Victory, but still some way to go
Don’t expect more black golfers after Tiger triumph
The faint hope that Tiger Woods’s miraculous comeback would make golf a more democratic sport was dashed when Donald Trump said he would award the Masters champion the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Woods did not hasten greater diversity in golf the first time around and will not do so this time either – especially with Trump appropriating his victory. When Woods was immobilised by back pain two years ago, Mike Bianchi, of the Orlando Sentinel, noted that Harold Varner III was the only black golfer on the PGA Tour – in a sport, Bianchi said, that was “whiter than the checkout line at Banana Republic”.
Golf has a lot more going for it than it knows. How many sports could lay on the kind of heart-wrenching spectacle we saw in Augusta’s final round?
The Ryder Cup is also adept at sending us into emotional orbit. The big golfing tests expose the protagonists to brutal stress, demanding that they perform infernally hard tasks while keeping mind and body in harmony.
Plainly the Woods rebirth was of another order: a human tale of physical distress and family chaos overcome. It was instantly recognisable as a triumph over malign destiny. And one of its most poignant outcomes was apparently to send Andy Murray to the practice range to hit a few balls.
Make no mistake, if Woods’s fightback inspired us gawpers, imagine how it looked to injured elite athletes. No greater beacon has been lit for sportsmen and women who feel their bodies have betrayed them – though few will be able to match Woods’s medical win.
The colour most viewers will have seen on television was not black but the red of the winner’s mock turtleneck. Woods’s ethnicity has never been a big issue in golf, partly because he declined to make it one. The larger reason is that the game in America, despite its “diversity” programmes, is still a pastime for economically comfortable white people and is missing a trick by not opening itself to everyone.
Striking though it was to see Woods go out for Sunday’s final round with Tony Finau – who is of Tongan and Samoan descent – nobody will call it a breakthrough in these racially divisive times, in a city that houses an old confederate gunpowder factory and where framed newspaper front pages in hotels carry items about legal disputes involving the Ku Klux Klan. This is not to call Augusta stuck in time. It happens to be a fascinating city with layers of history and a friendly outlook. But the Masters crowd is overwhelmingly white and its catering and security staff are predominantly black, which, of course, reflects economic and racial polarities.
As the Orlando Sentinel pointed out, from the heartland of Florida golf: “The NBA is 75% African-American. The NFL is 70% African-American. Major League Baseball has sunk to 9% African-American. Meanwhile, the field at The Arnie [Arnold Palmer] is 0.83% African-American. Donald Trump’s cabinet is more diverse than the PGA Tour.”
Some of this is circular. Varner has blamed the cost of playing and says he was inspired by Woods not because he was “black” but on account of his habit of “beating the s**t” out of his contemporaries.
What made people rush to their television screens on Sunday afternoon was not Woods striking a blow for fairness but a classic Easter resurrection, with emotional family scenes thrown in. It will have no bearing on country club memberships. But it did focus minds on how much better golf could be if it opened its arms to the masses the way Woods extended his arms to his children.
Woods’s ethnicity has never been a big issue in golf