Special report: ‘Tiger effect' hasn't changed look of golf

Ten years ago, when Tiger Woods had won only two majors, Barbara Douglas proclaimed him a beacon for black golfers, a springboard into a game dominated by whites.

“Oh, God,” said Douglas, then the president of the National Minority Golf Foundation. “I don’t know how you measure it. He’s had such an impact.”

A decade later, Woods is still the only black player on the PGA Tour, and there are no blacks on the LPGA or Nationwide tours. Some estimates indicate less than 1 percent of golf industry employees are black and in Colorado Springs, where 6.6 percent of 414,600 residents are black, there are few blacks at the high school ranks and in junior programs.

Douglas has since changed her tune, frustrated by the lack of color in her favorite sport.

“Things have tailed off,” she said, “so we’ve lost whatever progress we had made.”

Debate continues over whether the “Tiger effect” has materialized, yet the latest national statistics on participation by minorities paints a picture without many blacks on the links, and locals say golf isn’t attractive to a younger generation of blacks because of high costs compared with other sports and the absence of a black role model beyond Woods.

Woods has won 12 majors the past 10 years, most notably the Masters three times, giving him 14 major titles overall, four shy of the record held by Jack Nicklaus, and he boasts 71 PGA Tour victories, along with a record $93.1 million in prize money. He’s undoubtedly golf’s biggest name, despite a recent sex scandal that shattered his once-pristine image.

When Woods scored his first major, in 1997, blacks accounted for 3.3 percent of the 26.4 million U.S. golfers, according to the National Golf Foundation. The latest NGF study on minority participation, conducted in 2003, when Woods had won eight majors, revealed that 7 percent of blacks participate in golf and 20.1 percent were interested in the game.

Gazette research shows that of the 1,186 golfers on the six mainstream professional tours, eight are black — Woods on the PGA Tour; Shasta Averyhardt, Paula Pearson-Tucker and Darlene Stowers on the Futures Tour; Jim Dent, Charles Sifford and Jim Thorpe on the Champions Tour; and Renee Powell on the Legends Tour. There aren’t any blacks among the 204 players on the LPGA Tour and the 159 players on the Nationwide Tour.

The Gazette surveyed 19 high school girls’ golf coaches whose teams were part of Metro League tournaments this spring, finding four blacks among 170 players — two at Wasson, one at Doherty and one at Pine Creek. The most prominent is Paige Crawford, a Doherty graduate who has won the Metro the past two seasons and signed with Montana State.

DIFFERENT THEORIES

Douglas said the issue begins at the top, where “the industry has to make a commitment” to hiring more black executives, more black clubhouse managers, more black pros. Then again, she wonders if aspiring black professionals simply figure, “If I don’t see someone out there who looks like me, then why do I think there’s a place for me?”

The economic downturn has been “a very strong contributing factor” in choices by blacks to quit golf, said John David, president of the Multicultural Golf Association of America. For instance, 3.6 percent of blacks with household incomes less than $25,000 have played golf and 6.6 percent of black golfers are blue-collar workers, according to the NGF study.

But David blames The First Tee, a World Golf Foundation initiative designed to offer the sport to youngsters, for sinking several minority golf programs. He says course managers tell parents, “Go to The First Tee. We support The First Tee.” When parents call a First Tee chapter, David says “they’re often told that they don’t have room or that there’s a fee.”

“The First Tee program hurt a lot of minority golf programs around the country,” he said.

At Valley Hi Golf Course, there used to be an “Open Fairways” clinic, for disadvantaged kids who wanted to try the game. The annual program bit the dust when donations lagged following the financial crisis. There’s now an $80 junior program, featuring an hourlong clinic every Wednesday and unlimited range balls during the summer.

Mike Northern, the PGA head golf pro at Valley Hi, called the 60-person program “pretty much a majority white.” He speculates black kids “tend to lean toward other sports,” such as football, basketball and baseball. “Those are the sports that are more glorified,” he said.

Patty Jewett Golf Course hosts three junior camps, each three days long at $80 per camp, in June and July. Like Valley Hi, Patty Jewett also makes available a $50 annual pass for juniors, in which they can play nine holes for $9.50. Still, black kids rarely show up.

“We’re just not getting the (black) participation in these programs,” said Bill Martin, the PGA head golf pro at Patty Jewett. Martin hasn’t given up hope, noting that “just because they’re not playing as kids doesn’t mean they’re not going to play as adults.”

Creating lifetime golfers is one of the goals of the “Pikes Peak Linkers” program, funded by the U.S. Golf Association at Cherokee Ridge Golf Course. Sessions once were held 15 times over the spring and summer, and there are now nine clinics from May to July. Of the 200 participants last year, 14 percent were black, according to the USGA.

“It’s still kind of got a country club air to it,” said Todd Laxson, the assistant PGA pro at Cherokee Ridge. “If you’re not versed in the sport, it is kind of tough to break into.”

