Charlie Sifford on his first TOUR win

Editor’s note: The following is Chapter 15 of Just Let Me Play: The Story of Charlie Sifford, The First Black PGA Golfer by Charlie Sifford with James Gullo and published courtesy of the Sifford family. The book in its entirety is available for purchase here. It is also available in Audible, Kindle and paperback. I didn’t want to be a survivor on the TOUR my whole career. I wanted to be a winner. As the sixties went by, I saw that they were taking my career right along with them and I would have to make my move right away if I was going to take my game up a notch. I had won at Long Beach in 1957 and in a couple of smaller tournaments like the Puerto Rico Open, but I had yet to win a big, four-round tournament against a full field of the PGA’s finest. That became my goal. A very simple line cuts neatly through the roster of touring professionals. It’s the line that separates those who win tournaments from those who play well but always come up short. I saw it happen every week out there-one guy would have the will to come out on top. Maybe the greatest example I ever witnessed of this was the 1964 U.S. Open at Congressional when Ken Venturi withstood terrible heat and shot two incredible rounds on the last day to win. I was in the top 15 going into that last day and could have made a run for it, but I wound up shooting a pair of 77s in that blistering sun and humidity. Hell, I just wanted to get out of there without fainting dead away on the golf course. I realized that I was going to have to rise up over all of the petty bullshit that I encountered as a matter of course and put it out of my mind if I wanted to win. Nobody was going to do 148 it for me or magically make the conditions perfect for me. It became my goal to win a tournament before I was through. I wanted to jump over that line into the elite group of winners. I wanted there to be no doubt in anybody’s mind that I belonged with the best golfers, and a win would be something that nobody could take away from me. I knew a lot was at stake if I won a big one. I wanted it for all of the black kids who didn’t know that black men could play pro golf. I wanted them to see a black man holding up that big winner’s check, and I wanted it for my wife and family who had stood by me for so long. Most of all I wanted it for myself. Coming out on top would be my personal vindication for all of the miles I’d driven and all of the hardships I’d withstood. Week after week I saw how hard it was to get that first big win on the tour. I came in second a few times and in the top five many times, but there was a big difference between number two and number one. Winning took something special, an ability to rise up to the challenge of the course and block out all of the distractions on and off the golf course. It took near-perfect concentration down the stretch and mistake-free golf in the clutch moments when the other guys were breathing down your neck. It also took a winning attitude, which I hadn’t allowed myself to have since I stopped playing on the Negro circuit. In order to survive in my early years on the tour I had developed some bad habits. Instead of having a killer instinct when I was within striking distance of the leaders, I made myself play safe time and again. Shooting right at the pins on every hole is the aggressive thing to do, but it’s also the road that leads to disaster. You miss a few of those greens and wind up with double-bogies and you’re out of there. I was always too aware that if I messed up and was too aggressive I could put myself out of the tournament and way down in the money. I approached every single shot as if it were the difference between earning enough money to keep me on the tour another week or packing my bags and heading home. That is certainly not a winning attitude, but it was what I needed to survive. It would have crushed me if I had fallen so far down on the money list that I lost my card or had to requalify. Although I wouldn’t say that things exactly softened up out there on the tour, it did seem to ·get a little easier as the late sixties rolled around. For one thing, I finally had some black friends to share the time with. Pete Brown, who grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and Rafe Botts, a young guy from Washington, D.C., came onto the tour in 1964 after I signed both of their approved tournament player’s applications. Pete and Rafe were big, strapping guys with terrific games. Pete was good enough to win a satellite tournament, the 1964 Waco Turner Open in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Rafe used to caddy for President Eisenhower in Washington before becoming one of the best amateurs on the black circuit. I met him at a UGA tournament and brought him out to California to play in 1959. By 1964 he was ready to try the TOUR. Those guys were as broke and hungry as I was when I started, and they used to drive with me in my car from tournament to tournament. I introduced them to my network of contacts, showed them how things worked on the TOUR, and tried to smooth the way for them as best I could. If nothing else, we had each other to talk to when some kind of racial crap was thrown at us, and it helped me enormously. Just seeing those guys playing professional golf made me feel that what I had been through was worthwhile and that I had managed to open the doors for them and other black golfers who were coming up. Which is not to say that their lives were easy and free of prejudice. Pete and Rafe and all the guys who followed them have all gotten their share of bad treatment and meanness from people in tournaments. They played off and on through the seventies and struggled to keep their cards, and they both come out now for senior