MoreThere was an obit on Thursday in The New York Times, sandwiched between the business pages and the sports pages, for Abraham L. Woods Jr., a distinguished Baptist minister from Birmingham, Ala. The Rev. Woods went to Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he played a little recreational golf and met a big man, Martin Luther King.
Rev. Woods, who was 80, marched with King through the South and stood behind King during the "I Have a Dream" speech. He ran from his church, St. Joseph Baptist, to another one, 16th Street Baptist, after a Sunday morning Klan bombing there in 1963 that killed four young black girls. In 1990, he was still fighting the good fight, protesting Shoal Creek as a site for the PGA Championship, outraged that the club had no black members and that its founder, Hall Thompson, defended the exclusion with the words, "We don't discriminate in every other area except the blacks."
Rev. Woods, then the president of the Birmingham chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, went on "Nightline" and called for the boycott of Delta Airlines and every other sponsor of the tournament unless Shoal Creek changed its ways. (He learned the lessons of Dr. King well.) When the club rushed in a black Birmingham businessman as an honorary member, Rev. Woods saw that as nothing more than an acceptable start. Seven years later, Eldrick "Tiger" Woods won the Masters and became an honorary member of Augusta National, as winners there do. Abraham Lincoln Woods Jr. could not have been happier.
"My father was ecstatic," the Reverend's son said in a telephone interview on Thursday. A urologist named for his father, Dr. Woods was visiting his family in Birmingham. He lives in Orlando, where Tiger lives. "He admired Tiger's excellence as a golfer and the way he carries himself, his decorum. He was a great fan of Earl Woods, how he taught Tiger discipline. He admired his connectivity with his son," Dr. Woods said. He has been close to Tiger Woods at the Bay Hill tournament in Orlando, "on his good days and his bad days," but he's never shaken his hand. The closest he's come is to "buying Tiger Woods paraphernalia for my son," he said.
In 2010 and 2011, Tiger's own PGA Tour event, the AT&T National, will move from its home at Congressional near Washington, D.C., to Aroninink, outside Philadelphia, as work is done to Congressional. Woods surely knows the civil rights history of Aronimink: the 1962 PGA Championship was scheduled to be played at Wilshire Country Club, in Los Angeles. But the California attorney general, Stanley Mosk, told the PGA of America that its championship was not welcome in the state because blacks were not permitted to join the PGA (a policy that came to an end in late 1961) and because Wilshire was an all-white club. (Mosk wrote about the fight in SI in 2001.) The '62 PGA was moved to another all-white private club, Aronimink, which was scheduled to host the '93 PGA Championship until the Shoal Creek fiasco. In part because of the pressure brought to bear by Rev. Woods, the PGA required host clubs for its championship to prove they had minority members. Aronimink was not willing to rush in a minority member, as Shoal Creek did, to keep the tournament. Now there are minority members at Aronimink. There would have to be, or Tiger would not be able to bring his event there, under PGA Tour regulations.
Dr. Woods said his family name comes from the dead plantation world of Prattville, Ala., and that he did not know if he was related to Tiger Woods in any distant way. "In some ways," he said, "we're all related." In any event, he said, he'd be happy to claim him.
Dr. Woods has never been to Shoal Creek, but he's been to many other private clubs over the years, sometimes as a duffing golfer, more often as a lecturer. He is a member of a dining club in Orlando called the Citrus Club. A catchphrase of the club, on its Website, is, "Where the Member is King." M.L. King wasn't likely thinking about such clubs when he marched on Selma, and neither was A.L. Woods. Those Baptist ministers had more fundamental rights in minds. But today the Citrus Club has black members, presumably treated as kings, and so do Shoal Creek and Aronimink and most every other place you can name. The First Golfer (come Jan. 20) is a black man. Woods, famously apolitical, said of the Obama presidency, "It will be one of the great days in America to see a man of color in the White House." Before that could happen, there had to be a man of color in the Shoal Creek clubhouse. And there was. RIP, Rev. Woods.
