King of the Green: Joe Louis, Lee Elder and the 1951 UGA National Amateur Championship
- David Stone
- 4 hours ago
- 17 min read
Up until the late 1920s, most African-Americans gravitated away from the game of golf. The amount of land required to establish a golf course, as well as maintenance expenses, limited access and opportunity to play, and most could not afford the time required to play or the price of equipment. Most, like North Carolina native Dewey Brown, began their journey in golf through the caddie yard. Brown, who moved to New Jersey as a child, caddied at the Madison Golf Club, where he learned the game under the guidance of the club's Scottish professionals. He quickly developed an aptitude for the game, particularly in the art of club-making, and became so well-known that he made clubs for some of the country’s premier golfers, like Chick Evans, who won the 1916 U.S. Amateur using a set of clubs crafted by Brown.
Brown eventually became an instructor and was hired as an assistant pro at what is now Shawnee Inn and Golf Resort in Pennsylvania. He was granted membership in the Professional Golfers’ Association of America in 1928, which he kept in good standing for six years until his membership was unexpectedly and unceremoniously revoked by the organization in 1934. This was the year that the PGA of America wrote the “Caucasian Clause” into their constitution. Before that time, the PGA had no formal policy excluding African-Americans. Most private country clubs employing PGA professionals already excluded minorities. But while history is not clear on a specific individual or incident that gave impetus to their action, once it was approved by the board, Article III, Section I stated that the criteria for membership in the organization would include “professional golfers of the Caucasian race and their assistants, over the age of eighteen years, residing in North America or South America who have served at least three years in the profession (either in the employ of a golf club or as an assistant to a qualified professional).” Dewey Brown met all the criteria but one.
Since its founding in 1894, the USGA, had no specific exclusionary language in its by-laws, as was evidenced by John Shippen’s six U.S. Open appearances between 1896 and 1913. Heretofore, its policy on Black golfers had been influenced by private country clubs, which mostly barred minorities. Nevertheless, Black interest in golf increased in the 1920s, and the construction of more municipal courses during the Great Depression increased African-American participation in the sport, even after the stock market crash in 1929. This growth spurred the formation of Black golf clubs in major Northeast and Midwest cities. Clubs like Alpha and Windy City in Chicago, St. Nicholas in New York, and Citizens and Capital City in Washington fostered social interaction among the Black middle class and advocated for access to segregated courses and the construction of new ones.
As the sport gained popularity in the African-American community, access to prestigious tournaments remained limited, prompting many to advocate for self-reliance in pursuing equality in golf. In 1925, B.C. Gordon and John R. Anderson hosted the first “International Negro Open Golf Championship” at Shady Rest Country Club. The event's success led to a meeting at Washington, DC's YMCA aimed at uniting Black golfers and associations into a national body. This was the genesis of the United Golfers Association.
Initially known as the United States Colored Golf Association (the name was officially changed in 1929), the organization brought together twenty-six African-American golf clubs from across the nation and elected B.C. Gordon as its first president. Key members also included Chicago’s Walter Speedy, and Robert H. Hawkins, a former caddie and golf course manager from New England. Hawkins had recently purchased Mapledale Golf and Country Club, a private club for Blacks near Boston. With Speedy and Gordon's help, Hawkins organized the first National Colored Golf Championship, which was held at Mapledale on Labor Day weekend, September 5-6, 1926, and was won by Chicago's Harry Jackson. The tournament later became known as the UGA National Open or its shortened version, the “Negro National.”
The UGA National Open had men's professional and women's tournaments, both contested by medal play, a men's amateur tournament following the same format of the U.S. Amateur Championship. It was held annually in cities like Chicago, Boston, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and other cities progressive enough to have integrated golf courses and big enough to house 300 to 400 entrants and their fans. Before the PGA's integration in 1961, the tournament stood as the premier competition for Black golfers and was referred to as "Our Masters" by Hall-of-Famer Charlie Sifford. Its champions included many of the pioneers of African American golf, including Pat Ball, Alfred "Tup" Holmes, John Brooks Dendy, Howard Wheeler, and Ted Rhodes.
In the post-World War II era, record numbers of African-Americans were playing golf, thanks in part to the enthusiasm heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis had for the game. Joe Louis Barrow was born on May 13, 1914, on a farm outside of Lafayette, Alabama, in a rickety, unpainted shack on the land that his family farmed. At the age of 12, his mother and step-father moved the family to Michigan during the Great Migration and as Walter Speedy, B.C. Gordon, and Robert Hawkins worked intently during the summer of 1926 to establish an organized presence in the game of golf, young Joe and his family were settling into their new home in the Black Bottom neighborhood of Detroit.
