Three mini-columns for the price of one . . .
His name was Charlie Sifford, and he won the Rhode Island Open way back in the late-1950s, back when I was just a young kid and starting to caddy at the Rhode Island Country Club in Barrington, starting to be around golf. The only reason I remember him was because he was black, and hearing about a black golfer back then was like hearing about a black basketball player in the Atlantic Coast Conference, which didn’t have any back then.
I interviewed him twice many years later, both times when he was Newport in the early 1980s for tournaments at the Newport Country Club.
And he carried his bitterness as if it were just another club in his bag.
For there had been too many bad memories, too many insults, too much pain. He was a black man trying to make it in the lily-white world of professional golf, and the actual playing of the different courses was the easy part.
He had begun caddying for whites back in the Charlotte, N.C., of his childhood. He began playing the game by sneaking on the course in the off-hours. And there were never any lessons, and never any new clubs, but eventually he quit high school and began chasing this game he had come to love.
These are the big brush strokes of his career, but they don’t tell you that he had to play in small black tournaments, as the PGA Tour was as white as
Article source: http://www.providencejournal.com/sports/content/20150210-bill-reynolds-charlie-siffords-struggle-shouldnt-be-forgotten.ece
