This issue is certainly not limited to Augusta National, or even to race. I am personally uncomfortable playing golf anywhere that doesn’t admit minorities or women as members.
People have to deal with this stuff even though it’s difficult, and not just try to sweep it under the rug. And it doesn’t get resolved in a hurry. Prejudice and racism scar people for life. But we as a society never really discuss that stuff at length because it isn’t comfortable. The black goaltender who plays for the Carolina Hurricanes, the backup goaltender, is a guy named Kevin Weekes. He played great for Carolina early in the playoffs coming off the bench, and he helped the Hurricanes get to the Stanley Cup finals. That sorry-ass franchise never had been close to the finals before. And even though this guy was mostly the backup (to Arturs Irbe), the team couldn’t have gotten to the finals without Weekes coming in to play the way he did several different times during the playoffs. Anyway, somebody threw a banana at him and hit him in the head during the playoffs. Yes, it was reported, but it was touched on just for a minute on SportsCenter. I’m sure—or at least I hope—it got some major attention down around Raleigh because it was local or regional news in North Carolina. But nationally, there was hardly anything on it. Wasn’t that worth a longer discussion, that a black goalie gets hit in the head by a banana in 2002? You know the symbolism is, “Here’s this black guy in a predominately white sport and he’s being called a monkey.” Don’t get me wrong now, I’m glad ESPN reported it, but don’t tell me that in 2002 a black man playing goalie for a professional hockey team and gets hit by some bigot throwing a banana isn’t worth more than just a mention. You don’t just give five seconds to a story like that and go straight to a damn baseball score. That shit deserves some examination and some comment, doesn’t it?
I’m thinking, “Man, there’s some shit still going on out here in the world,” but people aren’t saying anything about it. Do they not think about it, or just not say anything about it? Bad stuff just happens and it goes unreported or there’s barely a mention of it before we go back to business as usual. The Weekes story reminded me of the Bobby Jones story going into the Masters. ESPN did a SportsCentury profile on Bobby Jones, and I know magazine articles and entire books have been written on the life of Bobby Jones because he’s a historic figure in golf. You can’t write the history of golf without telling the story of Bobby Jones. The SportsCentury piece was talking about him being the greatest golfer ever . . . then just like that you hear, “Oh, and he wouldn’t have anything to do with black people.” Okay, I’m exaggerating a little bit, but after a couple of more comments by people saying the same thing, that was pretty much the extent of the treatment of Bobby Jones as a racist? Most times when you see or read stories on Bobby Jones there isn’t even that much on what a bigot he was. Usually, it’s like somebody shrugs and says, “Well, it’s not that big a deal because he was a product of his time.” What kind of shit is that when things just get explained away by the phrase “product of his time”? Is that supposed to convince us that it was cool, because a lot of other white people did it, too?
A lot of stuff that happened in the South and stuff that still happens today makes me angry as hell. But those times in the South were more complex than that. Some people didn’t just go along. Weren’t there a bunch of courageous white people who got their asses bit by police dogs and sprayed with water hoses and beat with police batons trying to fight racism? They were right there in the front of marches alongside black people all across the South. They were right there at those lunch counters protesting segregation in public places. They were on the front lines hand in hand with black people. They were white and southern, so what the hell were they a product of?
Tell you something else: no black athlete or performer could be portrayed in mainstream media as a hero if he openly hated white people. He was a product of his time? No damn way. That excuse would never fly for a black athlete or entertainer. And after I said something about it, after I commented about it on TBS or TNT, people came up to me and said, “How could you call Bobby Jones a racist? You shouldn’t say that.” Hey, ESPN just told me about Bobby Jones in the SportsCentury profile, and from all indications he was a bigot. I didn’t know Bobby Jones personally. He’d be 129 years old by now. I can only go by ESPN’s reporting. And it’s not like anybody has come forward to dispute their reporting. What am I supposed to say after I see a profile of Bobby Jones’s life that made it very clear he didn’t like black people? Am I supposed to say, “God Bless Bobby Jones”?
