Editor's note: This column originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times on January 9, 1969.

Before Charlie Sifford, if a Negro walked on a golf green in this country, chances are he was carrying someone else's clubs and/or a wet towel to wipe somebody else's ball.

If he was in the grille room, he was carrying someone else's coffee. He came to fix a shower, not take one.

Golf was not a game for the ghettos. Neither did it leave any time for carrying picket signs, joining demonstrations, or running for office. Charlie birdied, not talked, his way through society prejudice. He broke barriers by breaking par. His weapon was a nine-iron, not a microphone. Charlie stands as a social pioneer not because he could play politics but because he could play golf.

Golfers, you have to know, have to be single-minded human beings. Ask one of them what he things of Richard Nixon, and chances are, he will frown and say "Too much right hand" or "He's bringing his right shoulder through too fast." The golfer doesn't know his politics, just his handicap.

Prior to Charlie, pro golfers had the effrontery to have "Caucasians only" clause in their bylaws. It was the recreational arm of the Ku Klux Klan. Charlie came out of the darktown alleys of Carolina, packing for the rich folks, but practicing his own swing by moonlight. He "looped" for the hotheaded Clayton Heafner, with whom he gypsied through the tournaments. He hustled the hoods of Philadelphia. Charlie putted for his supper. He played nickel-and-dime games with the same skill and enthusiasm as $10 Nassaus. Charlie learned how to save strokes around the green and around the first tee, too.

The singer Billy Eckstine got him out of nickel cigars and nickel putting contests, and together they began to apply the abolitionist movement to golf. The first breakthroughs were -- and, I have to think, were intended to be -- token. When they were backed to a wall, golf tournaments would let Negroes in -- and then sit back and watch them shoot 80. "See, It's not their color, it's their score," they would contend.

Charlie doublecrossed them. Charlie could play this damn game all right. Charlie was competition, buddy.

His swing was nothing to get drunk over. Off the tee, Charlie ends up with his hands crossed, his legs crossed, and sometimes his eyes. He looks like a guy who had just fouled off a low, outside 0-and-2 pitch. But when Charlie gets around the green and smells money, he's like a surgeon.

Charlie is the only Negro to have won a tour tournament. He made the field -- and the cut -- in five National Opens. He has been in the top 60 money winners every year since they let him in -- in 1961.

They kicked his ball out of bounds in some Southern tourneys, but Charlie held his temper. No Uncle Tom, neither is Charlie a minstrel Negro. He's as dour as Hogan on the course, as serious as an undertaker. He doesn't like his back slapped any better than his face. Charlie is his own man; the face around the cigar frequently scowling. He doesn't like anybody standing in his line -- on or off the course. Getting a weekly threatening letter from some mental case in Florida, as Charlie does, hardly promotes a sunny outlook on one's fellow man anyway.

But Charlie, who tees it up in the L.A. Open this week, has now played in every tournament in America save one -- the Masters. This August Augusta tournament has a complicated formula for selecting its field. If you come from Formosa, it's easy to get in. If you come from a cotton patch in Carolina, it's impossible.

The one avenue open to Charlie isn't really open at all. Past winners of this tournament can vote in a man who, either because he wasn't lucky enough to be born in Formosa or to have had one bad round in the Open, does not otherwise qualify.

In the past two years, Charlie has played this game about as well as anyone on the circuit, certainly as well as anyone in the Masters. The past Masters selected Mike Souchak and Tommy Jacobs.

Pretty soon Charlie found people driving into him from the front tees. "Sure I was disappointed. Sure I know it's the only tournament Negroes have never played in. Sure I know that most of those Masters winners come from Texas or the Deep South. But I find letters putting words in my mouth to get at Jones (Bobby) and the Masters. So I get this letter from Bobby Jones telling me to stop threatening him. I don't threaten any man. I GET threatened. But I felt that, when I finished 25th in the money list, or won that tournament, or took third in the Canadian Open, I was entitled to some consideration. I have never disgraced anybody -- with a golf club or with a salad fork."

It is a feeling of this 22-handicapper that the Masters ought to send a car for Charlie and, considering he's the only guy in the field who couldn't get started on his golf career till he was 33 years old or his tournament career till he was almost 40 because it took democracy so long to catch on in this country, maybe they ought to give him two a side. If they do, I'll guarantee you Charlie will be voting on the invitee next year.

This column originally appeared in The Los Angeles Times. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Jim Murray, the long-time sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times, won the Pultizer Prize for commentary in 1990. He died Aug. 16, 1998.