Charlie Sifford, who broke pro golf’s racial barrier as the first black player in a PGA Tour event and became the first black in the World Golf Hall of Fame, died on Tuesday in Cleveland. He was 92.
Wendell J. Haskins, a spokesman for the PGA, said that Sifford died at Southpoint Hospital and that he lived in Brecksville, Ohio.
Although he began playing as a pro in the late 1940s, Sifford was relegated to the black players’ tour and its meager purses until the PGA of America dropped its Caucasians-only membership clause in 1961.
By the time Sifford got a chance to compete against the golf world’s best, he was almost 40. But he showed what he might have accomplished in his prime and paved the way for Lee Elder, Calvin Peete, Jim Thorpe, Jim Dent and Tiger Woods.
“Charlie, in my opinion, is one of the most courageous men ever to play this sport,” Woods once said.
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Soon after Jackie Robinson broke the modern major league baseball color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, Sifford met him and told of his dream to become a pro golfer. Robinson warned that he could not be a quitter and told of the hostility he would face.
“When you look at it, and what he accomplished and how he stayed in there, you have to put him in the Jackie Robinson category,” Lee Trevino told The Orlando Sentinel in 2004.
But Sifford thought of a figure far beyond the sports world in reflecting on his life.
“Didn’t anyone think I was going to get this far,” he said in 1992. “It’s like Nelson Mandela. They kept him in jail 25 years, but it didn’t break his determination. They couldn’t break mine.”
Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.
