The Week: What's Wrong with This Picture?

A lack of diversity is harming the National Minority tournament

By Farrell Evans

GOLF PLUS EXTRA Big Play: Wayne DeFrancesco Rookie on Tour: Vision Quest TRUST ME The Hale Irwin era is over on the Champions tour. He shot 73 on Sunday to blow another lead, and he remains winless in '03. The good news? Irwin, 57, will go down as the tour's greatest player. NEXT UP PGA Tour: Wachovia Championship Champions Tour: Kinko's Classic of Austin LPGA Tour: Asahi Ryokuken International Championship PGA European Tour: Benson and Hedges International Open INSTANT POLL Which 2003 major was the best? The Masters The U.S. Open The British Open The PGA View Results

When I was the seventh- or eighth-ranked player at Florida A&M in the mid-1990s, many of the historically black colleges we competed against were just beginning to recruit their first white players, from the U.S. and abroad. For those of us who grew up supporting black colleges, it was an ominous sign of things to come. In recent years white players representing black schools have become the rule, not the exception, and last week I attended the 17th annual National Minority College Golf Championship to see how much the face of minority golf has changed. The tournament, held under the paternalistic watch of the PGA of America at its PGA Golf Club in Port St. Lucie, Fla., turned out to be a showcase of the best nonblacks from 14 historically black colleges, plus predominantly Hispanic Texas-Pan American and Johnson & Wales, a culinary-arts and business university with five campuses nationwide, including a North Miami branch that school officials repeatedly pointed out is 70% black and Hispanic.

Bethune-Cookman, of Daytona Beach, won the Division I title with four white players -- two Canadians, an Australian, an Englishman -- and a native of Calcutta. Johnson & Wales took the Division II crown with four white Americans and an Argentine. Indeed, only five of the 30 players on the top six teams in the field could be classified as minorities.

All of this would surely have been dispiriting to the late Dr. Herschel Cochrane, the former president of the National Negro Golf Association who conceived the tournament in 1986 to encourage the participation of black golfers at historically black colleges. The PGA took over cosponsorship of the event in 1998, and ever since, the mission has become sanitized and less specific -- and ultimately less effective. Minority is now used as camouflage for a strategic ambiguity about race. Any college with a student body made up predominantly of minorities (currently or historically) is eligible to compete in the championship, but its golf team can be as lily-white as the '80's-era Shoal Creek Golf Club. Some may consider this an appealing sort of reverse affirmative action, but college golf already has the NCAAs to identify the best players and teams. The National Minority College Championship was founded to foster camaraderie and competition among black players at historically black schools, but that unique atmosphere has become a casualty of today's win-at-all-costs mentality.

I once played in a match against an upper-middle-class white Toronto native who told me he didn't know he was going to be attending a black college until the day he arrived at school. The kids can't be blamed for accepting scholarships; they simply want somewhere to play. It is up to the coaches and alumni to recruit black student-athletes and to restore the meaning of the tournament. At this year's awards dinner PGA boss Jim Awtrey called the National Minority one of his organization's major championships. To me, that mentality is a big part of the problem, but apparently I'm in the minority.

O.B.: Tour -- Where the Boys Are

•A gaggle of Tour wives is taking time out from this week's Wachovia Championship to throw a baby shower for John Rollins's wife, Jenny, and the occasion has everyone feeling in the pink. "We're all pretty excited because she's having a girl," said Stuart Appleby's wife, Ashley, the hostess of the event. "A lot of other wives are pregnant -- I think there are 13 or 14 of them -- but they're all having boys."

•Speaking of the wives, they got the royal treatment at last week's HP Classic of New Orleans, enjoying freebie spa treatments at the Ritz-Carlton and an endless variety of off-course activities. The Wachovia, a first-year tournament trying to establish goodwill, ups the ante this week by flying 20 wives from host city Charlotte to Asheville, N.C., for a wine tasting and a tour of the Biltmore estate.

•More than a dozen players took in the playoff action between the Hornets and the Philadelphia 76ers last week at New Orleans Arena, but rookie Cameron Yancey was the only HP Classic competitor to attend two games. So is Yancey a hoops junkie? "Not really," he says. "I had never been to a game before. The whole experience was to save me from having to sit around and think about golf." Yancey finished 56th and is now 194th on the money list, with $25,990.

•Steve Flesch's victory means that Skip Kendall now holds the good news-bad news title of the Tour's career money leader without a victory, with $5.2 million in 275 starts.

—Alan Shipnuck

Issue date: May 12, 2003