by Jackson Baker
ho says there
aren't happy endings for this post-modern time? Last week, even though the
very elements seemed to conspire against the 1997 FedEx-St. Jude Classic
-- with rains that repeatedly stopped play for three of the four days of
the tournament proper -- the only real superstar in the field, Australia's
Greg Norman, won, and the Shark did so in style, making birdies on each
of the last three holes at the Tournament Players Club at Southwind to finish
with a 72-hole total of 268.
That
was good enough to edge out no-names Dudley Hart by one stroke and Craig
Parry and rookie Robert Damron by two. And when Norman, who had been absent
from Memphis for 12 years before this year, promised he'd be back next year,
the exultation among spectators and sponsors alike at Southwind was palpable.
NOT TO SOUND BOOSTERISH OR anything, but it's useful to know that a city which has been in such obvious, anguished search for big-league status over the last several years may have been in possession of it for four full decades already.
That realization should have dawned last week with the playing of this year's FESJC -- the city's 40th annual tournament held in conjunction with the Professional Golfers Association.
The PGA: even though those initials aren't as well known as the NFL, the fact is that the 1958 Memphis Open, won by one Billy Maxwell, was the Bluff City's first brush with major-league sports, the first occasion for big-name pro athletes, the creme de la creme, to come to Memphis as competitors.
In its four decades of existence the tournament has had three venues -- old Colonial Country Club east of Perkins, "new" Colonial in Cordova, and the current site, the Tournament Players Club at Southwind, along the developing suburban corridor from Germantown to Collierville.
It's had six names -- the Memphis Open, the Memphis Invitational Open, the Danny Thomas Memphis Classic, the St. Jude Memphis Classic, the Federal Express St.Jude Classic, and -- finally -- the FedEx St. Jude Classic.
As the evolution of its name would indicate, the tournament benefits St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and, for the last 11 years, has been sponsored by the hometown Federal Express Corporation. According to a 1995 study, the Memphis economy gains by more than $13 million from the FESJC, with out-of-town visitors accounting for 35 percent of that.
Who shows up for the FESJC? The tournament handbook says that 69 percent of the attendees have a household income of more than $50,000, that 88.1 percent of them are college-educated, and that 63 percent have executive-level jobs.
More importantly, once this tournament was built those four decades back, the stars of the PGA came -- a full generation before the Houston ooops, Tennessee Oilers' Air McNair had even reached zygote status, a decade before Memphis' short-lived American Basketball Association team had arrived, and nearly two-score moons before the first big-time tennis tournaments were booked at The Racquet Club.
Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Ben Hogan, Ken Venturi, Jay and Lionel Hebert, Julius Boros, Dow Finsterwald, Tony Lema, Gent Littler, Lee Trevino, Chi Chi Rodriguez, Billy Casper, Tom Weiskopf, et al., et al. Those were the names of yore.
"Terrible" Tommy Bolt, who made club-throwing fashionable, played -- and won -- here. Arnie's Army, Jack's Pack, and Hogan's Hordes all reconnoitered on Memphis soil. Nicklaus won here, Hogan contended in a playoff. Memphis' own Dr. Cary Middlecoff, the "golfing doctor" of yore, performed surgery on the old Colonial Country Club course in 1961.
Gerald Ford -- yes, that Gerald Ford, the former president, had a hole-in-one at the Celebrity Pro-Am in 1977, and the same year Al Geiberger set a still unequalled one-round PGA tour record of 59. (Geiberger's score was posted at the second Colonial Country Club, which -- at the time -- was the longest course on the PGA tour.)
And there was old Charlie Sifford, one of the first truly competitive PGA golfers of the black golfers on the PGA tour. He struggled for years in the shadows of the aforementioned, as did Lee Elder and a few, a very few, other African Americans. For the fact is, that blacks, either on the links or in the gallery, had historically not figured prominently in golf.
