Fried Egg Stories: Jackie Robinson the Golfer

This episode of Frida Egg Stories is brought to you by the US Open Victory Club. So to celebrate the upcoming US Open Week, the Victory Club has teamed up with the Frida Egg to give away four ticket packages. Each of these has two tickets for Saturday and Sunday at the one hundred and twenty first US Open at Tory Pines in twenty twenty one. The Victory Club is

Here's the thing.

Playing out of a buried lion of bunker is completely different than playing out of a night and clean lion of Greenside Bunker.

You need to be.

Aggressive on any show. Weather it's sitting cleanly for its Friday egg.

Well, we've all faced it, the dreaded Frida egg. Not to be feared though, it's actually a pretty easy shot to hit.

Today, my guest will be Tommy Armour, the Silver Scott, one of the finest playing golf prolls of all times.

That's the voice of Jackie Robinson.

Tommy Armour and I will begin our conversation right after this important message.

It's about nineteen fifty eight nineteen fifty nine, a couple of years after Robinson retired from Major League Baseball, and he has a radio show called Jackie Robinson's Sports Shots.

He interviewed famous sporting personalities and that included Tommy Armour everyone.

Rosemary Marrivet's is the one who told me about these clips.

My name is Rosemary Maraboth. I'm the curator of collections with the usg Golf Museum.

The audio from Jackie Robinson's Sports Shops is in the United States Golf Association's archives.

But my son is twelve years of age now and he is beginning to take an interest in the game now My question to you is, should I, as a average golf for eighty high seventies, go out and tell my son how to hit the ball or should he go to a pro for lessons to start out?

You know, it was a very conversational kind of a segment, very reminiscent of podcasts. The format was very accessible.

Don't try, Jack, it's not the deal. You're a terrific baseball player, remember that.

Uh huh.

Now you're in the golf gate, all right. You know a little about golf, just a little. You play well, But when you get there and try to teach children the simple thing of golf, I don't know if you know them when you're.

In many ways, the conversation between Robinson and Armor is unremarkable. Robinson asks about Armor's career, about swing technique, and about what makes a golf champion.

Quite a question, Jack, But in a.

Few unspoken ways, it is remarkable. For one thing, this is the late fifties and here are two men, one of them black, the other white, speaking in the friendliest and most natural way.

And it was really fun to sort of hear this mutual admiration.

And for another, you can just tell how much of a golf tragic, Jackie Robinson really.

Is You didn't know that, did you?

No?

Gay Oh?

Yes, to give it up, jack Oh, I love it too much. It's a great game. And then you're telling me that.

It just sounds like to people that are interested in golf having a very normal conversation. They happen to be incredible athletes. But what's bringing them together as kind of a very simple concept.

This is Friday's Stories. I'm Garrett Morrison. In this episode, we explore Jackie Robinson's life in golf. Now you're probably familiar with how Robinson desegregated Major League Baseball, how in nineteen forty seven he became the first black man to play in the MLB in the twentieth century, and how he confronted racism with strength and grace. In American culture, his story has taken on the weight of a heroic myth,

Robinson grew up in Pasadena, in southern California, where golf was popular. There were there are a number of golf courses. This is Lane DMUs all right, tryg and Garrett.

Hey, can you hear me?

Yeah, you can hear it?

Perfect, Okay, excellent. He's a history professor at Central Michigan University.

I'm the author of the book Game of Privilege and African American History of Golf.

In researching his book, Lane came across a number of tidbits about Jackie Robinson's early experiences in golf.

There's a story that he used to sneak on to the local private courses and find balls and sell golf balls back to the golfers.

Later, around the time Robinson arrived at UCLA in the late nineteen thirties, he took up the game properly.

There's a story that he basically borrowed a friends clubs and played for the first time on borrowed clubs and broke a hundred shot ninety nine.

That just doesn't seem fair, does it.

And then it's clear that he got a chance to play more in college and eventually he's apparently shooting in the mid eighties, winning sort of Pacific Coast League golf tournaments. That's not too surprising in the sense of if anybody knows Jackie Robinson's college career, I mean, it's arguably the most well rounded, incredible college athlete of all time. I mean almost every sport he got involved in.

He excelled at football, basketball, track.

And arguably baseball was probably his worst sport in college.

But baseball turned out to be his future. In nineteen forty seven, Robinson was called up to the Brooklyn Dodgers and wearing number forty two on his back, he broke the MLB's sixty three year color line. Meanwhile, his love for golf continued to grow.

