The Elder statesman

IT’S funny how 30 years can go by in the blink of an eye.

A few years earlier, Clifford Roberts, the co-founder of Augusta, said that as long as he was alive "golfers will be white and caddies will be black". He bent the rules to keep blacks from playing at Augusta, changing the qualifying criteria when he had to. He ignored the US Congress and stuck to his twisted beliefs, which were the beliefs of so many of his contemporaries. As Curt Sampson wrote in The Masters: Golf, Money and Power in Augusta, Georgia: "Roberts was a self-righteous man who harboured views on race that were and remain fairly common but are seldom so unashamedly revealed for the record."

Tomorrow evening, at a ceremony in downtown Augusta, Elder will be made a freeman of the city. From mayor Bob Young he will receive the keys to a place that once locked him out, threatened his life and struck so much fear into him that in that week of weeks he rented two homes in Augusta and flitted between them. "I thought I’d be killed. It was best I moved around."

Of all the great stories that have come out of the Masters, Elder’s heroic struggle is among the best of them. Originally from Dallas, Texas, he was brought up in Los Angeles by an aunt after he lost his parents at the age of seven. His father was killed in the Second World War and his mother passed away months later, of a broken heart it’s been said. Lee was their eighth and youngest child. "Tough years. I had to go and provide for myself really because there were so many of us."

He did it by following his brother Raymond into the game of golf. From the age of nine, he knew he wanted nothing else out of life. "I was too small to caddy in the beginning so what I did was when the golf pro gave lessons I would shag. I would shag the balls for the lessons until I was big enough to carry the bag. I’d take the shag bag, stand there and pick them up as they hit them. A lot of times you were the target, you know. You had to have good eyes to see that ball coming."

He started caddying aged 12 but he was always destined to be a player. Teddy Rhodes, who taught the world heavyweight champion Joe Louis how to play and got him down to a single-figure handicap, became his mentor. Rhodes was a gentleman, a hero. When Tiger Woods embraced Elder after his seismic victory in the 1997 Masters and thanked him "for making this possible" Elder felt much the same about Rhodes, who had died in 1969. Elder remembers the day. "I was leading the Buick Open at Grand Blanc, Michigan, when they brought me the telegram. Teddy was dead. Ah, he was a great man."

In his late-teens Elder took his first steps in professional golf by hitting the road and becoming a hustler. What stories he has of those days. "I travelled with a fella by the name of Titanic Thompson. Ti was the greatest hustler golf has ever known. People spoke about Mark Stanowich - the Fat Man out of Minneapolis, Minnesota - but he wasn’t fit to carry Ti’s bag. Titanic was as good left-handed as he was right-handed. I watched him shoot 64 off the left side one day and shoot 63 off the right the next. He was good enough to play on the tour, but the money wasn’t there at the time. These hustles were for big money, five grand and up. You couldn’t get that kind of cash playing tournaments.

"We went all over the place together. He’d say ‘I need a caddie’ and, of course, there were loads around. ‘I’ll take that fella over there’ he’d say pointing to me and I’d be pretending not to be interested. I spent about three years with Ti in the 60s. He passed away about five years ago."

Eventually Elder broke out on his own. He couldn’t get a game in white clubs, so he headed for Indiana and Chicago and Detroit, where all the black hustlers operated, and played for $100-500 a time. He would go in the day before in disguise, play the course a couple of times, do his yardages and only then put his money down. "I was doing yardage before Jack [Nicklaus] ever thought about it. I’m telling you. Everybody used to go on sight and feel in those days but I was playing with my own cash."

Word got round the circuit that Elder was good. In certain places, there was a handicapping system, of sorts, but even then he found a way of beating it. "On one occasion in Chicago in 100 degree temperatures, I played in a rainsuit, zipped to the top. I had on one of those ski caps that they pulled down over my ears and tied underneath. The guy I was playing thought I was gonna pass out. I almost did. It was a nine-hole match and I put him out after six holes. When it was over I jumped out of that rainsuit so quick. I had sweated so fiercely there was a pool of water inside.

