Twenty-five years after Tiger Woods’s arrival, golf is still overwhelmingly White. HBCUs (and one NBA champion) are hoping to change that.
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Smith, who took up golf 13 years ago and claims a five handicap, turns heads here. He skipped college to enter the 2004 NBA draft, but last fall, after retiring from basketball, he enrolled at A&T and began pursuing a degree in liberal studies. He also is 6-foot-6, made $90 million during a 16-year pro basketball career and unapologetically brings swag to the fairways.
That’s a matter of debate among HBCU coaches. This is a flash point moment, after all, for the institutions that teach tens of thousands of Americans but have been underserved, poorly funded and largely ignored for decades. The murder of George Floyd captured the world’s attention and set off a redirection of eyeballs and dollars toward HBCUs and their sports teams. Some here believe golf can capitalize on and help fuel that movement.
Growing up three hours away in tiny Winnabow, N.C., Williams was the only Black golfer on his youth, middle school and high school teams. Opponents tried to cheat him sometimes, assuming he didn’t know the rules, and once a White kid refused to shake Williams’s hand after their round. Course marshals and fellow golfers watched his every move, his mom says, and sometimes threatened to report or eject him for even a slight offense.
Watkins grew up in Greensboro, played golf throughout his youth and experienced this for himself. He was a child in 1960, when four Black activists first entered the F.W. Woolworth Co. and sat at the lunch counter, igniting the national sit-in movement. Watkins was 8 when he went to the Carolina Theatre to see “Flipper” and was made to sit in the balcony. He was in college when a golf-course employee called his golf coach at High Point University.
So why put yourself through it? These are just a few of the million psychological cuts, large and small, that it takes to be a Black golfer in America. The game is a mental grind anyway, and so many other kids succumb to the ridicule or cost or slow pace, give up, pick up a football instead.
“Talking about I wasn’t focused and all of that,” Smith says. He drained a franchise-record 65 three-pointers during the 2016 playoffs, and Cleveland came back from a 3-1 series deficit to win its first championship. . Top-ranked football recruit Travis Hunter committed to Jackson State and Sanders. Just this week, President Biden named NBA star Chris Paul, who attended Wake Forest but who has associations with North Carolina Central and A&T, to a new HBCU board of advisers.
He also noticed something that made him uneasy: for such an abundance of talent, for all the energy surrounding HBCUs, Rice says he was one of five coaches there from a historically Black institution.,” Rice says. “They’re all trying to come to HBCUs or mid-major or bigger schools. And we’ve got five HBCU coaches there? It’s frustrating because they just want to win.”
“I recruit Black kids,” says Rice, who attended and played golf for A&M. “They’re harder to find, no question, because they’re not educated enough on knowing how to really contact a coach. The other thing is, they’re not going to have — because it costs so damn much, they play in smaller events. … They’re out there; we just have programs that aren’t even looking.”
A few minutes later, three more carts arrive at the 13th. One is carrying Smith. Rice points out to a pair of Washington Post reporters that they wouldn’t be at the Aggie Invitational if Smith weren’t playing.
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