When the stock market crashed on Black Friday and his step-father lost his job, Joe dropped out of school to find work to help support the family. He took odd jobs–delivering groceries, delivering ice, sweeping floors, and shoveling coal–and in his idle time began hanging out with one of the neighborhood gangs. To keep Joe off the streets, his mother arranged for violin lessons, but fate had other plans. At sixteen, Joe sparred with a friend, Thurston McKinney, and discovered a talent for boxing. McKinney encouraged him to pursue the sport instead of music, introducing Joe to boxing magazines and the potential for success in the ring. This transformative experience gave Joe a newfound sense of purpose and direction in life. According to his son, Joe Louis Barrow Jr., he boxed under the name Joe Louis because his full name wouldn't fit on the signature line of his fight application. As an amateur, he compiled a record of 50-4 with 43 knockouts and won the Golden Gloves in 1933 and 1934. He turned professional on July 4, 1934, around the same time the PGA inserted the Caucasian Clause into its by-laws.
It was while training for his first fight with Max Schmeling in 1936 that Louis became enamored with golf. He had his first taste of the game in July of 1935 when he played a round at Jackson Park Golf Course in Chicago with his manager and several friends. Months later, Louis developed a friendship with Ed Sullivan, then a young sportswriter for the New York Daily News, who gave Louis his first tutorials on golf, bought him a couple of books on the subject, and loaned him some clubs. Soon, Louis couldn’t resist the temptation to break training and sneak onto the course against his trainer’s advice. There were times when he had to be almost dragged off the course. Louis could be found playing afternoon rounds at Lakewood Country Club with sportswriters, and he even rode over to Baltusrol to watch a round at the U.S. Open.
Louis's trainer, Jack Blackburn, expressed concern about Louis's golf habits, fearing it would affect his boxing performance, but Joe didn’t listen. He continued to play whenever he could. He did put the game on the back-burner long enough to knock out "Cinderalla Man" James J. Braddock for the World's Heavyweight Boxing Championship on June 22, 1937, and successfully defend his title seven times over the next two years, including a first-round knockout of Max Schmeling in their now-famous rematch on June 22, 1938. Throughout his time in the ring, Louis loved golf so much that he was content to hack away at it, shooting scores in the high nineties or triple digits, but following his victory over Tony Galento in June 1939, something changed. After the Galento fight, Louis decided he wanted to take golf more seriously. He wanted to become a championship-caliber golfer.
After a summer spent working with Bermudian pro Louis Rafael Corbin, Louis entered his first tournament, the Eastern Open at Langston Golf Club in Washington, DC. As his knowledge of golf deepened, so did his commitment to the sport. Having walked the fairways of Baltusrol and Winged Foot watching the country’s best white amateurs and professionals in the USGA’s national championships, he recognized the potential of Black golfers to compete at high levels if given the opportunity. Aware of the challenges they faced in terms of time and finances, he financially backed many of the players on the Chitlin' Circuit, often providing entry fees, expense money, and equipment. Working closely with his friend Bob Seymour, Louis sponsored the first Joe Louis Open at Detroit's Rackham Golf Course on August 12, 1941, which became the richest events on the UGA schedule and was among the first to include white professionals, providing African-American golfers a chance to compete for high stakes against all comers.
In the early 1950s, it appeared that a youth movement of sorts was beginning to take shape in the United Golfers' Association due to growing concerns about the future of African-American golf. Not that there weren’t Blacks playing standout golf, because there were. The problem was that the same four names–those of Ted Rhodes, Howard Wheeler, Bill Spiller, and Charlie Sifford–were always among the favorites in every professional tournament, and very little new blood was being injected into the sport. Since little had been done to develop junior golfers in high schools or at municipal courses–and they certainly couldn’t count on private country clubs for help–UGA National Secretary Marshall Johnson called on all forty of the organization’s member clubs to sponsor young golfers to play in youth tournaments, the winners of which would compete for the junior title at the UGA National in Washington later that year. Unfortunately, most young Black men and boys seemed to have little interest in tournament golf except as spectators, content to play foursomes or hustle skins games on weekends. Those with talent needed to learn to compete under pressure. They needed exposure to stiffer competition and more challenging course conditions. Rhodes, Wheeler, and the others were good, but they weren’t going to be around forever. Someone was going to have to step up and carry the torch.
