Pain, Casey Martin says, has been a constant companion.
So has incredulousness.
When the budding professional golfer sued the PGA Tour in 1997 and argued that the Americans with Disabilities Act entitled him to use a golf cart at tournaments, not everyone signed up for the underdog story. After a federal court in Oregon ruled in Martin’s favor in February 1998, the conservative columnist Linda Chavez lamented that the ADA “has been used successfully by everyone from infertile cops to drunken airline pilots to force employers to offer special treatment in the name of accommodating the disabled.”
The Boston Globe (Jan. 31, 1998).
Bob Ryan of The Boston Globe was even more direct. “He talks about pursuing his dream. That dream was unrealistic to begin with,” Ryan wrote of Martin. “This man got into Stanford. The Man Upstairs may not have given him much of a right leg, but He definitely gave him a superior brain. I’m sure he can use it to earn a living.”
Twenty years ago, in a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in PGA Tour, Inc. v. Martin that Martin was right: that the ADA required the PGA Tour to allow Martin the use of a golf cart to accommodate his disability (a rare vascular disorder called Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome, that left Martin with a dangerously fragile right shinbone). Even at the highest court in the land, though, there was incredulousness. “No wildeyed dreamer has ever suggested that the managing bodies of the competitive sports…should try to take account of the uneven distribution of God-given gifts when writing and enforcing the rules of competition,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in dissent. “And I have no doubt Congress did not authorize misty-eyed judicial supervision of such a revolution.”
Golf has long suffered from being too homogeneous — and worse, too resistant to change. For all its efforts to open the game to newcomers, golf courses remain populated mostly by white, able-bodied men. The Martin case, some of those white men feared, would change everything; “I think we would lose the game of golf forever the way we know it,” Jack Nicklaus said of Martin’s case in 1998. But the sound and fury of the Supreme Court’s decision signified almost nothing: outside Martin himself, only one player has invoked the ADA to use a golf cart in a major (John Daly, at the 2019 PGA Championship).
As always, golf is a reflection of society at large — where, more than 30 years into the ADA’s existence, people with disabilities still face more systemic barriers than able-bodied Americans. At the center of those barriers, in both society and in golf, lies a disbelief that anyone who looks or behaves differently would dare walk through the clubhouse door. And not even the Supreme Court could strike that down.
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Casey Martin never hoped to go down in history as a civil rights pioneer. As a boy growing up in Oregon, playing pickup basketball and backyard football games with childhood friends, Martin dreamed of a career in the NBA. “The challenge for me is that every time I did that, I would come back in fairly significant pain,” Martin said. “It was a tearful thing for me to go play basketball, or play some football in the yard when I was 7 or 8 years old.”
So Martin eventually gravitated toward a favorite sport of his father and older brother: golf. “I recognized at an early age, ‘Hey, this doesn’t hurt the leg quite as much,” Martin said.
The Arizona Daily Star (May 4, 1994).
After an honors-filled college career at Stanford, Martin played two full seasons on the Hooters Tour in the South. The mini-tour wouldn’t allow Martin to use a golf cart, so he walked — but the pain in his leg became unbearable. So when the PGA Tour denied Martin’s request to use a cart at the final stage of Q-School in 1997, he sued the Tour under the ADA’s public accommodations provision, Title III — which requires anyone overseeing a place of public accommodations (including golf courses) to make “reasonable modifications” to their policies “unless…such modifications would fundamentally alter the nature” of the activity.
The PGA Tour’s defense to Martin’s claims matched its public relations strategy: namely, that the case wasn’t so much about Casey Martin as it was about the PGA Tour’s right to set rules for its players. “I’m saying no carts. I’m not dealing with Mr. Martin,” Ken Venturi said in videotaped testimony. (“It is about me,” Martin allowed in a moment of frustration in 2000. “I’m the one driving the cart. It’s my lawsuit. So it’s definitely about me.”) The Tour’s witnesses — Venturi, Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, and Scott Verplank among them — all testified that walking was a fundamental part of golf, and that allowing Martin to ride in a cart would fundamentally alter PGA Tour contests. “I think it looks terrible,” Nicklaus testified. “I just don’t think it’s part of the game of golf.” (By 1998, Nicklaus was a fixture on the PGA Tour’s Senior Tour, where all players are allowed to use golf carts.) The federal judge overseeing Martin’s trial promptly disagreed and, after entering a preliminary injunction in December 1997, announced a verdict in Martin’s favor just three months later. Walking was not fundamental to golf, the judge concluded — and on top of that, Martin’s condition left him more fatigued after a round of golf than other players, even when he used a cart.
