- Minister and social justice advocate, LaSimba Gray has a story to tell about Memphis.

His book, "Out of Bounds: The History of African Americans and Golf in Memphis", highlights the experiences of Black golfers over the 20th century, and the brotherhood of the love of the game.

Friend and fellow golfer, Dr.

Bill Adkins, joins him for A Conversation with Dr.

LaSimba Gray.

[gentle music] Hello, everybody, I'm George Larrimore.

Welcome to A Conversation With here on WKNO.

Our guests today are Dr.

LaSimba Gray.

He is the Pastor Emeritus of New Sardis Baptist Church, and Dr.

Bill Adkins, who is the senior pastor and founder of a Greater Imani Ministries.

Now, these two are a couple of professed, longtime golf buddies, but our story today is about a whole lot more than golf.

Thank you, fellas, for being here.

Really appreciate it.

- Thank you, thank you.

- Thank you for having us.

- Dr.

Gray, we're gonna talk about your book, "Out of Bounds", which is the History of African Americans and Golf in Memphis.

Now, tell me about your passion for golf, if you don't mind.

We might as well start talking about golf, 'cause I know you played a lot together for years and years.

- Well, I started off as a caddie, and was introduced to the game by Albert Flowers.

We called him Spooky, and got, you know, competition sets in.

And then you wanna beat him, then you wanna beat somebody else.

And my passion for golf was in being a competitor.

- And you were how old at the time?

- I was 15, 16 years old at the time.

- Dr.

Adkins, when did you start playing?

- I actually started when I was in about the seventh grade.

I lived in South Memphis adjacent to the old Riverside Park, which at the time was segregated.

And me and other kids would sneak into the park late in the evening when nobody was looking.

And my father had three golf clubs: a driver, a 7-iron, and a putter.

And I started going over to Riverside with that driver, that 7-iron, and that putter, playing holes when nobody was looking.

Then when, of course, it integrated, I went over there.

Rocky Reed was the pro there, and Rocky Reed kind of took me under his wing and started teaching me how to play golf.

So that's how I started.

So it was around seventh grade when I actually started.

- Well, let me ask you this.

Golf is a game of passion.

People love golf, love to watch it, love to play it.

What was it that got you going the first time you played golf?

Do you remember?

- I made a putt.

[Dr.

Adkins chuckles] - Accidentally, however, I made a putt.

And I was hooked from that point on.

But in golf, you are competing with yourself.

You know what you're supposed to do, can you do it and do it on a repeated basis?

And that's where you really get hooked into the game of golf.

But then the comradery, you get to be with people that you enjoy being around.

And Bill and I got started in the '70s, playing together and working together in golf tournaments.

And we developed a real bond, and they're still existing 40 years later.

- You know, now golf is a game of muscle memory.

Athleticism won't help you as much.

It might help you a little bit, but athleticism won't help you totally in golf.

Golf is a game of discipline.

And like Dr.

Gray said, every golfer remembers a certain shot that he or she hit that they never forget.

And that gives you, fuels the passion for you to go on and on on, 'cause you're looking for that shot one more time.

To hit that kind of shot, one more time, one more time.

It's a very challenging game, difficult to master.

But if you get hooked on it, you just hooked on it.

- In my neighborhood, George, we built golf courses.

When we couldn't play, we called 'em sandlot golf courses.

And I was at the corner of Perry and Ball Road, we took the old Army Depot, the west side of that establishment, and we built holes with sticks and flags.

And that's how we'd play.

Everybody got a club, you'd have it one or two, maybe three clubs, but you played who could get there and get the ball in the hole the quickest.

- So you had those all over your community.

- Yeah, segregation did that.

- All across the country.

- Yeah, segregation.

- Black golfers made makeshift golf courses.

- Yeah.

- Wherever they could find a piece of land, you know, they could makeshift a golf course.

The only real golf courses Black people could play on were the ones that were designed just for Black people.

We were not allowed on courses.

We didn't have the country clubs, public golf courses were all that we had.

And of course, when integration came about, that's what opened the doors to the courses, where we could go and play.

- There was a dentist I'd like you to talk about, because you reference him in your book, Dr.

Ike Watson, Jr., who was a civil rights icon, who loved golf.

