting better."

The earliest days of black golf actually stretch back several decades before Sifford and Rhodes barnstormed golf's hard-scrabble "neckbone circuit" in the '40s and '50s. In 1899, Dr. George F. Grant, a black Boston dentist and Harvard graduate, patented the first tee. (Prior to that, balls were driven off little mounds of sand.) Grant's ingenuity was preceded by the unsung heroics of John Shippen, a black man who taught golf at Shinnecock golf course in Long Island, NY, in the 1890s and who is acknowledged by golf historians to be the country's first professional.

In 1896, Shippen competed in the first of his five U.S. Opens, an event that was marred by racism. At the last minute, the mostly-foreign white entrants threatened to boycott the tournament if Shippen and Oscar Bunn (a Shinnecock Native American) were allowed to enter. But when United States Golf Association president Theodore Havermyer informed them that "we are going to play this thing today even if Shippen and Bunn are the only people in it," the group grudgingly played on.