tournaments. Guards and tournament officials still stop them and ask whom they’re caddying for, which continues to be a fact of life if you’re a black professional. Time was helping to break down the resistance to my playing on the white TOUR, but then I wasn’t getting any younger either. I was fast approaching 45 when the 1967 season started, and there were young guys out there like George Archer and Lee Trevino to whom I was giving away 15 to 20 years. You don’t bounce back quite as fast from a sore back or a strained muscle when you’re 45, and those golf courses seem to get a little longer every year when you’re out there walking. You see those young bucks out there hitting 280-yard drives and practicing all day long and you wonder if the game might be about to pass you by. I knew that if I didn’t win soon it might never happen. There just aren’t a lot of guys pushing 50 who can keep their game together for four straight days to win tournaments. But by 1967 at least it didn’t feel like I was walking into the enemy camp every single time I showed up somewhere to play golf. People were nicer to me and I started to relax and play better. I also had a brand-new reason to play well-on August 28, 1966, my wife delivered a baby boy. Craig Leslie Sifford, our second son, came at a time when Charles, Jr., was 18 years old and about to move out of the house. I suddenly had my work cut out for me all over again with this new mouth to feed. Whatever the factors were, I started to play a lot better and more confidently as the 1967 season progressed. I was knocking on the door of the leaders nearly every month, and the money started falling into place. I made $1,600 in Tucson with an eighth-place finish in February and followed it up at the end of March with $5,300 and a fifth-place finish in Greensboro. Every couple of weeks I would put up a big number like a 67 that would put me in the running. By the first of August I had made over $22,000, which was by far the best year I’d ever had on the tour. For once I didn’t have to worry about every penny I might lose if I made a bad shot, and for the first time in years I found myself really enjoying the game. I had somehow managed to tame my savage hook and keep the ball on line. I don’t know if I was playing better because I was more relaxed or was more relaxed because I was playing better. It’s a chicken-and-egg thing, I guess, but all I knew was that it felt awfully good. On Monday, August 14, I left from Firestone in Akron, Ohio, after finishing 18th at ·the American Golf Classic, and headed for Hartford. I liked playing in Hartford. I had friends there, the Duvals, with whom I stayed every year, and I liked the Wethers-field Country Club course where they played the tournament. At 6,568 yards, the course wasn’t particularly long and was well suited to my game. I always finished in the money there, and the way I was playing I knew that I could leave in a week with another big check in my pocket. The purse was $100,000, with $20,000 of it going to the winner, which in those days was about as good as the money got on the tour. They had a good field for the tournament, the brightest name being Gary Player, who was coming back to the Tour after a month spent at home in South Africa. Art Wall returned to defend his championship, and guys like Al Geiberger, Frank Beard, Chi Chi, Harold Henning, and Julius Boros were touted as having a shot at the ring. Lee Trevino was a rookie who had finished fifth at the U.S. Open at Baltusrol in June, and he showed his stuff by shooting a 31 on the front nine the first day. Scoring was made even easier that week because they’d been having trouble with the grass and were allowing free drops whenever your ball landed in a bad patch of grass. You give a pro the opportunity to improve his lie and he’s going to hit that green practically every time. We were gonna have a shootout that week. Gary Player was true to form on the first day with a sweet 65 that was 6-under par. Right behind him were Terry Dill with 66 and Trevino and another rookie named Bob Lunn with 67s. I shot a 69 that included an eagle on the 14th hole. I should have known right then that that hole would be my best friend all week. It was a reachable 497 yards and I sank about a 20-foot putt to eagle it. Number 17 was a tough par 3 that I bogied, and then I came right back to birdie the 18th. I finished tied for fifth place with about a dozen other guys. I slipped to a 70 on the second day, and if you had told me that I was in a position to win the tournament I would have thought you were nuts, because Dave Hill came out and shot one of the best competitive rounds of golf ever played. He put up a 61 that day that could have been a 60 if he had dropped a 10-footer on the 18th green. It was a hot, still day where it was easy to score on the course and most of the top guys broke 69. Gary Player’s 69 kept him in second place, and Terry Dill had a 68 to stay close. Doug Ford put up a 67 that launched him into fourth place, a stroke ahead of Trevino. I was suddenly six strokes off the lead in about 15th place, and I was going to have to do a lot better than one-under to catch up with those thoroughbreds. Once again I had scored on the 14th hole with a two-putt birdie but got beat up by that long, par-3 17th. I played a 3-iron into it and missed the green and wound up with another bogie. Saturday was a crucial round for me. I had made the cut easily and was 3-under par, but I had had a tendency in prior years to blow up on either Saturday or Sunday. Maybe I lost my concentration a little after I knew that I would finish in the money but felt that I was so far down that I didn’t have a chance at the lead. I would then shoot a high score that would take me out of the tournament