Chapter 32

The 61st Masters

Augusta National Golf Club

Augusta, Georgia

April 5–8, 1997

At a postsurgical checkup with his cardiologist at UCLA, Earl doesn’t like what he hears. It’s too soon in his recovery to risk a cross-country flight, he’s told.

“Screw that,” Earl says. “I’m going to watch my son.”

Tiger’s status as the heavy favorite in the 1997 Masters is the number one topic in sports. “For months,” says CBS announcer Jim Nantz, “everybody felt like the coronation was coming at Augusta.”

“He’s playing really well, but Augusta takes a lot of local knowledge,” two-time U.S. Open winner Curtis Strange says, ticking off the various reservations he’s heard leveled against Tiger. “It’s a veteran’s tournament. It’s a veteran’s golf course. This kid is young. He’s really still inexperienced in major championships.”

The sports talk radio station near Paul Azinger’s home in western Florida jumps into the mix. Thirty-seven-year-old Azinger is the 1993 PGA Championship winner and a recent cancer survivor making his way back onto leaderboards.

“What has Tiger Woods done to be the favorite?” the announcer says. “C’mon, there’s a better chance he’ll miss the cut.”

It’s true that Tiger missed the 1996 cut, back when it was his U.S. Amateur title that secured his place at the tournament.

Azinger disagrees with the trash talk. He calls in to the radio show, and though he’s sure the local announcer will recognize his voice, makes no attempt to disguise it as he takes the radio host to task.

“You have it wrong,” Azinger says. “Not only could Tiger win, but he could win by a lot.”

Tiger’s only the fourth Black man to ever play in the Masters.

It’s not for lack of trying.

“I never will set foot inside that place,” Charlie Sifford says of Augusta National Golf Club.

Sifford hasn’t forgiven Augusta National for blocking his 1967 and 1969 PGA Tour wins from qualifying for those previous Masters. It wasn’t until 1972 that the club changed its rules to ensure that all PGA Tour winners receive an automatic invite.

“He did everything that was required,” Sifford’s son Charlie junior says of his dad, “and they kept changing the requirements.”

It’s not until April 10, 1975, that the first Black golfer to ever compete in a Masters tournament walks onto the course for his 11:15 a.m. tee time.

Lee Elder is a forty-year-old US Army vet who’s had his PGA Tour card since the 1968 season. His first PGA Tour win, at the 1974 Monsanto Open, qualifies him for the 1975 Masters.

Elder’s appearance in Augusta that spring—at a club that would not admit its first Black member for another fifteen years—was the latest step in a long, slow series of advancements for Black golfers.

“I’ll never forget the ride down Magnolia Lane,” Elder tells Golf Digest. “Some of the players had told me how it felt, but I wasn’t prepared for it. When we turned down that cobblestone road, I started to shake.”

For his opening round that Thursday, Elder dresses from head to toe in green clothing—green shirt, green sweater, green trousers—hoping to add a Masters Green Jacket to the ensemble. “This happens to be one of my favorite colors,” he notes. “My wife suggested I wear it rather than wait until Sunday.”

Around a hundred Black supporters have turned out to cheer for Elder, including Hall of Fame football player Jim Brown, here to watch his friend and fellow athlete “compete in the best tournament in the world,” which Brown says is “not only important to Lee or to black players, it’s also important for all qualified people.”

Many in the gallery are wearing GOOD LUCK LEE buttons, and the boost helps calm Elder’s nerves. So does reflecting on the encouragement he’s received from other Black sports mentors—especially heavyweight boxing champ (and self-described “golf junkie”) Joe Louis as well as Teddy Rhodes, the dominating champion of the all-Black United Golfers Association in the 1940s and 1950s, considered the first Black professional golfer. Louis acted as Rhodes’s patron, and Rhodes in turn hired Elder to be his traveling caddie. “Whatever has happened to me in bigtime golf, and whatever success I attain eventually, I owe to Ted Rhodes,” says Elder. “He took me under his wing when I was sixteen years old and completely re-built my golf game and my life.”

In 1948, Rhodes unsuccessfully petitioned the PGA to remove its “Caucasian only” clause; he’s retired by the time Sifford and others finally manage to get it rescinded, in 1961. Elder is the first Black player to benefit from the new Masters rules.

It’s not enough to earn Lee Elder a win in 1975, though. He’s cut after the second round.

“See you down the road,” he tells reporters, fulfilling his prediction by making it to the Masters five more times between 1975 and 1981, including a top-twenty finish in 1979.

In 1980, Calvin Peete becomes the second Black golfer to qualify, repeating the feat seven more times, scoring as high as eleventh in 1986. Jimmy Lee Thorpe follows in 1982, with six Masters appearances between then and 1988 (his best score also a top-twenty finish, in 1985).

It’s been nine years since a Black man played in the Masters.

None has yet cracked the top ten.

Like Tiger in 1995, Peete faced backlash for saying of the Masters, “It’s just another tournament”—but there’s no denying the specter of race hanging over the club’s history. Until the last two decades, Black faces were only visible in staff roles: caddies, waiters, attendants. In 1983, Peete snapped at one nosy reporter, “To ask a black man how he feels about the traditions of the Masters is like asking him how he feels about his forefathers, who were slaves.”

Sometimes the bigotry is more overt. Lee Elder was subjected to harassing notes and calls, even death threats, before and during his first Masters appearance. It’s similar to what Hank Aaron experienced when he was in the process of breaking Babe Ruth’s all-time home-run record in baseball.

“I wasn’t heckled, but I received strong letters,” says Elder. “I saved every one of them.”

Elder and Tiger have that in common. In 1995, after he’d first played Augusta as an amateur, an envelope addressed to Tiger traveled across the country—postmarked in Florida, mailed to Augusta National, then forwarded to Cypress, California, where Tida opened it on her son’s behalf, since he was away at Stanford.

The anonymous sender used a typewriter to compose a single nasty sentence:

“Just what we don’t need, another nigger in sports.”

Tiger has kept this letter for two years. It’s been nearly fifty since Jackie Robinson broke the racial barrier in professional baseball. Tiger could do the same at Augusta National.

I’ve filed everything away. I’ve played practice rounds with Nicklaus, Palmer, Floyd, Couples, and Norman, guys who have had a lot of success here. I’ve been lucky enough to pick their brains.

Just don’t screw it up, Tiger tells himself.