Augusta, Ga. – Picture a pyramid, Tiger Woods says, not in its fully formed, majestic entirety, but rather in its nascent stage, almost when brick initially meets brick.
That, he says, is where the relationship between golf and minorities stands today, 10 years after his epic, historic victory in the 1997 Masters.
“These kids are younger, more athletic, bigger, stronger, faster,” Woods said. “Some of the guys that I’ve seen are former baseball and football and basketball players. They are not just strictly golfers. They are athletic and coming from these different backgrounds and saying, ‘You know what, I like golf more.’
“That was not the case when I was playing junior golf. Golf was looked down on as a wussy sport.”
The same geometric figure also helps explain why, a decade after Woods stood the sport on its ear, he’s still the only African-American on the PGA Tour, with less than a handful playing on the minor-league Nationwide Tour. While the 1997 Masters may have brought countless new fans to the sport, it didn’t mean the newcomers would rise up off their couches and join Woods at Augusta the following year, or even a decade later.
“You don’t get into it today and become a professional tomorrow,” said Renee Powell, one of only three African-American women who have played on the LPGA Tour. “Look at all the white guys who have been on tour for years and are still struggling. It takes a lot of time to get good, and in today’s society we want to have everything quickly. It doesn’t happen that way in golf.”
Just as every boy or girl who has dribbled a basketball has dreamed of becoming just like Michael Jordan, there are scores of Tiger-wannabes. But by the time the young golfer successfully navigates the junior ranks, high school, college and the mini-tours, let alone attempts to reach a PGA or LPGA qualifying school, the numbers have dwindled drastically.
“Golf is very expensive, and it’s very hard,” said Tom Woodard, the director of golf for The Meadows and Foothills golf courses in suburban Denver. “Even in the junior ranks, if you look at these American Junior Golf Association events, all those kids are shooting in the 60s, and when you’re talking Division I golf, you’re only talking seven or eight guys on a team. It’s just very competitive.”
Woodard knows firsthand. After playing on the PGA Tour for three seasons in the 1980s, part of him wondered if his son, Aaron, might do the same. In 2004, Aaron, a student at East High School, teamed with Champions Tour professional Craig Stadler to win the First Tee Open.
Today, Aaron Woodard is a scholarship student at Kansas State, but not for golf. He no longer plays.
“I saw it coming; he could shoot in the low 70s but he couldn’t consistently shoot in the 60s,” Tom Woodard said. “He worked really hard on his game, but he wasn’t shooting the scores you need to play Division I golf, so he decided to just give it up.”
But if Aaron Woodard won’t be the next great African-American player to appear in the Masters, perhaps it will be someone named … Woods?
Tiger’s niece Cheyenne Woods, a high school state champion from Arizona, has had great success in the junior ranks, so much so that her famous relative is quite impressed.
“She’s just coming into her own,” a smiling Tiger said earlier this season. “She’s starting to understand the game; it’s fun to see. Occasionally we’ll talk about it, and it’s neat for me to see her progress. I remember the day she first started. She started in the same garage where I started. I’ll never forget that day.”
Strength in numbers
According to the National Golf Foundation, in 2005, the latest available figures, there were 12.5 million adult “core golfers” in the United States. A core golfer was defined as someone 18 or older who played at least eight times a year. In 1996, the year before Woods won at Augusta, the number of core golfers was 11.4 million; in 1998, the year after, it jumped to 13.9 million.
The last time the foundation did a formal study on minority participation was 2003, and at that time it put the number of African-American golfers at 1.3 million.
Powell, however, prefers to look at a different set of numbers. Like the 57 years the LPGA has been in existence and the thousands of players it’s featured. And the fact that she, LaRee Sugg and Althea Gibson have been the only African-Americans among them.
Or the fact that, at age 60, she’s the only black woman automatically able to enter a tour event.
“I think that’s sad,” Powell said. “I’m the only African-American woman who has a card and could play? One person? In the entire country? When you think of it that way, realizing there are about 28 million golfers? Boy, those aren’t good numbers.
“We might have a wish and a hope and a want that things will change; hopefully it will; the sad thing would be if they don’t.”
Sugg qualified to play in last summer’s U.S. Women’s Open and hopes to do so again this year. Now an assistant athletic director at the University of Richmond, Sugg hasn’t been a regular on tour in six years, but her experiences may be instructive when attempting to determine the scarcity of minority players in the upper echelons of the game.
“I really struggle with this, I get frustrated,” Sugg said. “Tiger didn’t get to be a champion by accident. He may have had talent and desire, but he also had great opportunities, and that’s what’s really lacking now.”
While Sugg managed to cobble together a few sponsorship deals early in her career, in the waning stages the well dried up, to the point where she was forced to use her credit cards to stay afloat. Many minority players who are now of an age to perhaps reach the professional tours, she said, haven’t been heard from because of similar difficulties.
“Would I have had a different career if I had had more funding? I don’t know, but I would have liked to find out,” Sugg said. “There’s no secrets about what it takes to produce a champion, but to ask someone to play and train at the level you have to to make it and then support yourself throughout that process is almost impossible.
“No one can understand the level of commitment and sacrifice it takes to make it. I was really one of the lucky ones, I didn’t slip through the cracks, but I think it’s shameful and a complete breakdown of the system to take someone and get them to a certain point and then leave them hanging out there, saying, ‘What can I do to get there from here?”‘
Facing the problem
Sugg and Powell believe the solution could come from corporate America, especially that part of big business that is most closely connected to golf. In that scenario, they say, everyone wins.
“Tiger has opened things up, he’s made everyone more aware of golf, but I don’t know if he should have to be the Pied Piper,” Powell said. “He’s brought attention to the game, but now what? I don’t think anybody thought about that before, it didn’t resonate anywhere.
“But anybody with anything to do with golf has a stake in this – the golf cart companies, the equipment companies. We need to make the game healthier; the game has to be healthy for everyone to benefit. Now, people are saying, ‘Hey, where are the minorities, the people of color? Why aren’t they participating?’ I guess if you’re going to solve a problem, you first have to realize there is a problem.”
Staff writer Anthony Cotton can be reached at 303-954-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com.