ARGUABLY, THOUGH, THAT WAS then; this is now, the day of Tiger Woods, who ran away with this year's Master's tournament at Augusta, Georgia (the first of four "Grand Slam" tournaments, which annually include the U.S. Open, the British Open, and the PGA championship).
At 21, already a millionaire several times over, Woods is a study in racial diversity who calls himself "Cablinasian" by way of getting at his various racial origins, but is, alas, the same old Sambo to those who want to stay in practice with their racial stereotyping.
Like Fuzzy Zoeller, for example, a Louisville touring pro -- one of three consultants in the development of Southwind, incidentally -- who got in trouble after this year's Masters tournament in Augusta, wondering if "that little boy," when it came time next year for the reigning Masters champ to designate the main course for the tournament banquet, would name "fried chicken and collard greens, or whatever they eat."
Ill-timed, that jest -- several decades off. And even though several of Zoeller's fellow pros kept pointing out that ole Fuzz was just a "jokester," Kmart, which up to that point had sponsored him and paid him big endorsement fees, wasn't laughing. Conscious of its P.R. (and, no doubt, of its marketing strategies) the big discount chain dropped Zoeller cold.
Anyhow,Tiger
wasn't here this year, and Zoeller, a former Masters champ himself, was.
Therein lay a tale. It was some measure of local concern that a tournament
which used to draw the big names routinely had become eminently skippable
in recent years, despite an enormous evolution upward in the purses it offers.
Listen: Maxwell copped only $2,800 with his win here. At stake this year was a total purse of $1.5 million with the winner's share due to be $270,000. The problem was: who was that lagniappe to be settled on -- somebody big-time who would rub off on the tournament -- and its host city -- some lustre? Or some rookie or journeyman whose name was famous only in his own household?
The tournament has had its share of the latter. The Bob Eastwoods, Jodie Mudds, and Mike Hulberts of the world. Perfectly good players, but the outer world would not exactly stop to take note of their victories. Or the place where they earned them.
The archetypal no-name winner at Memphis was Dave Hill, who won here four times from 1967 to 1973, alternating in that general time-frame with Lee Trevino, the Merry Mex, who won three times himself.
Jack Eaton, the longtime WMC-TV sportscaster who was back in the saddle this year doing radio from the FESJC, remembers hobnobbing with Hill back when he got his string started. "What he said was, `I've got to get out there and manufacture a swing." Whatever that meant. The problem was that Hill tended to leave his swing here, his success elsewhere being negligible.
THE TPC IS ONE OF THOSE PHEnomena -- part gated community, part public extravaganza -- that help define the fragmented nature of these times. A lot of people live year-round on the course, in the impressively sized bungalows whose purchase price runs all the way from a a few hundred thousand to way past a million.
Nancye Hines and her husband, Dr. Leonard Hines (who served as this year's FESJC medical coordinator) live just behind the water-encircled 11th green, which concludes a 146-yard par 3 -- the kind that has players teeing off with an iron, rather than a wood.
Normally, the Hineses put up one of the players for the duration of his stay here. Last year's guest was a young player named Byran Gorman. "Listen, we did everything we could to get him going. Some of my friends and I even put together a gallery for him. We had signs up saying `Gorman's Groupies.'" Gorman would finish in a tie for 28th and win almost $9,000 in prize money.
Nancye Hines, a fixture on the Republican political circuit and a former contender for the Shelby County GOP chairmanship, finds golfers to be a likeable breed -- not like some of the tennis players the Hineses domiciled when they lived off Walnut Grove, hard by The Racquet club and its annual tournament. "I won't mention any names, but we had one guy stay with us whose girlfriend came with him and tried to treat us like servants."
Indeed, there is an etiquette to golfers and to golf itself consistent with the game's British origins. The galleries that follow players maintain a church-like hush, especially when a player is ready to shoot. (The marshals at FESJC hold up signs that say "HUSH, Y'all.") Sometimes the quiet is so funereal that you almost long for one of those yahoos who come to outdoor concerts and keep going "WOOOOOOOOH!" in your ear.