So if y'all don't mind, tell me his part of this story.

- Well, Dr.

Watson got frustrated because he could go out of town and play the better golf courses, but he couldn't play the better golf courses in Memphis.

So they had given African American people Fuller to get us away from wanting to play at the Caucasian courses.

And so Dr.

Watson, in 1960, filed a lawsuit, and he and other group joined with him to do that.

But it's called Watson v. the City of Memphis, the lawsuit.

Well, in that discussion and deliberations, it was brought up that Memphis was dragging it's feet in terms of school desegregation.

And so in that process, they got the wheels turning to desegregate the Memphis City Schools.

So when Ike Watson filed a lawsuit in 1960, then Memphis desegregated in 1961.

- But did not open all the golf courses until '62.

- '62, that's right.

- So golf led the way, but didn't get the results for golfers until a year later.

- Year later, and that's a part of the process, but it had to be started.

And Dr.

Watson and the courageous group of men got together and they did it, willing to suffer whatever the consequences were.

They knew they would suffer consequences, but they did it.

And the city the better all for it.

Now I need to say this, there were only a few recorded incidents of resistance in Memphis.

In some communities, they burned down the clubhouses.

They barred and threatened African-Americans, "If you come, we'll shoot you."

I remember playing in Jackson, Tennessee in the early '70s.

We would watch the woods, whenever we came up on a set of woods we would watch the woods to see if someone was in there with a gun.

It was that kind of a hostility.

But this courageous group led by Dr.

Watson, had to be the barriers.

Initially, Thurgood Marshall says it's a waste of money and time, a golf course.

But the lawsuit was based on the 14th Amendment, that as a citizen of the United States of America, he had all rights and privileges of any other citizen.

That was the premise of the lawsuit.

And so when that lawsuit was won, there was a domino effect for every segregated institution in the City of Memphis failed.

So we owe a whole lot to golf.

And the idea of wanting to play because you had a right to play.

- Now, of all the professional sports, you made me think, you know, talking about Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court.

You made me think about Jackie Robinson, who had integrated baseball in 1947.

But this is 14 years later.

- Yeah.

- Of all the professional sports, the last to integrate on the tour was professional golf.

- Well, golf is the upper crust, upper elite, even amongst white people.

Golf is the country club set.

It's wealth, it's power, it's money, it's all of that.

I mean, even poor white people did not enjoy the benefits of playing in country clubs.

So, you know, if you were not a part of that group, that set, you know, you didn't get to play on those kinds of courses.

So, you had to play on the public courses.

And, you know, it was just a fight.

Golf was a fight for integration.

Golf was a hard fight.

And Dr.

Gray, he chronicles that in the book, "Out of Bounds".

It was a tough fight.

Ike Watson, to give you an idea, Sam Qualls, who was the owner of a funeral home here in Memphis, made a statement that I never forgot.

He never forgot when they gave us Fuller Golf Course, Sam Qualls said that Fuller Golf Course was purposely designed to discourage us from playing golf.

It's one of the toughest golf courses, and I've seen pros.

I played with Lee Elder on Fuller Golf Course.

John Daly played on Fuller Golf Course.

Professionals say this is one of the toughest golf courses they've ever been on.

The only golf course they'd ever seen, we talked about this earlier.

It started off hole 1 with a Par 3 over 200 yards.

- Par 3.

- Par 3 over 200 yards.

A golf course out of 18 holes, only 6 holes could you stand on T and see the green.

Everything else was a dog leg left.

That's how so many of us learned how to draw the ball at Fuller because everything turned left, so.

- All right, let's go back in time.

So we were talking about, again, there was all, again the expression, separate but equal.

And this was not separate but equal when you have one golf course that which Black people were allowed to play on freely.

1956, the city opens its golf course, T.O Fuller at T.O.

Fuller State Park, which is south on BB King, and I guess around Mitchell Road.

- Yeah.

- On Mitchell Road.

- But so this course, again, to emphasize what you just said, was seen to have been particularly designed to discourage people like yourself from playing golf.

- Yeah, it was tough.

It was tough.

I've seen so many pros, we talked.

When Memphis had, at Colonial, when the pros finished on Sunday at Colonial, many would come to Fuller on Monday, because of course, they played amongst each other at Fuller.

