Back in 2015 after screening a documentary about a tragedy that has become a part of our daily norm of late by students of Howard University. One of the students, a then junior hung back trying to speak to the film’s executive producer, a two-time Kia NBA MVP, and an avid golfer. The young man had hoped to hit the links with the NBA star, and while that did not happen, they engaged in a brief conversation about their mutual love for golf. That chat made an impression that set into motion said player making a major donation that brought back competitive golf to “The Real HU” for the first time in many years.
On Monday, three-time NBA champion and two-time Kia MVP Stephen Curry of the five-time defending Western Conference champion Golden State Warriors and Howard University President Dr. Wayne A.I. Frederick announced plans for the institution’s first Division I Men’s and Women’s Golf Program at that news conference.
That announcement, which took place at the Langston Golf Course in Northeast Washington D.C. consisted of Curry making a six-year commitment to help fund the program, beginning with the 2020-21 season.
While the amount of money Curry will give to the program was not disclosed, The Washington Post, who first reported about the golf program being resurrected at Howard, did report that the commitment would be in the range of seven figures.
“Today is obviously a historic opportunity for not just Howard but I think historically black colleges and universities,” Dr. Frederick said at Monday’s news conference.
Dr. Frederick added by saying at the course named after John Mercer Langston, the first African-American elected to Congress in Virginia and the first dean of Howard’s Law School, “This is an avenue for students who otherwise wouldn’t have an opportunity to attend Howard University to use the game of golf to participate in that.”
Howard for nearly five decades had a Division II Golf team and an intramural golf program. It was discontinued during the late 1970s according to the school’s officials. The new program is believed to be the first time Howard will have a Division I golf program in the 152-year history of the university.
Dr. Frederick said at Monday’s news conference that Curry’s financial commitment to the program for its first six years will give Howard the ability to do the proper assessment of its competitive standing in D-I. The men will play in Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC), while the women will be independent since there is no women’s golf programs in the conference.
When the program begins next year, it will have a coach and three scholarship athletes, with two of the slots going to women. The team will be outfitted by the shoe company that sponsors Curry, Under Armour and Callaway Golf will provide the equipment.
While the golf course Howard will practice and compete on has yet to be determined, the hope the school’s officials have is the location where they had their press conference to announce this new team, Langston Golf Course.
“It’s a big opportunity for us to expose students to a game that oftentimes is played as business deals are decided and a game that generations of families can play together,” Frederick said.
The aforementioned rebirth of the program at Howard was set into motion after a chance meeting between Curry and a then junior student Otis Ferguson in January 2015 after a screening of “Emanuel,” a documentary film on the 2015 mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, S.C., which Curry executive produced.
After the screening, Ferguson talked to Curry about efforts to possibly make golf more mainstream on HU’s campus.
“You know, Otis talked about wanting to start a golf club here, and he had sent out flyers trying to have people come to a room on Howard’s campus, and just get people interested in game,”
Curry said about his conversation with Ferguson on Monday. “But he wanted to take it to another level. And the idea around turning it into a Division I program for men and women was born on that specific night. And 7 ½-eight months later we are here now announcing the first Division golf program for Howard University all because of this guy right here.”
To put into perspective how big of a moment this is for not just Howard but all Historically Black Colleges/Universities (HBCUs), about roughly six percent of golfers that compete collegiately are African American, Latino or Native American, according to the N.C.A.A. That is despite the influence of Tiger Woods, who more than two decades ago burst onto the scene as the first African American golfer to win the Masters.
While the number of people playing golf has increased, it has not moved the needle in terms of the numbers of minorities who play. In fact, they have gotten worse.
According to the National Golf Foundation, of 2.6 million people who played golf for the first time in 2018, an increase for the fourth consecutive year for those that were in the beginners phase, just 26 percent were identified as “non-Caucasian,” with that number being partially attributed amongst participants that were Asian. The number of African American players has dropped from 1.5 million to 800,000 between the years 2007 and 2018.
The representation of participants on the PGA Tour continues to be Caucasian Americans, just as it was in the 1980s.
Observers and historians of golf have also noted while there have always been African American golfers and caddies, the sport is very expensive and requires a great deal of space for access to many African American kids.
This decrease has also been the result of the major hurdle that has stood between African Americans and their opportunities to excel in golf and that is simply access.
These long-standing barriers range from the hardline practices of racism at members club that have been in existence for many years to the systemic issues from course locations to the cost of equipment, from golf clubs to shoes.
It has not helped that a lot of historic African American golf courses like Freeway Golf Course in Sicklerville, NJ, the first African American-owned 18-hole golf course in the U.S. are closing or have been closed.
“It’s not a sport that is cheap for people to play, you have to travel long distances to get to golf courses, and golfers don’t get all the ballyhoo that basketball and football players get,” Calvin Sinnette, author of “Forbidden Fairways: African Americans and the Game of Golf” and a retired professor of Howard’s medical school said. “As a result, the game doesn’t attract many young black people.”
Golf is also a sport that very often is passed down from parents to their kids, which is how Ferguson picked up the game as he spent his early years in Bloomfield Hills, MI swinging plastic golf clubs as a way to spend time with his father on the links.
That is how Curry picked up the game, from his father and legendary shooter of the Charlotte Hornets Wardell Stephen “Dell” Curry, who now does color commentary for them on FOX Sports Southeast. He first joined his dad on the golf course at about age 10, which led him to playing the game for three years on the high school team.
“I was blessed at a young age that we could afford to play,” Curry, a frequent golf partner of the 44th President of our nation Barack Obama said. “I just think about how many kids, especially from underserved communities, have the talent to play but just don’t have the funds or the resources.”
