But Mack never knew. 

That’s because instead of relaxing in hotel rooms, Mack was living in hotel parking lots, camping out in the tight back seat of his 2013 Ford Mustang. Tinted windows mostly kept others from discovering his predicament.

“It was embarrassing, and it’s probably the only time in my life I lied to my mom, telling her I was in places where I wasn’t,” said Mack, who used public restrooms and the locker rooms of the venues he played to survive the nearly two years of transient life. “My dad was the only person who knew, and he checked in on me all the time.”

That nomadic career surely makes what will happen on Thursday morning sweeter for Mack, when he’ll hear his name announced at the start of the 124th U.S. Open at Pinehurst No. 2 (8:57 a.m. ET start time, 10th hole).

It’s a moment he dreamed of when he first picked up a golf club at age 6, and a milestone — playing in a major — he imagined when he turned pro would have occurred a lot sooner.

“You always dream of playing in something bigger,” Mack said. “I always wanted to play in the U.S. Open and the PGA Championship, and being able to play in my first major championship is going to be special for me and my family.”

Mack, who played at Bethune-Cookman University, joins the list of alums of historically Black colleges and universities to play in the U.S. Open, including Adrian Stills of South Carolina State and Jim Thorpe of Morgan State University. Mack played at Bethune through 2011 under Gary Freeman, who coached the BCU men’s and women’s teams to a combined 10 PGA Minority Collegiate Golf Championships.

“He was like a second father to me,” Mack, who is from Flint, Michigan, said of Freeman. “That was big being away from home to go down to Daytona Beach.”

After starting his career on mini-tours where he played across the United States and spent a lot of his stops in his back seat, Mack earned a spot to play on the PGA Tour Latinoamérica in 2018. But the thrill of playing in the glamorous locales of Columbia, Guatemala and Jamaica waned when the math stopped mathing (he earned $766.62 for a T46 finish at the 2018 BMW Jamaica Classic).

Throughout his career, Mack has had to hustle to continue to pursue his dreams. He debuted on the PGA tour in January 2021 at the Farmers Insurance Open (he was a substitute for his friend, Kamaiu Johnson, who had to give up his sponsor exemption after he tested positive for COVID-19), and later that month Tiger Woods awarded him a spot in the 2021 Genesis Invitational under the Charlie Sifford Memorial Exemption. In four PGA events in 2021, Mack earned $28,343.

Another big accomplishment for Mack was earning a card on the 2023 Korn Ferry Tour. That proved to be a one-year opportunity as Mack eventually lost his tour card at the end of the season with earnings of $45,872 in 20 starts. 

What guarantees the return of Mack each year to play golf are the lifelines provided by the mini-tour events, where winning earns him enough to play another week.

One of the most important mini-tour is the Advocates Professional Golf Association, a tour formed in 2010 with a mission to bring greater diversity and help developing golfers, particularly African Americans, earn spots to play at golf’s highest level. Mack returned to the APGA this season and is the first player from that tour to earn a spot in the U.S. Open.

“This is a milestone,” said Kenyatta Ramsay, the PGA Tour vice president of player development who has helped bring APGA tour events to major golf venues. “Give a lot of credit to the APGA for providing their guys with the opportunity to get competitive reps and make enough money to invest back into themselves.”

Mack’s ability to invest back into himself set up the moment on June 3 during what’s billed as “golf’s longest day,” where 687 amateur and pro golfers played in 10 Final Qualifying events for 44 available spots in the U.S. Open. Mack was playing at The Bear’s Club in Jupiter, Florida, where 73 players played 36 holes for five U.S. Open spots.

Mack entered the last of his 36 holes needing a birdie to force a playoff. He reached the par 5 in two, and two-putted from 40 feet to reach the playoff where three golfers played for the last U.S. Open spot.

Mack was one of two golfers to advance to the second playoff, where he hit a tough bump-and-run chip to within inches of the hole to make par (his opponent, Brendan Valdes, three-putted for bogey).

It was a moment that screamed for an emotional response from Mack who, instead, had his head down as he walked to shake the hand of Valdes before later sharing an embrace with his brother Alex, who was carrying his bag.

