Sport
Charlie Sifford – first black PGA golfer, dies – he was 92
The one goal that eluded him was a chance to play in the Masters, which did not invite its first black player until Lee Elder in 1975. Sifford remained bitter, though the pain was eased when Tiger Woods won the first of his four green jackets in 1997.
Woods often has said he would not have played golf if not for Sifford and other black pioneers.
“It is not an exaggeration to say that without Charlie Sifford, and the other pioneers who fought to play, I may not be playing golf,” Woods said in an email to The Associated Press late last year. “My pop likely wouldn’t have picked up the sport, and maybe I wouldn’t have either.”
The road was never easy.
Sifford was born on June 22, 1922 in Charlotte, North Carolina. He worked as a caddie and dominated the all-black United Golfers Association, winning five straight national titles. He longed to play against the best players, only to run into the same barriers that Teddy Rhodes and Bill Spiller faced — the Caucasian-only clause.
In his autobiography, “Just Let Me Play,” Sifford told of meeting Jackie Robinson in California about the time Robinson was trying to break the color barrier in baseball.
“He asked me if I was a quitter,” Sifford wrote. “I told him no. He said, ‘If you are not a quitter, you are probably going to experience some things that will make you want to quit.'”
During the 1952 Phoenix Open, one of the few events that blacks could play, Sifford found human feces in the cup when he got to the first green. He received death threats over the phone at the 1961 Greater Greensboro Open and heard racial slurs as he walked the fairways. He finished fourth, and did not quit.
