“Miss it, n- - - - -! Miss it!”
Several years ago, Pete Brown and I spent an afternoon at Madden Golf Course talking about his golfing past, including that one ugly round at the PGA Tour’s Colonial National Invitation in Fort Worth, Texas.
It was 1964, the height of the Civil Rights movement in America, but also a time when Jim Crow laws were firmly in place in the South.
It had been only three years since the PGA of America had eliminated its “Caucasian only” rule from its bylaws and Charlie Sifford had integrated the pro tour.
Brown, though, had made real history — albeit quietly considering what he had done — when, just a week before the ’64 Colonial, he had won the Waco Turner Invitational in Oklahoma and become the first black ever to win a PGA-sanctioned tournament.
He also was the first black to play on the Colonial Country Club course and, as he remembered it, there were a few guys who didn’t quite embrace the historical landmark.
“I was really afraid and didn’t want to play there,” he said. “And early on there were hecklers in the crowd. When I’d get ready to putt, they’d yell that stuff.
“Well, I never retaliated, but Bob Goalby, who played with me, went after some of them. And then an interesting thing happened. The young kids began to follow me and by the end of the week I was the crowd favorite.”
Pete Brown was one of professional golf’s true Pied Pipers, a quiet, gracious, extremely well-liked man who managed to lead people out of the racist rough, back onto a fairway that was also the right way, the just way, the way things should have been in the first place.
He, along with other black golfing pioneers like Sifford, Lee Elder and Jim Dent paved the way for guys like Calvin Peete — who died last week — in the 1970s and Tiger Woods, who rose to greatness some 20 years after that.
Brown’s story is especially compelling because he overcame so much,.
He was born the son of a Mississippi Delta sharecropper and thanks to ingenuity, will and, of course, skill he beat the odds and ended up on the PGA Tour for 17 years. After that the City of Dayton brought him in from Los Angeles — where he was running a driving range — to revive the fortunes of Madden.
For many of his years here he did that, but after his retirement was announced in 2004, he suffered several serious health issues and finally, at the behest of his old friend Dent, Brown and Margaret, the Mississippi girl he had married when they were both teenagers in 1957, were coaxed to move to Evans, Georgia, a suburb of Augusta.
The Browns had looked after Dent many years ago when they lived in the Baldwin Hills section of Los Angeles — it was called the Black Beverly Hills — and now, as they faced financially tough times, Dent put them up in a house next to his, rent free, he said, for the rest of their lives.
And Friday — after numerous strokes in recent years and congestive heart failure — Pete Brown died. He was 80.
Humble beginnings
Brown was born in Port Gibson, Mississippi, near Natchez, and as a youngster he chopped cotton and picked peas.
When he was 10, the family moved to Jackson and soon after he began to caddy at Livingston Park golf course. He said he made 35 cents for nine holes, 55 cents for 18.
But back in those days there was also a bigger reward, he said with a grin.
Although blacks weren’t permitted to play at Livingston or at most other courses across the South, he said: “When it got dark, we’d sneak on the course and play a few holes near the woods until we got chased.”
He had only two clubs then.
He and his brother first found a left-handed three wood in a neighbor’s garage. “I was right-handed, but it was the only club I had, so I learned to hit left-handed,” he said. “Eventually, I could hit a ball 200 yards.
“Then I found a right-handed five iron in a lake, so after teeing off left-handed, I used that iron for everything else, including putting.”
After a while he said he and some of his buddies heard about a golf course in New Orleans that let blacks play on Mondays for $3.
“That put life in my dream,” he said.
He and three friends began a weekly pilgrimage. They’d pile into a car an hour or two after midnight Sunday and make the 160-mile drive down Highway 51, through towns like Beauregard, Bogue Chitto, Magnolia and Ponchatoula, hoping to get to New Orleans before dawn so they’d be the first group to tee off Monday morning.
“We were always a little nervous back then,” he said. “Four young black guys going through those Southern towns at night, you could find yourself in trouble for nothing. You sure didn’t want to run out of gas.
“But all we had in mind was playing golf from dawn to dark. I wanted to play as much golf as I possibly could.”
By the mid-1950s, the teen-aged Brown was playing on the loosely-structured black tour that had tournaments in select cities. Houston had the Lone Star tournament, an event he would win four times. In 1955, he came to Dayton and played well in the UGA Tournament at Community.
But just a year later he developed non paralytic polio.
“I was in bed for a year,” he said. “My weight went from 172 pounds down to just over 100. I couldn’t move, couldn’t see, couldn’t swallow. The doctors said, at best, I’d end up in a wheelchair.”
Eventually, he said the medication, his inner will and intervention “from above” helped him recover.
The illness still took a toll on his legs and back, so much so that years later famed pro Chi Chi Rodriguez said he’d pay for Brown’s back surgery, an offer Pete turned down because he said he was too afraid.
A year after he earned his PGA Tour card in 1963, Brown entered the Waco Turner Open Invitational, a tournament whose founder was one of the most colorful character associated with pro golf.
Waco Turner was an oilman who built his own course outside the littler town of Burneyville. He’d drive around the course, right up to the greens, in one of his vintage Cadillacs.
Although the tournament purse was $20,000 — with $2,700 to the winner — Turner went around the course with bags of cash and showered it on players for good shots.
He also kept a shotgun on the floorboard of his car, two .45 pistols on his hips and made sure the spectators were civil and tolerant.
Brown shot an eight-under-par 280 for the tournament to edge Dan Sikes, the 1963 Doral winner, by a stroke.
In 1970, Brown finally won again — the Andy Williams San Diego Open — when he edged reigning British Open champ Tony Jacklin in a playoff after topping a field that included the likes of Jack Nicklaus, Tom Weiskopf, Lee Trevino, Julius Boros, Hale Irwin, Gay Brewer, Dave Stockton and Rodriguez.
Although he would make 356 career starts on the PGA Tour, make the cut 225 times and earn $214,413, Brown never did make the field for the Masters.
Although tournament winners were invited back in the mid-60s, when Brown won the Waco Turner Open the rule was changed. He didn’t get an invite after San Diego either, and though former Masters champs could suggest an invitation, the folks at Augusta never extended one.
Always gracious
“Sure, I’ve been a little bitter about certain opportunities that were missed,” Brown told me. “I played my best golf when I was young and if I had been able to compete certain places then I might be a rich man today.
“Early on we had trouble getting in the front gates at certain clubs. There were other places we weren’t allowed in the clubhouse and a few tournaments in Florida kept us out altogether. But overall golf’s been good to me. And I’ve made some good friends, guys like Jim Dent, Lee Trevino, Gibby Gilbert, Jim Colbert, George Archer, J.C Snead and a lot more.”
After he left the PGA Tour, he and Margaret — they had six daughters — lived in Los Angeles until a fire destroyed their home. When they came to Dayton, Brown played on the Senior Tour for a while, but later health issues — plus the loss of two daughters to cancer — took a real toll on him.
Finally, Dent convinced the Browns to come to Georgia and, in the process, he took Pete to Augusta National for the first time in his life.
I remember how gracious his comments were afterward and I remember later how Margaret summed her husband up best when she told an Augusta Chronicle writer:
“He’s had some things happen out there, but it didn’t make him bitter. Pete takes things in stride. He still believes in treating everybody the way you want to be treated.”
That’s how he was near the end of his life and that’s how he was back in 1964, when he went from being heckled to the crowd favorite and made history in the process.
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