And they would, of course, gamble with each other.

And you could hear them cursing from hole one all around the 18 about Fuller, because it was so difficult.

It's so mountainous.

It's mountainous, it turns, it bends.

It's hard to walk, it is difficult to walk, a very tough golf course.

- George, to give you an example how tough it is, Walter Payton, the legendary football player of Chicago Bears would come and train at Fuller.

[Dr.

Adkins laughs] Up and down, over the hill.

- Up and down the hill.

- Sweating, I mean, soaking wet.

But he said it was ideal for his type of training.

So you can imagine trying to walk that to play golf.

You had to have a golf cart at Fuller.

- You couldn't.

- You couldn't walk it.

- Then you had to be able to bend the ball, fade the ball, and that kind of thing.

- And by the rules, pro golfers have to walk the course.

- Yeah, yes.

- They have to walk the course.

- Yeah.

- So, you know, when they come to Fuller, it would be so difficult.

- So the bottom line was a lot of those people that played that course regularly were better golfers, 'cause they were playing a harder course all the time.

- This is what happens.

And you know, we, as both ministers, we could say very easily, God works in mysterious ways.

Fuller taught Black golfers how to navigate the toughest of holes.

So when they opened the Pub Links to Black golfers for the first few years that Black golfers were in the Pub Links, they dominated the Pub Links in Memphis.

- Now do you mind explaining to our audience what the Pub Links is?

- Pub Links is the open public golf course the tournament that's held in an area, where it's the best golfers that are registered in the USGA that come together to play a course, play a tournament on a public course.

It's supposed to be the best public players, not the country club players, but the best public course players come together to play each other.

- And at that time, a lot of the time, the Black golfers were dominating the Pub Links.

- It was easy to them.

- Which were a lot of people, I'm sure, were not ready for that.

- No, not at all, shocked.

In fact, shocked.

- Well, Pless Jones tells of trying to register for the Pub Links.

Well, they would mislead him to keep him from meeting the deadline to register to play.

He'd get to, for example, Audobon.

They said, "Well, you gotta go to Pine Hill to register."

He'd rush over to Pine Hill, and they said, "Well, the registration's at Audobon, you should have been registered over there."

He'd go back.

And he did that two or three times, but he was determined to get in.

And each time he got in, he'd win.

So, you know, the thing was that the evil that may have been intended - Yeah.

- Worked for the good.

- Worked for the good.

- Now you guys are sitting here laughing about this, and it's not funny.

Right, you think about, tell me what you're feeling about what those guys were going through at the time.

- Well, we all went through it.

I mean, he and I have been close all of these years because we were part of the fight of the struggle.

We were part of the fight.

We were always together, not just on the golf course.

We were together in actions against injustice and discrimination.

We leave the golf course, we have to go to a meeting.

We did these things.

We sued the City of Memphis together because the city was using the runoff provision of the election to keep African-Americans from having a majority on the City Council when we were the majority population.

So golf became a place of escape for us to at least go and have some fun, but then we gotta get back to work.

So the trials that we had on the golf course, what I'm trying to say, the trials we had in golf paled compared to the other trials we dealt with every other day, everyday at the time.

So golf became laughable in that sense.

- Well, the other part of it is relationships and friendships developed even in the midst of the segregation that went on.

For example, Charlie Wilson was a caddie at Chickasaw.

Well, he caddied for a man who told other men that, "Hell, my caddie can beat you."

They said, "You got to be out your mind."

Well, let's see.

Then Charlie would beat their brains out, but friendship developed and then they would travel together to various tournaments, in separate cars.

- Yeah.

- But when they got there, they would put Charlie up and let Charlie play.

Same thing with Lee Elder.

That's how Lee Elder got on the pro circuit.

- Yeah.

- He was playing with his "man", and his man would tell, "Hey, you can't even beat my caddie."

Said, "You got to be out your mind."

"$100."

"No, $100 a hole."

And they had to get up and leave town before the morning because they'd be discovered, you know.

But that kind of relationship developed.

And many of the caddies in developing friendships said at Christmas time, the man that they caddied for would bring to their homes food and Christmas gifts, paid for their children to go to college, and things like that.