“He carried my bag on the Korn Ferry Tour, so it was a full circle moment of doing it together,” Mack said of his brother. “We later went to our parents’ house and had a nice celebration.”

Mack’s even-keeled temperament might be his biggest asset when he’s announced to play his opening round Thursday.

“Just standing on that first tee, I know I’m going to be nervous kind of like anybody in that situation,” Mack said. “But once I hit that first tee shot, I’m going back to work and hoping I can do something great from there.”

Mack has definitely faced many challenges to reach this moment, and enduring those nights in the back seat of the Mustang can only help him embrace what he’s about to face in his first major.

“My dad always told me ‘don’t ever give up,’ ” Mack said. “People go through things every day. I’ve been through a lot, and I would do it again just knowing the love I have for this game.”

Woods never said he was the greatest. He didn’t need to. “There is no sense in going to a tournament if you don’t believe that you can win it,” he once said.

Yet, coming into the PGA Championship at the Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Kentucky, Woods was circumspect about his chances of hoisting his fifth Wanamaker Trophy. Asked about the state of his game, he admitted that he was rusty and that the barrage of injuries had taken a toll on his body. “I can still hit shots,” he said on Tuesday. “It’s getting around is more of the difficulty that I face day-to-day and the recovery of pushing myself either in practice or in competition days.”

When the tournament began on Thursday, Woods, who was making his 23rd appearance in the PGA Championship, performed like the part-time player that he has become over the last several years. On his way to a 1-over par 72, the 48-year-old World Golf Hall of Famer hit a smattering of good shots but hardly kept pace in a first round that saw a record 64 players shoot under par scores.

“It’s just the competitive flow,” he said after the round. “It took me probably three holes to get back into competitive flow again and get a feel for hitting the ball out there in competition, adrenaline, temperatures, green speeds. These are all things that normally I adjust to very quickly, and it just took me a few holes to get into it.”

By Friday afternoon, the tournament had been temporarily upstaged by the early morning arrest of Scottie Scheffler, the game’s No. 1 ranked player, for allegedly disobeying a police officer’s order at the entrance to the Valhalla Golf Club. Looking invincible like the Woods of old, Scheffler settled down after the shock of being handcuffed and hauled off to jail to shoot a 5-under par 66 to go into the weekend with a chance to win his second major of the year after taking the Masters last month. As Scheffler went off to answer questions about spending time in a Louisville holding cell, Woods was starting his round and would need a good one to avoid missing just his 15th cut in 93 major appearances.

Starting his second round two shots off the projected cut of 1 under par, Woods went seven over par in his first four holes to guarantee that he would miss the cut. It’s hard to imagine a worst scenario for a player already battling competitive rust and old age in a game dominated by much younger players. Here he was looking ahead to the next tournament, the next opportunity to show that he could still play at next month’s U.S. Open at Pinehurst, but stuck for five hours on a golf course where he had solidified his legend 24 years earlier in an epic duel with Bob May at the 2000 PGA Championship.

Back then when Woods was in the morning of his career, he turned the Jack Nicklaus-designed Valhalla Golf Club into a theater with a two-act play and May as his benevolent antagonist. In the final round in 2000, they matched each other shot for shot, creating a drama unprecedented in televised golf history. Then in the three-hole aggregate playoff, Woods survived to win by one stroke. That victory at Valhalla was the third leg of the Tiger Slam, which climaxed when Woods won the 2001 Masters.

But these are different times in the game of golf. In 2000, the PGA Tour was in the beginning of a period of monumental growth as an outsized talent with a mixed racial heritage was transforming what had long been identified as a country club sport played mostly by white people. To many, Woods was the game and the PGA Tour was his home. Now, no longer the masterful player capable of holding your attention for hours on Sunday with his feats of excellence, Woods has become a senior statesman in the game and a defender of what he has helped to build in the sport over the last 30 years.

As the biggest name on both the PGA Tour Policy Board and the PGA Tour Enterprises Board, Woods has become one of the most powerful figures in negotiations between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), which funds LIV Golf. During what is turning out to be a slow and painful exit from competitive golf, Woods is helping to set the direction of the future of the game.

At Valhalla, he took on his new role.