By middle school, Ferguson was playing competitively and made the varsity squad in his freshmen year of high school.
That same year he took a trip to Howard, where his dad and uncle attended college, as well as his three older sisters and several cousins. After attending HU’s famed Homecoming, it was then that at age 14 Ferguson decided this was the institution that he would enroll in.
That choice also meant him giving up playing competitive golf because very few HBCU’s had competitive golf programs and make having them as part of their school a priority, putting the focus of the bulk of their resources and scholarships for athletics on sports that generate major revenue like football and basketball.
To bring this into context, out of the over 100 HBCUs in the nation, only about 30 of them have golf programs, with none of them with their own golf course on campus, according to Sinnette.
It is that grim reality that led former Jackson State University golf coach Eddie Payton, who coached that program to be one of the best in the nation, for 30 years said African American golf will cease to exist unless “another Tiger Woods” comes along.
Just one year after the retirement of Payton in 2017, Jackson State announced it was disbanding their golf program.
“It broke my heart,” Payton said. “It’s a damn shame that our university leaders don’t see the value.”
As mentioned earlier by Curry on Monday, Ferguson posted flyers that suggested the formation of a campus golf group in the spring of his sophomore year.
With no expectations of who would be interested in taking part in this, nearly 40 people showed up.
It took him until the following fall to put this program together, but when Curry arrived in January, the club figured out where it would hold practice. That led to Curry offering help, providing Ferguson with his e-mail address.
Even though they touched basis once, the e-mails from Curry stopped because the Warriors season was in full swing. That did not stop Ferguson from sending consistent updates about finding sponsors for the team and the covering of cost for the tees. He also sent e-mails about the club’s results of the two tournaments the club competed in, and that he had a short conversation with Dr. Frederick, who was receptive to the idea of turning the golf club into an official team.
Ferguson sent Curry a fifth and final e-mail in May congratulating him on the Warriors reaching The NBA Finals for the fifth consecutive season, but he still had not responded back.
Curry though was reading each of Fergusons e-mails and was determined to figure out how he could make a golf program at “The Mecca” a reality.
After the Warriors season concluded in the middle of June with a six-game loss in The Finals to the Toronto Raptors, Curry reached out to Howard’s officials to ask what it would take to restart their golf program.
Admits all the of calls to gets things in order from sponsoring the team and how to get things into place before the start of the fall semester, both parties realized they forget to let Ferguson know.
He found out from a message on Instagram, that was sent by former HU basketball player, who now runs Curry’s media business.
That long-awaited phone call from Curry to Ferguson came the next day and that dream of him finally playing competitive golf again was on the horizon.
On Monday, Ferguson finally got to have that round of golf with Curry, and he was joined by Dr. Frederick and several others on a scorching 90-plus degrees.
Four years ago, a chance encounter between a then Howard University junior named Otis Ferguson and perennial All-Star after a screening of his documentary turned into a conversation of a sport that they grew to love through time with their dads. That encounter turned into bringing a sport back that has been cold to African Americans for many years.
This encounter also serve as a great lesson in having an idea, having the determination and focus to bring it to reality and never losing the essence of why you love something.
We have come to know Stephen Curry as a great basketball player, father, scratch golfer, and now executive producer. He turned his love and passion for golf, and with creator Chris Culvenor, and fellow executive producers of Eureka Productions and Unanimous Media Paul Franklin, Wesley Dening, Jeron Smith, Erick Peyton Charles Wachter, and Michael O’Sullivan and created the miniature golf reality competition “Holey Moley,” commentated by ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” play-by-play analyst Joe Tessitore, with color commentary coming from actor, comedian and retired U.S. Marine Corps Reserve officer Rob Riggle and sideline correspondent and co-host on the talk show “The Real” Jeannie Mai that has aired during the summer on Thursday nights at 8 p.m. on ABC.
On Monday, Curry helped Ferguson make his dream of playing competitive golf again a reality, while giving future African Americans who want to do the same as well if they attend Howard University.
This moment more than anything shows how two people who are worlds a part in terms of where they are in their lives can connect through something like the sport of golf and the lesson that can be learned from it.
It also shows how someone like Curry, who took the time to listen to someone like Ferguson who had a simple dream of just continuing to do something that he loved and making a commitment to bringing it to life with the help of some powerful folks, and in spite of the historic hurdles and naysayers that were right in front.
“We are at a very interesting time in our country and our nation’s history,” Frederick said on Monday. “There is no doubt about that. There’s a lot for us to be cynical about. A lot for us to be disappointed by, especially in terms of the rhetoric. But one of the things that I think we all must make sure we double down on is investing in the people that invest in us.”
ESPN.com’s reporter for the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder Royce Young concurred by saying what Curry did is “one of the coolest stories of the summer for me.”
He added, “Steph is so invested in not just the game of golf, but for that university that is super cool.”
Information, statistics, and quotations are courtesy of 8/19/19 3 p.m. edition of “NBA: The Jump” on ESPN with Brian Windhorst, Royce Young, and Tim MacMahon; 8/19/19 www.nytimes.com story, “Stephen Curry to Bankroll Golf’s Return to Howard University,” by Sopan Deb; 8/19/19 www.washingtonpost.com story “NBA Superstar Stephen Curry Gives Howard University The Gift of Golf,” by Wesley Lowery and Candace Bucker; www.africanmaericangolfersdigest.com/african-american-owned-or-operated-managed-golf-courses-in-the-us; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holey_Moley; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Riggle; and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Curry#Production_company.
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