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James Levister thought it would be a phase. Sure, he was an avid golfer. A 4 handicap at his best, in fact. But when he started his 3-year-old daughter, Mesha, playing golf, he figured she would eventually get tired of the game. He was wrong, though. His daughter loved playing with her dad on weekends – she finally beat him when she was 16 and never lost again – and she thrived on the challenge of the game. “It was our thing,” Mesha said. “I liked that it was hard, and I continued to play because it was hard. But for me, when I was small, it was about being with him and doing something different.” She played four years of varsity golf and basketball at her Florida high school, got scholarship offers in both sports, and wanted to turn pro. Eventually, she had to choose between the two. “I told my dad I would rather play golf because there are fewer people that look like me playing golf,” said Levister, who is African American. “I wanted to be a trendsetter. … I felt like I had something to give in the game. I didn’t realize what it was back then as a little 17-year-old.” On Wednesday, some 23 years later, and on her 41st birthday, no less, Levister was at Memorial Park Golf Course to watch three of the players she coaches at Prairie View A&M University play in the pro-am at the Cadence Bank Houston Open. Christian Latham, who is working on his master’s degree in architecture, and seniors Rondarius Walters and Taylor Harvey, a member of the women’s team, would play with Phil Griffith, who is a vice president of operations for United Airlines’ Houston hub, and PGA TOUR pros Stewart Cink and Matthew NeSmith. “I hope that they get an out-of-this-world experience that they may not have ever gotten – ever,” Levister said. “Or that it opens up their eyes to the maximum potential and drives them to be whatever they want to be.” The pairing with Griffith is no accident. United Airlines, in partnership with the PGA TOUR, has earmarked more than $500,000 in grants to 51 golf teams at HBCUs like Prairie View. Each school gets $10,000 in travel credits to bolster travel and recruiting budgets and potentially help more than 250 student-athletes compete in places that may have been out of reach. Griffith also attended a clinic earlier this week in which golfers from another Houston-area HBCU, Texas Southern, worked with youngsters from the First Tee. He’s excited about the impact the grants are having. “I’m very impressed with these kids and when I look at where I was back then, if you don’t know that something exists, yeah, it’s kind of hard for you to aspire for,” Griffith said. “And a lot of the things that these kids are doing today, I had no aspirations for because I just didn’t know. “I think as we continue this program,” he added, “just opening their eyes and showing them valuable and effective ways of getting there, it’s going to be a lot of fun over the years. That’s what I’m hoping.” All in it together Levister coaches the men’s and women’s teams at Prairie View A&M, which is the second oldest public university in Texas. She’s also done double duty at North Carolina Central University, as well as at Lincoln University in Jefferson, Missouri. “It’s interesting to see the dynamic and be able to create a culture here of togetherness and make sure that everybody roots for everybody because we’re all one team,” Levister said. Forging something of a non-traditional path is second nature to Levister. When the women’s team at her college in Florida disbanded, she was recruited by NCCU to play on its men’s team. She played No. 1 and was the team’s most valuable player as a freshman, also earning Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association Rookie of the Year honors. After 9/11, Levister left school and went home to Washington, D.C. She was the first African American to win the 2004 Virginia Women’s Amateur and was named the state’s female golfer of the year. She turned pro in 2006 and joined the Symetra Tour in 2010. Life on the road could be lonely, though, particularly for a young woman who was often the only African American entered in an event. “I’m still a golfer, regardless,” Levister said firmly. And she can’t shake the memory of being pulled over by a policeman in New York. “The cop came over and asked the other tour player that was in the car, who was a white female, instead of asking the normal stuff, he asked the young lady that was in the passenger seat, ‘Are you OK?’” Levister said. “So, for me that was a little bit of a traumatic experience. … But he let me go. So, he really pulled me over just to check on the person in the car.” After Levister’s father died in 2014, she decided to quit the tour. She still competed, winning the 2015 EP Pro Women’s Championship, but began to focus on teaching. She joined the staff at NCCU in 2020 and helped