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Charlie Sifford, first black player on PGA Tour, dies at 92

 
Charlie Sifford broke pro golf's racial barrier as the first black player in a PGA Tour event and became the first black in the World Golf Hall of Fame. [AP photo]
Charlie Sifford broke pro golf's racial barrier as the first black player in a PGA Tour event and became the first black in the World Golf Hall of Fame. [AP photo]
Published Feb. 5, 2015

Charlie Sifford, who broke pro golf's racial barrier as the first black player in a PGA Tour event and became the first black in the World Golf Hall of Fame, died Tuesday in Cleveland. He was 92.

Wendell Haskins, a spokesman for the PGA, said Mr. Sifford died at Southpoint Hospital and that he lived in Brecksville, Ohio.

Although he began playing as a pro in the late 1940s, Mr. Sifford was relegated to the black players' tour and its meager purses until the PGA of America dropped its Caucasians-only membership clause in 1961.

By the time Mr. Sifford got a chance to compete against the golf world's best, he was almost 40. But he showed what he might have accomplished in his prime and paved the way for Lee Elder, Calvin Peete, Jim Thorpe, Jim Dent and Tiger Woods.

Woods often has credited Mr. Sifford and other black pioneers.

"It's not an exaggeration to say that without Charlie, and the other pioneers who fought to play, I may not be playing golf," Woods said in an email to the Associated Press late last year. "My pop likely wouldn't have picked up the sport, and maybe I wouldn't have either."

Elder, who in 1975 became the first black player to compete in the Masters, told the New York Times in 1992, "Without Charlie Sifford there would have been no one to fight the system for the blacks that followed."

He added: "It took a special person to take the things that he took: the tournaments that barred him, the black cats in his bed, the hotels where he couldn't stay, the country club grills where he couldn't eat. Charlie was tough and hard."

Mr. Sifford won the PGA Tour's Greater Hartford Open in 1967 and its Los Angeles Open in 1969 and captured its Seniors' Championship in 1975. He was an original member of the Senior Tour (now the Champions Tour), which was founded in 1980, and won its Suntree Classic that year. He earned more than $341,000 on the regular tour and more than $1 million for his overall pro career.

Mr. Sifford was named to the World Golf Hall of Fame in St. Augustine in 2004 and was introduced by the renowned international golfer Gary Player.

Player, having witnessed the injustices of apartheid in his native South Africa, observed that "we honor a man not just for what he accomplished on the course, but for the course he chose in life."

The one goal that eluded him was a chance to play in the Masters, which did not invite its first black player until Elder in 1975. His bitterness was eased when Woods won the first of his four Masters titles in 1997.

Mr. Sifford, a native of Charlotte, N.C., and the son of a factory worker, caddied at his hometown Carolina Golf & Country Club as a youngster, and at age 13 sometimes broke par when caddies were allowed to play the course on Mondays.

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He earned 60 cents a day caddying, gave his mother 50 cents and kept a dime to buy cigars. In the years to come, they were his trademark.

Mr. Sifford served during the battle of Okinawa in World War II but returned home to find himself unwanted in the sport he loved.

In 1952, he was allowed to play in the Phoenix Open in an all-black foursome that included the former heavyweight champion Joe Louis. On the first green, they found that someone had put excrement into the hole.

Mr. Sifford competed mostly on the black players' United Golf Association tour in the 1950s. He won the National Negro Open every year from 1952 to 1956 and again in 1960.

In 1957, Mr. Sifford won the Long Beach Open in California, which was not an official PGA Tour event. Two years later, according to the U.S. Golf Association, he met Stanley Mosk, the California state attorney general, who knew that Mr. Sifford was barred from PGA tournaments in his state.

Mosk asked the Tour to show reasons other than race why Mr. Sifford was denied membership.

As a result, the PGA made Mr. Sifford an approved tournament player in 1960, the first black to win the designation.

When Mr. Sifford won the Greater Hartford Open by one stroke in August 1967, shooting a final-round 6, he received an ovation from the galleries and pats on the back from his fellow pros. His triumph represented much more than his $20,000 pay check.

"If you try hard enough, anything can happen," he said with tears in his eyes.

In winning the Los Angeles Open, Mr. Sifford shot a 28 on the back nine of his opening round and went on to defeat Harold Henning in a playoff.

Sometimes gruff, Mr. Sifford struggled to overcome anger at the opportunities he lost to racial discrimination, and he sought psychological counseling and listened to relaxation tapes.

Charlie Owens, 82, of Tampa, who followed Mr. Sifford on the PGA Tour in 1970 and later won two Senior Tour events, had known Mr. Sifford since the early 1950s and frequently played with him at Rogers Park Golf Course.

Owens said Mr. Sifford took pride in every dollar he earned, and didn't part with it easily on the golf course.

"He was a very careful player," Owens said. "He could have won more tournaments. When he'd get in position to win, he could make a charge, but he made sure he made a paycheck. . . . When he'd get a dollar, he'd squeeze it so tight the man on the face of the dollar would choke."

Soon after Jackie Robinson broke the modern major league baseball color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, Mr. Sifford met Robinson and told of his dream to become a pro golfer. Robinson warned that he could not be a quitter and told of the hostility he would face.

"Didn't anyone think I was going to get this far,'' Mr. Sifford said in 1992. "It's like Nelson Mandela. They kept him in jail 25 years, but it didn't break his determination. They couldn't break mine."

Times staff writer Greg Auman contributed to this report.