“We’re trying to make the PGA TOUR the best it can be day-in and day-out,” he said Tuesday. “That’s one of the reasons why we have arguments and we have disagreements, but we want to do what’s best for everyone in golf and the TOUR.”

About the PGA Tour’s negotiations with LIV Golf, he said, “we’re making steps and it may not be giant steps, but we’re making steps.”

Easily missing the cut at the PGA Championship after a six-over par 77 on Friday, Woods didn’t take any steps toward reclaiming a place at the top of the pecking order of the best players. At Valhalla, he still commanded the biggest galleries like he did when he won there 24 years ago. Back then, he was looked upon by many as the savior of the game, who gave an inspiring and life-changing sermon on Sunday afternoons with his golf clubs.

That seemingly ubiquitous presence on Sundays is waning, but his star still shines brightly over these players still playing on the weekend on a stage he set for them.

But here was Tiger Woods, who was accustomed to playing late on Sunday afternoons, finishing his day with a 5-over par 77 to finish in last place among the 60 players who made the 36-hole cut.

On Saturday, the five-time Masters winner — saddled with back pain — shot an 82 for his worst round in 26 appearances in golf’s first major of the year. Yet he was determined to finish the tournament. Only Woods could draw such a massive gallery, where the patrons hadn’t come to see him compete for the green jacket, as much to celebrate what he had been when he was the best golfer on earth.

As he made his way up the 18th hole on Sunday, the patrons swelled around the green, forming an amphitheater for perhaps this great player’s last scene on this grand stage.

The 15-time major winner has never looked worse in a storied career mired with injuries. In Saturday’s third round, Woods hit just eight greens on his way to two double bogeys, eight bogeys and two birdies. It was more of the same on Sunday. After making a birdie at the par 5 second hole, he went six over for his next 16 holes and had just one birdie in the round.

Yet he declared the week a success, showing a defiance and optimism for a playing career with bleak prospects for the future.

“It was a good week all around,” he said. “I think that coming in here, not having played a full tournament in a very long time, it was a good fight on Thursday and Friday. Unfortunately, yesterday it didn’t quite turn out the way I wanted it to.”

Woods is determined, if not perhaps a tad delusional, to believe that he still has what it takes over 72 holes to win a major championship or any tournament. But few athletes in any sport have shown as much dedication as he has to overcoming adversity to return to the winner’s circle.

On Sunday morning, Woods rose at 3:45 a.m. to go through the treatments to get his body prepared for his 9:35 a.m. tee time. Where once he set the standard for excellence on the course, causing players to tremble with fear in his presence, he’s now almost pitied by competitors, even as they revere him as a god in the sport.

“I don’t think anyone wants to catch Tiger at his best,” said Neal Shipley, a 23-year-old amateur who played with Woods on Sunday. “No one is going to win when he’s playing his best. Certainly rooting for him and rooting for good golf shots. I really appreciate all the work that he does to keep his body ready to come out here. He’s really grinding and making a big commitment to be out here for everyone.”

Woods will tell you how hard he’s working. It’s his nature both to do the work and talk about it. These days, he’s doing more training than playing competitive golf. On Sunday afternoon, he repeated his mantra: “keep the motor going, keep the body moving, keep getting stronger, keep progressing.”

But to what end will all this work serve for his future as a serious challenger in major championships?

Coming into the Masters, many in the golf world were hoping that Woods’ body could withstand Augusta National’s hills for four days. On Sunday afternoon, there was a sigh of relief on the faces of many in the gallery when he walked up the 18th hole. It was a relief that was also on his face. He couldn’t be satisfied by his play, but the vicissitudes of life have taught the 48-year-old to be grateful over more modest gains like a pain-free day and simply completing a tournament.

By the time he finished signing his scorecard, Woods was already looking toward the remainder of the year’s major championship schedule. In May, the PGA Championship will be held at the Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Kentucky. In 2000 at Valhalla, Woods beat Bob May in a three-hole playoff for his second straight PGA Championship. That was the Woods who was in the midst of winning four straight major championships.

He can’t be that player again and he knows it, but that doesn’t mean he’s not determined to get one more shot at greatness.

Sixteen years later, Woods is still playing through pain.

