Iconic black golfer looks to future

Lee Elder helped break color barrier, but he wants to do more for young players

WAKE FOREST -- They stood side by side in the morning sun Monday, hitting practice balls, telling golf stories, smiling, enjoying themselves.

Golf has been good to Billy Casper, Gene Littler and Bob Goalby, all in their 70s, all past winners of major championships.

And good to Lee Elder, too, albeit with a different twist.

Elder, 73, never won a major. But he was a part of one of the most historic majors. His name is often mentioned by the man who may win more career majors than anyone who has ever played -- Tiger Woods.

Elder is African-American. In 1975, he became the first black invited to play in the Masters, at Augusta National Golf Club, where blacks at the club then served as caddies or served peach cobbler on the veranda.

But Elder, who was at The Hasentree Club on Monday for a Grand Champions Pro-Am, isn't so much concerned about the past as the future. Even Woods' overwhelming success has failed to lure more young blacks into the sport. An expected influx of young pro golfers, all trying to tail Tiger onto the PGA Tour, has not materialized.

Elder wants to do something about it, not keep talking about it.

"I really think it's going to take an academy to train them and get them going in the right direction," Elder said.

Elder said he recently talked with Jim Thorpe, another former PGA Tour player, about a golf academy at the Foxwoods resort in Mashantucket, Conn. Thorpe, a Roxboro native who now is a Champions Tour veteran, represents the resort.

Elder said he also conferred with PGA of America officials this spring at the Minority Collegiate Championships at the PGA Golf Club in Port St. Lucie, Fla., about using the club's golf center.

"They have a wonderful facility there, and I think it would be a perfect marriage with the PGA to train young minority kids," Elder said. "I think that's what it's going to take. A lot of them come out of college, and they have no place to go, no place to turn to, and their career is pretty much over with because they don't have the finances or experience to go on and play on the [PGA] Tour.

"They come out of college, they try to qualify for the PGA Tour, but they're not ready because they haven't played the kind of golf courses that they try to qualify on. They're at a disadvantage."

Elder started his path to pro golf like other black golfers such as Charlie Sifford -- as a caddie. But until the early 1960s, the PGA Tour had a "Caucasians Only" clause that prevented such promising golfers as Sifford, Teddy Rhodes and Bill Spiller from playing with the Littlers and Goalbys.

"Teddy and Bill, they really battled hard," Casper said. "Charlie had it hard, but it wasn't what they had to experience."

Goalby said Rhodes, who died in 1969 at age 55, had a "classic golf swing" and would have done well on the PGA Tour had he been allowed to play. But Sifford would be the first black to secure playing rights on the tour in 1961.

"I feel a little guilty," said Goalby, the 1968 Masters champion. "I was at a tournament at Pensacola [Fla.] with Charlie, and he couldn't eat in the grill room with us. I had never realized what he was going through. Until you walk in their shoes ..."

As Littler put it, "I couldn't imagine playing under the conditions he did. It had to be hard."

Sifford won the 1967 Hartford Open and the 1969 L.A. Open. But Sifford, a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame who turned 86 on Monday, didn't qualify to play in the Masters.

That didn't come until 1975, after Masters officials had announced all PGA Tour winners would be invited. That meant Elder, who won the 1974 Monsanto Open, could take the drive down Magnolia Lane at Augusta National and tee it up in the Masters.

"I was scared to death," Elder said. "But from the time you arrive, it's a gratifying moment. It's a chance of a lifetime. I'm so happy it came at a time when you needed someone to get there and play. There had been so much controversy about the fact no black had played the Masters.

"Even though I was shaking on the first tee, I accomplished my mission."

Twenty-two years later, Elder stood near the first tee as Woods chased history of his own. In his first professional major, Woods, who was born in 1975, shattered the Masters scoring record in winning by 12 shots.

"Tiger appreciates what Lee and Charlie and the others did," Goalby said. "He often mentions them and gives them credit where he could ignore it and say, 'I'm here and I'm the big guy.' "

What Elder wants is more black golfers competing against the tour's "big guy."

"One day," he said, smiling.