Silence on race is Augusta tradition
The coronavirus pandemic has silenced the Masters Tournament’s resonant roars. It has erased the par- 3 contest, drained the color from the wintering azaleas and brought brisk north winds into play for the first time.
This week’s tournament, rescheduled from the first major of the year to the last and stripped down to better safeguard the participants from the virus, is happening in one kind of bubble.
But Augusta National has always existed in a bubble, a byproduct of a famously private club consolidating its influence and then enforcing it over the decades while maintaining practices that, throughout most of its storied history, were exclusionary and racist.
The Masters, first played in 1934, didn’t extend an invitation to a Black competitor until 1975. The club didn’t admit its first Black member until 1990 and didn’t offer membership to women until 2012.
As host to what is considered the most prestigious event on the golf calendar, on the most exquisite course that money can maintain, Augusta National serves up a history that is Southern comfort food for the pilgrim’s soul but leaves out the unappetizing bits.
After a year characterized by widespread protests over racial inequality and amid an ongoing reckoning in America over race, Augusta National on Monday at last joined the conversation. The club announced plans to honor Lee Elder, who in 1975 became the first Black man to play in the Masters.
On the 45th anniversary of his barrier- breaking appearance, Elder was recognized with an invitation to become an honorary starter alongside the sport’s elder statesmen and long- serving curtain- raisers, 85- year- old Gary Player and 80- year- old Jack Nicklaus.
Fred Ridley, Augusta National’s chairman, said Elder, 86, would join Player and Nicklaus for the ceremonial first tee shot next year, when he hopefully can be surrounded, and celebrated, by the tournament’s customary complement of fans.
“The opportunity to earn an invitation to the Masters and stand at that first tee was my dream, and to have it come true in 1975 remains one of the greatest highlights of my career and life,” Elder said in a statement. “So to be invited back to the first tee one more time to join Jack and Gary for next year’s Masters means the world to me.”
Unspoken was the fact that Augusta National could have honored Elder five, 10 or 15 years ago.
In choosing to do so now, the club appeared to be trying to catch the tail end of a wave of racial awakenings that spurred work stoppages across a variety of professional sports, forced the NFL to publicly reverse its position on on- field protests and led to the banning of the Confederate flag at NASCAR events.
Yet golf, especially in America, has always been different.
Historically it has practiced segregation by class, gender, race and religion. The Professional Golfers Association had a “Caucasian clause” from 1934 to 1961, which precluded nonwhites from becoming members.
Augusta National’s founders, famed amateur Bobby Jones and Wall Street broker Clifford Roberts, were both men of their times. In Golf Digest in 2017, Tom Callahan wrote that Jones and Roberts “might not have been any more bigoted than the average American born in 1894 or 1902, but neither was a champion of affirmative action.”
Callahan will get no argument from the family of Charlie Sifford, whose two PGA Tour victories, at the 1967 Greater Hartford Open and the 1969 Los Angeles Open, were not enough to gain him a start at the Masters.
“He did everything that was required,” said Sifford’s son Charlie Jr., “and they kept changing the requirements.”
In 1983, Calvin Peete, the second Black golfer after Elder to compete in the Masters, was asked his opinion of the Masters traditions.
“Till Lee Elder came, the only Blacks here were caddies and waiters,” he said.
“To ask a Black man how he feels about the traditions of the
Masters is like asking him how he feels about his forefathers, who were slaves.”
In 2020, the defending champion is Tiger Woods, a five- time winner whose 15 major championships make him the most conspicuous symbol of racial progress in the sport.
“Yes, it has had some roots that I don’t think that everyone is proud of,” Woods said last month, referring to Augusta National.
“But it has evolved. We have minority members now. It’s more diverse.”
Augusta National’s membership, thought to number roughly 300, is not a matter of public record. The club’s dues and rules are also kept secret, although it can be surmised by the reluctance of members to speak openly that not publicly addressing club matters is rule No. 1.
One member, Lynn Swann, an NFL Hall of Fame receiver and one- time Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, demurred weeks ago when asked about the proposal to honor Elder.
“The club has some histories and traditions and things that they follow,” Swann said in a telephone interview. “I’m on a committee that does not look into those things.”