Joe Louis was no stranger to youth advocacy. He had been doing it his entire career, from supporting YMCAs and playing Santa Claus for needy children to establishing Joe Louis Youth Clubs and the Chicago School of Automotive Trades. He didn’t do it for profit. He did it for kids like him who faced challenges in the job market when they got out of high school or college. Not surprisingly, Louis was already running point in the campaign to get more youngsters interested in tournament golf. Two years earlier, he bankrolled Willie Brown on the UGA circuit, providing the fifteen year-old with new clubs, lessons from Ted Rhodes, and the means to travel from town-to-town for tournaments. In 1950, Louis hosted a junior tournament in conjunction with the Joe Louis Open, and the winner, a Detroit caddie named James Booker Littlejohn, went on to represent the Midwestern District at the 1950 UGA National in Washington.
Much of the UGA’s best new talent hailed from the South, including Curtis Reese, a 20 year-old Atlanta high-schooler who defeated Joe Louis to win the Southern Open that summer. There were also a handful of Texas teenagers rising to the top of the amateur golfing ladder, including Willie Brown, who burst onto the UGA scene in the summer of 1949, just after his sixteenth birthday. Under the watchful eyes of Ted Rhodes and Joe Louis, Brown finished second in three events that season—the Windy City, the Joe Louis Open, and the UGA National Amateur—but when Louis's financial situation tightened in 1950, Brown's tournament participation was limited mostly to local events. In his only major meet that summer, he finished a disappointing third in the Texas Negro Amateur Championship, but he returned to the same event the following year and became the 1951 Texas Negro Amateur champion after a hard-fought, extra-hole match with another Lone Star teen—a sixteen year-old caddie from Dallas named Robert Lee Elder.
Lee Elder was born in Dallas on July 14, 1934, the ninth of Charlie and Almeta Elder’s ten children. Elder's father was killed in 1942, and when his mother passed away in January 1946, he moved to Los Angeles to live with his Aunt Helen Harris. took him in, taught him right from wrong, and did her best to give him the tools he needed for life on his own, but money was tight, and since Elder’s running buddies were all caddies, he started skipping school to loop a few rounds during the week to earn a few extra bucks for grocery money. Elder’s first exposure to golf had been back in Dallas, tagging along with his older brother as he caddied at one of the local courses there. Golf didn't seem like a big deal at the time, but in Los Angeles, it soon became his chief source of income. As his aunt struggled financially, Elder quit school in the tenth grade and went to work, first at Lloyd Mangrum’s golf shop in Los Angeles and later in the locker room at Apple Valley Country Club in San Bernardino.
Elder immersed himself in the game, learning by observation as he ascended the pecking order to caddie at Apple Valley and played every chance he got, usually on Mondays when there was less traffic on the public courses. He also played a lot of night golf, which meant sneaking onto courses after dark until he was run off by the park police. As his game improved, Elder ventured out to Western Avenue, where he honed his game and made side money with some small-time gambling, and when he heard through friends that there was a lot of action back home in Texas, he knew there was one place he could make plenty of cash.
Elder returned to Dallas in 1950 to live with his older sister, Sadie, and took a job with his friend Moses Brooks caddying at nearby Tenison Park Golf Course. Brooks was older and more streetwise, and he soon introduced the soft-spoken Elder to the local gambling culture there. As William Barry Furlong described it, Tenison “was to hustlers what the Vatican was to priests,” and its clubhouse served as a basilica to the notables of Texas gambling legend. Men like Johnny Moss, Big Ace Darnell, Dandy Dick Martin, and the legendary Titanic Thompson held court at the East Dallas munie, and the hustling tag-team of Brooks and Elder were more than happy to help them scalp any sucker who let his mouth outplay his golf game.
While Blacks were legally forbidden from playing at all-white courses in Texas, the segregation at Tenison was selective. Head pro Erwin Hardwicke operated under the unwritten maxim that “our own blacks could play if they didn't get in any whites' way, but no outside Negroes were allowed.” The outsiders were relegated to Elm Thicket or Hilliard Park, which consisted of nine holes strung together in a cow pasture near the runway at Dallas’s Love Field airport. It was at Hilliard in July of 1951 that Elder took Willie Brown to the wire in the finals of the Texas Negro Amateur championship. This sparked a desire to compete on a larger stage, and when offered the opportunity to play in the UGA National Amateur in August, he jumped at the chance. Armed with a set of mismatched clubs, a pocketful of gambling winnings, and a confidence that can only be bestowed by youth, Elder hopped in a car with Brooks and an older friend, Presley Flewellen, and headed to Cleveland, Ohio, for his first taste of national competition.
