A Wider Shade of Pale

The PGA Tour's 20-man board of directors has one African American, Carl Ware of Atlanta. There also is only one African American among 79 staff members pictured in the tour's 2006 media guide, Don Wallace, director of operations for its Shotlink computerized scoring and hole-by-hole tracking system.

The PGA of America, the organization representing America's club and teaching professionals, has no African Americans on its 17-person board of directors and one African American, Earnie Ellison, director of business and community relations, among 30 staff directors pictured in its current media guide. The LPGA, which hasn't had a black player regularly on tour since 2002, has no African Americans on its board of directors (13), none on its senior staff (5) and none on its tournament operations staff (13).

In the PGA of America's most recent survey, 22,000 of 28,000 members responded. Among those 22,000, 61 were African-American professional members, and 80 were African-American apprentice professionals. But executive director Joe Steranka, now in his first year on the job, said the organization's goal is to increase the number of all minorities and women in its membership to 2,200 over the next 10 years.

"We are conscious of having people of color and women involved in every facet of the PGA of America," he said. "Our track record of growing diversity in the game and the business of golf is substantive, as well . . . Can we do better? Absolutely. It's important to us."

Trying to Get a Head Start

Over the past decade, the most ambitious initiative to raise the number of minorities playing golf has been the PGA Tour's First Tee program. The initial mission was to take the game to areas where golf was not all that accessible, particularly the inner cities, while also teaching educational and life skills.

Headed by Joe Louis Barrow, the son of heavyweight champion Joe Louis, The First Tee had 217,000 participants in 2005 and has 250 U.S. facilities, most with learning centers such as the one at Langston Golf Club in Northeast Washington. But in its most recent annual review, The First Tee reported that only 26 percent of its participants from 2001 to 2005 were African-American, with 51 percent white, 10 percent Hispanic, and 5 percent Asian American.

"We've had a lot of success helping kids go on to college and some even playing college golf," said Jimmy Garvin, who runs Langston and oversees a variety of programs for youngsters at the course. "But there's so much more we should be doing, because at some point, the game starts to get very expensive, and it's extremely difficult to get the kind of training you need to make it to the top."

Said Bill Dickey, who has run a longtime Phoenix-based college scholarship program for young minority golfers: "The First Tee takes a lot of these kids only so far. We get some of these kids to a certain level, but then when they need to start playing in all those junior events on a national level, when they need more sophisticated instruction, how do we do it? Where does the money and the support come from? That's what we've got to figure out. I'd like to see more of it coming from the African-American community, to tell you the truth. But that isn't happening."

Barrow maintains it will only be a matter of time before First Tee graduates begin to make their mark in the professional game.

"I'm seeing a lot more young [African-American] people playing high school golf," he said. "I see more moving on to college golf. We're seeing more African-American and Hispanic kids in the American Junior Golf Association [AJGA] events. The pipeline is starting. Earl Woods said when we started we needed to give it time. It took us 20 years to get Tiger where he is now.

"Let's face it, the old feeder system that produced guys like Charlie Sifford and Lee Elder went away. I'm talking about caddie programs that used to give African Americans their first real access to the game. We're starting to see a little resurgence in caddie programs around the country. And whether young people playing college golf have the ability and the perseverance to get to a higher level has yet to be seen."

There are other discouraging numbers, as well. According to the AJGA, which has a weekly national ranking of junior players from 12 to 18, not one African American is in the top 100 for boys in that age group. The highest-ranked junior girl is Cheyenne Woods of Phoenix, Tiger's niece, at No. 25, and the only other African-American girl ranked in the top 100 is No. 75 Jennifer Adyorough of Atlanta.