Charlie Sifford, often called Jackie Robinson of golf, dies at 92

In one of golfer Charlie Sifford's first events as a member of the professional tour, he was heckled by white spectators — one even kicked his ball off the fairway and covered it with beer cans — in his home state of North Carolina.





That night, an anonymous caller advised him not to show up for the second round.
"Whatever you're going to do," Sifford replied on that night in 1961, "you'd better be ready at 9:20. Because that's when I'm going to be out there on the first tee."
Golf was more than a game for Sifford, who, at age 39, became the first black player to earn a Professional Golfers Assn. of America membership card. His determination to climb over the whites-only wall that surrounded professional golf at the time — an effort set in motion by an insistent California attorney general — helped clear the way for generations of minority players.

On Tuesday, Sifford died in Cleveland at 92 after a recent stroke. President Obama praised Sifford on Wednesday, saying he had faced "indignity and injustice even as he faced the competition" and helped to alter "the course of the sport and the country he loved."
Known as much for his short swing as his short answers to interviewers' questions, the cigar-chomping Sifford was commonly referred to as "the Jackie Robinson of golf," an appellation he viewed with a jaundiced eye.
"If I was the Jackie Robinson of golf, I sure didn't do a very good job of it," he often said. "Jackie was followed by a hundred great black ballplayers. I was followed by no one."
While Sifford opened the door, the number of African American golfers who followed was, as he suggested, relatively small. The most famous, Tiger Woods, on Wednesday called Sifford "the grandpa I never had."