The twenty-fifth edition of the UGA National Championship was held the week of August 27-31, 1951, at the Seneca Municipal Golf Course in Cleveland, Ohio. Known originally as the Brecksville Golf Course, Seneca was built with WPA funds by the city of Cleveland to bring quality, low-cost golf to its southern suburbs. It occupied a tree-lined 350-acre plot in present-day Broadview Heights and was one of only two public courses in the area that granted full access to Black golfers. Seneca opened first as a nine-hole course on August 1, 1940, another nine holes followed a year later, and a second championship course was added in the summer of 1942. The two parkland-style courses were home to two other UGA events: the Forest City Golf Association’s Ohio Amateur championship and Sixth City Open.
Cleveland’s central location and Seneca’s ability to accommodate the tournament’s 400 entrants made it an ideal place to hold this year’s Negro National. Between three and four thousand spectators packed into the Majestic, the Carnegie, and other hotels on Cleveland’s east side in anticipation of the UGA’s silver anniversary. The National would be Ted Rhodes’s final chance to win a major tournament this season, but despite having fully recovered from surgery earlier in the year, he was not this year’s favorite. That role belonged to Howard Wheeler, whose win at the Joe Louis Open propelled him to the top spot in the professional ranks.
Despite a potential showdown between Wheeler and Rhodes, the most intense competition was expected in the amateur division, where at least a dozen golfers, including Joe Louis, had a chance to take home the trophy. The retired undefeated heavyweight champ, now age 37, was in the midst of an ill-advised comeback, but critics questioned his recent performances, labeling him as "washed up" after two recent lackluster wins. With no immediate boxing commitments, Louis decided to turn his full attention to the golf course. He had a strong track record at Seneca, having won the Sixth City Although he had spent the past month in the boxing ring, Louis had two wins and a runner-up finish in three tournaments that summer, making him the betting man's favorite to win this year’s UGA National Amateur.
Seneca’s teeth were out for the National that week. The hot August sun made its fairways brick hard and its greens lightning fast, placing a premium on shot-making and touch around the greens, but there was something about the course that brought out the best in Louis’s game. He shot a 76 during Monday qualifying, easily earning a spot in the match-play portion of the tournament, and dominated defending UGA champion Martin “Tex” Guillory 7 & 6 in their first round match. He followed that up with a 3 & 2 victory over Eural Clark and advanced to the semi-finals the following day, knocking off 1950 Ohio Amateur champion Bob Williams by the same margin.
For his semi-final match, Louis drew eighteen year-old newcomer, Moses Brooks, whose philosophy as a hustler at Tenison had been to identify the best golfer in town, steer clear of him for a while, and work his way up, beating average players until he was ready to take on the big dogs. Only this week, hustlers' rules didn't apply. In his second round match, Brooks had to scrap for a 1-up victory over 1949 UGA Amateur champ Butler Cooper, and after winning his quarterfinal match, he now faced the biggest dog of them all.
As Brooks later recounted to Pete McDaniel in his book Uneven Lies, “I was so nervous that I just gave him the first four holes.” Then, he said, Louis did something completely unexpected, “He looked me in the eye and said, ‘I’m just a man like any other man. Don’t be making me out to be no god.’” This settled the young Texan down, and he played better the rest of the match. Gradually, he chipped away at the lead but couldn’t overcome the early deficit he created for himself, and Louis finally closed things out on the 17th hole for a 2 & 1 win.
In the other semi-final match, Lee Elder was paired with Clarence Watson, a popular Cleveland entrepreneur and sometimes golf columnist for the Cleveland Call and Post. To reach that point, Elder had reeled off wins over Jay Precia, LeRoy Harris, and qualifying medalist Rober Turner, and he entered the match brimming with confidence. “Lee didn’t think any man could beat him,” Brooks told McDaniel, “and when he was playing his best, no man could.” In an evenly contested match, Elder and Watson ended their first eighteen holes all-square, but because tournament officials ordered a nine-hole playoff rather than the usual sudden death, it was after 9 o’clock that evening when Elder arrived at the final green in near-total darkness, needing a 5-foot putt to tie the match and send it to extra holes.
