This Protester Put Issue in Black and White

More than 30 years before Martha Burk thought about trying to persuade Augusta National Golf Club to do the right thing, Jim Murray boycotted the Masters.

The issue that drove the late, Pulitzer Prize-winning Times sports columnist away from Augusta was, like Burk’s, one for the times. During a period in which avenues were opening for African Americans throughout the country, including the Deep South, Magnolia Lane remained closed to blacks who should have been invited to play in the Masters.

As much as Murray loved writing about golf and golfers, as much as he revered the Masters and most of its traditions, as much as he was enthralled by the azaleas and dogwoods, he refused to go during a seven-year period beginning in 1968.

He returned in 1975, to cover the historic moment when Lee Elder became the first black to tee off in the Masters.

Murray never wrote about the boycott in his column. He came and went before the “look-at-me” era of sports punditry. But even if he hadn’t, it wasn’t his style to draw attention to himself, except in those late-night hours when he would sing Irish ballads by the piano. For years, we in The Times sports department had a quote hanging on the wall from Sports Editor Bill Dwyre that said, “I’ve got agate clerks with bigger egos than Jim Murray’s.”

*

Neither did Murray make an issue of his stance with most of his friends and relatives. One son, Ted, who works for The Times, remembers watching the Masters in those years on television with his dad but never hearing him talk about his reasons for not being there to cover it.

Edwin Pope, a longtime sports columnist for the Miami Herald and a member of Murray’s close circle of sportswriting friends, said last week, “I never heard Jim expound on it, and Jim expounded on everything, especially after midnight in the hotel bar when he wasn’t ready to go back to his room. Murray’s Law: Whenever you go back to your room, the maid will be there.”

Pope said that if Murray talked to anyone about it, it would have been Dan Foster, another member of the circle from Greenville, S.C., who was sympathetic.

“It’s true,” Foster said of Murray’s boycott. “We talked about it, but, even with me, he didn’t dwell on it. He didn’t have to. He didn’t go for a long time, then he went the year Lee Elder played. It was pretty easy to interpret.”

But, Foster said, not everyone knew the efforts Murray had made privately to persuade those in power to right the wrong, specifically on behalf of Charlie Sifford.

Until 1961, the PGA of America was for whites only. That changed when California’s attorney general said the PGA Championship could not be played in the state unless it changed the policy. Six years later, Sifford became the first black to win on the PGA Tour with a victory in the Hartford Open.

When he won again two years later at the L.A. Open, Murray wrote, “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 until 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 [strokes] a side.”

But the Masters didn’t automatically admit tour winners, a point the tournament’s founder, Bobby Jones, made to Murray in letters several times when the columnist would suggest Sifford should be invited.

Murray argued that the Masters could have been more flexible, as least as flexible as it was in establishing its relatively lax standards for foreign players.

“After all,” Foster said, “the tournament is an invitational.”

Rebuffed by Jones and Masters chairman Clifford Roberts, Murray, according to Foster, took his case directly to players he knew such as Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson and Jimmy Demaret. For many years, former Masters winners were allowed to vote for one special invitee. So were former U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur champions. Murray found no allies.

*

“As a friend keeps telling me, it’s proof that God is one of the good guys.”

Murray wrote those words the week in 1974 that Elder earned an invitation to the next year’s Masters with a victory in the Monsanto Open in Pensacola, Fla. Masters officials in 1972 had decided that PGA Tour winners did belong in the field.

In his first column from Augusta upon returning in ‘75, glee dripped from Murray’s fingers as he typed, “They finally got around to the Emancipation Proclamation, which up to now has been a nasty Yankee rumor, and they got a black in the field doing something besides carrying someone else’s clubs.”

But after that tournament, it was 18 more years before Murray returned to Augusta.

I asked him once in the early ‘80s about why he didn’t cover the Masters.

“I like the tournament,” he said. “I don’t much like the people.”

I’m not sure how Murray, who died in 1998, would feel about today’s controversy. If it were only about pressuring Augusta National to extend membership to a rich, white woman who happens to be a corporate CEO or to sit on the Supreme Court, I’m not sure he would be too sympathetic. If, on the other hand, it were about admitting Rosa Parks or Maggie Hathaway, who crusaded for decades on behalf of black golfers, Murray would be in Burk’s corner, if not on her picket line.

“The Masters is lucky to have him,” Murray wrote in 1975 of Elder. “Hell, America is lucky to have him.”

The Times was lucky to have Murray. Hell, America was lucky to have him.

*

Randy Harvey can be reached at randy.harvey@latimes.com.