D4 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, APRIL 10 , 2022
NATHANIEL S. BUTLER/NBA ENTERTAINMENT/GETTY IMAGES
Smith said LeBron James frowned on his golf outings during Cleveland’s 2016 NBA title run.“Having him out
here is definitely a
good thing, man.
He’s bringing a
little light to HBCU
golf. I just hope he
gets better.”
Mike Rice, Florida A&M golf
coach, on the impact former
NBA star J.R. Smith can have
by playing for an HBCU
school.him relax, provided a competitive
challenge, gave his mind some-
thing to do besides think about
how to defend Klay Thompson or
Stephen Curry.
He did this during playoff se-
ries and even the NBA Finals
during his first season with the
Cleveland Cavaliers — at least
until 2016, when he says LeBron
James and the Cavaliers’ coaches
told Smith to stop.
“Talking about I wasn’t focused
and all of that,” Smith says. He
drained a franchise-record
65 three-pointers during the 2016
playoffs, and Cleveland came
back from a 3-1 series deficit to
win its first championship.
He stopped at golf stores dur-
ing offseasons to hit balls, turned
on the PGA station on satellite
radio, flipped on the Golf Chan-
nel for ambient sound. When
Smith retired after the 2019-20
season, he moved to West Palm
Beach, Fla., land of a thousand
links. He says he played almost
every day. He got better, at least
compared with most professional
athletes in other sports, but he
was inconsistent.
Eight months after Smith’s fi-
nal NBA game, he was in the
Dominican Republic when he no-
ticed Ray Allen constantly on his
laptop and on Zoom meetings as
he pursued a master’s degree. “I
ain’t just a basketball player,”
Smith says Allen told him. “He
really tweaked my whole way of
thinking.”
By the time Smith started
thinking about going to school,
support was already gathering
behind HBCUs. In the summer of
2020, shortly after Floyd’s killing,
star basketball recruit Makur
Maker committed to play at How-
ard University instead of UCLA
and Kentucky. More A-list sports
figures began publicly reconsid-
ering and embracing HBCUs for
the first time in decades. Jackson
State named Deion Sanders, the
former two-sport star, as head
football coach; former Heisman
Trophy winner Eddie George be-
came coach at Tennessee State,
followed by Hue Jackson in the
same role at Grambling State;
and former NBA all-star Kenny
Anderson became head coach at
Fisk.
Curry pledged $6 million in
donations to help Howard start
men’s and women’s golf pro-
grams. Top-ranked football re-
cruit Travis Hunter committed to
Jackson State and Sanders. Just
this week, President Biden
named NBA star Chris Paul, who
attended Wake Forest but who
CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGEbe allowed to participate. They
didn’t say why.
“That course has no Black
members, I’m the Black kid on the
team, and yeah,” he says with a
shrug. “We never got a reason.”
This has been part of Wil-
liams’s life since he first swung a
golf club at 2 years old. He says it
builds character to be the only
Black golfer at a tournament, and
he says teammates on his high
school basketball team were be-
ing playful when they referred to
him as “Tiger Woods” when he
entered the locker room. He was
surprised when he attended an
A&T golf tournament and learned
this was still a White sport even at
a Black school.
“Golf is such a mental game; I
don’t believe you can be a young
Black man today and not be men-
tally strong and play this game at
a high level. Because not only are
you going to be clowned and
looked down upon by White peo-
ple but even your own people.”
So why put yourself through it?
These are just a few of the million
psychological cuts, large and
small, that it takes to be a Black
golfer in America. The game is a
mental grind anyway, and so
many other kids succumb to the
ridicule or cost or slow pace, give
up, pick up a football instead.
Knowing it worries your mom,
the dedication it takes and the
constant reminders of your out-
sider status — why keep coming
out here?
Williams shrugs.
“I just love it,” he says.For Smith, love at first swings
On the par-5 sixth, Smith
smashes a 3-wood to the back of
the green and two-putts for a
birdie. Photographers periodical-
ly show up to watch and capture
his swing. The Chicago State
coach asks Smith for a selfie. His
playing partners keep asking him
to regale them with stories from
his past life.
“I can see the glow in their
eyes,” Smith says later, “and I just
try to give them what they’re
looking for.”
Even if they’re not looking for
golf stories, that’s what Smith
gives them. The first time Moses
Malone handed him a golf club, in
2009, Smith drilled the ball 300
yards down the center of the
fairway. Malone adjusted his grip,
showed Smith a few things, and
he went for it again. This time he
missed the ball completely. He
was hooked.
He used to disappear from the
team hotel on game days to sneak
in a quick nine holes. It helpedboro, played golf throughout his
youth and experienced this for
himself. He was a child in 1960,
when four Black activists first
entered the F.W. Woolworth Co.
and sat at the lunch counter,
igniting the national sit-in move-
ment. Watkins was 8 when he
went to the Carolina Theatre to
see “Flipper” and was made to sit
in the balcony. He was in college
when a golf-course employee
called his golf coach at High Point
University.
“They asked: ‘Is that guy still
on your team? If he is, then y’all
can’t come.’ Well, they didn’t use
the word ‘guy,’ ” Watkins recalls.
He says only that it was a racial
slur. “It wasn’t ‘player.’ It wasn’t
‘Richard.’ ”
Those examples are from the
1960s and ’70s, but here’s one
from 2016: Xavier Williams says
his golf team departed for a tour-
nament at a rural country club.