It was an economic engine for the African-American community because in Binghampton you could pitch watermelons all day for a penny a piece.

But you could caddie a golf, a round of golf for $7, $8.

You can go to West Memphis, Arkansas, and chop cotton for 40 cents an hour.

But you could caddie and you could make $15, $20 a day.

So it was an economic engine that led to the greater good of the community at large.

But it started in pursuit of this thing called golf.

- I picked this book up and I thought, "Well, I understand it'll be about the sort "of relationship between golf and the civil rights struggle in Memphis at the time."

It's a whole lot more than that.

- Yeah.

- Part of it was the story behind clubs like these.

Now these were clubs were made by who made from what, and what's the connection with Memphis?

- Well, this club was made at Bert Dargie, Scottish family, immigrants, who had brought their skills of making golf clubs to Memphis.

Then there was some caddies, who hung around to get work, and they may have started out cleaning up the shop and stuff like that.

But eventually, Bert started to train them to make golf clubs.

And this is the persimmon head golf club.

But when they started making metal golf heads, club heads, it put this out of business.

But that's a skill to make that golf club.

And them Birkin brothers, Willie and Cornelius, were masters at making those clubs.

So there were club makers all over the country come to Memphis and order a set of persimmon head clubs, including that old putter.

They had a persimmon head putter was just amazing.

But these guys made their living because a Scottish family taught them the skill of making golf clubs.

- We're talking, I remind our audience, we're talking about your book, "Out of Bounds", which is a fascinating history of golf in Memphis, but it's also a history of Memphis.

- Yeah.

- And whether you're a golfer or just someone who likes to know how this community got to be the way it is, it's a book worth reading.

Go back to caddies for a second.

Another chapter in your book talks about the people, who went from being caddies and learning life lessons as a caddie, to having very significant careers later in their life.

Tell me about caddies, how that worked.

- Well, I think one of the chief ones would be Herman Morris.

- Herman Morris, yeah.

- He was the CEO of Memphis Light, Gas and Water company.

Leading attorney, civil rights lawyer.

Herman said he learned more than golf at Chickasaw.

He learned about life.

And oftentimes, the person they were caddying for would drop nuggets of wisdom, and he utilized those things.

You had Willie Ward, who was one of the chief vice presidents at FedEx.

He talks about the lessons he learned as a caddie and the relationship they developed with the person he was caddying for.

So it had tremendous rippling benefits, positively, for the community at large.

- Remember, caddies didn't just carry the bag.

- That's right.

- Caddies knew the golf course.

Caddies knew the science of the golf course.

They knew the topography of the golf course.

They know which way the ball would roll.

- There you go.

- They knew everything.

So it was a sign.

So when you got a caddie, you didn't want just a caddie to carry the bag.

You wanted a caddie that could actually teach you how to play and manipulate the golf course.

- See, they called a neophyte a bag toter.

That's all he knew, was to carry the bag.

But you want a caddie, you knew somebody know that up here you going to have a deep bend to the left and then a drop.

Or deep bend to the right and the rising of the green.

They had helped build the golf course, many of the caddies who worked at these places.

So they knew that.

And the other thing was, if you help your man to win, you got bonuses.

- Right.

- You are on a golf course with a caddie or you're on a golf course with each other, or just say two people who don't know each other very well.

I want you to talk about relationships built from playing golf.

Again, that is one of the social aspects of golf that makes it so significant, where it seems to me like the socializing is almost as important as the game.

- I think so.

- Well, golf, even though you're competing with each other, golf is a game where you can actually have empathy for your competitor because golf is so tough.

And after a while, you develop these relationships.

You know, these relationships, these bonds are tightened on a golf course.

I mean, you'll find that golf buddies are golf buddies for life, even when they don't play golf, like us.

I mean, we're older now.

We don't play as much as we used to.

There was a time we played two, three times every week.

But, you know, we don't do that any longer.

But the relationship is still there through all of those years that we played together.

It was just a normal thing that we would get up and play golf.

We would always find time to play golf.

Those relationships are strong.

And if you talk to any golfers, white, Black, whatever, you'll find out that golf builds relationships like that.

- Again, you guys met in the '70s, started playing together in the '70s, but you were golfers established.

You'd already been playing for a long time by then.