When he integrates Major League Baseball, he says that golf is his favorite hobby. He tells the press that he plays sometimes with other Brooklyn Dodgers and in fact that this was a nice way to sort of overcome sort of the tension amongst white baseball players of having a black teammate and all these things that they apparently played some golf on the side.

Robinson also plays with fellow African American celebrities, including Joe Lewis, the famous boxer and former heavyweight champion of the World and an avid golfer. Like Joe Lewis, Robinson takes an interest in the professional game, specifically in the efforts of black pro golfers to break their sports color line, golfers like Bill Spiller. In nineteen fifty two, the PDA of America bars Bill Spiller from the San Diego Open, and Robinson, at the height of his baseball career, goes to bat.

For him, Robinson saying, you know, golf is the most racist of the sports that's left out there. We've got to get more black golfers into these events.

And after he retires from the MLB in nineteen fifty six, he goes on NBC's Meet the Press.

And talks about golf again and says, golf is the last sport. You know, every other sport black people have broken into, not golf.

So golf is not only a passion for Jackie Robinson, but also a cause.

Sometimes we don't.

Well, what's the first thing then that a kid should know?

Principle, Take your boy, Yeah, right, twelve years of age. Stock your boy like you. Yes he is. You're not a boy? No, no, no, get him a good set of clapse.

Okay, let's go back a few steps here. Segregation in American golf was there from the beginning. After all, the game became popular in the US in the eighteen nineties, which historians now see as the start of what's called the Jim Crow Era.

The starting point that is commonly used for the Jim Crow Era is the Supreme Court's ruling in the eighteen ninety six case of Plessy versus Ferguson.

That's Marvin Dawkins, a professor of history at the University of Miami and the author of the book African American Golfers during the Jim Crow era and.

When Pless Versus Ferguson was passed, which essentially legalized segregation. That is often used as a marker or the rise of Jim Croism.

Jim Crow laws were essentially updated versions of the old slave codes.

And the slave codes regulated every aspect of life for slaves, prevented them from marriage, prevented them from being taught, that is literacy.

Scratch out slaves, scribbling black people, and you have this new, yet familiar system.

It was really designed to make it clear that these people are not to be respected, these people are second class, these people are to be regulated. And there were laws that clearly provided advantages privileges for whites at these basive blacks.

So how did this system manifest itself in the golf world.

Well, that's where you get me at, Joe.

Basically, Jim Crow structured golf from top to bottom. Courses were segregated, tournaments were segregated, and the various professions of golf firmly segregated.

Clearly, the understanding when the PGA was founded in nineteen sixteen was that black people were not welcome.

It's sort of an unspoken racial barrier that's very common in society, but basically it's real. It's codified, but not in the writing.

This unwritten prohibition was put to the test in nineteen twenty eight when a black man applied for membership in the Professional Golf Association of America.

The guy that tried to join his faskin he was someone who may have been able to pass for whites. His name was Dewey Brown. Dewey Brown just sent in his membership fees. They sent him a membership back. Dewey Brown actually had a membership in the PGA, and someone took the PGA office say, you know, this guy's black.

The PGA revoked Dewey Brown's eligibility, and in nineteen thirty four it officially amended its constitution to limit membership to quote professional golfers of the Caucasian race. That was the actual written phrase, and it came to be known as the Caucasian only clause.

The Caucasian clause that the PGA has.

The Professional Golf Association's Caucasian only clause.

What had already been there, the sort of racial all white notion of PGA players is now codified in a written constitution of this organization that has huge implications for a range.

Of individuals, including African American competitive golfers, because increasingly, by the nineteen thirties, top professional events are requiring PGA membership for.

Entry, and so you can get tournament organizers who consider themselves quite progressive on this the Southern issue of race and segregation, but their golf tournament is going to be a golf tournament for members of the PGA, and that means black people. Black players are out.

But African Americans didn't withdraw from the game. Instead, they created what Marvin Dawkins calls parallel institutions.

Blacks formed their own organization in nineteen twenty six and was called the United Golfers Association, and the UGA was very, very, very significant in promoting the organization of black goffers, primarily in the Northeast and the Midwest.

UGA events attracted great players in the nineteen thirties and forties. Ted Rhoades, Howard Wheeler, and Bill Spiller were the Black Tours answer to Jean Sarazen, Byron Nelson and Sam Snead, in the same way that Oscar Charleston, Josh Gibson, and Satchel Paige were Negro League Baseball's answer to Lou Garrigg,

In nineteen forty eight there was an effort led by black coffers for them sue the PGA. The PGA said through which leaders, look, look, look, we would tick up the Caucasian only clause in our next meeting if you withdraw the suit. The suit was withdrawn. They did nothing, and there were some people who were involved in that who were enrage.