“I hurt every day,” he said Tuesday at the Masters, two days before he is to make his 26th appearance in the tournament. His high pain threshold has become a part of the legend that began at the Augusta National golf club, where he won the first of his five green jackets in 1997 with a record-setting 18-under par score of 270. Woods withdrew from the Masters in 2023 after reaggravating his plantar fasciitis. After vowing at the beginning of the year that he would play once a month, he has entered only one event, the Genesis Invitational in February, where he withdrew with flulike symptoms.

“My body wasn’t ready,” Woods said. “My game wasn’t ready. But now we have major championships every month from here through July. So now the once-a-month hopefully kicks in.”

Dating back to 1997, Woods has never missed a cut at the Masters as a pro. Even as his body has let him down with one injury after another, his admiration of the tournament has never wavered.

His eyes still light up when he thinks about the first time he visited Augusta National for a college tournament. No matter what is happening in his life, coming to the Masters recharges him. In April 2010, two months after he apologized publicly for his extramarital affairs, he came to the Masters, where he could focus on golf. With little competition coming into the tournament, he finished in a tie for seventh, one of his 14 top 10s in the event. Pain is the price he will pay to play in the Masters.

“Just the fact that I’m able to put on a green jacket for the rest of my life is just absolutely amazing, “ Woods, 48, said.

Though with his injuries and relatively advanced age in a game dominated by younger players, it’s easy to dismiss Woods now as a mostly ceremonial presence in the Masters. A part of the allure of the tournament has always been the history of the course and its great champions from Gene Sarazen to Ben Hogan to Arnold Palmer to Jack Nicklaus to Gary Player. As the only major championship that comes back to the same place every year, the golf world has unparalleled intimacy and knowledge of this golf course.

Woods may be one of the tournament’s greatest champions and also one of its biggest fans.

“[The Masters] has meant a lot to my family,” he said. “It’s meant a lot to me. I always want to keep playing in this.”

As a past champion, he can play in the tournament for as long as he wants. Palmer was in the 2004 Masters field at age 74 for the 50th and final time. Woods is unlikely to play competitive golf into his 70s. He has long said that he has no interest in being a ceremonial golfer, happy to bask in the nostalgia for his greatness from adoring fans. For now, he believes he can still play with the best players in the world.

“If everything comes together,” he said, “I think I can get one more.”

Many thought he was done winning major championships. Then he won the 2019 Masters, when everything did come together. To win a sixth green jacket this week would be the greatest accomplishment of his career. It wouldn’t just be because of all that he’s been through with the injuries, but also because of the endurance of a self-belief and love of golf that began when he was a 6-month-old baby sitting in a high chair watching his father Earl hit balls into a net in their garage.

“I love golf,” he said Tuesday when asked why he continues to play. “And be able to have the love I have for the game and the love for competition be intertwined, I think that’s one of the reasons why I’ve had a successful career. I just love doing the work.”

On Thursday at 1:24 p.m. ET, when he starts his first round of the 88th Masters with Jason Day and Max Homa, Woods will get a chance to prove to himself that his body can endure the hilly Augusta National layout for four days and he can win another green jacket.

It’s hard to doubt him at Augusta, where everything works together for the good for him when he’s on these hallowed grounds.

“I still think things” can come together, he said. “I don’t know when that day is, when that day comes, but I still think that I can. I haven’t got to that point where I don’t think I can’t.”

Six months earlier, Montgomery had beaten Walker in a unanimous 15-round decision. In the crowd of 17,466 for the rematch were 20 Augusta National Golf Club members, including one of its founders, Clifford Roberts. The group had come to New York to support Walker, a former shoeshine boy at the club who had made it big as a lightweight champion. Since his first fight at Madison Square Garden in 1941 in a victory against Guillermo Puentes, these titans of the business, legal and amateur golf worlds had been coming to New York to support the 22-year-old boxer. His name was now synonymous with the club that had hosted the first Masters tournament in 1934.