When the bus arrived, a course
official said the Cougars wouldn’tplayer, well, ‘He’s just ghetto.’ ”
Most every Black golfer at the
Aggie Invitational has stories like
these. A.J. Ford, another A&T
golfer, caddied for years at Atlan-
ta’s East Lake Golf Club but
wasn’t permitted to practice his
putting. After tournaments, play-
ers and coaches say, Black golfers
rarely socialize or compare scores
because it feels safer to stay quiet.
Florida A&M Coach Mike Rice
says his golfers, a majority of
whom are Black, are confronted
“all the time,” even on the team’s
home course, for supposed of-
fenses such as not filling a divot
or driving a cart too close to the
green.
“Even me,” Smith says, “when I
go to the golf courses, people still
look at me like: ‘What are you
doing here? Why is he playing
here?’ It’s, damn, like, no matter
what status you have, how much
money you make, you’re still
Black.”
Watkins grew up in Greens-“For a lot of us, as young
African Americans, golf isn’t
cool,” Smith says. “The slacks, the
polo shirt, the quirky shoes. I like
to be comfortable.”
Smith, who took up golf
13 years ago and claims a five
handicap, turns heads here. He
skipped college to enter the 2004
NBA draft, but last fall, after
retiring from basketball, he en-
rolled at A&T and began pursuing
a degree in liberal studies. He also
is 6-foot-6, made $90 million
during a 16-year pro basketball
career and unapologetically
brings swag to the fairways.
Above all, he’s a Black man on a
golf course. That remains a rarity
and to some an oddity, even a
quarter-century after Tiger
Woods burst onto the global
scene. Woods’s dominance and
star power were supposed to
change the game’s complexion.
That didn’t happen, though. Be-
fore a pandemic-fueled golf reviv-
al, only about 3 percent of recre-
ational golfers in the United
States were Black, according to a
survey by the diversity group We
Are Golf.
Even here at the Aggie Invita-
tional, a tournament in which
nine of the 11 competing pro-
grams are from historically Black
colleges and universities, fewer
than half the players are Black.
Richard Watkins, A&T’s golf
coach and the tournament’s orga-
nizer, is one of just four Black
head coaches. His school’s stu-
dent body is almost 80 percent
Black, but his six-member men’s
golf team is only 50 percent Black.
“If there were a plethora of
Black kids out there playing golf
that were good, that were good
enough to help us move to where
we’re trying to get, we’d have
them,” says Watkins, who started
the golf program at A&T in 2015.
“They’re not there.”
That’s a matter of debate
among HBCU coaches. This is a
flash point moment, after all, for
the institutions that teach tens of
thousands of Americans but have
been underserved, poorly funded
and largely ignored for decades.
The murder of George Floyd cap-
tured the world’s attention and
set off a redirection of eyeballs
and dollars toward HBCUs and
their sports teams. Some here
believe golf can capitalize on and
help fuel that movement.
When Smith decided last sum-
mer to go to college, he knew he
would enroll at an HBCU. The
question now, as Smith limbers
up: Can a retired NBA player —
with his skills, style and 6.2 mil-
lion Instagram followers — help
do what Woods could not and
draw Black golfers to the course?
Smith blows warm air into his
hands while he waits his turn on
the tee box. His two playing part-
ners are White. He doesn’t say
much at first, but Logan Kiley, a
freshman from Maryland Eastern
Shore, can’t pass up the opportu-
nity to chat up Smith.
“Do people go crazy when they
see you on campus?”
Smith purses his lips and nods.
There’s no blending in when you
look like him, neither here nor
when he walks through A&T’s
student center.
“Don’t tell me you’re eating at
the caf,” Kiley says.
“Yeah, Chick-fil-A!” Smith says.
They laugh, and then Smith
watches as his playing partners
hit drives into the fairway. Now
it’s Smith’s turn. He swings,
makes contact and watches the
ball.
“Oh, no,” Smith says as it soars
left. “Fore! FORE!!”
Made to feel like outsiders
A few holes ahead, Xavier Wil-
liams tries to correct what he did
wrong on the previous tee shot.
His drive shoots right anyway and
lands near a row of trees.
“The f--- are you doing?!” he
yells, slamming the head of his
driver into Bryan Park’s mani-
cured grass.
The response is relatable to
anyone who has swung a club, but
Williams’s mother, sitting in a
golf cart nearby, frowns. Nobody
corrects her son this time or
glowers at him or threatens him.
But they have before, and those
memories inflame his mom’s
anxiety.
Growing up three hours away
in tiny Winnabow, N.C., Williams
was the only Black golfer on his
youth, middle school and high
school teams. Opponents tried to
cheat him sometimes, assuming
he didn’t know the rules, and
once a White kid refused to shake
Williams’s hand after their round.
Course marshals and fellow golf-
ers watched his every move, his
mom says, and sometimes threat-
ened to report or eject him for
even a slight offense.
Onya Gardener has reminded
her son for years to ignore these
abuses, to watch his language, to
react calmly after a poor shot. “A
White player might be: ‘He’s just
emotional,’ ” she says. “A Black
HBCU FROM D1
Hoping to show that golf is cool, Smith joins HBCU program
GRANT HALVERSON/GETTY IMAGES
GRANT HALVERSON/GETTY IMAGESCORNELL WATSON FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTFormer NBA star J.R.
Smith, who has golfed with
Air Jordan and played golf
while wearing Air Jordans,
brings his personal swagger
and style to the course with
his Nike putter cover.
Smith, a walk-on for the
North Carolina A&T golf
team, wants to see more
Black people take up the
sport, but his coach,
Richard Watkins, said he
doubts Black children will
see Smith playing and think
the sport is cool: “Would I
like to see it change?
Certainly I would. But it’s
cultural.”