Charlie Sifford’s Gift to Tiger Woods Continues to Give Back
Fifty-four years ago on Jan. 12, 1969, Charlie Sifford won the Los Angeles Open in a sudden-death playoff over Harold Henning to earn his second and last PGA Tour title. Sifford was six months short of his 47th birthday—the same age as Tiger Woods, who is making his return to competitive golf this week at the same event in Los Angeles, now the Genesis Invitational.
Nearing 47, Sifford had aspirations of becoming the first Black man to play in the Masters, but he wasn’t surprised when his win in Los Angeles didn’t get him into Augusta. Out of the Jim Crow South and an all-Black golf tour, Sifford had clawed his way through racial discrimination to the top of the game. But his joy was tinged with sadness. “I just wish I could call back 10 years,” he said during a celebration after the tournament.
The Genesis Invitational is a reminder of the reckoning that the game of golf has had with Sifford’s legacy: those lost years of his prime that he couldn’t call back because of the PGA’s “Caucasians Only” clause that was in place until 1961. Since 2009, the tournament has awarded an exemption to a golfer from a marginalized group. Renamed the Charlie Sifford Memorial Exemption in 2017, the award has brought 15 players to one of the most famous venues in all of golf, the Riviera Country Club. As the host of the tournament, Woods is a caretaker of that exemption and Sifford’s legacy.
Tiger Woods, pictured at the 2020 Genesis Invitational, is the caretaker of the exemption that honors Charlie Sifford's legacy.
Gary A. Vasquez/USA TODAY Sports
This year’s exemption recipient is Marcus Byrd, a 25-year-old member of the Advocates Professional Golf Association (APGA) Tour, where he has two victories. Forty-seven is a long way off for him, but those years will come in a flash as long as he continues to pursue professional golf at the highest level.
Sifford and Woods saw their respective 47 years unfold very differently. When Sifford won the Genesis in 1969, he was trying to prove that Black men could win on the PGA Tour. “I hope this proves once and for all that a Negro is capable of playing under pressure and has the ability to play championship golf with the best and win,” he said.
It was his hardships that eased the path for Woods to reach 82 PGA Tour wins, including 15 majors. At 47, Woods is trying to rediscover that greatness, even as he battles injuries and aging. Perhaps it’s easier for him to relish the past than it is to look forward to more major championships. With a steadily evolving empire that includes a golf course design business and a new golf league, he may be firmly embracing life after competitive golf. But we are reluctant to let him move on, because for many of us he is the GOAT.
Byrd has grown up watching the GOAT. He can imagine himself with a PGA Tour card because he’s seen Black men like Woods and Sifford do it before him. Sifford didn’t have that kind of role model, but he believed he knew what it took for others like him to make it to the tour.
“The greatest influx into pro golf these days is from college rather than from the caddie ranks, from which I came,” he said in 1969. “The only way we’ll have better Negro professionals is if they go to college and get on the team, that’s where they’ll learn to play.” Black golfers are heeding that advice. Byrd brings a game to Riviera that he nurtured while on the golf team at Middle Tennessee State.
Woods has the power to represent the same urgency for change that Sifford articulated when he was that age. In many ways by just being the GOAT, he’s ascended the mountaintop that Sifford and so many other Black pioneering golfers couldn’t reach. Yet, Sifford had a more urgent role for other Black players. In 1969, there were as many as 10 Black players on the tour, and Sifford was their sage leader.
There was a Charlie Sifford Day in L.A. shortly after he won the 1969 Genesis. At the ceremony, Sifford was showered with awards and proclamations. He’d nursed a bad cough during the tournament. He was tired, but his mood was upbeat and reflective. “This is a day I was really looking forward to,” he said. ”But at times I didn’t think it would come.” Another round of Masters invitations would soon go out, and he wouldn’t make the list. Still, he’d reached the pinnacle of his career, and his place in the game was set.
The Genesis Invitational allows us to stay in that moment in 1969 with Sifford to gain a glimpse of both the past and the future of golf that would birth Woods. The lessons that Sifford shared when he was 47 are just as important now as they were then. Woods will undoubtedly view his 47 years through the lens of his own journey, but hopefully his eyes are open enough to see how another man who played this tournament at his age continues to watch over him and the game.