Leonard
Hines, a steady player himself, is asked whether players could perform in
a din if they got used to it. "Probably so," he reflects, "but
there's a lot of wear and tear in the kind of concentration that comes with
golf."
There are some permitted celebrations, of course. It has become the custom, when one of the leaders in a tournament hits his tee shot, for someone to shout, "You're the man!" -- timing it for just after the clubhead's contact with the ball -- whereupon everybody else, briefly, whoops it up.
This year's recipient of most of that holler was Norman, who -- until Woods came along -- was the big name in golf, a blond, broad-shouldered ex-surfer who looks like a slimmer version of Nicklaus, the so-called Golden Bear who is generally reckoned as the game's greatest player to date and who now adorns the PGA's Senior Tour.
Norman sometimes plays like Nicklaus, but he has also evinced an un-Bear-like tendency to fold under pressure -- most recently and glaringly at the 1996 Masters, where, on the back nine of the tournament's last day, Norman catastrophically surrendered a six-stroke lead to eventual winner Nick Faldo, who seemed as surprised as anybody else.
In Tiger's absence, it was clearly up to Norman to play the role of chief crowd-pleaser.
Well, and there was Penny Hardaway, the erstwhile University of Memphis basketball player and current Orlando Magic superstar, who drew a gallery of several thousand at Wednesday's Pro-Am, which allows amateurs to play along with pros.
Hardaway commanded the first -- and, until Norman's last round, the largest -- gallery of the tournament, some 8,000 souls who trucked around in his wake, watching him spray shots every which way. Penny had only been playing the game for the last two months, prevailing on an assortment of old friends and Tiger boosters to go around this or that course with him.
He also gave autographs -- sparingly, if one is to believe the complainants, who greatly outnumbered the fortunate few who appear in this or that published photograph of a besieged Penny scribbling away.
Hardaway shot wild most of the day, sometimes by a hundred yards or so in the wrong direction, but he redeemed it all -- and perhaps foreshadowed events to come -- with a 40-foot putt on the 18th green.
Another celebrity at the Pro-Am was C&W singer Vince Gill, who kept putting on the TPC's practice green after finishing his round. A passersby -- evidently a friend -- yelled at the shaggy-haired Gill, "Hey, I thought you were gonna get a haircut." To which the singer replied, "Come over here and take your ass-kicking like a man."
Alongside Gill, warming up his putter for the tournament to come, was Zoeller, whose caddy said, "Hey, Fuzzy, got a new club for you," and reached in the bag to pull out a sledgehammer. "Well -- the way I've been hitting 'em," Zoeller replied.
Actually, ole Fuzz the funster would do okay, shooting 69-67-70-69 for a 265, 9-under-par total that netted him $21,750. More than most of the players, he also stayed fairly close, during the tournament's several rain delays, to the Player's Lounge on the second floor of the TPC clubhouse.
There was lots of food and drink up there, and there were such ancillaries as a couple of tall blondes who kept angling a security guard to get in. One of them eventually gave up the direct approach and reached somebody on her cell phone. "Hey, do you want to hang out with me?" she said.
BUT MAINLY NORMAN WAS THE show at FESJC. Even wandering amongst his mates on the practice green, he was a cynosure, his trademark wide-brimmed hat setting him off from the baseball caps of the others. He looked like -- well, like a shark among fish.
Sometimes he even seemed like one -- as when he instructed a photographer to buzz off on the tournament's second day. Or when he shrugged off autograph-seekers, like the kid who beseeched him after a round, "Would you sign my shirt, Mr. Norman?" As when he answered a Commercial Appeal reporter's persistent questions about his 1996 Masters fold with icy evasions.
But the crowd was always with him, even to the point that, as the boyish Damron put it, "They cheer him more for missing putts than they do me for making them." (Norman's way of acknowledging his fans: "I admire them almost as much as they admire me.")
