LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Charlie Sifford: North Carolina
built 212 days ago
A black caddie from a poor family in Charlotte, North Carolina, Charlie Sifford dared to play professional golf with white men. It was not a friendly game for Charlie. He endured open heckling, insults and who knows what else.
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Sifford dropped out of high school and left his hometown, Charlotte, North Carolina, because members of the Carolina Country Club made threats to physically harm Sifford if he were seen on the grounds of the club. Even when Charlie Sifford moved to live with his relatives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, racism interfered with his right to play golf. While in Philadelphia, Sifford met and befriended Howard Wheeler—regarded by many as the best black golf player during that time—who was working at Cobbs Creek Golf course, a golf course for blacks. Wheeler won the first of the Negro National Open’s five championships and served as a mentor to Sifford.
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Charles Luther Sifford was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1922. He grew up in a racially mixed area that was surprisingly free of prejudice, but the insulation did not last long. At the age of ten he began to earn pocket money as a golf caddie at the Carolina Country Club. In those days before motorized golf carts, young men could earn wages for carrying the heavy bags of clubs from hole to hole for golfers.
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Born June 2, 1922, Sifford started in golf the only way a black kid growing up in North Carolina could in the 1930s - as a caddie. He earned 60 cents a day and gave his mom 50 cents and kept 10 cents to buy stogies, which became his trademark on the course. By 13, he could shoot par golf.
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This news, combined with a minor scrape with the law, convinced Sifford to move elsewhere. He ventured north to Philadelphia, where he had some family, and there he found the public golf courses he needed to perfect his game. "I always did want to be a pro," he said in the Lexington Herald-Leader. "But the pro tour wasn't open to us [African-Americans] then." Instead, Sifford entered segregated golf tournaments and made friends among the black golfers of his day. The early 1940s found him on the United Golf Association tour, and between 1948 and 1960 he won the Negro National Open six times.
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Still, Sifford's homecoming to North Carolina to play in the 1961 Greater Greensboro Open included a telephone death threat and racial slurs hurled at him as he walked the fairways. He tied for fourth.
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