Nearly 30 years ago, racism stared down the PGA of America and won. History and cowardice have a way of repeating themselves, it seems.
In the days leading up to the 1990 PGA Championship at Shoal Creek in Birmingham, Ala., the organization found itself on the horns of a dilemma of its own complicity: a public-relations nightmare stemming from Shoal Creek’s refusal to admit African-American members. The PGA squirmed (“In no way does the PGA condone discrimination,” the PGA’s director of media relations said), and so did the players (“I play golf, not politics,” Fuzzy Zoeller bravely demurred). History rightly judges both the players and the PGA. The Nineties were hardly an era of social evolution: racial discrimination was by then universally reviled. Yet the PGA could not be troubled by the moral weight of the moment.
Bob Dylan once wrote, “How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?”
At least 29 years’ worth of times, apparently.
Fast-forward to the present moment, where the president of the United States is an open racist and racial discrimination is apparently not universally reviled anymore. On Sunday, President Trump tweeted that four congresswomen — all of whom are people of color — should “go back” to the countries they came from. Even the mainstream press, which typically would rather wring the skin off its hands before calling Trump’s racism by its real name, has not hesitated to label Trump’s comments an age-old racist attack.
Twenty-nine years after Shoal Creek, though, the PGA is again not merely silent, but acquiescent.
“As an organization, we are fully committed to Diversity and Inclusion,” the PGA said in a statement, “but we are not a political organization and simply don’t weigh in on statements made in the political arena.”
First of all, any time your statement includes the words, “we are fully committed to diversity and inclusion, but…,” you should reconsider.
Second, and more importantly, the PGA doesn’t get to choose to stay out of the political arena anymore; they already entered it, eyes wide open. When the PGA announced in 2014 that its 2022 Championship would be held at Trump Bedminster, Trump wasn’t a presidential candidate yet, but he’d been peddling his racist lies about President Obama’s birthplace for years. The PGA rolled the dice on the bet that Trump’s radioactivity would dissipate by 2022.
Now that its bet has come up empty, the PGA is making a different calculation that’s even more cynical: that nobody will care if its biggest championship is hosted by a racist.
Maybe they’re right. I won’t be watching the 2022 PGA Championship, but among golf fans, I’ll undoubtedly be in the stark minority. History records that the 1990 PGA Championship came and went, and the sun kept rising in the east, and eventually enough time passed that the furor died down. Maybe the PGA figures that the same thing will happen again — especially in an era where, thanks to the sort of deferential silence on display at the PGA, Trump’s racism has been normalized.
But in its own way, the failure to act against Trump’s behavior is even worse than what happened in 1990. In fairness, the controversy around the Shoal Creek tournament — though completely foreseeable — didn’t materialize into a national controversy until the days immediately preceding the event. Today, though, the PGA has three years before anyone is set to put a peg in Trump Bedminster. That’s more than enough time to find another venue — or, lacking that, at least long enough for President Bedsheets to regain his cool after an appropriately unequivocal rebuke.
Instead of that, the PGA is making the same shameful decision that it made at Shoal Creek: trying to ride out a foreseeable mistake by making an unforgivable one. Golf has enough fans who feel the same way Trump does, the PGA figures — or at least the fans don’t care enough to make the PGA pay for the decision.
The PGA talks a lot about “growing the game.” If their calculation about golf fans is right, then we shouldn’t want to grow it.
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