I was telling some friends that if Tiger keeps winning the Masters, Bobby Jones is gonna walk through the front door of the Augusta National clubhouse one day and say, “If y’all can’t beat this colored boy I’m gonna come back from the dead and kick his ass myself. I know y’all can do a better job than this against him.”
I know Bobby Jones wasn’t alone in the way he thought, but damn, let’s not act like a great golfer is the only thing he was. The lives of athletes and public figures get examined all the time today. This ain’t the 1930s. Things have to be looked at and discussed and not just swept under the damn rug.
I know people of all colors and ethnic backgrounds, particularly kids and people in their twenties, who don’t get bogged down with ugly shit like race; they embrace Tiger. Kids just don’t care; they haven’t been programmed by adults yet and brainwashed with a whole lot of garbage. Their interests are pure. They see somebody doing something great, they like it and appreciate it and aren’t polluted with some sick-ass agenda.
But I think also that a lot of other folks who’ve been carrying around their own baggage see Tiger win at Augusta and want to think everything is okay. They’ll try to act like everything at Augusta National is just fine. Look, if they want to take the easy way out and not confront a whole lot of truths, fine, go ahead. But it’s still a bunch of BS.
I didn’t know until recently that Lee Trevino went to that clubhouse only once. Somebody wanted to throw him out the very first time he went there to play and he never wanted to go there again. They made him feel so uncomfortable being there he went out back and changed his shoes. He changed his shoes in the trunk of his car like he was some weekend hacker at a public course. Lee Trevino, one of the greatest golfers of all time. Can you imagine that? And you know there are people running around saying, “How can Lee Trevino be bitter toward Augusta and the Masters?” The people who ask that question, with disgust in their voices, were probably never turned away from someplace or asked to leave or enter a back door because of their color. I was down in Alabama playing golf one day in May, not long after the Sports Illustrated article ran, and I ran into some guys who said, “Hale Irwin said your views about Tiger and Augusta National were silly.” I said, “Listen, I like Hale Irwin. But Hale Irwin doesn’t live in Alabama where y’all are rednecks. Hale Irwin flew in here in a private jet for a few days, maybe a week. He played at the finest country club and he stayed in the most luxurious hotel he could find, which didn’t exactly give him a taste of what it’s like to be poor and black in Alabama, or poor and white in Alabama for that matter. Of course he’s going to feel what I said was silly. But did you ask him if he disagreed with me that blacks and poor whites and Hispanics in this country are treated like shit?” Of course, the guy didn’t ask him. He couldn’t even connect with the sentiment I was expressing. The larger question would never cross the guy’s mind. I’m not saying he was a bad guy. But it simply wouldn’t cross his mind.
It’s interesting that golf courses are places where guys really talk now. You’ve got all kinds of people playing together and eating lunch in the clubhouse together, and some of those guys would never meet people different from themselves if it wasn’t for the golf course. You’ve got to think some of the people coming into golf now are there because of Tiger, right? I’m not talking about just black people, but white people and Asian people and Hispanic people who didn’t think golf was open to them. A lot of people just started to look at it differently becau
se of him. It’s like the game is okay for everybody to participate in.
And a lot of us are always going to remember what we were doing or where we were when he won the Masters for the first time, in 1997, when he just kicked everybody’s butt, set the record (270) and the next guy—was it Tom Kite?—was something like 12 strokes back (282). Man, that’s a day that changed golf forever. It changed the direction of sports in this country. The day Tiger won, I was playing for the Houston Rockets and we had a Sunday afternoon game. I remember I was nervous as hell. Black people aren’t always happy for other black people when they achieve goals, which is something that really bothers me. There’s often jealousy involved, and I just don’t understand why that is or how something like that got started. But sometimes guys come up to me and say—and they’re talking about athletes or entertainers—“Man, you guys have it great.” And yeah, the end result is great. But I tell them, “Man, getting there involves some shit you don’t want to know about and I don’t want to talk about.”
