There are no Black golfers in the Players Championship. Is the game doing enough to change that?

For the second straight year in the Players Championship, there are no African American competitors in the 123-man field—the first time that has occurred in the 52-year history of the PGA Tour’s flagship event.

None of the only four Black players to play on the PGA Tour this century—Joseph Bramlett, Harold Varner III, Cameron Champ and Tiger Woods—qualified for the tournament. Champ and Bramlett are on the Korn Ferry Tour; Varner went to LIV Golf in 2023; and the 50-year-old Woods, a two-time Players champion who has been inactive on tour since the 2024 British Open, is recovering from back surgery and also saw his five-year exemption into the tournament lapse in 2025.

It’s an unsettling recitation to hear in 2026, considering the transformational future many projected for Black professional golf back in 2000. Woods was completing one of the greatest seasons in history and the mass excitement from Tigermania also energized a perennially disconnected segment, young African Americans. It seemed certain that it was “only a matter of time” before more Black players than ever would be arriving on the PGA Tour.

Woods continued to inspire, but the truth is that since the 1970s, when fully a dozen Blacks played regularly on the tour, that number has steadily declined.

It hasn’t been for a lack of earnest programs and initiatives designed to improve the lives of disadvantaged young people through golf, with the accompanying hope that some of them will reach the top of the sport. Since the First Tee began in 1997, some of the initiatives include Youth on Course, the East Lake Foundation, Steph Curry’s Underrated, PGA Reach and Woods’ own TGR Foundation.

There’s also one organization specifically dedicated to launching the most promising minority players into the highest reaches of the pro game—the Advocates Professional Golf Association Tour (APGA), an 18-tournament circuit that is offering $1.8 million in total purses in 2026. While teaming up with the PGA Tour’s Pathway to Progression program, the APGA’s payouts have grown exponentially in recent years, and while the tour once played on sometimes-scruffy public courses, it has hosted tournaments of late at the likes of Baltusrol, The Concession Golf Club, Torrey Pines, Pine Needles, Spyglass Hill and numerous TPC venues.

The APGA was co-founded 16 years ago by former Nestle executive Ken Bentley, who questioned why pro golf remained overwhelmingly white, despite Woods’ influence and the sport’s oft-stated goal of “looking more like America.” Yet pro golf still doesn’t, nor does it look like America’s other major sports. Is it possible that one of the PGA Tour’s stated goals—to achieve increased racial diversity—has stalled or even gone backward?

It’s a particularly resonant question at this moment, with the PGA Tour being guided by private equity investors, new CEO Brian Rolapp and a policy board with a player majority that is preparing a schedule overhaul that possibly by 2027 would reduce the number of events, fully exempt players and the annual graduates from the developmental Korn Ferry Tour.

The mantra steering the changes is to “create the best possible product,” which in concept will have a more narrow star-driven focus. In the short term, at least, that will also reduce the chances of more Black players making it to The Show. Although, during his press conference on Wednesday, Rolapp called “pathways” like the tour’s partnership with the APGA “really important” and that investment in them would continue.

Of course, Black professional golfers have never expected their road to the PGA Tour to be easy. It’s been a frustrating theme even before the sport lagged well behind baseball, football and basketball in integrating—which, in all three cases, instantly made those competitive products better.

In fact, when the PGA of America, then running what would become the PGA Tour, finally dropped its “Caucasian only” clause in 1961, it appeared that golf might be on a similar fast track. Charlie Sifford and Pete Brown, who like other talented Black players had always been relegated to playing the United Golf Association—analogous to baseball’s Negro League—both won on the PGA Tour in the 1960s. And in the 1970s, there were fully a dozen African Americans who played regularly on the PGA Tour.

However, it was not a growing trend, as Black golfers of that era were usually hindered by having learned the game in a time that golf was effectively racially segregated. Nearly all of them started as caddies, with Calvin Peete, who didn’t start playing until age 23, being the notable exception. The caddie system, before it was marginalized by the golf cart, was a poorly paid but experientially rich feeder system of good Black golfers. Still, their ceilings were usually compromised by untutored golf swings, ragged golf courses that did not demand a ball flight well suited for tour-caliber course setups, putting strokes that lacked the refinement attained on good greens, and a lack of exposure to truly top-flight competition. Those gaps in development generally kept Black players from rising very high if they were able to get on tour.

Even so, such a Black golfer could make a tenuous living in the 1960s and 1970s when only the top 60 money winners were exempt, which left as many as 70 spots to be claimed by Monday qualifiers. That system gave marginal journeymen a realistic opportunity to get into enough tournaments to stay on tour.

In a way it was a high point for professional Black golfers. But when the system changed in 1982 to give the top 125 money winners a weekly exemption, it drastically reduced the number of Monday qualifiers, and the number of Black players on tour dwindled. Playing cards earned through the tour’s Qualifying School also were reduced, going from as many as 50 a year granted in the 1980s to half that in the 1990s, and eventually a Q-School that only gave out cards for the Korn Ferry Tour.

Before Bramlett in 2010, the last black player to get through the PGA Tour Q-School was Adrian Stills in 1985.

