How is sports greatness measured? Because of the number of great victories and unforgettable championships? Or for something less obvious, but perhaps more profound: an athlete’s determination to go against the grain and break the status quo in both sport and society, even at the risk of personal injury?
If this last measure is as true a test as any other, we must make a niche in the pantheon of the greats of all time to Lee Elder. An indefatigable African-American golfer, died this sunday at 87 years, nearly half a century after he faced the brutalizing stain of racism and became the first black golfer to play the Masters, paving the way to nothing less than Tiger Woods.
“He was the first,” Woods said, shortly after wowing the sports world by winning the Masters in 1997 at age 21. “He was the only one I looked up to. Thanks to what he did, I was able to play here, which was my dream ”.
What a trip, what a life. The harsh and tumultuous arc of sport in the second half of the 20th century – indeed, the arc of American history during that time – can be traced through Elder.
He was a black man born in the Jim Crow South who learned to play golf on segregated courses and honed his craft on the Los Angeles golf tour. barnstorming, similar to black baseball leagues.
He dreamed of reaching the top, but professional golf took its own time as sports like baseball, basketball and football slowly integrated. The Professional Golfers Association maintained its Caucasian-only clause until 1961.
Elder never wavered. He made his way onto the PGA Tour in 1968, aged 34. At that time, with the battle for civil rights well underway, the Masters came under pressure to add at least one black player to their field. In 1973, a group of 18 congressional representatives even asked the tournament to do so. Elder was among the top 40 money-earning golfers on the circuit and had played at several US Open and PGA Championship, so why not Augusta National?
But after deciding not to invite prominent black golfers, like Charlie Sifford, during the 1960s, the tournament established a strict requirement for its participants: victory in a PGA Tour event.
Elder got it at the 1974 Monsanto Open, the same Florida championship in which six years earlier he had seen forced to change clothes in a parking lot because blacks weren’t allowed to use the changing rooms of the country club.
Elder had a quiet but firm resolve. He wasn’t in a hurry to make a fuss about racism, but he wasn’t afraid to talk about it, either. “The Masters have never wanted a black player, and they kept changing the rules to make it more difficult for blacks,” he said, adding: “I got rid of them. [los que establecían las normas] to win”.
That first Elder participation in Augusta
Since its inception in 1934, the Masters has drawn on the old codes of the American South. Held at the Augusta National Golf Club, Georgia, on a former indigo plantation, it had a caretakers and caddies What only African-Americans allowed to enter to field. No one described the Masters more truthfully than the columnist from Los Angeles Times Jim Murray. The tournament, he wrote in 1969, was “as white as the Ku Klux Klan.”
In the months leading up to the 1975 Masters, Elder was the subject of multiple threats of death. “Sometimes they were sent to the field where I played, other times they came to my house,” he said. “Things like ‘you better watch yourself behind the trees’, ‘you won’t make it to Augusta.’ They were bad things, but I expected them ”.
Yet on April 10, 1975, there he was, on the first tee, surrounded by a gallery of friends, including American football star Jim Brown. When Elder launched his tee shot straight to the fairway, he not only made Masters history, but also opened the cloistered and often racist world of golf to new possibilities.
If we look at the contours of his career beyond 1975, we see a constant solidity. He won three more titles on the PGA Tour and eight more on the Senior Tour and represented the United States for the Ryder Cup. It will always be a great unknown how high Elder could have reached if he had had the same opportunities in his prime, if he had been able to play. PGA Tour tournaments in their personal splendor.
We can say this with certainty: Elder established himself in the firmament of sports history at the 1975 Masters. He will always remain there, like a north star for others to follow.
Woods arrived just over two decades later, winning the 1997 Masters by 12 strokes and announcing himself as the inheritor not just from Elder but also from Jack Nicklaus, who won at Augusta six times. When Woods walked past a gallery of astonished fans upon receiving the green champion jacket for the first time, he saw Elder and the two embraced. The past met the present, paving the way for the future.
However, the road to equality in golf remains difficult. The sport was overwhelmingly white in Elder’s day and overwhelmingly white when Woods burst onto the scene. It is still overwhelmingly white.
The game “still lags quite a bit” when it comes to diversity, said Cameron Champ, 26, whose mother is white and whose father is black, speaking of Elder this week. Champ is one of the few African-American players on the circuit and one of the most talked about the need for diversification.
We had to wait for this year – fueled by tumultuous national protests over racism and police brutality in 2020 – for the Masters to give Elder what he deserves.
In April, alongside Nicklaus and Gary Player, Elder sat on the first tee at Augusta National as the honorary starter of this year’s tournament. The tubes were inserted into his nose to supply him with oxygen. He was too lame to take a hit.
A group of tournament players were nearby, paying due respect to a golfer whose greatness stretched far beyond the fairway. The crisp, cold morning had a reverent and unforgettable air to it, recalled Champ, whose paternal grandfather fell in love with golf in part thanks to Elder and later taught the game to his grandson.
But it took 46 years for golf to honor Elder at the Masters. Think about it.
Why wasn’t it made in 1985, on the 10th anniversary of his stint on the Augusta National color line? Or in 1995, 20 years after the fact? Or at any other time?
Why does change always have to take so long?
by Kurt Streeter
Video | He throws his golf ball at over 140 km / h and is caught by lightning