As the case sped through the trial-level district court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, even the PGA Tour’s supporters could read the writing on the wall. “I think we’re going to lose,” Davis Love III conceded in early 1998. “If we lose and Casey rides a cart, it’s going to set the game back,” Mark O’Meara concurred. (Not everyone on Tour fought Martin. Greg Norman, the world’s top-ranked player, and Tom Watson supported Martin’s request. “I'm on your side,” Norman told Martin in a phone call. “I hope you get your cart, and I look forward to playing with you someday.” Phil Mickelson also spoke in Martin’s support.)
Most players were, at least, kinder to Martin’s face than they were with reporters. Not everyone followed suit. “I was grateful, looking back, that it was a time pre-social media,” Martin said. “I don’t know — I think it could have been a lot different if that was me today, trying to be groundbreaking. I think there would’ve been a lot of positive support, but there’s a lot of haters out there that like to be vocal. So I think it would’ve been a little more emotionally difficult doing it today.”
By mid-2000, nearly everyone believed the conflagration had died down permanently. Martin was a struggling Tour pro with just one career win to his name, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had affirmed the verdict from Martin’s trial. The Tour quietly moved forward with plans to seek review from the Supreme Court, but Martin’s legal team was confident that the case was finished.
They weren’t the only ones planning on a boring term at the Supreme Court. When Andrew Siegel — now a law professor at Seattle University — arrived that year to begin his clerkship for Justice John Paul Stevens, the Court was still catching its breath from a 1999 term full of landmark decisions: Stenberg v. Carhart (abortion rights), Apprendi v. New Jersey (sentencing), and Santa Fe Independent Schools v. Doe (school prayer) among them. “The prior term had been really dense and had decided lots of important issues,” Siegel said. “I remember arriving that fall with a relatively thin docket, and people saying, ‘Oh, you missed all the big cases!’” A few months into Siegel’s clerkship, a historically divided Court decided Bush v. Gore.
When the PGA Tour’s request for the Court to review Martin’s verdict arrived, Siegel recommended that his boss vote to deny — “the only time I remember Justice Stevens being seriously annoyed with me,” Siegel recalled. Stevens told his clerk that he disagreed; that he intended to vote to grant certiorari, and that he believed the Court would accept the case. “I think part of why they were so excited to have a case of interest to them, and of interest to the media that wasn’t inherently political, was that they’d had so many political cases recently,” Siegel said.
The Chicago Tribune (Jan. 17, 2001).
At oral argument, barely a month after the Bush v. Gore decision and mere days before George W. Bush’s first inauguration, consensus immediately bloomed across the Court’s philosophical divide: Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, both mainstream conservatives, quickly signaled skepticism of the PGA Tour’s positions, as did Siegel’s boss and other more liberal justices.
Only Justice Antonin Scalia, the conservative firebrand, pushed back against Martin’s attorney, Roy Reardon. “I don’t understand the whole meaning of fundamentalness with regard to a sport,” Scalia said. He likened the PGA Tour’s walking rule to baseball’s strike zone: could a batter with a disproportionately long torso, Scalia mused, demand a different strike zone? He could not, Reardon conceded.
“It’s a silly rule,” Scalia said. “All sports rules are silly rules, aren’t they?”
“I don’t think it’s a silly rule. I think it gauges how well the pitcher can control the ball and get it within the strike zone,” Reardon retorted. “Here, we are dealing with something that isn’t fundamental.”
But Stevens, the liberal lion and by then a 25-year veteran of the Court, was no less blunt with the PGA Tour’s attorney. “The thing that puzzles me,” Stevens mused, without much of a question attached, “is how it can be a fundamental rule that does not apply in the qualifying events.”
The Martin argument and decision say at least about the legacies of Stevens and Scalia as anything else. By 2001, Scalia had become at least as much an arch-conservative curmudgeon as as an originalist: his dissenting opinions, which had always been passionate and colorful, had become more mean-spirited and marked by claims that the sky was falling. True to form, when Scalia found himself on the losing side of a 7-2 vote in Martin, he abandoned his textualist principles and resorted to melodrama; the Court’s “Animal Farm determination that fairness and the ADA mean that everyone gets to play by individualized rules which will assure that no one's lack of ability (or at least no one's lack of ability so pronounced that it amounts to a disability) will be a handicap,” Scalia wrote. “The year was 2001, and ‘everybody was finally equal.’”
It is a low moment for Scalia. There is no intellectual high ground to his dissent, no pretense of monopoly on history or fealty to text. There is only manufactured confusion, packaged in the same incredulousness that Martin had faced throughout his ordeal.
Justice John Paul Stevens. Credit: Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States.
For Stevens, on the other hand, the opportunity to write the Martin majority opinion played to two of his chief qualities: intellectual precision and an abiding sense of fairness.