In a scene that could have been plucked from a Hollywood movie script, three hundred spectators watched as Elder, aided by the illumination of numerous flashlights and the headlights of cars surrounding the green, lined up his putt and smoothly stroked it toward the hole. As soon as the ball hit the bottom of the cup, the crowd erupted, honking their car horns and rushing the green to carry the teenager off on their shoulders. After a good night’s sleep, Elder returned early the next morning and won the match on the third hole of sudden death, but more than that, his courageous play that week won the hearts of everyone in attendance.
In Friday’s championship match against Elder, Louis remained unfazed by the gallery, which clearly favored his seventeen year-old opponent. In the first round of their 36-hole tilt, Louis fired an even-par 72 and took a 4-up lead into the final eighteen that afternoon., but Elder wasn’t about to lie down quietly. He battled back, winning a hole here-and-there, eventually closing the gap to two, but he never got closer, ultimately succumbing on the penultimate hole by a 2 & 1 margin.
On August 31, 1951, Joe Louis was crowned the 1951 UGA National Amateur champion. It hadn’t been easy, but Louis had finally done what he set out to do over a decade before. Pundits could say he was past his prime or washed up in the boxing ring, but they couldn’t discount what he had achieved on the golf course. The Brown Bomber was, once again, The Champ. It had also been a good week for Louis’s swing coach, Ted Rhodes, as he broke out of his slump to capture his third consecutive UGA National title. Rhodes won the professional division with a four-day total of 280 (8-under par), while Howard Wheeler finished second at 286. Philadelphia’s John Skelton finished third at 287 and fourth place was shared by Bill Spiller and Charlie Sifford at even-par, 288. In the women's division, Eoline Thornton won her first UGA National title, defeating newcomer Myrtice McIver 1-up in their 18-hole match.
Although his comeback ended with a crushing loss to Rocky Marciano in October 1951, Louis continued to advocate for equality in professional golf. On January 17, 1952, he became the first African-American to compete in a fully-sanctioned PGA tournament when he teed off with Horton Smith and Duke Gibson in the first round of the San Diego Open. Louis shattered stereotypes by pursuing competitive golf at the height of his boxing career, funding his own amateur efforts while supporting golfers like Clyde Martin, Ted Rhodes, Eural Clark, and Charlie Sifford. He had expanded their opportunities to compete by establishing the Joe Louis Open to showcase Black golfing talent and spark interest in the sport within the African-American community. However, interrupted by World War II and hampered by Louis's post-war financial struggles, the tournament failed to break racial barriers as quickly as he had envisioned.
He later adopted a more proactive stance, using his fame to draw national attention to discrimination in professional golf. His efforts as a Black golf ambassador aligned with the growing civil rights movement and opened up limited opportunities for Black players in PGA events, ultimately contributing to the removal of the Caucasian Clause. He was inducted into the National Black Golf Hall of Fame in 1986, and posthumously received honorary membership in the PGA of America in 2009, the same year the organization granted posthumous membership to Ted Rhodes, Bill Spiller, and John Shippen.
While most people remember that Louis held the world's heavyweight boxing title for nearly 12 years, defended that title 25 times, and amassed a professional record of 66-3 (52 by knockout), few know of his efforts to improve the lot of African-American golfers or how he had taken on the PGA of America in what he called the "biggest fight of his life." When Tiger Woods won his first Masters Tournament in 1997, he honored Lee Elder, Charlie Sifford, and Ted Rhodes for their role in paving the way for his success. During Sifford’s 2004 induction speech at the World Golf Hall of Fame, he acknowledged the careers of Elder and Rhodes along with those of Spiller and Calvin Peete. Although they spoke of his efforts on other occasions, neither mentioned the man who got the ball rolling: The Brown Bomber, Joe Louis.
“If you ask Black golfers," noted Joe Louis Barrow Jr., "they recognize that Joe Louis started the movement and made sure that the movement was going to continue.” While he took immense pride in his ability to win, both on the course and in the ring, he considered his support for Black golfers to be his greatest achievement in golf.
For more on the golfing life of Heavyweight Champ Joe Louis, check out my new book, The Biggest Fight of His Life: Joe Louis and the Battle to Integrate Golf. It is the first golfing biography of Joe Louis and is now available for pre-order at this link and is due for release on January 21, 2027, the 75th anniversary of Louis's historic appearance in San Diego.
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