We find ourselves at the midpoint of the 85th annual Masters Golf Championship. Once again the year’s first major championship is being contested at the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia. The 36-hole cut has been finalized and by Sunday evening we’ll know who will don the Masters green jacket as the 2021 champion. Golf fans who follow the game closely constantly hear the commercial prelude to the Masters as voiced by Jim Nantz of CBS Sports. His line is always, “The Masters … A tradition like no other.”
One of the more unique Masters’ traditions is the honorary starter role that has been part of the tournament since 1963. That year Augusta National founder and amateur golfing great Bobby Jones asked Jock Hutchinson and Fred McLeod to do the honor of hitting ceremonial first tee shots to announce the commencement of that year’s Masters. It was a neat way to start the tourney and it has remained a Masters tradition to this day.
The first two honorary starters, Hutchinson and McLeod, were golfing greats from a bygone era. McLeod won the 1908 United States Open while Hutchinson took home the 1920 PGA Championship and the 1921 British Open. Their careers were a thing of the past when the first Masters was contested in 1934. However, Hutchinson and McLeod both had an Augusta National connection. In 1937 and 1938, Augusta National hosted the inaugural and the second annual Senior PGA Championship. Hutchinson was the 1937 champion and McLeod was the titlist in 1938. They were honorary starters from 1963-73 and 1963-76, respectively.
There were no honorary starters for four years and then Gene Sarazen and Byron Nelson took on the role for close to two decades. Sarazen had won the 1935 Masters and was the first golfer to achieve the career grand slam. Nelson won the Masters in 1937 and 1942. Three years later Augusta National made it a threesome as three-time Masters’ winner Sam Snead joined the honorary pairing. Snead won the Masters in 1949, 1952 and 1954.
From 2003 until 2006 there were no honorary starters. In 2007, four-time Masters champ Arnold Palmer took on that assignment. Three years later Arnie was joined by six-time green jacket owner Jack Nicklaus, and in 2012 the other member of the Big Three, Gary Player, joined the festivities. Player has three Masters titles to his credit.
Arnold Palmer passed away in 2016 and since that time Jack and Gary have served as the honorary starters in a twosome. This year they were joined by 86-year-old Lee Elder. Elder never won the Masters but his place in Augusta National Golf Club history is well established. Elder was the first black man to play in the Masters. While other golfers of color won PGA Tour events before Elder, the club’s longtime racist history prevented black PGA Tour winners such as Charlie Sifford and Pete Brown from teeing it up at Augusta National. Elder won the Pensacola Monsanto Open in 1974 and teed it up in his first Masters in 1975.
Lee Elder was born on July 14, 1934 in Dallas. He was one of 10 children. His father died in Europe during World War II when he was just 9 years old. Three years later his mother passed away. He moved to Los Angeles at age 12 and lived with his aunt. He started earning money immediately at the local golf course, first as a caddie, then as a locker room attendant, and finally as an assistant golf professional.
As a teenager, Elder played a round of golf with avid linkster and boxing great Joe Louis. Louis was impressed with Lee’s potential and connected him with black golfing great Ted Rhodes. Elder was under Rhodes’ tutelage for three years. There was a two-year period after that when Elder was drafted into the United States Army. However, while stationed in Washington state, Lee connected with an officer who reassigned him to the special services unit on his base. He spent the remainder of his two-year Army hitch playing golf with Army brass.
Upon his discharge in 1961, Lee Elder turned professional and ventured out onto the United Golf Association Tour, a high-level professional circuit for black golfers. The PGA of America still had a Caucasian-only clause in those days and the top golfers of color played in organized events on public golf courses, mainly in the South. A large number of those tourneys were sponsored by Joe Louis and big band leader Billy Eckstein. Lee was a dominant figure on the UGA Tour and at one stage from 1962 through 1963 he won 18 out of 22 UGA events.
Legal and political pressure ultimately forced the PGA Tour to rescind the Caucasian-only clause and open its doors to golfers of color. In the fall of 1967, Lee Elder had saved up enough in tournament winnings to be able to enter PGA Tour Q School. He finished in ninth place and got his tour card for 1968. In the days when only the top 60 golfers on tour were exempt, Lee had a great rookie campaign and finished 40th on the money list. His total winnings for the year were $38,000 and the high-water mark of his first season was a runner-up finish at Firestone in Akron where he lost to Nicklaus in a four-hole playoff.
Lee Elder had a solid professional golf career from that point on. Along with his 1974 win at Pensacola, he also had wins at the Houston Open, the Greater Milwaukee Open and the Westchester Golf Classic. He won eight events on the Senior Tour once he turned 50 years of age. He also won a pair of Coca Cola Grandslams in Japan, the Jamaican Open, and the Nigerian Open on the Safari Tour. In 1971 following a personal invite from Gary Player, Elder broke the color barrier in apartheid South Africa by playing in the South African PGA Championship.
An entire generation of black golfers from Charlie Sifford to Pete Brown to Ted Rhodes to Howard Wheeler to Bill Spiller had the talent to play golf at its highest levels, yet the door was locked tight when it came to joining the American PGA Tour. While Lee Elder wasn’t the first African American golfer to win on the PGA Tour once it ended its exclusive policies, he was the first linkster of color to play in the Masters. He didn’t make the cut way back in 1975 and he would never win a green jacket in subsequent Masters. Nonetheless, it is very fitting that Lee Elder was able to join Gary Player and Jack Nicklaus this past Thursday morning on the first tee at Augusta National as an honorary starter. A man of class and charm, Lee Elder is very deserving of his new-found place alongside the former greats of the game at the Masters.
