“Blacks often furnish the greatest athletes in football, baseball, basketball, in the Olympics. Roberts, a New York investment banker, could be political and patronizing toward Black folks on the issue. “We had that boy from Thailand last year and he was as Black as the ace of spades.” “I don’t know what you mean,” Roberts answered. “Why no Blacks?” asked a reporter in 1968. Newspaper reporters at the Masters hounded Clifford Roberts, who was the chairman of the club and its chief decider. “The Masters Tournament is as white as the Ku Klux Klan,” wrote Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray. By the mid-1960s, the Masters was facing scrutiny in the media for its all-white fields. In his pursuit to qualify for the Masters, beginning in the late 1960s, he became a conduit of golf’s collision with the civil rights movement. Born in 1934 in Jim Crow Texas - the same year as the first Masters - Elder fought intense racial discrimination to reach this mecca of golf. At the tournament, the caddies were all Black and the players were all white. Related Story How racism prevented Lee Elder from being among golf’s Big Three Read nowįor years, the Masters had represented continuity with an American South still holding on to the economic and social vestiges of slavery.
But when Elder is viewed through the prism of the Masters and golf history, he becomes perhaps the most important figure in the game, more significant than Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Woods. Over time that distinction becomes, without proper historical context, primarily material for a game of sports trivia.
Yet the fact that Elder, whose death at age 87 was announced Monday, was the first African American to play the Masters is not the most important statement about his accomplishment. That same year Elder made the cover of Sports Illustrated, another first for a Black golfer. In the golf category, Elder’s name is there with John Shippen and Charlie Sifford, a few rows away from Jackie Robinson in baseball and Althea Gibson in tennis. Four months after playing in the 1975 Masters, his name was listed in an article called Black Firsts in Sports in the August edition of Ebony magazine. It’s been convenient to simply consign Elder to a place in the pantheon of Black heroes to break color barriers in sports. Forty years old when he played in the 1975 Masters and 34 when he joined the PGA Tour in 1968 after years of toiling on the all-Black United Golf Association circuit, Elder would never win a green jacket or any major championship, but to a game mired in racism, he was its savior and greatest champion.
This was an honor typically given to a past champion. Elder loved the attention that he received from Woods, who recognized him as a pioneer who had eased the way for him to pursue his dream of winning a green jacket.įinally in 2021, Elder was made an honorary starter at the Masters, alongside Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player. Eight years earlier, Elder had been thrust back into the spotlight at the Masters when a 21-year-old Tiger Woods rocked the world by winning the 1997 tournament by 12 shots. He was disappointed that the tournament had not acknowledged his anniversary with a spot in the Par 3 Contest or a place as an honorary starter. “People honked their horns and tried to stop me for autographs.” “It was like a ticker-tape parade every day driving around down here,” Elder told me for a Sports Illustrated story in 2005. Elder drove through the streets of Augusta, Georgia, with “LEE ELDER-MASTERS 1975” painted on the driver- and passenger-side doors. My favorite memory of Lee Elder is the time Hank Aaron loaned him a Jaguar XJ6 from his Atlanta car dealership to celebrate the 30 th anniversary of his historic appearance in the 1975 Masters.