Fowler: With golf club, cigar and cane, Charlie Sifford pointed way toward progress

A lot of people remember the cigar that was a Charlie Sifford trademark. I remember the cane.

More specifically, I remember a sunny, breezy day in May in Charlotte in 2011. Sifford was the guest of honor at a modest golf course in Charlotte, the city where he had grown up and learned to play golf. It was the first time I met him. He looked at me, raised his cane in his right hand and pointed to a creek running alongside the course.

“If I wanted to make a living, I had to get some balls out of there,” he said.

This was when Sifford was 13 years old, during the height of the Depression in 1935. If Sifford dug a gleaming white ball out of that creek, one that was barely used and also a name brand, he could sometimes clean it and sell it to another golfer for a quarter.

That was good money. Because when Sifford caddied 18 holes back then at Charlotte’s whites-only golf courses, he only got paid 60 cents.

“I’d give 50 cents to my mother, and then I’d go get me a cigar,” Sifford cackled.

On Tuesday, Sifford died in Cleveland at age 92. He had had a stroke about three weeks before that, his son Charlie Jr. said.

That golf course with the creek is now named for Sifford. Once, it didn’t allow African-Americans to play. Now it welcomes everyone and is officially called the Dr. Charles L. Sifford Golf Course at Revolution Park.

Sifford would receive many other honors – most notably when President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Sifford was a great golfer who was the first black man to join the PGA tour, in 1961. At age 38, he was past his golfing prime then. But he still won two PGA Tour events despite open hostility to his presence, including death threats and racial slurs.

Occasionally, some racist fellow pros would kick Sifford’s ball into the rough. Obama said at November’s ceremony that Sifford was one of the country’s “trailblazers who bent the arc of our nation toward justice.”

Sifford would become his sport’s Jackie Robinson. He stayed involved with golf throughout his life. He had a close relationship with Tiger Woods, whom Sifford sometimes called “Junior.”

At a news conference before the 2013 U.S. Open, Woods said: “It was a tough time for Charlie to go through what he went through, but he paved the way for a lot of us to be where we’re at. I know my dad probably wouldn’t have picked up the game if it wasn’t for what Charlie did.

“I’ve always called him my grandpa, the grandpa I never really had. I’ve gotten to know him through the years and it’s been fantastic. We owe a lot to him and all the pioneers that have paved the way for us to be here.”

Sifford pointed the way for years – first with that cigar (usually unlit and mostly a good-luck charm) and, later, with his cane. He was one of those people who made our city a better place – a native Charlottean who really just wanted to play golf.

But in his own way, one hole at a time, Charlie Sifford helped change our world.

This story was originally published February 4, 2015 at 12:01 PM.