TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/072291/0722260.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.2 KB | 189 lines

                                                                                SPORT, Page 66

The Last Bastions Of Bigotry


A year after the P.G.A. banned discrimination on the tour, private
golf clubs have made, at most, token changes

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III -- Reported by David E. Thigpen/New York,
with other bureaus


    When the U.S. men's pro-golf tour vowed last summer to
stop holding its tournaments at clubs that discriminated on the
basis of race, the decision was hailed as somewhat akin to
Jackie Robinson's arrival in major-league baseball in 1947. The
Professional Golfers' Association heard a sudden outcry against
holding the 1990 championship at all-white Shoal Creek Country
Club in Birmingham -- and against the widely known but
long-ignored fact that 17 of its 39 tour courses were at private
clubs with no black members. The P.G.A. quickly imposed antibias
rules, and Shoal Creek admitted its first black as an "honorary"
member. Within months the women's and senior pro tours and the
U.S. Golf Association, which sponsors the U.S. Open and Amateur
tournaments, followed suit.

    Cynics said the repentant parties were probably motivated
by money: image-sensitive corporations and TV networks provide
most of pro golf's cash prizes, and the controversy prompted
sponsors like IBM to yank $2 million in advertising from ABC's
P.G.A. championship telecast. Whatever the impetus, the
response prompted such seasoned observers as Arthur Ashe, the
Wimbledon tennis champion and historian of black athletics, to
predict sweeping change at exclusive clubs. Said Ashe: "In two
or three years it is going to be completely different."

    A year later, however, it is disappointingly the same.
Says Calvin Peete, the foremost black pro: "Shoal Creek really
did not have much impact." The nation's private golf clubs --
symbols of power and privilege at play, manicured enclaves of
racial, religious and sexual discrimination -- show few signs
of more than token reform.

    To be sure, at least five all-white clubs opted to change
behavior, including Crooked Stick in Carmel, Ind., which will
be host to the 1991 P.G.A. championship next month. But four of
those five have admitted one black each, and the fifth,
Baltusrol, in Springfield, N.J., has pledged only to comply with
the racial rules by its date for playing host to the U.S. Open
in 1993.

    Worse, these compliant clubs are in the minority. At least
eight others gave up major championships rather than meet the
rules, although a few have since begun to admit blacks and can
regain eligibility. The St. Louis Country Club in Ladue, Mo.,
ceded the 1992 Women's Amateur Championships, ostensibly because
it is renovating its greens. The Chicago Golf Club in Wheaton,
Ill., relinquished the 1993 Walker Cup. Aronimink Golf Club in
Newtown Square, Pa., took in a few blacks as junior members in
recent months but withdrew from the 1993 P.G.A. championship
because it could not guarantee that such members would move up
to full voting status by then. The Merion Golf Club in nearby
Ardmore concluded that it would not be integrated in time for
the U.S. Women's Open in 1994.

    That is apparently typical: industry experts estimate that
three-quarters of the nation's 5,232 private golf and country
clubs have no black members. Among 74 private clubs in the
Chicago area, only 10 say they have black members, and only 26
enroll women. In the moneyed Westchester County suburbs of New
York, only 11 of the 39 clubs have black members. In
metropolitan Detroit, the tally is 11 of 38.

    Discrimination against Hispanics is less sweeping but
nonetheless apparent. In a 1990 survey of 20 courses on the
pro-golfing circuit, nine said they had Hispanas members; one
declared it had none. The other 10 courses did not respond on
the issue. Says Rudy Berumen, a Tempe, Ariz., member of the
Mexican-American Golf Association: "It's not that easy for a
Hispanic to join some clubs around here. But it would be tougher
for a black, unless he was a Governor or Senator."

    For women, who were 50% of the sport's new recreational
players last year, forms of clubhouse discrimination vary. They
may be denied membership or admitted only as associates of
their husbands. They may be excluded from certain dining rooms
and bars or get lower priority for desirable weekend-morning
tee times. Last year Marcia Welch charged Pittsburgh's Wildwood
Country Club with most of these indignities. The crowning
insult was that the club, which she joined while married, told
her to reapply and pay a new membership fee after her divorce.
Even female pro players can be snubbed on the job until the
tour's antibias rules take effect next year. The L.P.G.A.
tourney July 5 to 7 was at Highland Meadows in Sylvania, Ohio,
where women are not voting members.

