'Thank you for coming, Mr. Elder': When Lee Elder desegregated the Masters

On April 21, 1974, Lee Elder stood over an 18-foot putt for birdie on the fourth playoff hole to win the Monsanto Open. The 39-year-old had been two shots behind Peter Oosterhuis with two holes to play at a windswept Pensacola Country Club. Elder had birdied both, including a gorgeous approach under and around the trees on No. 18, to force their playoff. Oosterhuis had missed a three-foot putt for par to win on the first hole, a four-foot putt for birdie on the second and another birdie putt, from 20 feet, on the fourth. Now Elder, who had previously lost playoffs to Jack Nicklaus and Lee Trevino, could win his first PGA Tour event if he made his birdie putt, two feet shorter and on the same line.

He drained it and raised his putter into the air like a sword.

The tournament director was a former FBI man with a nose for the ominous; almost immediately, he escorted Elder into a waiting police car. The trophy ceremony was moved inside, into the relative safety of a clubhouse that hadn’t always welcomed Black golfers; on that fate-turning Sunday, Elder was treated as a champion rather than an exile. Rose Harper, Elder’s wife as well as his manager and agent, was back home in Washington, D.C., living and dying with every update relayed by friends on the clubhouse phone. At last, her husband took the receiver.

“Baby, we did it,” he said. “We finally did it, Baby. We finally won.”

Minutes later, over the state line in Georgia, the phone rang in the office of Clifford Roberts, the bespectacled, 80-year-old chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club. The previous week, Gary Player had won his second Masters there. Oosterhuis had also played in Augusta. Elder had not. No Black player had, ever. Roberts was informed by a reporter that Elder had won in Pensacola, meeting one of the presumed standards for entry to the 1975 Masters. The reporter waited for Roberts to digest the news.

“He’s automatically earned his invitation, and he will receive an invitation to play in the Masters,” Roberts said. “We’re very delighted he’s done so.”

It’s hard to imagine Roberts was, in fact, delighted. While stories of the chairman’s overt, even cartoonish racism are probably apocryphal, Augusta National’s history was obviously, indisputably racist. Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947. The PGA of America revoked its “Caucasian only” bylaw in 1961. The Masters, an invitational tournament, could have dismantled its own color barrier whenever Roberts pleased, before or after 1961. It, and he, had not.

Pete Brown won PGA Tour events in 1964 and 1970 and did not receive an invitation. Charlie Sifford won in 1967 and 1969 and likewise went uninvited. “To my mind, the Masters was the worst redneck tournament in the country, run by people who openly discriminated against Blacks,” Sifford later wrote.

Elder himself won the 1971 Nigerian Open and did not receive an invitation, though the winner of that tournament traditionally did. Roberts said the standing invite was good only for non-American winners of the event.

FROM THE ARCHIVE: The 1975 Masters—An Oral History

In March 1973 a cadre of U.S. Congressmen had asked Roberts to invite Elder to that year’s tournament, citing his 10 combined appearances in the U.S. Open and PGA Championship and 32nd-place finish on the money list in 1972. (Neither Elder nor Harper knew about the Congressional effort until after the fact.) Roberts had refused, arguing that to invite Elder would be to practice discrimination “in reverse.” The chairman had held fast to Augusta National’s new and unambiguous bar-setting from the previous year: The winners of every PGA Tour event would, from now on, automatically receive invitations.

“That’s certainly what I’m going to try to do,” Elder said at the time. He later confided that, already deep into his abbreviated career—he didn’t play his first full round of golf until he was 16—he’d put too much pressure on himself to win. Wanting so badly to be the first had seen him too often finish second.

Now Elder had won the Monsanto Open, and Roberts called him to extend his belated invitation. Elder was busy hugging his trophy and didn’t take the call. “It was my first PGA Tour victory,” Elder, who died in 2021, told Golf Digest’s Guy Yocom in 2019. “I really wanted to celebrate.” His champion’s dinner at the club went late. He did not find the time to call Roberts back.

Roberts reached him the next morning. “Lee, this is Cliff Roberts,” he said. “I’m just calling to extend an invitation to you, and I’d like to know if you’ll be coming.”

Elder, following the advice of Reuben Payne, his attorney, swallowed the surge in his chest.

“Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t say for sure right now,” Elder said. “It really depends on what I’m involved in.”

Each man hung up. In 2019, Elder remembered the satisfaction he felt in that moment, the faint chime of the phone fading away as though he’d found the cure for tinnitus, the sense of reversal that came with his making the late man wait. “I just wanted to give Cliff a taste of his own medicine,” Elder said.

FIFTY YEARS AGO this April, Lee Elder arrived in Augusta. He and Harper had rented two houses, one on Washington Road and another on Wheeler. For years, Elder claimed that keeping the two houses was a safety measure, meaning no one knew where, exactly, he and Harper were on any given evening. “It was a different time,” Elder said. Harper, who divorced Elder in the 1990s, disputed his account in a recent interview. “The town was in a good mood,” she said. They had two houses only because they had so many guests. Harper—the first woman to be recognized as an agent by the PGA Tour, a ground breaker in her own right—had asked for and received more than 20 badges from Augusta National, an unusual amount. “Everything I requested, they provided,” she said.

