There has been a lot of denials and claims of “political correctness” surrounding Steve Williams’ race-inflected comments at an “informal” caddie function aimed at the former employer who made him rich and “famous.” Attempting to explain the narcissism behind his credit-hogging fulsomeness after Adam Scott’s win at the Bridgestone Invitational last August, Williams let fly “My aim was to shove it right up that black arsehole.” No one laughed like they were supposed to. As one caddie quoted in The Daily Mail said, “Never have you been in a room and seen so many jaws drop at the same time. We knew he was an idiot but we didn’t know he was a racist idiot. I was standing next to a European Tour official who said, ‘Thank God he is not on our tour.’”
Tiger Woods—much like Barack Obama—has gone out of his way to diffuse race as an issue in their public lives. The problem is that other people have done that for him. Tour member Greg Owen has said that when he was paired with Woods in an event early in his PGA career, he was stunned by the amount of racial vitriol aimed at Woods from the gallery. This so-called “gentlemen’s” game was hardly lacking in ungentlemanly behavior by players, either. We still remember Fuzzy Zoeller’s “joke” about how Woods would select a meal of chicken and collard greens if he won the 1997 Masters. The Golf Channel’s Kelly Tilghman “joked” that Woods would have to be taken out in a back alley and “lynched” if younger players hoped to win. Former tennis star Martina Navratilova got into the act, once whining about how she as a white lesbian didn’t get as much “respect” as this black guy. Before Williams’ slur, some clown threw a hotdog at Woods while he was putting at the Frys.Com Open. The man actually claimed to “like” Woods.
Don’t people find it rather odd that these things only seem to happen to Tiger Woods, the only “black” man on tour? Isn’t it “odd” that people would deliberately call attention to his race in a negative manner? Just a little bit?
Greg Norman, meanwhile, defended Williams and declared that there was no racism in golf. This was frankly a naïve statement coming from a man who is a citizen of a country where the native inhabitants were routinely referred to by the “N-word” until it became unfashionable, and which until recently barred the immigration of non-whites. Refugees from Asian countries have been allowed into Australia on a case-by-case basis, but they have not been welcomed by everyone; one of Australian actor Russell Crowe’s early films was “Romper Stomper,” in which Crowe played the leader of a neo-Nazi gang that preyed on Southeast Asian immigrants. Why should golf, a game more than any was perceived as the preserve of whites, be any different?
It might surprise some people, but like the “negro” professional baseball leagues in the first half of the 20th Century, black golfers who were banned from playing in the whites-only PGA were forced to play in the “negro” golf tour, known as the United (or “Colored”) Golf Association. Black golfers like Charlie Sifford, Ted Rhodes and Bill Spiller were among the best in the country, but because of the PGA’s discriminatory bylaws, even PGA events that wanted to showcase a black golfer were prevented from doing so by PGA officials. Black golfers who played well enough in non-sanctioned events to be automatic qualifiers in PGA-sanctioned events were told that they could not participate because they did not have PGA tour cards, and because the PGA had a whites-only rule, it was virtually impossible for a black golfer to even play his way into a PGA event. Purses in the “colored” association were miniscule compared to the PGA, usually a $100 or less for the winner. It goes without saying that the racism in the sport then had long-term effects for the future, since it was impossible for a black golfer to make a living playing golf fulltime, and this contributed to the decrease in interest in golf among blacks relative to other sports.
Not that there wasn’t a fight. In 1948, Horton Smith, president of the PGA, and the Richmond Country Club was sued by three black golfers who qualified but were prevented from playing in the Richmond Open after performing well in the Los Angeles Open, which was a non-PGA sponsored event. The Taft-Hartley Act was invoked, which outlawed “closed shops” like the one the PGA was operating that banned non-whites from earning a living in that trade. With the likelihood of losing the case, the PGA “agreed” to stop discriminating against black golfers—with one “catch”: Sponsors of tournaments were allowed to invite who they wished. Given the racist atmosphere of the times, almost none of the sponsors “invited” black golfers.
Yet times were a’changing, and that change came courtesy the biggest name in black sports at the time: Joe Louis. Besides being a boxing great, Louis also happened to be an avid (if amateur) golfer, and in 1952 the sponsors of the San Diego Open decided that they needed a famous sports name to help promote the event, and invited Louis to lend his name to the field. Yet scarcely a week before the event, the PGA contacted the sponsors and informed them that Louis and the other black players they had invited could not participate. In today’s world this blatant discrimination against a popular sports hero would have caused an uproar, but it would not be until Walter Winchell, a well-known radio personality, jumped into the fray that Louis’s plight became the subject of national outrage: “Who the hell is Horton Smith? He must be another Hitler” Winchell railed. To head off the bad publicity, Smith allowed Louis to play based on his amateur status, but still refused to allow any other blacks to play because they were not PGA members—which they were continued to be unable to earn because of the white-only clause in the PGA bylaws.
Threatened with another lawsuit and bad publicity generated by Louis, the PGA finally decided that a “select” number of black golfers could play in the PGA events if they qualified, but only if they were “invited.” But some tournaments did begin to invite the top black golfers to play, and in the 1952 Phoenix Open Louis and seven other black players were invited and allowed to participate. Not that racism was “dead”: the black golfers were stilled forced into segregated facilities, and subjected to racial taunts from spectators and white golfers alike. And it was not until a threatened suit by the California attorney general against the PGA’s whites-only rule that in 1961 Charlie Sifford became the first black to be awarded a PGA membership. But while sports like baseball, football and basketball were quickly desegregated once the wall of discrimination was breached, it was not the same for golf; years of discrimination had taken their toll, and those players were first participated in the UGA were long past their prime. Golf continued to be viewed as an unfriendly, whites-only domain in spirit if not in name. The petty jealousies and bigotry that greeted Tiger Woods’ success on the golf course was a legacy of this “spirit,” and it is clear even today that some white players and fans have a hard time wrapping their minds around the idea that a black man can dominate a sport which remains in many ways a whites-only preserve.
Since the Williams story broke, Rex Hoggard of the Golf Channel wrote “In a well-crafted statement released on Tuesday Adam Scott declared ‘the matter closed,’ an admirable combination of naiveté and wishful thinking on the Australian’s part…All of which makes his decision to dig in against the mounting wall of political correctness even more telling.” What hearing those words bring to my mind is the old expression that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
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