They carried this anger into the nineteen fifties, and marching right alongside them was Jackie Robinson.

When Jackie Robinson retired in nineteen fifty six, he became a columnist for the New York Post, and he wrote article after article after article targeting the PGA and his failure to permit blacks to play.

Robinson uses very strong language whenever he writes about golf. Robinson uses language like white supremacy, American apartheid is what he calls it.

The public pressure is mounting, but the PGA remains stubborn on the Caucasian only class.

Right up until the end. The national body of the PGA is voting overwhelmingly to.

Keep it, and Robinson keeps firing back. By Aron in nineteen sixty.

Robinson's talking about golf segregation is segregation in New York. In New York City, there's PGA events, in San Diego, in Pebble Beach, in California, there's PGA events. So Robinson is very much hitting this sense of America. If you support this, you support segregation in the whole country.

The outrage builds and eventually a key group of people gets involved, lawyers.

And then they get legal support from the Attorney General in California.

Mosque, the Attorney General of the state of California.

The PGA is threatened with legal action from these key states where there's a lot of important tournaments, and that's really what breaks the camel's back.

The PGA of America is spooped. So in nineteen sixty one, the year when Arnold Palmer wins six tournaments, the year when Jack Nicholas turns pro the PGA votes to remove the Caucasian only class from its constitution. It was a victory, but a late one and a sad one. The clause had lasted for twenty seven years. But obviously it was a step forward and in part a testament to what Jackie Robinson could do, and it.

Showed the influence of not just celebrity status, but the accomplishments and regard in which Jackie Robinson was.

Hell, tell me this about Tommy Armor. Where did you begin your career my golf career, golf career?

That's right.

You have varied interests as far and in your career as a too.

Oh yes, I have had some that have to be expaghaated before I co go did.

What am I side of playing golf?

But it's not like American golf instantly became a post racial utopia in nineteen sixty one. For one thing, black players had to meet a number of terms and conditions before becoming PGA members, terms and conditions that until that point they had not been allowed to work toward, and so they all had to go back to square one. Even Charlie Sifferd, a veteran pro with elite skills, didn't become a full PGA member until nineteen sixty four, he

Anti racism is not just an individual problem. So sometimes people think that we need to just focus on anti racists, and that's important, But when we talk about institutional racism, we're talking about the normal operations of society. There's nothing wrong with how we do things and run in our organizations to be profitable. Yet what you're doing as a normal operation of how you structure what you do is exclusion. There.

In other words, after the PGA struck the Caucasian only clause, its rules no longer mentioned explicitly, but in the everyday implementation of those rules, things were still more difficult for black golfers than for white golfers. This was post Jim.

Crow America, but it also wasn't We could talk about Jim Crowism as being forever from the time that black people were here in sixteen nineteen. So when people talk about the Jim Crow here, I make it clear that that's a historical period that was put in place. But certainly segregation and the oppression of black people has been continuous.

Improvac that was.

I think, without doubt the luckies golfer.

I don't know about being so it was a good play. Yeah, you have to be a good player. That went all the top prizes of PGA, the British Open, the Euros Opened, every major professional golf term of Tommy Armor has won.

But I still was lucky.

Let's catch back up with Jackie Robinson nineteen fifty six, he retires from baseball.

I mean, he is arguably the most recognizable athlete in the world. He has a tremendous amount of sort of social and cultural capital.

But Robinson takes what seems like a relatively unglamorous job. He goes to work as an executive for the coffee company Chalk Full of Nuts.

Robinson is leading this kind of Rockefeller Republican life, and he's commuting from Connecticut to New York City. He's serving on the board of on boards in corporate America, establishing banks in Harlem, all of these things.

And in many ways he fits right in.

You know, he had this bent where he was drawn to that world of you know, I don't know what you call Wall Street finance, corporate America. His politics sort of leaned that that way as well. So most of corporate America, most corporate boards, you know, they supported the Vietnam War and these anti communism. Robinson loved that stuff.

But on racial issues, Robinson remained progressive and outspoken.

Always on the issue of segregation, racism, and discrimination. He was a powerful voice for change.

It was a delicate balance between corporate America and the civil rights movement, but Jackie Robinson seemed capable of maintaining it.

