A Wider Shade of Pale

"I'm not sure that we're doing anything wrong in golf; it's just the other sports are doing better than we are at attracting minority kids and keeping them," said Stephen Hamblin, executive director of the AJGA. "So many of these teams sports are organized at such an early level. My own daughter played soccer at age four. They give them uniforms, all their friends play, they do things that are cool and fun. Golf hasn't really done that.

"Cost is also a factor, though that was more true four of five years ago. The USGA has changed the rules so junior golfers can now get expenses paid for traveling to tournaments, getting reimbursed for meals and lodging and accepting free equipment. We have a program [Achieving Competitive Excellence, or ACE] where a financially disadvantaged kid can apply for a grant of $4,500 a year to play national junior golf. We award 50 of them. There are many ways to address these expenses."

College Anxieties

At the college level, Kevin Hall of Ohio State, an African-American player who also is deaf, won the Big Ten championship two years ago and is now playing mini-tour golf. But Dickey said he sees very few African-American players competing in the upper echelon Division I programs, and also has noticed a distressing trend on golf teams representing many of the nation's historically black colleges. At the recent National Minority College Golf Championship, conducted by the PGA of America in West Palm Beach, Fla., a number of schools fielded teams filled with white players, most of them recruited outside the United States.

"I would say the majority of kids on the black college teams are now white," said Eddie Payton, the golf coach at Jackson State and brother of the late Walter Payton. "The minority pool of golfers is so small, every year you've got maybe a one in five chance to get a top minority kid in your program. So now you might go to Australia, where the No. 200 kid in the country is probably better than anyone you can get, and you bring him in. It helps the school in its own diversity goals, and it sure as hell helps your team."

Payton, who has seven African Americans and one Hispanic-American player on his own team, is not yet ready to describe the First Tee as a failure, but he also knows much more can and must be done to change the numbers of minorities on the PGA and LPGA tours.

"Sure there are more kids interested because of Tiger Woods," Payton said. "But the original problems still exist. There are not a lot of very good junior programs in minority communities. There are no existing teaching academies to take some of these promising minority players and give them the kind of instruction they need to play on a national level. Until we address those problems, we'll never see the amount of minorities playing at the highest levels that I'd like to see."

Payton and Dickey said they also believe Woods has already done his part to bring more African Americans into the game. They applauded his new $25 million learning center in his native Southern California, where academics and learning life skills are emphasized over golf, and they reject any notion that Woods could be doing more to make sure more African Americans advance to the professional tours in the future.

"Is it Tiger's fault there aren't any more playing with him?" Payton said. "No. It's our fault as a race, and the golf industry's problem if they don't see it as a necessity. It's hard to mandate to an individual what he should be doing, because it's something he should want to do, and he's shown that he wants to do it. But the way I look at, we are basically where we were 10 years ago when Tiger first came out on the tour. It's still an uphill battle, and we have a long way to go."

Meantime, John Fizer knows the journey he is just beginning will not be easy. His father, a dentist practicing in Trenton, N.J., introduced him to the game when he was 8 years old. His parents have always provided financial support and will stake him to the $25,000 he estimates he'll need to move to Florida, find a place to practice and pay the entry fees for mini-tour events for six months.

"I want to give myself a year to work on my game," he said. "If I don't see some results in the next two or three years, I'll look at other avenues. I want to stay involved with the game, whether it's playing, working in the golf business, teaching. There aren't a lot of black instructors or black players as role models. Tiger obviously is one. But he's also a one-in-a-million athlete."