for good and leave me no chance for a Sunday comeback. This time, though, I worked hard to stay on top of my game, and once again I turned in a solid, if unspectacular, round of golf. I shot a 69 on the third day, shaving two more strokes off of par with birdies on the par-5 second and 14th, and pars the rest of the way. By that point I had hit the green on the 14th three straight times and had played it 4-under, which is pretty damn good for one hole. I was still five strokes off of the lead, which Dill took on that third day, but for the first time in a long while, I had managed to stay within striking distance going into the fourth round. You could see the swings that take place out there. My buddy Dave Hill, for example, followed his incredible round of 61 with an even-par 71 on Saturday, a 10-stroke turnaround. Gary Player and Ray Floyd were lingering a few strokes away from the lead after shooting even par and 3-under, respectively. What those guys, who were winners, had done was given themselves a shot to win the golf tournament on the last day. They had had their ups and downs over the first three days, but they hadn’t done anything disastrous. Now they found themselves a few strokes off the lead going into Sunday, which is the place you wanted to be. A hot round would win the tournament, and that was the best you could ask for. I was in a group in 12th place that included Trevino and Gene Littler. I knew that if I could put together another solid round I’d finish up high enough to make some decent money. I didn’t really think about winning, because it would have taken a really nasty score to make up all those strokes that the leaders had on me. I not only hadn’t been making those kinds of shots that week, but I had traditionally had problems on Sunday. Again, it was a concentration thing where I would lapse on the last day and put up a disappointing score that would drop me way down in the money. I wish I remembered what I did the night before the final round, because I would do it again all the time. As I said earlier, there are times on the golf course when it all comes together and you put together a day of golf that is near perfection. It’s a glorious feeling that I had captured a few times in the past with my 63 to beat Arnold Palmer on the first day of the Canadian Open and a few 64s at other tournaments. But I had never managed to do it on the last day of a tournament, and let me tell you, nothing else compares. If shooting a 64 during a tournament is like throwing a no-hitter, then doing it on Sunday is like throwing a no-hitter in the World Series. I think it was the most thrilling thing I’ve ever experienced. My tee time was set for 12:10 p.m., and I was paired with Bobby Cole from South Africa and Al Geiberger. We were the sixth group from the end, when Terry Dill, Dave Marr, and Doug Ford would finish play. Gene Littler and Lee Trevino were right behind us, and the group in front of us included Tom Weiskopf and Harold Henning. I parred the first hole. The second was a 502-yard par 5 that had a slight bend to the left. It worked perfectly with my hook, and for the second day in a row, I reached it in two. I missed the eagle putt by a little, but tapped in for a birdie. One under par. I went on a run of pars for the next four holes. I was hitting the fairways and reaching the greens in regulation. My putting wasn’t great, but it was okay. When I got to the seventh, the putt finally dropped and I had my second birdie. Two under. I parred the eighth and then came up to the ninth hole, a 234-yard par 3. I hit a two-iron that day and put it on the green. Two putts later I had completed the front nine at 2-under, with no bogies, which wasn’t spectacular but kept me in the hunt. I sneaked a look at the scoreboard when we made the turn. I had picked up two strokes on the leaders, and I saw that Terry Dill and the others were having their troubles. They wert playing the front nine even or over par. I said to Bobby Cole, who was also putting together a good round, ”You know, if one of us shoots a 31 on the back we’re going to win this thing.” Bobby agreed, and then we went out and both birdied number 10. Three-under. I parred 11 and just missed a birdie on 12. On the 13th I hit my approach to within three feet of the cup and tapped it in for another birdie. Four-under for the day, and 7 under for the tournament. As I said before, number 14 had been my best friend for the whole week, and with an excitement rising in my chest, I knew that if I played it well I would be knocking on the door in the final four holes. I hit a solid drive down the middle of the fairway. As I walked after that ball, the butterflies started inside me and it was all I could do to keep calm. I had been reaching it in two with my 4-wood all week. I pulled out the club, took a deep breath to calm myself, and took aim. I was a little too fast, and the ball hooked on me. It squirted into a bunker on the left side and then rolled right back out again into heavy rough alongside the green. I was 25 feet away from the cup with no chance to putt. It looked like the best I could do would be to make birdie, but only if I hit a great chip. I did better than hit a great chip. I hit the chip of my life. The ball came out softly from that grass, bounced about 10 feet from the cup, settled, and rolled straight in. It was my second eagle in four days on the 14th, and suddenly I was 6-under for the day. I heard a roar from the gallery when my number was posted on the scorecard, but I didn’t connect it to me until we got to the 15th tee. Suddenly, thousands of people were running to get into position to watch what I’d do. Word had spread like wildfire that I was putting up some numbers, and by the time we teed off at 15 there must