Charles Luther Sifford
In the 1940s black golfers were restricted from joining the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) which ran most of the professional tournaments held across the country. Included within the PGA bylaws was the proviso that “it was for members of the Caucasian race.” Black golfers organized their own tournaments under the auspices of several associations. One of these was the United Golf Association (UGA). The so-called Negro Tours had several obstacles to overcome, including finding courses on which to play, with most private clubs having restrictive by-laws and many public and municipal courses restricted as well.
Charlie Sifford was born in North Carolina in 1922, near a municipal course where he worked as a caddie before he reached the age of ten, earning 60 cents per day, fifty of which he gave to his mother to help with household expenses. By the time Charlie was a teenager he could consistently shoot par, a scratch golfer. He served in the US military during World War II, another segregated organization, in the US Army’s 24th Infantry Division. Following the war he played in the tournaments sponsored by the UGA, but the purses which would allow a golfer to make a living were in the PGA. Members of the UGA referred to their tournaments as the “Chitlin Circuit”.
In 1952 Sifford received an invitation to play in the Phoenix Open from Joe Louis, which he accepted as it was an opportunity to demonstrate his skills to the all-white PGA players who would be competing there. PGA players who had played the tournament in the past were men like Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson and Jimmy Demaret. When the all-black foursome including Sifford and Louis reached the green on the first hole of their round, they found the cup filled with freshly deposited human waste. They were forced to wait for over an hour for the cup to be cleaned so that they could putt.
Sifford continued to play in UGA events, winning the National Negro Open six times during his career. In 1957 he won the Long Beach Open, a non-PGA event, and in 1959 he qualified for and played in the US Open, tying for 32 in the international field of golfers. When continued pressure from many sources on the PGA to eliminate the “caucasian race” requirement finally achieved a result in 1960, Sifford applied for and received PGA membership, and thus became the first black player on the PGA Tour. By then his best playing days were behind him, but he did win two PGA events during the remainder of his career.
Sifford had to endure the same racial invective and restrictions, particularly in the south, during his career in the PGA as did athletes in other sports. Lee Trevino publicly declared him as belonging in the same category as Jackie Robinson. The stubborn resistance to change among the clubs on which PGA events were held added to Sifford’s burdens, but he bore them with grace and character, and slowly more and more clubs were opened to black members. Tiger Woods credited Sifford for interesting his father in the game of golf. In 2004 Sifford became the first African American to be inducted into the PGA Hall of Fame.