Calvin Peete
Champion golfer who defied many obstacles in pursuit of success
n age 12, he had fallen out of a tree and broken his left elbow, leaving him unable to straighten the arm.
It was perhaps a serendipitous accident. It is a golfing dictum that for right-handed golfers, the left arm remains straight during a swing, but Peete, who never had a golf lesson before he turned pro, developed his own method, compensating for his handicap and developing a stroke uncanny in its accuracy, or, as his onetime caddy Dolphus Hill said in 1986: “He goes flag on you.”
Peete was regularly among the tour leaders in driving accuracy and greens hit in regulation.
“I get my accuracy from my tempo and rhythm,” he said in 1982. “I never really worked for it. It is just something that happened. I just seem to have a good tempo and good control as far as knowing just when to release the club.”
But that was long in the future. As a teenager, Peete grew tired of the laborious field work and eventually contrived a different way to earn money, managing to buy a car, travelling to farms and orchards up and down the East Coast and selling clothes and jewellery out of the back of his station wagon to migrant workers. He had no interest in golf.
“If I happened to turn the channel and see golf on television, I’d be like most people I knew,” he said. “I’d turn to a basketball game or a war movie.”
It was in Rochester, New York, in the summer of 1966 that he tried golf for the first time. He was 23. Friends invited him to a fish fry but they took him to a golf course instead.
“I couldn’t get a ride home,” he said, “so I went along with the fool idea.”
Quickly bitten by the bug, and with his selling done at night, he began spending days on the golf course, teaching himself by reading books. He took advice on his grip from the man who sold him his golf gloves, practiced on a baseball field, made films of his stroke and studied them.
It took him nine years and three trips to the PGA qualifying school before he earned the right to join the tour, at 32, in 1975.
At the time, black people were rare in professional golf, a sport that had a history of exclusion. A “Caucasian-only” clause was not rescinded by the PGA until 1961, and only a handful of black golfers – among them Charlie Sifford (who died in February), Lee Elder and Jim Dent – preceded Peete on the pro tour.
In 1975, Elder became the first black golfer to play in the Masters in Augusta, Georgia. In 1980, Peete was the second.
He never played especially well at the Masters; in 1986, his best finish, he tied for 11th. After the 1983 tournament – during which he had one of his worst rounds, an 87 on the third day – he was asked his opinion of the traditions at the Masters.
“Until Lee Elder, the only blacks at the Masters were caddies or waiters,” he said. “To ask a black man what he feels about the traditions of the Masters is like asking him how he feels about his forefathers who were slaves.”
Peete’s first marriage, to Christine Sears, ended in divorce. His survivors include his second wife, Pepper, and seven children.
In 1982, Peete took – and passed – a high school equivalency test; a high school diploma or its equivalent was required for membership on the American Ryder Cup team, which represents the United States in a competition against a team of Europeans.
Peete played on two Ryder Cup teams. On the 1983 squad with Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Ben Crenshaw, Curtis Strange and other stars, he helped the US to a narrow victory.
“Calvin Peete was a remarkable golfer; he overcame a lot of adversity, including a physical limitation, to become a very, very good golfer,” Nicklaus wrote on his website on Wednesday.
“Over the years, we played a lot of golf together, and I was amazed at what he could get out of his game.”
Nicklaus added: “He was an extremely straight driver of the golf ball; a very smart golfer; and, you might say, he was very much an overachiever.”