Time Capsule

The struggle for great gains on America’s fairways.

by Naadu Blankson-Seck
Photo by Amy Graves, wireimages.com

Large numbers of African Americans had begun to leave the south to populate the northeast and Midwest, and Chicago seemed to draw a pocket of enthusiasts ready to organize their play. In the fall of 1915, what may be the first Negro national Golf Tournament was played in Chicago’s Marquette Park Golf Course, but some time would pass before another tournament would be held. Meanwhile, tennis athletes, apparently similarly motivated, formed the American Tennis Association in 1916.

In 1925, their duffing counterparts would eventually form the United States Colored Golf Association (which would become the United Golf Association) the nation’s only African American golf association. The UGA began some forty years after the first Negro baseball league was founded.
Divisions are inherent to the history of African American people—be they based on job position, literacy, or even skin tone—and become particularly unwieldy when they intersect. The perception of golf as solely a man’s game isn’t complete fiction; like voting, defending this country, and even literacy, golf became co-ed on demand. In 1936, the wife of a prominent Washington D.C. physician called a meeting of women who would form the Wake Robin Golf Club, one of the first Black women’s clubs in America, and touch off similar efforts in Baltimore, Atlantic City, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York. Wake Robin happened on the part of women not included in their husbands’ group, the Royal Golf Club. As with their white counterparts, the game remained most accessible to persons like the doctor’s wife, who had time and money to spend on the courses perfecting their games. Though the game had clearly developed a significant following among African Americans, the sport was not one in which women in the community who either worked or cared for children full-time would partake.

Women not in Harris’ position were left to sheer resourcefulness if they were to make any headway into the game. Ironically, the position of caddy, thrown as a bone to excluded men as their only way onto exclusive grounds, was not available to any women. If race hindered phenoms like Robinson, Bill Spiller, and Charlie Sifford, the double blight of a socially undesirable race and gender was a potential mountain. Ironically, though developed as an solution to discrimination, the UGA adopted the PGA’s ostracist attitude towards women, who were to play as early as 1930, but refused as members until 1939. By that time, of the 5,209 golf facilities in the country, over 3,000 were private, 1,200 were daily-fee, and some 700 were municipally owned. Of the lot, fewer than 20 would admit African Americans, who at the time could only hope to gain access to municipal courses.

In 1895 the USGA, which unlike the PGA never had exclusionary language in its constitution, hosted its first women’s amateur championship. Ann Gregory, who had a formidable game, would integrate the amateur tournament a mere 61 years later. “Women have been present in golf for more than 100 years,” notes Rhonda Glenn, author and USGA manager of communications. “During that time I think women’s amateur golf probably kept pace with status of women in the country.”

Which women? At the 1963 open in Massachusetts, Gregory, by then a veteran of the tournament, was in the halls of the inn where the athletes stayed when Polly Riley, a fellow amateur and the first winner of the LPGA Tournament, saw Gregory dressed in her golf whites and called out to her—and made a less than polite request for room service. She had never even considered that Gregory was other than staff help. Moments later, when Gregory handed Riley a bunch of coat hangers with a smile, the latter saw Gregory’s golf gear and was embarrassed at her mistake. For Gregory, Riley’s assumptions were but one in a series of unfortunate events.

In 1959, Gregory, who was always eager to tee off, was playing in a championship at the Congressional Country Club in Maryland at the same time as a UGA event in Washington, D.C., and the athlete managed to anger people at both events—one for her attendance and the other for her absence. The country club management showed its displeasure by barring her from the players’ dinner on the eve of the championship.

“I told [USGA executive director] Joe Dey it was no big deal,” she would later explain. “I said, ‘I realize the money I paid to enter the tournament didn’t buy stock in the clubhouse. I’ll eat me a hamburger and just be as happy as a lark, waiting on tee number one.”

“Racism works best when you let it affect your mind. It was better for me to remember that the flaw was in the racist, not in myself. For all the ugliness, I’ve gotten nice things three times over. I can’t think ugly of anybody,” she told later Glenn at the 1988 US Senior Women’s Amateur.
Like Gregory, tennis pro Althea Gibson found her foray into the game to be no walk in the park either. After dominating the tennis court, cutting a jazz record, touring with the Harlem Globetrotters for a bit, and appearing on television and film, she tried her hand at golf. In a scant few years, she was the first African American on the LPGA tour, and on more than one occasion, she had to change her gear in her car because she wasn’t allowed in the clubhouses for too many reasons. Renee Powell, the second African American to make the PGA tour (and currently the only one), said of Gibson’s plight in 1967 that “lots of tournaments are called invitationals, [which meant] they could invite everybody on the tour or not invite anybody they didn’t want to. And they didn’t have to invite Althea.”

Rene Powell is an Ohio native who started competing at 12 and went pro in 1967, not long after racial discrimination became illegal under the Civil Rights Act. She says during her junior years “there were not many opportunities, so there were a number of events my parents had to fight to get me into.” Powell is now head golf professional at the historic Clearview Golf Club in East Canton, Ohio, which was built by her father so he could have somewhere to play without problems. Citing that only 40 of 28,000 PGA professionals are African American, Powell says that “At this point golf does not look like this country.”

“I was discriminated against because of color in my school and then my parents put me in a parochial school and I was the only person of color in the whole school. In high school there was one other girl in my class. I have been discriminated against so much for the color of my skin that from a sex and gender standpoint that was second.” As a matter of fact, Powell says there were amateur tournaments that she consistently did not receive invites to until she turned pro, which made her ineligible— hardly a coincidence, she believes. “Growing up as an African American I had run into discrimination and prejudice since age 8. If I had bowed out then there are a lot of things I wouldn’t have done,” which for Powell, includes traveling the world, meeting heads of state, and teaching a game she loves to countless people. “Everybody needs to play, whether they like it or not. It is the best business contact sport in the world.”

Lack of invitations notwithstanding, players like Powell, Gibson, Sifford, and Spiller have blazed a trail that has widened considerably over the last few years. Today, celebrity tournament guest lists are rarely complete without golf lovers like Michael Jordan, Beverly Johnson, and Samuel L. Jackson; juniors programs encourage boy and girls all over North America to learn the intricacies and etiquette of the game; in Puerto Rico, an entire complex developed by baseball legend and golf lover Roberto Clemente holds annual tournaments to raise thousands of dollars so residents can play golf at a nominal fee; and the list goes on. As barriers continue to come down, a new generation of future professionals and avid amateurs alike are heading to the links, getting into the game, and finding a place of their own. True to the history of this land, the struggle on the part of a few has yielded opportunity to a great many.