    Veteran pro Tom Watson, whose wife and children are
Jewish, resigned from the Kansas City Country Club last year
after it blackballed accounting mogul Henry Bloch, a Jew.
Although the club changed its mind about Bloch, Watson did not
rejoin. In a New York Times column last month, he decried the
"hypocrisy" of admitting a single black to "integrate" and
urged, "Let's discriminate right now, each one of us, privately,
between what is right and what is wrong."

    The wrongs seem obvious. The highly visible act of
excluding people from prominent community institutions based on
skin color serves as a powerful and disturbing symbol that
racism is considered tolerable in the nation's top social
echelons -- just as excluding women and Jews sends a message
that sexism and anti-Semitism should still be considered
permissible. In addition, in almost all cases, the private clubs
bring together a community's business, professional and
political elites and thus perpetuate patterns of unequal
opportunity.

    The clubs' excuse is that the very essence of privacy is
freedom of association. Most Americans accept that
discrimination is wrong when it comes to work, school or
government services but are queasy about social intrusions. And
many all-white clubs do not see themselves as consciously
discriminatory. Aronimink said it had not excluded blacks --
none had sought admission. New members are proposed by old
members, who naturally choose relatives, friends and neighbors,
reinforcing the circle of privilege. The web tightens if a club
has a waiting list. Promptly admitting minority members would
mean jumping them ahead of others who have patiently stayed in
line.

    That concern was cited by Cypress Point in Pebble Beach,
Calif., when the club last September withdrew its dramatic
oceanside course from a P.G.A.-sanctioned pro-amateur tournament
that it had been host to since 1947. Cypress Point insists that
it has no ban on blacks, although it has no black members and
none on the waiting list, where the delay is seven years. Vice
President Dan Quayle, who belongs to Maryland's male-only
Burning Tree Country Club, played at Cypress Point in December;
he said later he had been assured it "does not discriminate."
Members may genuinely believe it does not.

    Snobbery and exclusion have long been inseparable from
golf. Playing even one round requires the use of expensive
equipment, access to landscaped acres of greensward and, for
most people, expensive lessons in technique. A caddy is a sort
of walk-along valet. At private Baltusrol, new members put up
$25,000 as an initiation fee, plus a $5,250 bond and $3,900
yearly dues. In times gone by, those economic facts alone might
have barred most blacks. But, just in case, the sport had
overtly racist rules and practices. Blacks did not play in the
elite Masters tournament in Augusta, Ga., for 41 years. The
phrase "Caucasian race only" was part of the P.G.A.'s
eligibility rules until 1961.

    Despite this legacy, minorities now share in the game's
broad popularity. On Southern California's public links,
typically up to one-third of the players are black or Hispanic.
At the Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles, where the initiation
fee is $60,000, general manager Bill Masse says one-fifth of
the 1,500 members are black, Hispanic, Asian or of Middle
Eastern descent. Admission procedures are as Old Guard as at any
all-white club: an applicant must be sponsored by six members
who have known him or her for three years. Says Masse: "We
admitted our first black member in the 1940s. We're known as
nondiscriminatory."

    The lack of entree at elite courses may contribute to
golf's lack of astonishing black role models, a la Michael
Jordan -- except, perhaps, for Jordan himself, an eager amateur
who joined the Wynstone Club in suburban Chicago because it
offers color-blind corporate memberships. Only four of the
P.G.A.'s 240 touring pros are black -- and just 25 of the 20,000
country-club pros. The sport's one faint hope for minority
recruitment is the Atlanta-based Calvin Peete National Minority
Golf Foundation. Set up in 1989 to award scholarships to
promising blacks discovered on public courses, it has yet to
sponsor anyone. Donations total $100,000, barely enough for
administrative expenses. Only $20,000 has come from pro golf and
pro golfers -- and not a penny from private country clubs.