As Wikipedia page bio sentences go, Maggie Hathaway’s is intriguing in its breadth: Maggie Mae Hathaway (July 1, 1911 – September 24, 2001) was an American activist, blues singer, actress, sports writer and golfer. That kind of range is worthy of a Hollywood movie made about Hathaway – a woman who doubled on screen for Lena Horne and co-founded the NAACP Image Awards with Sammy Davis Jr.
Los Angeles named a public golf course after Hathaway. Considering all the work she put into making courses accessible for golfers of color, it was the least they could do.
Now the USGA will up the stakes as it aims to leave a lasting impact in the community that plays host to this week’s U.S. Open for the first time in 75 years – at Los Angeles Country Club, about 15 miles northwest of the nine-hole par-3 Maggie Hathaway Golf Course adjacent to Jesse Owens Park. Golf’s governing body is investing to have architect Gil Hanse upgrade and restore (pro bono) the public facility operated by Los Angeles County which provides affordable and accessible golf to thousands in the area. Its $1 million donation is one of the most significant host community investments in U.S. Open history, with the USGA joining forces with LACC, L.A. County, Southern California Golf Association, Western States Golf Association and other donors in a $15 million project not only to renovate the course and expand the practice range but also build a learning center and expand programming for Los Angeles-area juniors.
"What better way to do that than to establish a beachhead in one of the most thriving vibrant communities in the country."
Dave Aznavorian, USGA senior director
“We know that we want to see demographic groups come into golf that are currently underrepresented, whether that’s African-American or Hispanic or women or lower income,” said Dave Aznavorian, the USGA’s senior director, transformational initiatives. “What better way to do that than to establish a beachhead in one of the most thriving vibrant communities in the country, which according to any data that you look at from the NGF (National Golf Foundation) has like the highest amount of demand to play golf and the fewest number of holes.
“(Maggie Hathaway GC) is like 1,100 yards that already has good bones, but with the touch of Gil Hanse and a little bit of an investment into the infrastructure it can leave a long-term legacy within the L.A. community that allows more kids to get into golf and allows more underrepresented communities to have something that represents a community center.”
Ideally, the pilot Community Legacy Campaign will be so successful that it can be replicated in other host communities where USGA championships are conducted. “We’re already talking about what we could be doing in North Carolina for next year,” Aznavorian said of the 2024 U.S. Open at Pinehurst.
It’s the kind of mission for which Hathaway advocated in her adopted community.
“Her whole life was about staying relevant and opening doors for the next generation,” said Susan Henderson, a long-time colleague and friend of Hathaway. “I was there when Jack Thompson Golf Course was named after her (in 1997), and I watched her pride and joy then. I could just imagine if she's looking down from heaven … that she would be overjoyed, but she wouldn't feel like her work was done.”
Hathaway’s work against injustice on many fronts was never done, but golf held a particular passion for her. Hathaway’s introduction to golf in 1955 reads like a far-fetched scene from a movie script. Despite never playing the game (which she didn’t consider much of a sport until she tried it), Hathaway was appalled that even in more progressive California it was openly excluding people of color and the segregation was seemingly sanctioned by the community at large. When she heard that heavyweight boxer Joe Louis was participating in a pro-am at Griffith Park when “truly excellent Black golfers” like Bill Spiller were barred from pro golf, she decided to confront and scold the world champion who knocked out Max Schmeling in 1938.
“I caught up with him at No. 8, which was a short par-3,” Hathaway told the Los Angeles Times. “He hit down to the green, and I told him, ‘Anybody could do that.’ He said, ‘OK, you try. If you hit the green, I’ll buy you a bag of golf clubs.’ I hit the green with the first shot I ever took in my life, and he bought me the clubs.”
That moment of indignant hubris led to an obsession – both with the game that she honed as low as a 14 handicap and with opening the doors to it for other golfers of color. She quickly learned how discriminatory many courses were in Southern California and that most amateur and professional tournaments were exclusively for whites. She became well known for her aggressive efforts to change that.
"If you weren't picketing, and you were just passively going along with the program, that just wasn't acceptable to her."
Susan Henderson
Hathaway’s voice carried weight in Hollywood, where she had moved at age 20 in 1931 from her birthplace in the sawmill town of Campti, Louisiana. She went to California with dreams of playing piano in one of the exclusive “Black Broadway” cabarets on Central Avenue, but ended up getting bit roles playing mainly “Egyptians” or “exotics” in films. She danced in the Marx Brothers’ comedy “At the Circus.” Her statuesque extra turn in “Cabin in the Sky,” wearing long black gloves and black hat while strutting in the cabaret scene, landed her the job as Horne’s body double and later as Horne's “Stormy Weather” stand-in.
But Hathaway always bristled at the demeaning roles Blacks typically played in films. When she was cast in a film biopic about Woodrow Wilson, she was told to wear a bandana and sit in a field on a bale of cotton. “I could hear the voice of my father, a Louisiana farmer, telling me to get an education and never pick a piece of cotton,” she said. “I returned the bandana to the director, asked for a limousine and left Hollywood.”
Her civil-rights crusade carried into opportunities for Black actors in the film industry, co-founding the Beverly Hills-Hollywood chapter of the NAACP and the Image Awards that honor the outstanding work of Blacks excluded from the Oscars and other awards. Studio executives reportedly panicked at the mention of her name, worried she would be picketing them.