The very best Black players, unorthodox swings and all, still managed to thrive. Peete won 11 times in 1980s, including the 1985 Players Championship—the only Black player other than Woods to win at TPC Sawgrass. Thorpe won on tour three times, while Jim Dent was the only other mainstay, managing nine top-10s, without a victory, for the decade. By the time Woods came on the tour in 1996, only Thorpe among the old guard of Black players was still left. He was in his late 40s and would join the Senior Tour in 1999, where, no longer playing catch up, he and Dent would win 25 tournaments between them.

Of course, there has never been a bigger star than Woods—the only Black golfer on the PGA Tour for 12 years from 1999 to 2010. It was an era in which Woods was by far the best golfer and produced the best golf ever played, and, as such, he dramatically widened the audience, especially in the Black community.

In the same breath, Woods’ incredible dominance seemed to stun the golf world into ignoring that diversity on the tour wasn’t progressing. Now that Woods has turned 50 and has played only sparingly since winning the 2019 Masters, his absence has become more conspicuous.

However, Woods is a member of the policy and the chairman of the tour’s Future Competitions Committee. In his World Golf Hall of Fame acceptance speech in 2022, Woods candidly revealed how much racial discrimination motivated him throughout his career. He also chooses who receives the Charlie Sifford Honorary Exemption at the Genesis Invitational that he hosts. He will now have a key role in how the tour either reduces or enhances the future pathways for aspiring Black players.

In a time of recalibration in pro golf, it’s simplistic to say the game has lost ground toward racial inclusion. There’s a realization that while the Woods phenomena drove expectations understandably high for future players making it to the PGA Tour, a new group of smaller tours are giving young Black pros more stepping stones to better prepare them to make the jump to the biggest tour.

With some 2,500 players now listed in the Official World Golf Ranking, there is less room at the top but more pathways to get there. An instructive early example of benefiting from alternate routes is Tim O’Neal, a product of the HBCU Jackson State who missed making the PGA Tour when at Q-School in 2000 and 2002 he failed to get his card by one shot. O’Neal stayed afloat in part by playing on tours in Asia, Germany, Morocco, as well as the PGA Tour Latinoamerica, winning seven professional events on four continents. O’Neal’s determined grind culminated in 2024 in a victory on the PGA Tour Champions at age 52, which was inspirational to players on the APGA, another tour O’Neal once played.

This month, 17 APGA players, more than ever before, will try to qualify for a playing card on the PGA Tour Americas, which stages several events in South America and offers a point system toward getting a Korn Ferry card.

Holding full status on the Americas is Marcus Byrd, currently the top-ranked APGA player. Byrd, 28, attended Middle Tennessee State and grew up playing Langston Golf Course in Washington, D.C., a longtime hub for Black golfers, including pros Sifford, Peete, Thorpe, Ted Rhodes and Lee Elder. Byrd has nine APGA wins, with eight made cuts in a combined 28 starts on the Korn Ferry and PGA tours. Currently ranked 807th in the world, he was among seven APGA players who reached the second stage of PGA Tour Qualifying last winter—another most-ever by the tour.

In short, the foundation under the top of the pyramid is growing stronger. Especially at the grass roots base that, until now, has never been as well equipped to clear the traditional challenges—cost, access, poor facilities, lack of mentorship—that have hindered early starts by children in Black communities.

A transformative model for developing young minority players is The Park in West Palm Beach. Formerly one of yet another of the nation’s closed or defunct former municipal courses, the original course in 2023 was renovated into an already highly ranked masterpiece done pro bono by course architect Gil Hanse. Green fees are $20 for juniors 17 and younger, while the lighted nine-hole course is free for kids 12 and younger. The staff provides regular junior clinics and a special program, The Path, for underserved children from the local community. The project was pulled off with a public/private partnership led by former PGA of America CEO Seth Waugh, who raised $56 million from mostly wealthy golfing friends whose philanthropy is often focused on giving back to the game. Woods was one of the donors and hit the ceremonial opening tee shot.

A similar project at The Patch in Augusta, Ga., was funded by the Augusta National Golf Club. Tom Fazio produced a renovation of the 18-hole municipal course and Woods designed a short nine-hole course on the facility, The Loop, evoking what was his own optimal-without-being-opulent early years in the game.

Making the funnel for underserved kids wider and more attractive increases the odds that golf genius will emerge. Also contributing to that end are celebrations of the too often overlooked and underappreciated historical achievements of Blacks in golf, deepening the sense of purpose by African Americans whose dream is reaching the PGA Tour.

No one has done more in this area than Wendell Haskins, the former director of diversity and multicultural initiatives at the PGA of America and founder of The Original Tee, a tournament and gathering of avid Black golfers from the worlds of sports and entertainment. The event honors Dr. George Grant, a Black dentist who in 1899 invented the wooden tee. Haskins’ efforts to advocate for golf in the Black community include key roles in Sifford receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom and Elder taking part in the Honorary Starters ceremony at the 2021 Masters, 46 years after he became the first Black to play in the tournament and only a few months before his death.

Such moments remind us that the story of African Americans in golf has been one of slow progress, but progress nonetheless. Yes, the numbers of Black players on the PGA Tour have remained low, but the growth from the well-seeded ground below is steadily reaching higher. What was eagerly said when it appeared that Tiger Woods was speeding the story up still holds—it’s just a matter of time.