Still a stroke back: a Charlottean broke the PGA Tour's color barrier but didn't change its hue.

• Author: Campbell, Spencer
• Position: Up Front

The first black man to earn full PGA Tour membership grew up between the world wars in a Charlotte neighborhood flanked by two golf courses. Charles Sifford was destined to break one of golf's racial barriers, but it wouldn't be at either of them. A legal battle had to be fought in the 1950s before blacks could tee off at Bonnie Brae Municipal Golf Course, and though he earned 50 cents a round caddying at Carolina Golf Club--where he learned the game--members complained when they saw him play the course. When he was 17, Sifford moved to Philadelphia. Golf was more integrated there.

He vied for $500 first-place prizes on the United Golf Association tour because the rulebook for the PGA Tour, where a winner could earn up to $50,000, restricted membership to Caucasians. He scraped by as the golf instructor to Billy Eckstine, a popular bandleader who palled around with boxer Joe Louis and other black celebrities of the 1940s and '50s. "Mr. B" paid him about $150 a week. Through pressure applied by the former world heavyweight champ, Sifford and a group of black golfers were allowed to try to qualify for the 1954 Phoenix Open. Human feces filled the cup on the first green.

The PGA Tour let him join in 1961,14 years after Jackie Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers as Major League Baseball's first black player. His first tournament in the South was in North Carolina. During the second round of the Greater Greensboro Open, a dozen white men trailed him, shouting things like, "Hey, boy, carry my bag." He finished fourth. That GGO is heralded as a major milestone, but for Sifford it was just another mile marker. Sponsors denied him entry to the next event, in Houston. Same thing at the one after that. He captured his first PGA Tour victory in 1967 and another two years later...