start the women’s program before heading to Prairie View A&M. She’s only been there about a month, but she already feels accepted by her players, who share her goal of returning the Panthers to dominance in the Southwestern Athletic Conference. And she wants to make it easier for others to follow her path. “I am definitely all about how I take on life now,” Levister said. “I just want to be a good person, do the right thing and break glass ceilings for the next people behind me so they don’t have it as hard as I did.” Keeping the program alive When Prairie View A&M lost its golf coach last fall, Latham had just graduated magna cum laude, finishing his architecture degree in three years, and started working on his masters. But the team needed a coach, and Latham stepped up in a big way. “He really held the fort down last year for both of the teams,” Levister said. Like Levister, Latham was a multi-sport athlete who started playing golf because of his dad. But his favorite sport was baseball – his grandfather Cliff Johnson played 20 years in the major leagues, including two World Series with the New York Yankees. By the time Latham got to high school, though, he had become disillusioned with baseball. He endured racist taunts, many times from the adults, and coaches who flat-out lied to him. “I lost my passion for baseball,” he said. “I didn’t even want to play anymore. So that’s what really got me stuck into golf because it’s like at the end of the day, no one can else say anything about me as long as I’m shooting a score I need to shoot. “So that’s how I really got into it. And I just focus on golf only now. That’s what brought me.” The summer before he entered high school in Katy, Texas, a Houston suburb, Latham spent every day at the golf course. He shot 111 in his first tournament, but by the end of the summer, he broke 80 for the first time. With continued improvement, he began to think about playing in college and verbally committed to Prairie View A&M after his sophomore year. In addition to studying for his masters, where he’s designing a practice facility for the golf team as a class project, and hitting balls on the range, Latham is getting hands-on experience by working at an architecture firm several days a week. He also has a 14-month-old son named Kai – who is full of “joy and happiness,” Latham said – half the week. “He’s like my little twin,” Latham said. “So now I got him a plastic set of golf clubs and seeing him wanting to play with that is pretty cool.” Just because he’s working on his master’s degree doesn’t mean Latham is giving up on his dream to play golf professionally, though. He’s already played in one APGA event and hopes to play well enough this year to finish in the top five of its collegiate rankings, which would give him scholarship access to the tour’s events through the remainder of the 2023 season. “I’m not going to just stop that goal and stop that dream,” he said. “I’m going to still work hard this semester to try to get to that level or continue to just add on to where I should be.” Giving players wings With the travel credits provided by United, schools like Prairie View A&M will be able to compete in higher profile events that might otherwise seem out-of-reach – quite literally. Levister, who once rode 11 hours from Durham, North Carolina to Port St. Lucie, Florida, for a college tournament, has already started putting those credits to work. “Even in the short time that I’ve been here, it’s saved us a tremendous amount of time and money just to be able to have access to go over to Houston Airport and to fly,” she said. “Just to reduce costs of travel helps tremendously because now we can use those funds to give them a better experience as a student athlete and a college golfer.” Latham remembers a 15-hour bus ride from Houston to Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, where the Panthers played in – and won – the 2021 PGA Works Championship at TPC Sawgrass. With two travel days each way and the tournament itself, the Black Panthers were gone nine days. That’s why on Wednesday Latham planned to thank Griffith for United’s support. That United and organizations like the PGA TOUR are seeing value in HBCU golf has been a big help. “I want to say it makes us feel more comfortable when we’re not having to travel,” Latham said, “cramped up for 14 hours, 16 hours, when we could just make a two-hour plane ride. And it makes an impact on the team. “I mean, we’ve had times to where people didn’t even have enough seats on the bus,” he continued, “and we’re just kind of all locked up or having to make multiple trips to get somewhere because we don’t have enough room to bring everybody. So, it means a lot. Gives us the opportunity to try to feel more like a sports program because we see other sports programs get to travel like that. And we never necessarily got to.”