STARTING EARLY KEY

The PGA didn’t strike a “Caucasians only” clause from its bylaws until 1961, the year in which Sifford became the first black to crack the PGA Tour.

It wasn’t until 1963 that the late Althea Gibson broke the LPGA Tour’s color barrier, and it wasn’t until 1975 that Lee Elder ignored hate mail in becoming the first black to play in the Masters.

In 2003, there were 30 blacks among the 4,219 members at eight clubs on the PGA Tour, according to USA Today. None of the 15 members of the USGA executive committee is black. Ditto for the five most high-profile executives at the PGA of America, where there are 1,250 minorities among 28,000 members — an increase of 850 minorities since 2001.

“There are certainly not enough,” said Ernie Ellison, the director of diversity for the PGA of America. “We need more at the executive levels. We need more on the boards. … The more people that play the game, the more they understand the correlation to careers and business, the more they will entice their kids to play the game.”

Ellison doesn’t place the entire burden on Woods, maintaining he’s “only one person who happened to be very good and excel at his sport. That doesn’t mean you’re going to have others that are going to be as good as Tiger and excel like Tiger.”

Woods has voiced concern over being the only black on the PGA Tour, telling reporters in 2005, “I thought there would be more of us out here. … At the junior level, there are some players with some talent. But as you continue to play throughout golf and continue to move up in levels, the process of screening kind of weeds them out.”

Colorado College men’s basketball coach Andy Partee, who is black, regrets not trying golf as a kid. He started playing a couple of years ago after he bought a house along Antler Creek Golf Course in Falcon. Before then, he thought “that you have to have a wealth of money to play golf and be a member. … I thought that golf was an elitist type of a sport.”

“Growing up as a minority,” Partee added, “you really find you don’t have the resources to go out and play the sport at a young age, especially if your parents have to foot the bill. As you get older and you can afford to do it, you find yourself doing it.”

The “Play Golf America” program, for both kids and adults, has a participation rate of 24 percent among minorities, according to the PGA of America. The USGA has given $26 million to 173 First Tee chapters, most of which cater to blacks, and last year, 22 percent of the 215,000 kids in 125 USGA-funded programs were black, according to the USGA.

“We really want to help make sure that the game is affordable and accessible to as many people as possible,” said Steve Czarnecki, the USGA’s assistant director for grants. “That has been the focus of our efforts. … It’s good to have a more diverse participation pool.”

Czarnecki refuted David’s criticism of The First Tee, arguing “the more programs there are for young people to get involved with the game, the better. If their programs are full, it probably means they’re doing a good job in trying to build their capacity.”

Mandating fees for junior programs is “no different from any other sport,” said First Tee chief executive officer Joe Louis Barrow Jr., whose Florida-based organization has 22-25 percent black participation among 4,000 kids at 203 chapters in 700 locations.

“Some of your primarily minority-based programs didn’t charge,” Barrow said, “and that can be problematic. You’re sending the wrong signal to young people. Their parents may be able to pay, and if they can, they should. … We feel everyone should pay something because we think every young person should understand there’s a value.”

‘SECOND TIGER’ NEEDED

David said golf needs “a second coming of Tiger.” A lack of interest led to the folding of girls’ golf teams at Mitchell, where one student tried out, and Palmer, where two students appeared for tryouts. Harrison and Sierra also don’t have girls’ golf programs.

“Your Coronado, your Cheyenne Mountain, which demographically is your upper-middle class, you get more draw,” Mitchell girls’ golf coach Martin Cornell said. “These are the girls that have the clubs. These are the girls that have the membership in the family. … It comes down to monetary. It’s a rich sport to pursue.”

The activity fee at Mitchell is $65, the same as all other sports. However, Mitchell athletic director Brett Williams noted “the cost to the kids for the golf clubs and bag and greens fees in the offseason. … If you’re trying to sell something that people aren’t interested in buying, you can’t make them buy it.”

Of the two Palmer girls who tried out, one wound up playing for Coronado, and the other is playing for Wasson. Palmer athletic director Robert Framel also is a believer in the cost factor, pointing to the 150 girls who played lacrosse, soccer and tennis this spring for the Terrors. “Sometimes during a recession, you just don’t have enough money,” he said.

Originally a basketball player, Crawford began golfing only because her father left on the weekends to play with his friends. “I want to do golf,” she told him. Eventually, he broke down and bought her a set of junior clubs from Target, and she spent hours hitting balls in her backyard, then on the driving range, where she almost always was the lone black.

Crawford said her black friends are “not interested, and they don’t have family members that play. That’s the problem. So they don’t really know anything about it.”

She’s confident a day will come when blacks have a presence on the PGA Tour and the LPGA Tour, when it’s not only Woods. “This is just the beginning for us,” she said.

Douglas isn’t nearly as optimistic.

“I don’t see it in the next five years,” she said. “Hopefully, one day, we might get to that point. But we’ve got a long ways to go, and I don’t see it happening any time soon.”