So you knew the game, you knew the players in the game.

Lee Elder, whom you mentioned earlier, is one of the early professional golfers, who was African-American.

- Yeah, Charlie Sifford, Jim Dent, Pete Brown.

- Pete Brown.

- These are the guys that we brought to Memphis - Yeah, Pete.

- During this historical development of this Sickle Cell Open.

- Yeah.

- And Bill and his wife, Linda, played a major part in that.

- Yeah.

- Mr.

Johnny Arnold adopted us and brought in a major sponsor, Miller Brewing Company, and put us on the map as the number one amateur golf tournament in the Mid-South.

We had 205 golfers on the second year we did it.

No other golf tournament in the area could draw that number of people.

And so, we are very proud of that.

And we built that until the state decided no longer to operate T.O.

Fuller.

So what they did was they canceled the golf cart contract.

And so, if you have no golf carts at T.O.

Fuller, nobody comes to play.

Nobody comes to- - 'Cause you can't walk.

- You can't walk it.

- You can't walk.

- And with Labor Day weekend, hot as it would be, you can't walk it and carry a golf bag, or walk it, period.

You don't walk T.O.

Fuller.

So they closed the course and said that it was because of drop in revenue.

That was not the case.

It was because the state decided not to operate it any longer.

And the state had done the City of Memphis a favor by building, allowing Memphis to build the golf course on that site, which is in Southwest Memphis, extremely remote from the rest of the population.

- I had the fortune, a good fortune to play a round of golf with Charlie Sifford, with Lee Elder, and Pete Brown.

- Oh, yeah.

- And you will always learn something.

Not golf, of life.

Charlie Sifford was probably one of the greatest teachers on the golf course that I've ever been around.

I mean, when I played with him, he was up in age.

He didn't hit the ball very far.

He didn't have to, he was so accurate, you know?

But he taught you lessons all around that golf course.

How to make a decision, why you go shoot that?

Why you hit it over there?

Why do you?

And these lessons just build in your mind and your head, and they're lessons of life.

- We got a couple of minutes left.

It would be impossible to have this conversation and not mention Tiger Woods.

- Hmm.

- I'm trying to think.

He is an older player now.

He's still playing.

Not at the level he played when he shook the world.

But what was your feeling at the time when you first saw what a phenomenon he was on the golf course?

And how did you think that would play out over time with young people?

- Well, it was a welcoming phenomenon that this young African American could take on golf at the level he took it on, and then win consistently the way he won.

I learned when he came to Memphis, he didn't go to Colonial or he didn't go to Chickasaw.

He came to Pine Hill.

There was an African American pro at Pine Hill by the name of Charles Hudson, who had helped Tiger when Tiger first started.

They did what they called pass the hat.

And so Tiger could meet his expenses.

Tiger never forgot that.

And so when Hudson launch the thing of training young people to play golf, Tiger gladly came.

And it was one of the greatest days in the life of a golfer I've ever seen or been a part of.

To see Tiger Woods and his dad demonstrate all the shots that Tiger Woods could make was just amazing and overwhelmingly filled with joy.

- He laid a course for how people perceive Black people as thinking you don't be on the golf course.

You know, when Lee Elder tells the story that he was in a tournament somewhere one day, and somebody rolled a basketball out on the green when he was about to putt, and said, "This is the ball you play with."

- Yeah.

- They rolled a basketball on the green.

This is the ball you play with.

Lee Elder never forgot that because they said, "Your place is not here.

This is not the place you should be."

What Tiger really changed that because he was so powering and so good, they had to respect him.

They had no choice but to respect him.

And maybe that was not his intention.

I don't think he would consider himself a civil rights worker.

But really, in essence, he became that.

- Guys, I want to thank you so much for being here.

You have a wonderful book.

- Thank you.

- It is essential book for anyone, who would've want to know about how this city got to be the way it is in so many different ways.

And you've taught us a lesson here today that it's a whole lot more than golf.

Thank you very much for being here.

- Thank you.

- Thank you for having us.

- Thank you for being with us today.

I enjoyed it very much.

My name is George Larrimore.

Thank you for WKNO for putting this all together.

We'll see you next time.

[gentle music] [acoustic guitar chords]