The last 20-odd years of Spiller's life were not nearly as adventurous, and certainly not satisfying. He was never able to fulfill the five-year apprenticeship requirement needed to become a member of the PGA of America, because no one would give him the necessary assistant professional's job. Too old to schlep golf bags as a caddie, he made a few bucks here and there giving lessons, but mainly lived off the income of his wife. It was a demeaning existence for a man of his time, no matter the color of his skin.
In the early 1980s Spiller evinced signs of dementia and delusion. He would rise from bed in the middle of the night and rant about those who had denied him his chance to be what he wanted to be, sometimes waving his gun at those ghosts. After he suffered a stroke and was operated on for an aneurysm that left a scar across the top of his scalp, he began a steep and rapid decline. When he fell getting out of the bathtub and couldn't get himself up, his wife, by then herself aging, had no choice but to have him committed to a 24-hour board-and-care facility. He died there a year later, in 1988, at 75. His body was cremated.
Spiller was a serious pusher of the envelope. But aside from his challenge to the status quo in professional tournament golf, there is another indicator of just how forward-thinking he was. At the California African-American Museum, near the campus of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, there is a small exhibit honoring Spiller. It includes some of his golf artifacts, a large picture of him in a follow-through and a blowup of an article he wrote in 1948 after the debacle at Richmond CC. The article appeared in the Los Angeles Sentinel, a newspaper with a black readership. It reads as follows: Golf is new to Negroes and colored professional golfers are finding it difficult to make a living. As a Negro professional golfer I say that I would rather see my little boy on a golf course caddieing and trying to make a golfer of himself than any other place.
Golf is an individual game -- it develops the individual. Brute strength is not the most important thing. It develops concentration and teaches courtesy and good sportsmanship (in spite of the PGA).
In our fight to curb juvenile delinquency we should investigate golf a little more and use it as one of the ways to develop good citizenship among the young. We hope that citizens of the country -- not just this community -- will get behind us in this fight to remove the "lily-white" tag that the PGA has put on golf.
Those words are, practically speaking, the creed for today's First Tee program, which, in a nice touch of irony, is directed by Joe Louis' son, Joe Louis Barrow Jr. As Spiller often said to those who thought otherwise, he wasn't only looking out for himself. He had a larger vision and had it more than a half century ahead of the crowd.
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