Lee Elder

Robert Lee Elder was born on the fourteenth of July 1934 at Dallas, Texas, the youngest of ten children of Charlie Elder — a sharecropper turned construction labourer — and Almeta Elder, a homemaker. His father was killed in a 1944 explosion at a steel mill where he had been a wartime labourer; his mother died of a stroke two years later. He was thirteen, orphaned. He was sent to live with an older sister in Los Angeles. He began caddying at the Los Angeles Country Club at fifteen — the only legal entry-point for a Black teenager to the segregated American golfing establishment of the period — and taught himself the game by watching the members of the all-white club practice.

He took up the United Golf Association Black professional tour — the Negro circuit that existed in parallel with the all-white PGA tour from 1925 — at twenty-three in 1957. He played the UGA circuit through 1960 against the principal Black professionals of the day including Charlie Sifford and Ted Rhodes. He served two years of military service from 1959 and returned to the UGA circuit in 1961.

The PGA dropped its Caucasian-only clause from the bylaws in 1961. Charlie Sifford broke the colour line at the PGA Tour in 1961; Pete Brown joined in 1963. Elder qualified for the PGA Tour in November 1967 at his eighth attempt at the PGA Tour Qualifying School. He joined the PGA Tour for the 1968 season at thirty-three. He won his first PGA tour event — the Monsanto Open at Pensacola, Florida — at the playoff hole against Peter Oosterhuis in April 1974. The victory granted him the automatic Masters invitation he had not previously been able to secure.

He played the Masters at Augusta National Golf Club from the tenth to the thirteenth of April 1975 — the first African American to play at the tournament. The qualifying victory at Pensacola, the cuts faced at the Masters across his Pensacola win and the April Masters appearance, and the racial-segregation history of Augusta National since its 1933 founding made the moment one of the principal civil-rights events in American sport of the 1970s.

He played the Masters five additional times across the following years and won four PGA Tour events across his career. He played twelve seasons on the senior PGA Tour from 1984 and won eight events on that tour. The Augusta National Golf Club invited him to serve as one of the honorary starters at the 2021 Masters at eighty-six — the recognition of his 1975 breakthrough.

He died at Escondido, California, on the twenty-eighth of November 2021, at eighty-seven.

He is honored here as the first Black Masters player.