But I’m sure that other successful black people, people who have had to negotiate some serious situations to get where they are and appreciate all the BS that comes with trying to climb the mountain, are happy for other successful black people. There’s a kinship there because people have gone through similar experiences to achieve something even if their professions aren’t the same and don’t have much in common. I know successful black people were happy for Tiger in a way that had to be different from people of other races who were happy for Tiger that day, or in awe of what he did. I know black people who do backbreaking work every day of their lives, work like that for forty, fifty years trying to make a better life. But sadly they never get the chance to be successful on a big stage or even on a small stage doing something they love to do. And sometimes they can’t completely identify with what some successful black people have gone through just to reach that level.
I looked at Lee Elder, having been the first black man to play in the Masters, with tears in his eyes and I was trying to imagine just how deep his happiness was for Tiger. You know Lee Elder knew better than probably anybody else what Tiger had to go through, and he probably had more of an appreciation for what Tiger did than anybody else. That was so significant to me, just unbelievable. All the brothers in the Houston Rockets locker room that Sunday were just entranced sitting there watching the final round of the Masters. I don’t think we knew where we were or what we were doing for those few hours. Tiger had what seemed like a 50-shot lead and stayed perfect on every shot. But we were hanging on every swing and every putt, like he was clinging to a one-shot lead.
You relive it when you’re around other people and the topic comes up, Tiger and the Masters. And people who may not feel the same way have asked me, “Why were you so nervous when Tiger had such a big lead and nobody was threatening to challenge him?” And I remind them that this was 1997, one year after Greg Norman lost his final-round lead at the Masters. Every single shot that day, I’m thinking about Greg’s collapse the previous year. Man, I almost cried for Greg Norman. It was so hard to watch. Some of my friends at CBS told me Ben Crenshaw broke down and cried watching that. Oh man, that broke my heart that day for that to happen to Greg Norman.
If that had happened to Tiger . . . man . . . I can’t even think about it now. It would have been . . . just terrible . . . too terrible to even think about. But it didn’t. We couldn’t take our eyes off the TV, just sat there and watched every shot, and soaked up every moment of it as if it were happening to one of us. What a great day. That set a whole lot of stuff in motion, didn’t it?
If You Don’t Win a
Championship . . .
When Ted Williams passed away in the summer of 2002, it brought about a lot of fascinating reflection and it made me think about how people perceive athletes’ careers.
Obviously, in retirement Ted Williams was simply a very good guy. Even though he retired three years before I was born, I appreciated him because of his support for Negro League players who had been banned from playing with him in the major leagues. I’ve read excerpts of interviews and seen clips of speeches that showed he was about inclusion and integration and recognizing everybody’s talents back when baseball didn’t want any part of black and Latin players. And even beyond that, in recent times, you knew Ted Williams had to be a really good guy because of the way modern-day players embraced him, and the way he embraced them. The way they surrounded him at that All-Star Game in Boston a few years ago told you how much the people in his profession thought of him.
What’s interesting is that in his retirement, when he became the elder statesman of the game, people hardly ever mentioned that he never won a championship with the Red Sox. I had forgotten he hadn’t won one until I started reading and watching the obituaries after he died. I mean, I know the Red Sox haven’t won a World Series since 1918, and Ted’s career went from 1939 to 1960, so obviously he didn’t win a World Series. But I’d forgotten about it because nobody tried to diminish him because he hadn’t won a World Series. I’ve read that people brought it up during his career, when he was perceived by a lot of people as being a bad guy, but since he was clearly a good guy for many, many years, people just let it go. It’s a serious double standard, and it’s silly because it’s not like he was two different players. So if he’s a good guy it doesn’t matter, but if he’s a bad guy it does?
