Quietly last month, another piece of golf history was lost with the passing of 81-year-old James Black in his native Charlotte, North Carolina.
While Black’s friend Charlie Sifford became the face of professional golf’s overdue integration, and others, including Bill Spiller and Teddy Rhodes, drew more acclaim, Black was among the African-American players who helped change the game.
Some people, such as Sifford, change the game in big ways. Others do it in smaller, personal ways, and James Black was one of those.
Those people make the game better by their being part of it. Black was one of those people.
Sitting with me about 18 months ago at a golf course named for Sifford, with his health becoming a challenge, Black smiled when he talked about golf, and he talked about golf all the time.
The game kept a twinkle in his eye.
The late Clayton Heafner, a former PGA Tour winner and Ryder Cup player from Charlotte, helped Black’s playing career and gave him a lesson that Black passed down to his students, young and old.
“He explained to me that golf was a hand-and-feet game, the only two touching parts. Know where your hands are from the beginning to the end of the golf swing,” Black said that winter day, gripping an imaginary golf club.
It wasn’t easy for Black, but he liked to talk more about what he did than about what he wasn’t allowed to do. He talked of playing golf with Sam Snead and Arnold Palmer, of notching two top-10 finishes in his PGA Tour career, of shooting 67 in the first round of the old Los Angeles Open.
How hard was it on Black?
After qualifying for that Los Angeles Open in 1967, he arrived at the course to find he owed a $10 entry fee that he didn’t have. Black was going to withdraw until another pro named George Walsh gave him the $10 with one caveat: that Black would one day tell Walsh’s children of his good deed.
Black finished in the top 10 at Rancho Park that week.
For as long as he could, Black would show up at the Dr. Charles L. Sifford Golf Course in Charlotte. He’d hang around, talk golf and offer advice. He gave hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lessons over the years, and he was renowned as a short-game instructor.
Black’s death has been felt by many, but his impact lives on, summed up by something he said last year.
“It’s a lifetime game. I don’t know nothin’ else.”
Ron Green Jr.
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