On the course itself, Elder was accompanied by two bodyguards in plain clothes. “Security was excellent,” Elder said. He remembered feeling less safe off-site, especially in the car, especially in traffic. In Pensacola he had avoided passing through the small panhandle towns where Black people had sometimes disappeared, careful to travel in numbers and never at night. Augusta had a better reputation, but it was still in, and of, the South.

Thirteen days before Elder won the Monsanto Open, he watched Hank Aaron hit home run No. 715 of his career at Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium to eclipse Babe Ruth as baseball’s all-time home run king. The two men were the same age, and Elder knew the dangers that Aaron had faced during that fraught, shadow-long stretch of American history; he had wondered whether any of the fans who chased Aaron around the bases meant to murder him. Elder and Aaron talked in the leadup to the 1975 tournament about fear and how to face it down. When Elder and Harper flew into Atlanta on their way to Augusta, Aaron had arranged their car at the airport, having given them the lay of a still-fractured land.

Elder later recalled that Roberts was the first person to greet him when he drove up Magnolia Lane on Monday afternoon and got out of his red sedan, Harper by his side. Contemporaneous newspaper accounts, including that day’s Associated Press report, noted instead that Roberts was out of pocket, conspicuous in his absence. Harper remembered the same. “Cliff Roberts was not there,” she said.

Indisputably, Elder, looking sharp in a blue leisure suit and white turtleneck, was met by a small army of reporters. “I’m not talking,” he told them. “Every time I talk, I get into trouble.”

Harper, with a tight grip on her husband’s arm, got between him and his inquisitors. She had learned from some unlikely advisers, including Howard Cosell, to be direct with the media. “He has been talking for 52 weeks,” she said. “He is here to play a tournament.” The next day, she would relent to the demand, and Elder would talk some more; their joint press conference would last more than an hour.

The year between Elder’s win at Pensacola and the Masters had been filled with attention but no material gain. Harper could not recall a single endorsement that came from her husband’s impending achievement. His golf had also been providing limited returns. A nervy, distracted Elder said he packed on the pounds that year, and his game slipped out of range. He had spent a harried March trying to find it.

Finally, Elder’s long quest to make history was nearly over. He stepped inside Augusta National’s fabled clubhouse for the first time. A Black locker room attendant walked him to his locker. “We’ve been saving this locker right here,” the attendant said. The staff had preselected it, waiting years for the day it might contain something other than their dreams.

THE BLACK COOKS at their rented houses were equally thrilled to receive Elder, Harper and their friends and family. One night, they were entertained by Julius Scott, the president of Paine College, a historically Black Methodist school in Augusta. “Nice and quiet, so welcoming,” Elder said. “Good food, too.” The houses also proved reliable sanctuaries. Dora Thomas, Harper’s sister, could still remember the peach cobbler and sweet potato pie that Mrs. Ware, one of the cooks, prepared for them 50 years ago. “She was ecstatic that we were there,” Thomas said. “She treated us like royalty.”

The reception was nearly as warm at the course. Early in the week, Harper sat down at a table in the clubhouse for a bite to eat. Her Black waiter, wearing a pressed white jacket, said she was the first Black person to sit at that table rather than clear it.

That year’s tournament was a hinge point in Masters history in other ways. Jack Nicklaus and Johnny Miller were at the heights of their divergent games, and the crowds were as thick as the anticipation. Jim Murray, the Los Angeles Times columnist and another member of Harper’s informal advisory panel, wrote about covering the tournament by sound rather than sight because he couldn’t get near the action; he quit going soon after, preferring to write the Masters off TV than navigate the growing crush.

Among the colorful thousands—many in coats because of the rain and spring chill—Elder found an ally in Gary Player, the defending champion. Elder had joined Player on a golf tour of Apartheid South Africa in 1971, four years before he finally made it behind the hedgerows at Augusta. “Lee had the bravery of a lion,” Player told Golf Digest recently. He remained concerned for his friend’s safety at the Masters. “It’s not easy to concentrate on your golf when you have policemen walking around with you,” Player said. “I tried to give him comfort by sharing my own experiences with him, but worrying about your life is an extremely difficult thing to cope with.”

No one was especially anxious about how Elder’s fellow golfers might react. “There wasn’t a color issue for us,” Hale Irwin, who would finish in a tie for fourth that year, said recently. “I think players just look at the talent, and Lee had the talent to be there.”

Harper agreed: “It was a community,” she said, and she and Elder had been part of it since he earned his tour card in 1968. Nor was there much malice in most of the patrons, already well-schooled in Augusta National’s civilities. The fear was a rogue one, the single angry man hiding in the galleries, separated by only a rope from the subject of his scorn.

Along with the security detail, Elder would be accompanied every step by his caddie, Henry Brown, a 36-year-old part-time taxi driver who had worked at Augusta National for more than 20 years; he had carried Roberto de Vicenzo’s bag for eight, including when the Argentine signed an incorrect scorecard and missed out on a playoff in 1968. Brown, like every caddie who had worked the Masters since its inception, was in-house and Black. Elder had asked to bring his own caddie, Adolphus “Golf Ball” Hull, but was denied; golfers were not permitted to bring their own until 1983.

