Loverro: ‘A different time’

Bill Wright vividly remembers the feeling he had while he was flying to Denver for the 1959 U.S. Amateur Public Links Championship with a group of other golfers who were competing in the tournament at Wellshire Golf Course.

“Here I am. I can’t belong to any club, but I qualified for the tournament,” Wright said. “The players didn’t really want to even go on the same plane with me.”

Wright couldn’t belong to any club, because this was 1959 and he was black. The players didn’t want to go on the same plane with him because he was black, and in 1959 black players didn’t compete with white players, particularly in a major USGA tournament.

By the end of the tournament, a black player had won the U.S. Amateur Public Links for the first time.

Tiger Woods will host the third annual AT&T National at Congressional Country Club this week, 50 years after Bill Wright changed golf history and opened the door for Woods and other minority golfers by becoming the first black player to win a USGA championship.

It was a remarkable accomplishment, not just because of the racism Wright faced to compete but also because he had managed to learn the game as a young man growing up in Seattle.

“Nobody would help any black players then,” Wright said. “All the pros were white, and they wouldn’t take you on. I got my techniques from my dad [Bob Wright, who would compete in the 1963 Amateur Public Links], who was a good player and worked hard to teach me the game.”

Wright, 73, had been a basketball star in his youth, all-city and all-state at Franklin High School in Seattle, and he went on to play at Western Washington University. But golf became his love, and it was a tough love for a black golfer. He tried to play in the Seattle city amateur championship but wasn’t allowed, “because I did not belong to any golf club.”

“We couldn’t at the time,” he said. “We had to form our own golf club. When I got pretty good, my parents started fighting this.”

They managed to get the exclusionary rule tossed out, and Wright began competing in tournaments. He also got some lessons from a black golf pioneer, Charlie Sifford.

“The only tournaments a black player could play in then were in St. Paul, Portland, Vancouver and Seattle,” Wright said. “When he would come to Seattle, he would stay with us. He was an inspiration to me because I saw how much he practiced. I saw what it would take to play this game.”

Wright learned to play well enough to qualify for the U.S. Amateur Public Links in 1959. “Nobody had really played well from the state of Washington before in the tournament,” Wright said.

Wright did. In six rounds of matches, Wright birdied the first, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth holes every time, using just 12 clubs - two woods, nine irons and a putter.

“I was hitting the ball well, and I was always a good putter,” Wright said. “My folks had owned a restaurant and pool hall, and when I was very young, I was a very good pool player. Angles have always come easy to me.”

But even crowned a winner, Wright was reminded that in the eyes of the golf world, he wasn’t one of them.

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