After the tournament, Damron, who had led the FESJC most of the way, would also say, "Great players do great things."
And
that's a fair description of what Norman did. Trailing by two strokes, with
three holes to go on Sunday, he not only birdied the last three, but he
included at least two master-strokes -- what he called a "frozen rope"
4-iron shot from the 17th fairway to within four feet of the cup, and a
30-foot putt on the 18th which surmounted a small rise and seemed to see
its way into the hole.
When it did, Norman removed his hat and hurled it into the cheering gallery, which meant that at least one onlooker got one for free. (Norman's line of shirts and hats was on sale inside the tournament's souvenir shop; aside from generic PGA goods, they seemed to be the only goods on sale there.)
Later, in the clubhouse, Norman would remark of his winning putt: "I said to myself, `I haven't made a putt all day, it's time to make one.'" And, obviously thinking of the fans who had camped out at 18 or who were partying over at the nearby sponsor tents. "They'll think I've been making them all day!"
Waxing expansive after somebody brought him a glass of celebratory beer, Norman thought back on the largely dismal experience of his past year, ever since his horrendous fold at the Masters.
"When I get in that fix again," he said, "All I'm going to have to do is throw my mind back to Memphis. It'll give me confidence."
Would he be back? "I always defend my championships," the Shark said. Which was good news for the tournament.
And who knows? Next time maybe Tiger will come, too, come hell or more high water.
by Tanuja Surpuriya
s the PGA Tour
sloshed through Memphis last week for the FedEx St. Jude Classic at Southwind,
it brought with it some interesting observations about color. The stormy
skies shifted from clear blue to dark gray, and the fairways rolled out
in every shade of green imaginable. But there was only one color that can
describe all the golfers and most of the fans who watched them -- white.
Lily white.
Golf has been experiencing enormous popularity in the past 10 years -- with skyrocketing equipment sales and a growing number of participants taking up the game. So why does the Mid-South's largest golf tournament only draw a handful of minorities among the thousands making up the gallery?
Notably absent from the event was phenom Tiger Woods. Many think his presence on the pro tour will eventually break the color barrier in golf. At the same time, his multi-ethnic background would still keep him out of some of Memphis' most elite private country clubs.
It is no secret that in the past, the city's most exclusive private clubs -- including Memphis Country Club, Colonial Country Club, Chickasaw Country Club, Memphis Hunt and Polo Club, and the University Club -- have not had any minority members. African-Americans and other people of color, women, and Jews have, for the most part, been excluded from the amenities of the luxurious clubs.
But, in Memphis at least, this is a topic that almost no one wants to talk about. Repeated attempts to contact private-club members and African-American leaders in the city were met with "no comments" or unreturned phone calls. Even the local press seems disinterested. Marilyn Sadler's 1993 article for Memphis magazine about private country clubs is still the only definitive analysis of local private clubs produced by the local media.
Even in a city where almost everyone has an opinion on race relations, getting someone to talk about private-club memberships can be more difficult than actually joining one. White members, who don't see their club's exclusivity as a problem, don't think the media should even write about it. As one club manager told us, "We're a private club and we're really not interested in you doing an article on our membership."
Others, who do think there is a serious problem and hope that the clubs will become more inclusive, still say they do not want to talk on the record for fear of being ostracized by their friends.
These days, it's not certain that minorities even want to belong to such clubs. In the past, a country-club membership was the only way one could play on quality golf courses or tennis courts in the city. Minority golfers were once relegated solely to public courses, such as those operated by the Memphis Park Commission. Today, with daily-fee greens like Stonebridge and Holiday available, offering beautiful courses and good facilities, has private-club exclusivity become a moot point?
