Wright, the first Black USGA champion, taught much more than golf

They would come to The Lakes in El Segundo, and they would pay Bill Wright to fix their slices or develop their fades.

He would kick in the stories for free.

He talked of playing with Elgin

Baylor on a Seattle semipro basketball team. He talked of Western Washington, where he got shuffled when Washington showed a little apprehension about Black basketball players.

There could have been stories about Jim Brown, except that Brown was often there, eating club sandwiches with Wright. Happy Hairston of the Lakers might wander over, too.

“We had a hoop in the back,” said Scott Robert, a teaching pro at The Lakes. “Bill would go out there and shoot every now and then and clean everybody’s

clock. I remember one Christmas party, we had a pool table. Bill waited for a bit, then took his turn. He never left the table the rest of the night.”

The best stories were the ones he rarely told, especially the one about the first Black golfer to win a U.S. Golf Association championship. That one resurfaced after Feb. 19, the day Bill Wright died at the age of 84.

In 1959, the 23-year-old Wright defeated Frank Campbell, 3 and 2, at Wellshire Golf Course in Denver. That gave him the U.S. Public Links.

The PGA had not rescinded its segregation rules. So Wright became a teacher in several South L.A. schools, ran some auto dealerships, and set up shop at The Lakes. He rarely charged his junior pupils. He taught Josh Alpert, the director of the junior program at The Lakes and the founder of the Good Swings Happen academy, and told him to be more athletic and natural.

“I was super technical,” Alpert said. “It was all grip and angles and planes. He freed me up, taught me to see the shots before I hit them. But that’s the way he hit the ball. There was always movement, He would be gripping and re-gripping the club, and then for the last five seconds there was no stopping point. He changed the way I taught.”

You had to be a gamesman back then. One day Alpert was invited to play at Hillcrest Country Club. Wright was not the avuncular legend when he got to the first tee. This was business.

“I’d been playing some minitours,” Alpert said. “We were playing skins, and for six holes I was doing well. We got to the seventh, and he had about a 20foot putt, and I was standing on the green and he was just glaring at me. I started thinking I was in his line, although I really wasn’t. From then on, I was making sure I was out of his way and nothing went well after that. He had gotten into my head.”

Wright used only 12 clubs at that Publinx event, but he barely needed anything but the putter. In his 36-hole semifinal win over Don Essig, the 1957 champ, he enjoyed 23 one-putt greens. The galleries got behind him, and Wright occasionally had to shush them. Of the 64 who had qualified through the strokeplay rounds, he had been 63rd.

When a writer informed him that he had cracked a racial barricade, Wright slammed the phone down. That wasn’t his purpose. But he wasn’t blind. He remembered how he needed a handicap to qualify for the Publinx, and no one in Seattle would give him one. He drove south and got it at Eastmoreland in Portland, a gleaming diamond to this day.

Wright played most of his Seattle golf at Jefferson Park, where Fred Couples would later climb the fences. The Publinx win got him into the U.S. Amateur in Colorado Springs. He struggled to find playing partners, but Chick Evans arranged for Wright to get into a foursome the day before the tournament. The other partners were future PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman, and a teenaged Jack Nicklaus.

Wright and his dad would watch the PGA guys as they came through the Northwest, and they would follow Sam Snead and revel in his buttery swing. When Wright encountered Snead years later, The Slammer said, “You look like a kid that used to follow me around in Portland.”

Now Wright is gone. So is The Lakes. They began the transformation Feb. 15, and sometime in 2022 it will reopen as a TopGolf franchise, which Paul Goydos has described as “the Dave and Busters of golf.”

It’s hard to imagine Bill Wright would enjoy all the noise. “All I’ll say is that Bill was a green grass, parks and recreation type of guy,” Alpert said.

History lessons are better when they can be heard, especially the ones that walk.