“They didn’t want to see her coming,” Henderson said of Hathaway. “She always had an eye out for any, any, any injustice. … If you weren't picketing, and you were just passively going along with the program, that just wasn't acceptable to her. The thing about Maggie that, to me, is so important is that she never stopped. She never stopped. Nothing was ever enough. That’s why some people would run from her. ‘You did it, but what’s next?’”
Hathaway organized the Minority Association for Golfers to support young Black golfers by advocating for golf-related employment. She picketed PGA tour events advocating for access and the abolition of the PGA’s “Caucasians-only” clause. She took her cause to the newspaper pages in 1958, penning golf columns for the California Eagle about Black professional golfers. Her columns in the Los Angeles Sentinel, the city’s largest Black-owned weekly, harangued Augusta National and the Masters Tournament to include Black golfers.
“Well the ‘Mighty Masters’ has come and gone,” she wrote on April 18, 1974. “I guess Miss Aretha Franklin who sings ‘It Ain’t No Way’ could sing it one more time for the black professionals. White South African Gary Player won the Masters. It seems that just because the Masters made a rule that a pro had to win a four-day PGA tournament it brought bad luck to us.”
The next year when Lee Elder was finally invited to play in the 1975 Masters, Hathaway was credentialed to cover it. The moment Elder struck his first drive, Hathaway fainted. When she awakened later in a medical facility at Augusta National, next to her was Player.
“I’m a militant,” she once told the L.A. Times. “The only thing I’ve ever regretted is that I picketed Bing Crosby’s tournament. I found out later that he was trying to help Blacks get into the tournament, but he couldn’t do anything with the PGA.”
The second time Hathaway covered the Masters was 1997, when Tiger Woods competed in his first major championship as a professional and won it by a record 12 strokes. Her “Tee Time” column in the Sentinel before the tournament – under the headline “Have We Built Enough Bridges for Tiger?” – worried about the expectations heaped on the already promising young superstar.
“I just hope the press doesn’t put too much pressure on him by constantly having a camera in his face or by asking too many personal questions – as they have done so far,” she wrote, portending Tiger’s career in the glare of the spotlight.
Henderson said being present for Tiger’s ground-breaking triumph at Augusta meant the world to Hathaway – it was a “sunny day after gray, gray, gray.”
“Not only was he African-American – Lee Elder was an African-American and quite an achiever – but Tiger was a superstar,” Henderson said. “Maggie left this world knowing that they will never beat his record. So it was beyond sunshine after a string of cloudy, cold days.”
She became director of South Central’s Jack Thompson nine-hole course in the 1970s, using donated and cut-down clubs to teach kids the game she’d grown to love. In 1997, the course was renamed the Maggie Hathaway Golf Course to honor her tireless work.
Maggie Hathaway GC is just a few blocks up Western Avenue from Chester Washington Golf Course, named after the publisher of the Sentinel. It was at Chester Washington where Hathaway worked so tirelessly to desegregate to become a home for Black golf pioneers Spiller, Ted Rhodes and Charlie Sifford.
In 1955, Hathaway applied for membership in the Women’s Golf Club at Chester Washington and was denied by the all-white group. So she took her grievance to L.A. County supervisor Kenneth Hahn, saying a public facility everyone pays taxes for should not exclude minorities. Hahn agreed and banned segregated associations at all county facilities, forcing all-white groups to diversify and admit people of color.
“Through golf, they were able to change an entire county’s policies on segregation,” former general manager Brian Carrico told Golf.com.
Her efforts have long been honored in minority circles. She was inducted into the National Black Golf Hall of Fame in 1994. At the National Links Trust Langston Golf Course in northeast Washington, D.C., each hole is named after a pioneer of African-American golf, from John Shippen (No. 1) to Tiger Woods (No. 18). The short par-4 fifth hole is named “Maggie Hathaway.”
Until her death in 2001, Hathaway would go every Sunday afternoon to the clubhouse at Chester Washington to watch the golf. She was furious when she went in once during Tiger’s heyday and saw football on the television. “She thought it was important that golf be on. It was a golf course, it wasn’t a football field, and when the kids came through the café, they should see golf,” Henderson said. “And she carried on so that the late Jim Brown bought her a flat screen … to be mounted on the wall in the bar with the proviso that that TV must always be on golf if there is a golf tournament going on anywhere.”
One afternoon when Golf Channel was on at Chester Washington, it featured Maggie Hathaway being honored for her work making golf accessible to everyone. Henderson cherishes retelling the story of a young man who walked into a club meeting and addressed everyone in the room.
“I just want to know if you guys know that crazy old lady that's in a bar every Sunday that’s always talking?” he said. “She's really somebody! I saw her on the Golf Channel.”
If the USGA’s Legacy Campaign goes as planned, generations of kids coming into the game in South Central can thank that “crazy old lady” Maggie Hathaway whose work never stopped.
E-MAIL SCOTT
Top: USGA CEO Mike Whan (carrying bag), California State Sen. Steven Bradford (right) and APGA golfer Aaron Grimes (left) walk with a 15-year-old Alyssa Davis at Maggie Hathaway Golf Course in Los Angeles.
Thomas reitan, usga