Not as long as the members do more than just play golf. In Sadler's Memphis magazine article, she writes that while "all clubs insist that they're social in nature, none can deny that many a deal has been sealed over a round of golf or drinks in the clubhouse." And this -- the clubs' ability to draw business interests together -- is where the topic of all-white clubs is still a sore issue for many minorities.
While some Memphis clubs say they are trying to accept more minorities, they refuse to provide any proof. None of the clubs we spoke with would release membership lists or even provide us with the number of minority members. And while some clubs may have embraced a few minority members, the numbers do not seem large enough to suggest a shift in attitude. If the clubs have plans to attract a more diverse membership to their clubs, they kept that information from us as well.
Ron Walter, executive vice-president and station manager of WREG-TV Channel 3, was not only the University Club's first African-American member in 1993, but four years later, he is still the only black member there. Walter would not comment for this article.
Terry Anglin, general manager of the University Club, says that his club is one of the more progressive of the elite clubs in town, but would not comment on membership policies, fees, or the club's racial makeup.
Anglin does say, however, that his club offers full membership to women, which makes the University Club "one of the few elite clubs in town that offers that."
In some Memphis country clubs, women are still not allowed to be full members with the right to vote, hold office, or hold stock in the club. And while some of these clubs are changing their policies to include women on an equal basis with men, it is still primarily white women who are being included.
Carol Remmers, membership and catering director at Colonial Country Club, says that although her club has had only white members in the past, it is changing now. "We've evolved with the evolution of our economy," she says. "We have more international representatives that live here now since more companies are moving to Memphis."
Remmers says Colonial currently has women, Indian, and Japanese members and even Turkish and Egyptian officeholders. She says that the diversity has been good for all club members.
"Anytime you spread out the ages and sexes and races and include all of them," she says, "everyone benefits."
However, Remmers admits that Colonial, with a membership of more than 700, does not have a single African American on its roster. She says the club does not intentionally keep blacks out, but rather African Americans do not apply to be members.
Applying for membership can be complicated. An applicant for membership must be sponsored by a current member, and then voted in by a membership committee. Sometimes the entire membership gets to vote. Often one negative vote is enough to keep an applicant away. Getting into a private club usually requires the sponsorship of an existing member. Remmers says at Colonial, the membership committee will work with those people who want to be members but have no sponsor.
Warren Canale, president of the Chickasaw Country Club, Lewis Frank, manager of Memphis Country Club, and Michael Robinson, general manager of Memphis Hunt and Polo Club, refused to comment for this article. They all pointed out that their clubs are private and they never publicly discuss membership practices. It does not take much digging, however, to discover that while the clubs may have non-discriminatory policies, none of them has African-American members.
And that does not sit well with Circuit Court Judge D'Army Bailey, who says that, for the most part, Memphis country clubs have not done much to include minorities.
"I continue to be befuddled at how some of our leading white citizens can blindly go along with these discriminatory clubs," says Bailey, one of the few people we found who was willing to speak on the record about private clubs in Memphis.
Bailey says he does not attend functions at any of Memphis' country clubs except the University Club since "they took the nominal step in breaking down the color barrier" with Walter's 1994 induction into the club.
The outspoken judge even urged Bill Clinton, when he was still governor of Arkansas, to stop attending events at country clubs that discriminate. Clinton had been criticized in the national press for playing golf at the all-white Country Club of Little Rock.
"He said that it was an oversight and was very sympathetic to the issue," Bailey says. "I challenged him to go one step further and not allow members of his staff to belong to those kinds of clubs either."
While Clinton did not mandate that his staff sever all ties with country clubs, Bailey says Clinton himself no longer attends functions held at exclusively all-white clubs.
But while he thinks the president is on the right path, Bailey does not see any grand change in the near future.
"I just think that there is still a great deal of racial provincialism around," he says. "In Memphis, much of the white elite are of the generation of thought that is blindly indifferent to these problems. Instead of moving their thinking forward to the 21st century, they want to continue to look backwards at the antebellum South. And that's a shame."