Stevens also had the better end of the argument: while Scalia characterized Martin’s position as something out of “Alice in Wonderland,” Stevens seized on the ADA’s express definition of “public accommodations” — which explicitly included golf courses — and the emergent role played by golf carts in the Twentieth Century. It was the sort of view toward which a true textualist should have gravitated; but with Scalia interested in other things, his moderate and more mainstream conservative colleagues sided with Stevens.
And in hindsight, that Stevens wound up writing the majority opinion may signal Rehnquist’s sensitivity to the Court’s still-fresh Bush v. Gore scars. In the quarter-century that Rehnquist and Stevens had served together, they frequently found themselves in opposing points of view. But in Martin, they were of like mind; and for the chief justice, assigning the majority opinion to Stevens — the Court’s resident golf nut — might have marked an effort to repair the Court’s relationships.
“I think the idea that [Rehnquist] could take a senior justice, like Justice Stevens — who he didn’t always agree with — and give him an opinion that, for Justice Stevens would be a pleasure and a treat and a major opinion,” Siegel said, “but that he didn’t have to worry about it having deeper ramifications in the areas of law that he cared about — for him, it was probably a pretty obvious choice to make.”
When Stevens and his colleagues announced the decision on May 29, 2001, PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem’s encapsulation of the ruling was terse. “You prevailed,” Finchem told Martin in a phone call. Publicly, though, Finchem celebrated the narrowness of the Court’s decision — that is, that it rested heavily on the particulars of Martin’s disability, and probably would not have broader implications for the Tour. “Given the way the opinion was written, I must say that I’m pleased,” Finchem told The Tampa Bay Times. “Casey’s [part] is finished, and yet we still have a reasonably good chance to maintain the sport as we know it. … Hopefully, the way this opinion is written, we can have our cake and eat it, too.”
Finchem’s public reaction belied the Martin case’s realities, though: Martin had never wanted to take his case to the Supreme Court. From the very beginning, all he had asked for was an individual exception; if the Tour found that outcome worth celebrating, then doubtlessly, it would have found Martin happy to settle for that result in 1997. It was the Tour — not Martin — that risked a ruling broader than the district court’s fact-specific verdict by pursuing Supreme Court review; if it wanted a narrow outcome, then it could have achieved it by dropping its case after the Ninth Circuit’s decision. The fact that the Tour continued, though, underscores the incredulousness that Martin faced at every turn.
“I’ve come to know them,” Martin said in a rare moment of frustration, when the Tour indicated it might go to the Supreme Court. “Why should I expect anything less? It should be a pretty easy decision, but apparently not. Hopefully, we can get past it and move on. Apparently, two years hasn’t been long enough for them.”
. . .
Nor, perhaps, is 20 years long enough.
One night in October 2019, Martin was bringing his garbage can in from the road in front of his house. When he stepped off the curb, his foot — the right one — landed awkwardly. After nearly a half-century of strain, Martin’s weak, brittle shinbone finally gave way and broke.
“I thought it would happen at 27, not 47,” Martin said in early 2020. “But it has happened. I’m just going to do everything in my power to save my leg.”
The Courtroom of the Supreme Court.
More than 18 months later, on the 20th anniversary of his win at the Supreme Court, Martin is still receiving experimental medicine to try to improve blood flow to the broken bone, and still walking on crutches. “It’s been an uphill battle,” Martin said.
It is a reminder that, for people with disabilities, even a good day is no finish line. Every day presents its own challenges. The Supreme Court decision in Martin’s case was a good day. But there have been many days since — for Martin, for other Americans with disabilities, and for a Supreme Court that is now more conservative by bounds than the one that ruled in Martin’s favor.
There is a temptation to cast the Martin saga two decades ago as a different time. There is an accompanying temptation to believe that society has moved on from those days. But those are self-congratulatory temptations that people with disabilities do not indulge. For all golf’s professed desire to “grow the game,” it still has not come to grips with the fact that true diversity — the kind where newcomers feel welcome in new spaces — is not possible when newcomers are expected to conform, and are not welcome to bring their unique qualities with them.
Nor is progress likely when gatekeepers who stood in newcomers’ ways decline to admit their mistakes and hold open the doors they kept closed. At least as recently as 2011, Finchem — the PGA Tour commissioner during the Martin case — said he’d do it all again.
He’s not alone. A few days before the Martin decision’s 20th anniversary, Bob Ryan — who suggested in The Boston Globe in 1998 that Martin make a living with his brain instead of a his golf swing — was asked whether he stood by what he’d written 23 years earlier. He demurred. “Very difficult and awkward issue,” Ryan said. “Whatever you say is not going to please everybody.”
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