“As long as I’m alive,” said Clifford Roberts, one of the club’s founders in 1933 and a longtime Masters chairman, “all the golfers will be white and all the caddies will be black.”
In 1997, 20 years after Roberts’s death, Tiger Woods, with a white caddie, won the first of his four Masters championships, shattering the mirror that Roberts’s vision reflected. Woods, who has won 14 majors, changed the face of golf in more ways than one. Not only is the best golfer of this era not white, Woods’s success has helped push the black caddie to the brink of extinction.
At the 76th Masters this week, there will be no club caddies required; only two black caddies started the season with regular jobs on the PGA Tour and one has since been fired. The great black caddies of the past, who carried the bags for Gene Sarazen and Jack Nicklaus and the game’s other greats, are dead or well into the back nine of their lives.