He was a very effective communicator in a range of social situations and public situations. He was very much adept in the world of whiteness.

So in the mid nineteen sixties, this is where Jackie Robinson is commuting between Connecticut and New York, serving on corporate boards.

He's living that sort of relatively republican kind of conservative capitalists you know dream, right, and part of that dream is golf.

This is when golf is emerging as the favorite pastime of the business class. The suburbs of New York City have become crowded with country clubs, and Robinson starts to get invited to play at them, or at least some of them.

Predominantly Jewish clubs would be the most likely clubs that might be open to having black visitors.

There's a particular Jewish club where Robinson begins to play frequently as a guest, and.

The members grumble. A few members actually left the club over the fact that other members of the club were saying, this guy spends too much time here.

Eventually Robinson gets the message.

He never becomes a member at any of these sort of all white clubs that he visits in that period. So even though he was famous and largely beloved, his race was keeping him out of country clubs.

Of course, he keeps playing golf.

He would, you know, wake up like anybody at any other normal shlub and go down at four am to try to get a tea time at the municipal and get thrown together with people. So here, it's just amazing to think of one of the most popular athletes in the history of the world. But that's that's what he needs to do to access golf in Connecticut.

So Robinson starts writing editorials about this new, very specific form of racism he's encountering.

He says, there's clubs that in the Northeast that pride themselves on being sort of progressive and open to Jewish members, and all of these things, and yet if I get invited there too many times people start to talk about it, and even though I'm this famous guy, they don't want me at their club.

By nineteen sixty six, Jackie Robinson has another idea. He wants to establish a new country club, a truly race blind country club, and he gets the support of a bunch of his friends, from celebrities to businessmen, sort of.

High profile movers and shakers.

Including George C. Scott. George C.

Scott, who is a great actor.

Played Patent, has a fantastic chin.

And it's the Pheasant Valley Country Club, the.

Pheasant Valley Country Club, and it becomes a pretty big deal.

Seven.

There was a lot going on in the world, obviously, but the New York Amsterdam News, which is the leading black newspaper of New York, has like five or six headline front page not sports pages, but front page stories on Peasant Valley Country Club Jackie Robinson's attempt to try and build this club.

The main hurdle is finding a piece of land, and the Peasant Valley Group has its eye on two potential properties, both in upstate New York, both already golf courses and therefore already zoned as golf courses.

But in both cases local residents and local zoning boards moved to block the sale or move to put in these new stringent regulations. Some of the newspaper articles have this list of extreme regulations to sort of rescind what you're allowed to do on that property and basically make it inhospitable. Local folks who block this are sort of insistent that race has nothing to do with it. We don't want too many big city folks coming up here, right, I don't want you know, too many people will come.

And there's the noise factor.

Noise in these things, and so they say, let's be too much noise. You know, they would use all these other reasons to block this once they found out that it was a black a group of black investors who are trying to purchase the property. It's really an example of de facto segregation, right where you could use all of these other ways to try and block integration without specifically talking about race.

Robinson's group does try the legal route.

The NAACP provides some support, so in both cases they try to file suits with the New York Commission on Human Rights. The state Commission on Human Rights.

But ultimately, in nineteen sixty seven, Robinson's push for a race blind golfing country club just sort of peters out.

Really, what begins to fail is that they begin to lose support. Investors who had been on board just sort of back outs and were no longer interested.

And Robinson feels this as a kind of betrayal, so as he does, he writes an editorial where he says.

Sort of bitterly that you know, people were fine and supportive and putting down money when I'm trying to integrate Major League Baseball. Why didn't they stick with me in this case? You know, why didn't they stick to stick

For once, Jackie Robinson finds himself without a team. Maybe one reason for that is that advocating for racial equality in country club golf puts him in a sort of no man's land. On the one hand, he's not going to get much support from the golf establishment. On the other the civil rights movement has bigger fish to fry. Remember this is the long hot summer of nineteen sixty seven.

It's now this new phase of are we accepted? Are we truly a part of the American community? Do we have full access? You know? Are there still these arenas in which socially, culturally, or otherwise, even if you sort of change the legal language, people are still exercising daily sort of prejudice against the black community.

How do we fight that?

How do we keep America focused on that that the change has to keep going. It's not enough to just stop.

Now.

That's what Robinson's doing with Pheasant Valley, all these things he stands for. Many remember, many white Americans could look at that guy by the late sixties and says, well, we're all done. See Jackie Robinson, the great hero.

I love him.

