Local Foundation
Making a National Difference

By Shannon Gazze,
Staff Writer

Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, a year after modern pro football introduced its first two African American players, Kenny Washington and Woody Strode... and the flood gates were opened. Blacks had been playing these sports at a high level for years and were locked out only by the practices of the leagues.

Today, a majority of the NFL is African American and pro baseball is truly a melting pot for players of European, Asian, Hispanic and African descent.

The face of golf is changing, too, but the pace is more like Niagra Falls – slowly turning, step by step, inch by inch. The histories of football and baseball stand in direct contrast to the integration of golf over the years.

John Shippen was the first African American to play in a U.S. Open, at Shinnecock Hills in 1896. No one followed suit until Ted Rhodes in 1948. It wasn’t until 1961, close to 15 years after baseball and football came to their senses, that the Professional Golf Association lifted its "Caucasian clause" and Charlie Sifford became the first African American to receive tour playing privileges.

It was not that the PGA didn’t want black players, but it couldn’t find enough decent courses to play on that would allow them. Today, only a handful of private clubs continue to refuse play on the basis of race or gender, but you might not know it from a look at the golfers, the industry or even the fans.

One organization has made its mission to speed along golf’s integration of minorities, and it just happens to be located right here in the Valley.

The National Minority Golf Foundation was founded in 1995. It primarily serves as a resource to other golf organizations, seeking out and collecting the names and vital information of minority golfers for the purpose of providing opportunities in junior golf tournaments, golf scholarships, golf internships and employment in the golf industry.

• USGA News: More funding for NMGF • Index of past feature stories • Recent GolfArizona.com course reviews • Past articles by Shannon Gazze

Douglas took the NMGF reigns in October from former president Lewis Horne, Jr., after serving two years as the vice president of the organization. She realizes that, although minority interest and participation in golf has increased in recent years, there is still much work to be done.

"If you look at the 25,000 PGA professionals out there, you’ll probably find that less than one percent are minorities," Douglas says. "If you look at employment in the golf industry at the professional level (not in manufacturing), you’d find about one percent are minorities, because I can just about name the individuals that are out there and the companies they work for.

"If you ever go to an NCAA Division I, II or III event, chances are you won’t see too many minorities. And if you look at the PGA Tour or the LPGA Tour, who do you have? The Senior PGA Tour’s percentage is greater than any other, if you want to count eight players a large number."

The NMGF works to integrate golf at each of these levels.

What the NMGF is

Along with adding to its database, the NMGF works to find talented young golfers to help along individually in the competitive world of junior golf. Golfers can fill out a self profile on the NMGF web site (www.nmgf.org) and become eligible for aid in the form of grant money and golf equipment or find scholarship information and tournament sites and dates. Coming in 2000, low handicappers can get professional instruction at a John Jacobs Golf School in one of 47 cities across the country.

"I was a big proponent of having the Jacobs school affiliated because I believe in their teaching philosophy and I’ve been a student there several times," Douglas says.

Furthermore, the NMGF supports programs that seek to teach kids the game of golf and introduce golf into minority communities. It has administered the grant process for the Tiger Woods Foundation and provided counsel to several groups including the USGA, Nike and First Tee. Locally, the NMGF assisted the Gila River and Red Mountain Vista tribes in developing junior golf programs on their reservations.

Recently, the NMGF handed out Junior Golfer of the Year honors to two high school seniors, Andia Winslow of Seattle and Kevin Hall of Cincinnati, who the Foundation was able to assist in entering American Junior Golf Association tournaments. Both Winslow and Hall, who has been deaf since childhood, excelled at those events while maintaining 3.5 GPAs in school. In all, the NMGF assisted minorities in securing over 70 tournament spots in 1999.

The business aspect of the NMGF’s mission is a unique effort that is turning into one of the Foundations’ busiest.

"I get requests from people every day who are looking for candidates to hire," Douglas says. "I think, for the most part, that the upper echelon of golf companies out there realize that they need to diversify and they’re making efforts to do that and looking for help."

The NMGF has placed minority applicants from its database with several golf-related business including Golf Week and First Tee. To handle the growing task of job placement, Douglas has contacted a national search agency that will help to locate more promising minority candidates.