Kyle Westmoreland was born in Lewisville, Texas, four hours north of Memorial Park, host of this week’s Cadence Bank Houston Open. He lives in Katy, just a 25-minute drive from the Houston landmark where he will make his fifth start of the new PGA TOUR season. To be sure, Westmoreland, 31, can count this as a home game. “It’s an incredible opportunity,” he said. “I’ve wanted to play here since I can remember, from the time it was at TPC Woodlands to the Redstone Members course to the Players course to now here at Memorial. Growing up, we play a ton of junior golf events at Memorial Park, and it looks different than it used to about 20 years ago. “You know, it’s an awesome place and just a dream come true to be able to play here.” While few can claim to be more local than Westmoreland, fewer still have taken a more circuitous route to get to this point. In September, he made a shoestring tackle for the 25th and last spot on the Korn Ferry Tour Finals Eligibility Points List, 4.5 points ahead of Joey Garber. It was joyful validation for the long-hitting Westmoreland, who was lightly recruited out of high school. Although he had the opportunity to play for the University of Houston, he said, his dream was to play for Texas. Unfortunately, he wasn’t on the radar in Athens. “There’s a guy named Jordan Spieth that was a year behind me that I think the coaches were looking at pretty heavily,” Westmoreland said. “Air Force was my best option.” He won four times, earned All-Mountain West Conference honors, and graduated in 2014. Although he had considered a life in the air, that success opened his eyes to the possibility of playing golf for a living, and he pivoted from becoming a pilot, a 12-year commitment, to a five-year service hitch, instead. But even that plan was fraught with challenges. Stationed in Charleston, South Carolina, where he worked in financial management, his schedule was so jammed he hit balls under the lights at a nearby driving range until it closed at 10 p.m. He putted on a yardstick on the floor of his room to improve his alignment and path. He tested himself against the College of Charleston golf team on weekends, and sometimes drove two hours to Myrtle Beach to see his coach. Once, on the way to a deployment in Africa, Westmoreland spent a week in Roda, Spain, and found a practice facility that allowed players to rent one club per day. So that’s what he did. “The most important thing,” he has said more than once, “is to put one foot in front of the other.” Upon completion of his service in the summer of 2019, he turned fulltime to golf. His exit interview was delayed roughly two weeks when he Monday qualified into the Korn Ferry Tour’s Utah Championship, where he finished T25 to earn a spot in the following week’s event. He earned status on PGA TOUR Canada. He earned Korn Ferry status. Last season, making up for lost time, he didn’t miss a week, even throwing in a PGA TOUR cameo at The Honda Classic (sponsor exemption, missed cut). And when he squeaked through the Korn Ferry Tour Finals, he became the first Air Force Academy graduate to earn a PGA TOUR card. “I hope I’m not the last,” he said. “Hopefully we can inspire some people to continue playing golf even through their service time, get a little bit better, start putting on those Air Force and Army and Navy putting greens and try to get better and make it out here.” It’s been a slow start to the season, with Westmoreland missing three of his first four cuts. His best is a T54 at the Sanderson Farms Championship, but the 6-foot-3, 220-pound Westmoreland is not easily moved off his path. (He also served as an instructor in wrestling and ground grappling in Colorado Springs.) He is confident that with his coach, Jeff Smith, and the rest of his team, he can pivot. “The PGA TOUR, there’s data points everywhere,” Westmoreland said, “so we kind of look at them and see and kind of figure out what we need to do better to compete at the highest level … and I’m just excited to test it this week on a great golf course with some length. We like to hit it far, so, length’s always good.” One of the things his time at the Academy taught him, Westmoreland said at the season-opening Fortinet Championship earlier this fall, was perseverance. But that wasn’t all. “The biggest thing,” he added, “is it teaches you who you are.” Kyle Westmoreland, patriot, golfer, and PGA TOUR rookie, is a guy who finds a way.
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