Thing is, if Ted Williams had been traded to the Yankees in his rookie year for Joe DiMaggio, Ted would have all those World Series rings and DiMaggio probably wouldn’t have had any. But would DiMaggio not have been a great ballplayer? Would Ted have been any better? Ted only played in one World Series, 1946, and the Red Sox lost. But nobody has hit .400 since he did it. The guy won two Triple Crowns, which is almost unthinkable these days. But the bigger point to be made is the perception of what kind of player he was as it relates to playing for a championship team.
It’s something that all athletes have to live with, even the guys who win a championship, and it can be frustrating. It obviously hits home with me because I never played on a championship team in my sixteen years in the NBA. Some guy in Los Angeles once wrote that my career wasn’t fulfilled because of that. And that’s absurd.
Dean Smith once relayed to me a conversation he had with Roy Williams after Dean Smith won his first NCAA Championship, the one where North Carolina beat Georgetown in 1982. People had gotten on Dean Smith about coaching at Carolina for twenty years and not winning the NCAA Championship, even though he’d been to the Final Four a bunch of times. Roy, who was his assistant at the time, said to him as the game ended, “Now you can get ’em off your back about not winning a championship.” And Dean Smith said he told Roy, “I’m no better coach now than I was five minutes ago.” And it’s a great story because it’s true, Dean Smith was already a great coach, and because it showed how gracious he was to keep things in perspective even after he won.
But this notion that your career is somehow failed if you don’t win a championship, which I think is completely ridiculous, really started to get out of control the last ten years or so. People have just become so critical, so quick to ridicule. Phil Mickelson is going through that right now and I feel bad for him. I know Phil Mickelson. He’s the second greatest golfer in the world as I’m writing these words. And I know how badly he wants to win. But I think he’s pressing, and unfortunately starting to believe all this stuff about not being able to win a major championship. It’s difficult not to because you can’t escape it, not with all the sports talk radio and twenty-four-hour sports television and people asking him about it every single tournament. David Duval had it until the summer of 2001 when he won the British Open, and Colin Montgomerie has it to a degree, but nobody has it like Phil. Well, Greg Norman had it a while back until he won a couple of majors. But even with that, people look back on Greg Norman’s career now and you hear them say, “Well, he had the talent to win a lot more majors than he did.”
Man, that’s flat-out un
fair. The people making these assessments for the most part don’t have any idea of how difficult it is to win a championship—in golf a major championship—especially if you come along at the same time as the greatest player that sport has ever seen. Of course, I identify with what Phil’s going through because I had something very similar.
There’s really only one thing wrong with Phil Mickelson: he was born at the wrong time. That’s it. He was born too close to Tiger Woods. Same thing happened to me, to Patrick Ewing, John Stockton, Karl Malone, Reggie Miller, a whole bunch of guys. The guys who dominated at the championship level when I played were Earvin Johnson, Larry Bird and Michael Jordan. They won fourteen championships in nineteen seasons. They played in twenty NBA Finals between them. If you want to say that those guys were better than me, I’m going to agree with you. Is there any shame in that?
Once when he was being interviewed Michael gave me a backhanded compliment and said I was on the next level down from him, Larry and Magic. And I called him up and told him I had no problem with that. I told him, “If I’m right after you guys, I’m okay with that.” That means I’m with Malone, Stockton, Ewing, Gary Payton. Would I like to have won a championship, several championships? Of course. I played my ass off for sixteen years, trying to win every time out. But don’t expect me to see my career as something unfulfilled because I’m with those other guys.
Somebody took a poll once and the question was “Who’s the greatest team player in professional sports never to win a championship?” and I was voted No. 1. A similar topic came up when I was on Jim Rome’s show once, and I told him, “Jim, you never ask this question of a mediocre player. So I’m taking this as a compliment. When you interview a marginal player who managed to hang in there and last long enough in the league to make himself a ten-year career you tell him, ‘You had such a wonderful career.’ So by asking me this, you must think I’m a helluva player.”
I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It Page 8