Elder qualified for the PGA tour at the first time of asking, in 1968. That year he lost to Nicklaus on the fifth extra hole of the American Golf Classic and four years later he came close again to winning when Lee Trevino beat him on the first hole of a sudden death match at the Greater Hartford Open. He was still without a PGA victory, but his reputation had grown to such an extent that a week before the 1973 Masters, 18 members of the US House of Representatives wrote to Roberts and urged him to invite Elder to Augusta.

"A proclamation was sent to him [Roberts] and while I appreciated it I wasn’t in agreement with it. I wanted to qualify like the other players. I didn’t want to be brought in just because of the colour of my skin." That was never likely to happen. Elder wouldn’t have accepted an invitation but Roberts was never going to issue one anyway. His response read: "We feel certain someone has misinformed the distinguished lawmakers because there is not and never has been player discrimination [at Augusta]."

Roberts changed the qualifying rules as he pleased. Charlie Sifford won the 1967 Hartford Open and the 1969 Los Angeles Open and was never invited to play in the Masters. Pete Brown won in San Diego in 1970 and he, too, was snubbed. In 1971 Elder won the Nigerian Open. In previous years the winner in Nigeria was invited to Augusta but Elder was not. "Roberts said because I was an American citizen playing in a foreign tournament I wasn’t eligible. Every time myself or Charlie or Pete looked like making it, the rules changed.

"Being honest, I wasn’t that down about it. It was an unpleasant place, Augusta. I heard so many things about the treatment of blacks there. That statement he [Roberts] had made that no black would ever play at Augusta so long as he was chairman really disgusted me. If that was the way they looked at it, I didn’t want to be part of it. But, you know, Augusta wasn’t the only place like that. Before 1968 we couldn’t change our shoes in places like Pensacola, Florida. We were playing in the tournament, but we had to change our shoes outside."

On April 21, 1974, all that began to change. When Elder sank an 18-foot putt on the fourth hole of a sudden death play-off at the Monsanto Open in Pensacola there was absolutely nothing that Roberts could do to keep him out. The irony was that Elder once thought about dropping the Monsanto from his schedule, such was the unbridled racism of the place. "I’m tired of being called ‘nigger’ and ‘black boy’," he said a few years before winning there.

Even after winning, he wasn’t so sure about Augusta. "I dreaded it. In the build-up, myself and Roberts exchanged some pretty harsh words in the press. He wasn’t the type of man I wanted to talk to and it was really hard for me to meet him. I remember pulling up outside Augusta in a limo that first day and seeing him waiting for me. He stretched out his hand and I didn’t want to shake it but I did and that was so difficult.

"I lived in fear the whole week. I had received letters telling me that I was not to tee-off on Thursday or I would be killed. I rented two houses so I wasn’t in the same place all the time and I had people around me constantly. I couldn’t be on my own."

His practice time was all but wiped out because of the demands of the media. He said he would give one press conference - which lasted two and a half hours - but still he was besieged. He never really stood a chance. Save for a few rednecks, he was treated warmly by the galleries, but it was no surprise when he shot 74-78 and missed the cut

He went back again in 1977 and finished in the top 20. By then Roberts was 83 years old and ill from cancer and a stroke. "Most of his friends were dead," wrote Sampson. "Augusta National was all he had left, so he went there to die." One September evening in 1977, Roberts, dressed in new pyjamas and a raincoat, went for a walk to Ike’s Pond to the left of the eighth hole on the par-three course, took a .38 pistol from his pocket and shot himself through the head.

Elder continued playing at Augusta until 1983 and goes back every year, cheering Tiger on and speaking with him often. He is an active 70 and plays on the Grand Champions Tour for men of a certain age and enjoys it hugely. To him, though, there’s nothing like Augusta.

"I used to hate it but now I love it. It’s a changed place from 30 years ago. Very little has stayed the same, which is good. You know, I still hear them whisper as I go by. Kids who were not around in 1975 and older folk who were. ‘Hey that’s Lee Elder’ they say. ‘The first black guy to play here’. That’s wonderful. That makes me feel so good."