Others, both locally and nationally, continue to believe in the NMGFs goals and lend their own helping hands. The organization got off the ground with the help of a USGA grant and recently got its neighbors, the Thunderbirds, to sign a three-year agreement to sponsor Arizona juniors in AJGA events.

Forest Highlands Golf Club in Flagstaff recently made its second donation of equipment to the NMGF, a shipment that included 10 brand new sets of junior golf clubs.

Even the Golf Ball Connection, a small golf shop run by a Valley couple, has raised money for the NMGF through hole-in-one contests at local courses.

What the NMGF is not

"We leave the development and running of junior programs to the grass-roots communities, and what we try to do is assist those individuals and organizations," Douglas says. "There are over 250 of those grass-roots organizations out there.

"Some of the groups that have been out there for years are motivated to go into the inner cities where people don’t have the opportunity to be exposed to golf and expose them to golf. They’re doing a very, very good job at the local level of introducing children to golf."

And, of course, children are the key to diversity in the future.

"The hope," Douglas says, "is that the juniors, whether they play college golf or not, will continue to play golf. Some of them will end up in the golf industry. They will then become role models and be able to interest other kids."

But keeping juniors interested in a game that Horne, the former NGMF president, referred to as "a sport that suffers from both a prevailing perception of elitism and a relatively recent history of discriminatory behavior" is no guarantee. Golf is not only seen as elite, but also as an expensive game. A starter set of clubs can cost $200. Greens fees and golf carts on even public courses routinely run over $20 per round.

That's where the First Tee comes in. It’s an initiative that is a combination of golf’s governing bodies (the PGA Tour, the USGA, the PGA of America, the LPGA and Augusta National) that has an objective of building over 200 golf courses in the coming years. Douglas says they are well on their way, working on close to 75 courses to date that should be affordable and accessible to the new wave of golfers. They will give special access to kids, and they are all non-profit organizations.

Douglas says American Golf is pitching in, too. At their 400-plus courses, they make certain times of the day available to juniors for a dollar.

Both Douglas and Horne have said they already see the benefits of the widespread programs initiated in recent years. But everyone agrees that the road to integration might have been a whole lot rockier if not for the emergence of a savior – Eldrick "Tiger" Woods.

And they will call him 'Tiger'

Tiger Woods

Much like Arnold Palmer brought a wave of blue-collar Americans dubbed "Arnie’s Army" to the game in the '60s, Woods has once again made it cool to watch golf. Of course, as part of an influx of hip young golfers, he has made the PGA Tour as marketable and rich as it has ever been. But more importantly, he has shown America that golf is a game for everybody.

"Tiger has had a tremendous impact on golf and bringing not only minorities to golf but bringing people in general," Douglas says. "TV viewership and attendance at his events have gone up significantly, especially among minorities."

Douglas hopes that America’s youth will not only admire Woods for his play, but also will take what they learn from golf and use it to improve their communities.

"If you look at kids who play golf, you’re going to find good kids," she says. "Golf lets you commune with nature. You call your own penalties, so it teaches honesty. It helps you develop a great deal of self-confidence, commitment and dedication. You take those skills to the rest of your personal and business life. They’ll stay with you whether you shoot 90 or 70.

"We always say there is little trouble you can get into on the golf course. I think back to that Tiger Woods commercial where he’s bouncing that ball on the golf club. That tells me he’s spent a lot of time on the driving range. That’s the kind of trouble you get into on driving ranges.

"There aren’t any numbers that have been gathered specifically about his influence, but Tiger’s put a lot of the focus on golf and therefore, in a lot of ways, he’s opened a lot of doors."

Doors that the NMGF and other organizations have gladly stuck their feet into.

"What were trying to do we’re not going to resolve overnight" Douglas says. "We’re not going to resolve it in a year or two. In the long run, if you took that one percent that we talked about and, say in five years, that one percent was two percent and growing, then that would be success. When across the board the golf industry begins to resemble contemporary America, we know we’ve completed our task."

For more information on the NMGF or if you know of a junior golfer who should be in its database, please contact:

The National Minority Golf Foundation
7226 North 16th St.
Phoenix, AZ 85020
Phone: (602) 943-8399
Fax: (602) 943-8553
www.nmgf.org