![\"Sifford\"](\"http:\/\/theaposition.com\/tombedell\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2020\/09\/Sifford.jpg\")
<\/a>That clearly wasn\u2019t Horton Smith\u2019s goal. The two-time Masters winner (including the first) was the PGA President from 1952 to 1954, when the association administered all the sanctioned tour events and still had its Caucasian-only clause in effect. And which it unaccountably maintained until 1961, long after other major sports had integrated.<\/p>\nStill, some local tournaments merely co-sponsored by the PGA, mainly on the west coast, had begun admitting Black players in spite of the rule. But it was still a struggle.<\/p>\n
In the 1952 Phoenix Open Charlie Sifford, along with boxing champ Joe Louis, players Ted Rhodes, Bill Spiller and two amateur players were told to head out early, before all the white players teed off (or had even arrived).<\/p>\n
When they reached the first green, Sifford wrote in his 1992 memoir, Just Let Me Play<\/em>, \u201c…somebody had been there before us. The cup was full of human shit, and from the looks and smell of it, it hadn\u2019t been too long before we got there that the cup had been filled.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s too soon to know what our current chapter of history is going to look like further down the road. But it seemed like a good time to recall a few of the books that chronicle the hurdles that golfers of color have had to overcome in the game\u2019s long history.<\/p>\n Sifford\u2019s book, co-written with Jim Gullo (British American Publishing, 1992), is subtitled \u201cThe Story of Charlie Sifford, the First Black PGA Golfer,\u201d and so he was, earning a Tour card in 1960 when he was 39.<\/p>\n Sifford\u2019s recognition came late, but he did receive his due\u2014induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame, a Presidential Medal of Freedom bestowed by President Barack Obama, an Honorary Degree from the University of St. Andrews and a host of other awards. Tiger Woods named his son, Charlie, after Sifford.<\/p>\n If Sifford was the path-breaker onto the Tour, the broader history of golf and people of color is told in Forbidden Fairways<\/em> by Calvin Sinnette (Sleeping Bear Press, 1998), Uneven Lies<\/em> by Pete McDaniel (The American Golfer, 2000) and Game of Privilege<\/em> by Lane Demas (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), previously reviewed here<\/a>.<\/p>\n All of these cover much of the same ground, from the earliest days of golf in America right up to the Tiger Woods era, but all differ in approach. Sinnette\u2019s is the most anecdotal and readable; McDaniel\u2019s is the best coffee table book, loaded with photographs; Demas, an historian, takes the most comprehensive historical look. If his prose sometimes veers toward the academic, the volume\u2019s breadth and overall historical context helped Demas snag the USGA\u2019s Herbert Warren Wind Book Award in 2017.<\/p>\n Their participation was not without a threatened boycott from the 35 or so other golfers until USGA president Theodore Havemeyer said the two would play in the tournament even if they were the only two who did play. The rest relented, and Shippen went on to tie for fifth and pocketed $25 for the effort.<\/p>\n If Shippen\u2019s career was an early bright spot, more exclusionary times were to come. With the establishment of the PGA in 1916 an unspoken segregation went into effect; the Caucasian-only clause was put into writing in 1934.<\/p>\n Outside the professional ranks, Blacks had trouble even getting onto golf courses. Demas in particular shows how the desire to play fed into the civil rights movement of the 50\u2019s and 60\u2019s.<\/p>\n Alfred \u201cTup\u201d Holmes brought a golf desegregation suit against the city of Atlanta in 1955 that, Demas argues, was just as critical to societal history as Brown v. Board of Education.<\/p>\n Holmes was as determined to play as Sifford was to compete. While civil rights sit-ins were spreading throughout the south\u2014begun at a Woolworth\u2019s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960\u2014Sifford became the first Black to play in a PGA Tour event in the south in 1961: at the Greater Greensboro Open.<\/p>\n This piece first appeared in the Aug-Sept 2020 issue of\u00a0<\/a><\/em>Golf Oklahoma\u00a0<\/a>in slightly different form.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<\/a>Sifford was a little like Satchel Paige, moving from the Negro Leagues to Major League Baseball when he was a little past his prime. But Sifford won twice on Tour (the 1967 Greater Hartford Open and the 1969 Los Angeles Open), after years of consistent success on the United Golf Association tour, including five straight wins (1952-1956) in the National Negro Open (he won a sixth time in 1960).<\/p>\n<\/a>In each we read about John Shippen, likely the first home-grown U.S. golf pro who along with his friend Oscar Bunn, a Native American of the Shinnecock Tribe, played in the second U.S. Open, at Shinnecock Hills in 1896.<\/p>\n<\/a>One is tempted to call the stories of early pioneers\u2014Spiller, Rhodes, Walter Speedy, Alfred \u201cTup\u201d Holmes, Joe Bartholomew, William Powell\u2014horror stories, but they\u2019re also tales of remarkable perseverance in the face of intolerance.<\/p>\n<\/a>He shot a 68 in the opening round and led the tournament. But playing with state troopers following him around, dealing with hecklers on the course and deflecting threats off it, led to a shaky 75 on the last day, and a fourth place finish. But he\u2019d made history, and six months later the Caucasian-only clause was gone.<\/p>\n