I'll put a poster them on my wall, and I'm a white guy, and I'll tell my kids see the amazing things this nation accomplished. It's all done. The reality, right, as Robinson shows, is that it is not done. The fight goes on, and it might even be a tougher fight.

Five years later, Jackie Robinson dies, he's only fifty three. I have to wonder what he would make of golf today. As of twenty ten, black people made up about thirteen percent of the US population, but only about five percent of US golfers. As of twenty eighteen, ninety one percent of the PGA of America's membership was white. As of today, there are fewer African American players on the PGA Tour than there were for much of the nineteen seventies. Of course,

That's what makes check.

Why is golf the thinking man's game?

Well, it's a different game than any other. I tell the funny thing about Jack, I don't know if you ever realize it. To hit one shot, you got to move that club twenty two feet. That is, from the moment it's on the ground to the top of a beckswing. When you hit right through it is twenty.

Two feet.

And could you tell me this is just a good detail because we're getting a little bit of the ambient noise around you. Where are you right now?

Oh, of course I'm in the museum's collection storage area. So what you hear are probably a lot of other systems and our climate control that unfortunately or fortunately I can't turn off.

Rosemary Marrivatt's at the USGA Museum. It's showing me what's left of Jackie Robinson's life in golf, his gear. So, and you've got and you've got the gloves on and everything. So you've ready to do. I'm ready to go first. She points her laptop camera at the golf bag.

It's pretty pretty basic, sort of classic black leather golf bag. It has gold pipe into it. Wow, and it's a wonderful condition.

So yeah, I was gonna say that's like in flawless condition. Then the clubs, the clubs.

Are also in beautiful condition. There, McGregor attorney.

So that's what we're saying. Here is a per Simon driver. Okay, so I'm definitely not an expert on this stuff. Yeah, McGregor attorney velocitized it says, and and yeah, it really is in kind of shining perfect condition.

It is.

And if you can see there the grip that seems experience there, it's I'm not.

Sure if you caught that. Rosemary said, the grip has seen some experience and has been loved, And that's the key detail for me. Oddly enough, I find myself so moved by that because it gives me the sudden sense

While he had opportunities to play with celebrity friends or other people that he befriended that were members at certain clubs, he himself couldn't pursue membership. He wouldn't be considered. It didn't really matter. And if it didn't matter for someone like Jackie Robinson, it certainly wasn't going to matter for the typical African American golfer that was just trying to play a little golf, you know, and so how terrible that there was absolutely nothing that anyone could do to

His life in golf is not nearly as sort of triumphal as his life in baseball and anything else. And so it's always fascinating people talk about the Jackie Robinson of God. You always get the Charlie Soffers, the Jackie Robinson of golf.

Tiger Woods, when he wins the Masters in nineteen ninety seven, becomes the new Jackie Robinson of.

Golf, says Nike and everybody else.

Right in seven years before that, when Augusta National invites Ron Townsend to be its first black member, New.

York Times says, he's the Jackie Robinson of country club golf. What's so interesting about all this is that there is no Jackie Robinson of golf other than Jackie Robinson. Right, he is the Jackie Robinson of golf because his story is so unique and nuanced and has sort of the struggle to fight some victories but also some defeats. That that's the real story of golf integration. Then you don't have to look at anyone else other than Robinson himself.

Very true. Well, Tommy, I just want to say thank you ever so much.

Jike, been a great pleasure to meet you.

Well that just about does it for now, fans, see you soon.

This was the ninth episode of Friday Stories. It was produced and hosted by me Garrett Morrison, with editing and engineering by Jay Eric and extra assistance from Jay Offishal many thanks to our guests Marvin Dawkins and Lane Dimas, and of course to Rosemary Erav's and the whole team at the USGA Museum. This episode was actually their idea.

So what I wanted to show you bring news closer are the headcovers. So we have a one, two, three and four wood and if you can see that.

So he had.

Or someone had on his behalf embroidered a small two. Obviously the small two on the forewood head cover is a nod to number forty two. But we still don't know the two, and the three the seemingly twenty two and thirty two are supposed to mean.

So basically, each head cover has the wood number one, two, three, and four, and then on the two, three, and four next to each number is a small two.

Yes, that's been embroidered onto it as well. And you know, we've done some research on you know, past teams that he's played on in other sports, even to see if maybe there were some numbers that matched up and it was you know, a way of him paying tribute to these things. And we've been able to make any kind of connections. So this is a little bit of a history mystery and maybe some of your listeners will have some suggestions or some information for us.

Yeah, put it out to the hive mind exactly