“All he has to do is stay cool and relax,” Brown told reporters before Elder’s opening round. Elder, dressed in three shades of green, struggled to follow Brown’s advice. His jitters were such that he put his watch in his pocket and his golf balls in his locker before he realized his mistake.

“Think I’m nervous?” he said. 

His first-round playing partner was Gene Littler, an easy-going Californian and “a gentleman at all times,” Harper said. Elder always thought someone, perhaps even Roberts, had done him a kindness by pairing them. They walked together from the clubhouse to the opening tee. “C’mon, partner,” Littler said before he put a reassuring hand around the back of Elder’s neck. A photographer caught the moment Littler became golf’s Pee Wee Reese, who had put his arm around Jackie Robinson in front of a jeering crowd 28 years before.

“Good luck,” Littler said.

Elder dug his tee into the ground. “It was such a strange pressure,” he said. “I made a silent wish that I wouldn’t embarrass myself.”

Harper had forecaddied for her husband since an affronted observer had kicked Elder’s ball off the fairway at a tournament in Memphis, and she did again at Augusta, finding a quiet spot in the trees, praying she’d see his drive land where she thought it might. Wrestling with more nerves than he had felt standing over any single shot in his life, Elder hit his drive long and straight.

“Relief,” Harper said.

It was the start of a serviceable, unspectacular round, careful and measured. Dave Anderson of The New York Times walked with Elder, along with a hundred Black supporters, including Jim Brown, the Hall of Fame football player. Elder remembered tipping his visor and basking in ovations at every green. Harper also remembered being carried along by nearly constant cheering. Anderson, in contrast, expressed surprise at the restraint of Augusta National’s patrons, at least given the magnitude of the history they were witnessing. He counted 31 rounds of “polite applause” to go with Elder’s two-over 74.

ELDER WORE LAVENDER on Friday, teeing off a little after lunch beside Miller Barber, a fidgety Texan with a funky swing. Barber did his best to be quiet and still, almost invisible, but Elder was “out-of-the-box bad,” shooting 40 on the front nine. After the built-in triumph of his opening round, his second round felt almost anti-climactic, just another man on the moon, and he never felt the crackle that brought his best. He finished with a 78, missing the cut by four.

After the round, Elder found some humor in the situation. “I got a chance to see some of the beautiful flowers and shrubbery around here,” he said. In truth he was disappointed by his showing, for which so many had waited so long.

“Everything I did was incorrect,” he said.

Brown, his caddie and an excellent cross-handed hitter, had even suggested at one point they trade outfits, white coveralls for lavender, to give themselves a shot at the weekend. Harper had believed Brown and Elder were a bad match from the start and had wanted to request a caddie change; she thought Brown didn’t have the necessary eye for detail for such a crucial assignment. She was overruled by Reuben Payne, the attorney, and Jack Pohanka, a Washington car dealer and one of Elder’s few sponsors. Neither wanted to risk anything that resembled a controversy.

“Well, I told you to get rid of that guy,” Harper said to Elder before she and her husband made the quiet trip back home to D.C. Her feelings about their Masters experience have since softened. “It was a memorable, very pleasurable week,” she said.

Elder played the tournament five more times; he finished tied for 19th at his next appearance in 1977. That September, Clifford Roberts got a haircut, pulled on some fresh pajamas, walked down toward the manicured lip of Ike’s pond and shot himself. Thirteen years later, in 1990, the club admitted Ron Townsend, its first Black member. In 1997, Tiger Woods became the first person of color to win the green jacket. Elder had picked up a speeding ticket racing to Augusta National in time to see Woods begin his final round. Later, Woods noted that he’d been born the same year Elder desegregated the Masters, as if a spiritual baton had passed between them in 1975. “I had often thought of that,” Woods said.

Woods was not alone in his memories. More were shared in 2021, when Elder was named an honorary starter alongside Nicklaus and Player, and again that November, when he died at 87. One stood out.

Late that Friday afternoon, now 50 years gone, Elder was making his long, dejected finishing walk up No. 18, “Holly,” when he looked up to see some of the club’s Black employees lining the fairway. The same crowds that thwarted Jim Murray had parted to let them to the front. They stood in tidy lines, many in their bleached-white uniforms, glowing like lanterns in the coming dusk: the caddies, the waiters, the cooks, the cleaners, the drivers and the groundskeepers, now with a golfer in lavender also among their ranks.

One of them, “in this booming voice,” Elder remembered, shouted above the cascade of otherwise unbroken applause: “Thank you for coming, Mr. Elder!”

Someone else shouted it, too, and someone else, until the same expression of gratitude became a chorus, echoing against the pines. Elder, his gaze returned to the grass as he climbed the rise to the green, heard it again and again. Not so long before, at that tournament in Memphis, a racist had kicked his ball out of bounds. Now, at the Masters, a better audience was thanking him for being there, and only then did Lee Elder set free the tears he’d fought back for so much of that week, dropping like sash weights from his disbelieving eyes.