Golf’s racism-steeped history isn’t going away. The PGA Championship and Shoal Creek are part of that history.
In 1990, the PGA Championship’s visit to Shoal Creek in Birmingham, Ala., was an embarrassing spectacle for nearly everyone involved. Shoal Creek still excluded Black people from membership; the PGA hoped no one would notice; and when people did notice, players scoffed at the public outcry. “I play golf, not politics,” Fuzzy Zoeller told the New York Times.
Wayne Grady won the tournament by three strokes — not that anyone remembers. All anyone remembers is that 25 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, open racial discrimination was still alive and well in both the Deep South and golf — and that both the PGA and Shoal Creek were OK with that.
It would be foolish to suggest that either golf or the Deep South have emerged fully from that vulgarity. They haven’t. But at Shoal Creek, at least, there has been progress. That’s not enough to absolve the club of its history. But it ought to be enough to bring the PGA Championship back to Shoal Creek in 2022.
The PGA of America’s decision to strip Trump Bedminster of the 2022 championship creates more than just a logistical need to find a replacement venue. It creates an opportunity: a chance to stand apart from the spirit of white nationalism and division that fueled the January 6 violence at the United State Capitol, and which forced the PGA to move its flagship event.
Other sites purported to be in the running to replace Bedminster — Bethpage Black, Liberty National, Baltusrol (side note: another major in New York?), Southern Hills, and Valhalla — offer nothing but fall-back plans. Shoal Creek, though, offers contrast. Thirty-one years ago, Shoal Creek’s discriminatory membership policies brought deserved shame both to it and to the PGA. But in those 31 years, it has made genuine progress. The club has actively recruited Black members and has made conscious efforts to attract women.
Shoal Creek hasn’t finished the journey. None of us ever does. But it has committed itself to moving past its history of racism. In a sport where even that level of progress still is too uncommon, the Shoal Creek of 2021 is a success story. Golf needs that sort of progress to be held up as something for other clubs to strive for.
And the PGA needs the moment just as badly. Thirty-one years ago, the PGA was just as complicit as Shoal Creek in the shame that rained down on the championship: the PGA knew the club discriminated, and it turned a blind eye until the uproar forced it to speak — and even then, it washed its hands of responsibility (“When we made the decision in 1984 to come back in 1990, there were no discrimination issues (raised) at the time,” the PGA’s spokesman protested).
Progress arguably has been even more elusive at the PGA than at Shoal Creek. After all, the PGA awarded the 2022 championship to Bedminster with full awareness of who Donald Trump was. By the time the PGA awarded Bedminster the 2022 championship in 2014, Trump had established himself as the world’s most prominent supporter of the false, racist birther conspiracy theory. Instead of allowing common decency to “pollute” its decision making, the PGA awarded the tournament to Bedminster and gambled that the controversy would pass by 2022. And even long after the moment when anyone with a brain realized that controversy would smother the event, the PGA still did nothing.
If, as the PGA has explained, holding the 2022 championship at Bedminster “would be detrimental to the PGA of America brand,” then Shoal Creek alone offers the PGA a mulligan. Shoal Creek is a chance for the PGA to rehabilitate its brand, and to affirm the necessity of moving forward from golf’s dalliances with racism — both long past and recent.
Golf’s history of racism isn’t going away. But a future marked by racism might. Awarding the 2022 championship to a club that has made real strides on that path is the right opportunity for the PGA to bring itself and others along that path, too.
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