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Until recently, Horton Smith was best known for a stellar playing career that included winning two of the first three Masters (when the event was called the Augusta National Invitation Tournament) and serving as president of the PGA of America from 1952-54.
He also was among the most decorated ever to play the game, receiving the Ben Hogan Award in 1960 from the Golf Writers Association of America, for overcoming a physical handicap; and the Bob Jones Award in 1962, the USGA’s highest honor. In 1965, the PGA established the Horton Smith Award, to be given annually to the association member who makes outstanding contributions to professional education. Then, in 1990, Smith became a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame.
But the period of reflection that has followed the May 25 killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd has reminded the golf world that Horton Smith was also a man with flaws, the most egregious of which was defending the indefensible Caucasians-only clause in the PGA’s bylaws when he was its president.
In addition to prompting serious reassessment of his legacy, it also has compelled the association to remove Smith’s name from the annual accolade that long bore his appellation. Going forward, it will be called the PGA Professional Development Award.
“This regrettable part of our association’s history was the result of failed constitutional policy,” said PGA of America president Suzy Whaley of the membership stipulation that the PGA adopted in 1934 and finally rescinded 27 years later. “As a result, great pain was inflicted by denying Black golfers the opportunity to achieve their dreams. We are in no way diminishing the great accomplishments of those who have won this award previously. Rather, the board strongly believed that by changing the name of this national award, we make it representative of all our members.”
It is a welcome if not long overdue move.
Smith was the son of a farmer, born in 1908 and raised in the Ozark Mountains outside Springfield, Missouri, in the southwest corner of the Show Me State. He started caddying when he was 11 years old and learned to play the game by using a single club. As a young boy, Smith looped for Walter Hagen when the Haig came to Springfield to participate in an exhibition. Less than a decade later, Smith qualified for his first U.S. Open, at Oakmont Country Club, in 1927. A year later, he won his first PGA Tour event, the Oklahoma City Open.
Tall and lean, Smith possessed a swing that sports writer Grantland Rice described as “sheer genius,” adding that it was “as sound and as smooth a swing as Vardon, Braid, Taylor, Jones or anyone else ever had.” Others in the sport praised Smith for his brilliant putting. He made especially good use of those skills in 1929 by winning eight tour events and making the American team for that year’s Ryder Cup, which was played at Moortown Golf Club in Leeds, England. Just 20 years old, Smith was one of two rookies on a squad that also included Gene Sarazen and Johnny Farrell. As fate would have it, the captain was Hagen, the man for whom he once had caddied.
Playing for a spell out of Oak Hill Golf Club in Joplin, Missouri, Smith came to be known as the “Joplin Ghost,” in large part because he was such an unknown at the time. In later years, people took to calling him “Velvet Touch,” in reference to the deft way he wielded his flat stick. He didn’t smoke, and more often than not his beverage of choice was milk. He neither gambled nor cursed.
Of course, Smith’s biggest wins came at the Masters, before the tournament officially acquired that moniker. And according to a 1965 biography on Smith, written by Marian Benton and titled The Velvet Touch, Augusta National played another significant role in his life when in 1938 he married the daughter of charter member Alfred Bourne, an heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune and an early and important underwriter of the club. Her name was Barbara, and five years later, the couple produced their only child, a boy named Alfred, after his grandfather. But two years after that, the Smiths divorced. Barbara accused her former husband of “mental cruelty” and denied him visits with their son.
Smith enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942 and held a series of administrative positions stateside during World War II. He is also said to have played lots of golf with generals. He was discharged in 1945, and the following year became head professional of Detroit Golf Club, where last week’s Rocket Mortgage Classic was staged. Smith’s competitive career was essentially done by that time, though he did win the 1948 Michigan PGA Championship and the Michigan Open six years later.
Sadly, he also made clear at the start of his term that he was going to uphold the Caucasians-only clause by telling a pair of African-American golfers who had hoped to compete in the 1952 San Diego Open ... that they could not play.
It was after he took the Detroit job that Smith began to get more deeply involved with the PGA. After serving as secretary and then vice president of the association, he assumed its presidency in 1952, making his priority the improvement of education programs for PGA professionals.
Sadly, he also made clear at the start of his term that he was going to uphold the Caucasians-only clause by telling a pair of African-American golfers who had hoped to compete in the 1952 San Diego Open – professional Bill Spiller and former world heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis – that they could not play. Though Smith offered various reasons for his decision, there was no question that the ban was based entirely on their race. That rankled the golfers to no end.
According to Al Barkow in his book, Gettin’ to the Dance Floor: An Oral History of American Golf, Louis reacted angrily to that move: “We’ve got another Hitler to get by? Horton Smith believes in the white race (the way) Hitler believed in the super race.” Then the boxer, an avid golfer who carried a single-digit handicap and occasionally competed in both professional and amateur tournaments, shared his story with nationally syndicated columnist and radio commentator Walter Winchell. Winchell was appalled and quickly went on air to suggest that “if Louis could serve his country in the U.S. Army, he could surely carry a golf club in San Diego.”
The publicity that arose from that broadcast caused Smith to meet in San Diego with Louis and Spiller, who was toiling as a “redcap” at Union Station in Los Angeles 10 years before when he took up golf and got so good so fast that he qualified for the 1948 Los Angeles Open. Smith decided to allow Louis to play as an amateur, primarily because he was such a wildly popular sports figure at the time. But the PGA president was adamant that Spiller could not. That decision so upset Spiller that he stood in the middle of the first tee at the course the following morning in protest, holding up the start of the tournament until Louis could convince him to move.
Things did not change under Smith’s reign as president, and it was another seven years after his term ended before the Caucasians-only clause was finally rescinded. That happened only after Stanley Mosk, attorney general for the state of California, sued the association (which ran the tour until it was spun off as a separate entity in 1968) for its discriminatory membership practices. Appropriately, it was Spiller who had convinced Mosk to get involved.
Three years after Smith stepped down at PGA president, doctors diagnosed him with Hodgkin’s disease. He continued working as head professional at Detroit, even after having one of his lungs removed, and competed every year at Augusta. He passed away in 1963 at age 55, living just long enough to see that clause he enforced be taken off the books.
Top: Horton Smith won at Augusta National in 1934 and 1936.
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