have been 10,000 people standing there watching me. Man, that was a new feeling and I had to work real hard to keep those butterflies from choking me. I stepped up and drove it down the fairway, and my approach shot landed within 10 feet of the cup. I missed the putt but tapped in for par. I knew at that point that I was in the hunt. Knew it from the way the gallery reacted to my every shot. I dared not look up at the scoreboard, because I knew that there was nothing worse you could do to blow your cool. Behind me the picture had changed considerably. Terry Dill and Dave Marr were falling away on the back nine, but Steve Opperman was charging with a birdie of his own on the 14th. Ray Floyd, Doug Ford, and Gary Player were still in the hunt, too. This tournament was going to go right down to the wire, and any one of a half-dozen golfers could win it. The 16th was a long par 5 that I had been unable to reach all week, and I found myself about 50 yards short after my second shot. I chipped it to within eight feet on the third, which got a huge roar from the crowd, and dropped the putt for another birdie. I was 7-under par with two holes to play and had taken the lead. The 17th had been one of the toughest holes all week. It was a 215-yard par 3 that demanded a perfect shot or the ball would drain off into a trap or heavy rough. All I wanted to do was land the ball safely, and this time my 3-iron was straight and true. I two-putted it for par, and now I had one hole left. Although I knew that there was something going on behind me, I was pretty sure that if I kept the 7-under score intact, I was going to win the tournament. I had to play the 18th even up. As I said, I wasn’t about to look at the scoreboard to see where I stood. I knew that I was on top, and it would only tighten me up to see how close the other guys were. The 18th hole was a long par 4, and by that time it was packed on both sides by a huge gallery. I’ll tell you, I had played in hundreds of golf tournaments and seen a lot of galleries, but I never had had the feeling of having that huge gallery waiting to watch what I’d do. It didn’t matter that I wouldn’t look at the scoreboard, because on the tee an official came over to me and told me that I was winning. I was so excited that I could barely contain myself, but somehow I took out my driver and knocked one down the middle of the fairway. I wish I could describe to you that last walk down the fairway. It was like the whole crowd had been funneled into me. They were cheering and yelling my name and encouraging me. I think that a lot of people knew what was at stake and that I had never won a big tournament. They were rooting for me to win, and my heart was flying when I got to my ball. All I had to do was put it on the green and putt out. I pulled out my 7-iron and looked at the ball.It was sitting in a little rough spot of grass. I could have moved it, but I didn’t want to mess around or take any chances on a bad drop. I could hit it from where it lay, so I sized it up and took my stance. I swung, but I was a little fast and again I hooked it. The crowd gasped as the ball settled into a steep bunker on the left side of the green. This wasn’t going to be easy. I had my work cut out for me to save par. I took out my sand wedge and walked into that trap, and a hush came over the huge crowd. Man, I was so nervous that I just about couldn’t see. I closed my eyes and prayed to God. “Please just let me make this shot,” I said. I swung and the ball came out high and soft and pretty as could be. It thumped down on the green and stopped about four feet from the cup. Geiberger and Cole marked their balls on the green and let me putt out. I sized that putt up every which way. It was just a regular old, straightaway putt, one that I’d made a thousand times. I took my stance, pointed my cigar down, and stroked it. That dude went right down the center and I had my par and a final-round score of 64. The crowd roared. I threw up my arms in celebration. I knew that I had just won the tournament, and they knew it, too. Those people were so wonderful. They stood and cheered for me for what must have been 15 minutes. Cole and Geiberger shook my hand and swatted me on the back, and when I moved off the green about 20 other players were waiting to congratulate me. But the tournament wasn’t over. There were still all those guys behind me. Steve Opperman could have tied me and forced a playoff, but he missed a birdie putt on the 16th and bogied the 17th. He needed a birdie on the 18th to tie. My par putt suddenly loomed very large. He missed the birdie and was finished with a round of 67. In the final group only Doug Ford still had a chance, but he needed to birdie the last two holes to tie me. When he parred the 17th, it was all over. When I realized I had won, I broke down and cried. They handed me that big check for $20,000 and asked me to say something, but I could hardly talk. “If you try hard enough,” I said slowly, “anything can happen.” And then I was just too shaken up to say ·more. “Thank you,” I said. The crowd roared its approval for another five minutes. I wish Rose could have been there to see it. I never will forget Hartford, because that’s when my dreams came true. It had been my goal to be a winner and I had gone through heaven and earth to find a way to do it. I thanked God for my victory, and for giving me the strength to hang in there all of those years when winning a golf tournament seemed like the unlikeliest thing that would ever happen to me. If you try hard enough, anything can happen. How long I’d been trying. I was 45 years old and I’d been trying since 1947. When it finally did happen, it was the sweetest thing I’ve ever known.

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