Boxing didn’t make Walker a rich man or even a major celebrity like his contemporary Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion of the world, who could trade on his stellar career in the ring and patriotism during World War II for lifelong hero status with the American public. To early members of Augusta National, Walker was both a symbol of the power of an emerging sports culture that made heroes of athletes and the racism and prejudices of a society that resisted equality for African Americans. Their homegrown hero could be all that he wanted to be in New York, but in the Deep South, the members of Augusta National did not defend his rights as a man.

Bobby Jones, the club’s co-founder who won all four of golf’s major tournaments in 1930, was one of Walker’s biggest cheerleaders at these fights. Grantland Rice, the famous sportswriter and Augusta National charter member, wrote with insight about the sport.

After Walker was defeated in his first fight against Montgomery on May 21, 1943, Rice said that the young boxer “will be the greatest fighter in history if they don’t try to teach him how to box.” For Rice, who wrote that the heavyweight champion Joe Louis had the “instinctive speed of the wild,” Black fighters were largely incapable of mastering the sweet science of boxing.

However, there is some truth to Rice’s analysis of Walker’s toughness in the ring. “People have to want to see you fight,” Walker once told a reporter. “When they learned about this boy from Georgia . . . they found out that I would fight every second of every round and never give up.”

This was a mentality that he discovered in the bowels of an Augusta hotel. During the early years of Augusta National, before there were cottages on the grounds, many members stayed at the Bon Aire Hotel in the city. Augusta National’s Black steward, Bowman Milligan, would organize a battle royal, which featured a half-dozen young Black boys fighting each other in a ring, for their entertainment. Wearing full-size boxing gloves, the boys would fight until the last man was standing.

Since the days of slavery, these battle royals had been popular amusements for white men. In Jackson County, Alabama, slave owners matched their slaves by size and placed bets. Frederick Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist, wrote in one of his memoirs that these fights were “among the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection.”

There is a vivid battle royal scene in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, Invisible Man, where the leading white citizens gather in a hotel ballroom to witness young blindfolded Black men fight each other. “A glove smacked against my head. I pivoted, striking out stiffly as someone went past, and felt the jar ripple along the length of my arm to my shoulder,” said the narrator of the book, which became an international bestseller. “Then it seemed as though all nine of the boys had turned upon me at once.”

In Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner describes the battle royal as a “hollow square of faces in the lantern light, the white faces on three sides, the black faces on the fourth, and in the center two of his wild negroes fighting, naked, fighting not like white men fight, with rules and weapons, but like negroes fight to hurt one another quick and bad.” Ellison and Faulkner didn’t need to look far for this description. In the early 20th century, the battle royals were still featured events at fairs, carnivals and holiday celebrations. Of his battle royal passage, Ellison said, “the patterns were already there in society, so that all I had to do was present them in a broader context of meaning.”

Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion, honed the rough and mean style that characterized his boxing as a teenager in battle royals around south Texas. In a match in Galveston, Johnson was forced to wear a Sambo mask and fight his brother-in-law. When the white promoter told him to fight harder or get a real beating, Johnson told him that he hit his brother-in-law so hard that he might get another beating when he got home.

Many Black fighters came to the sport through the battle royals, often like Johnson with little power to make their own choices, but there were some who had refused to participate in these dehumanizing exercises of white power. Henry Armstrong, who won titles in three weight classes, refused to sign up for battle royals in St. Louis, where black towels were wrapped around the contestants’ heads. “I wouldn’t go for that,” he said. “I was too proud.” Another fighter, Collis Phillips, a Black Southern boxer in the 1930s, said he “valued himself too highly” to engage in these battles.

In Atlanta, where Bobby Jones was raised and lived until his death in 1971, battle royals were warmup bouts to the city’s main boxing events. “It looks like a race riot,” said the Atlanta Constitution. “Some places call it a battle royal, but down here it’s a battle blind.” In 1906, Atlanta had been the site of a race riot that resulted in the deaths of at least 40 African Americans hundreds injured after the city’s newspapers reported four alleged sexual assaults on local white women.

As an agile and quick-footed 15-year-old, Walker viewed the battle royals as an opportunity to make money to help his grandmother feed his brother and sisters. Milligan recognized his potential as a fighter and hired him at the club. Ultimately, the group of 20 Augusta National members would form a syndicate to finance Walker’s boxing career with Milligan acting as the boxer’s manager and guardian until he turned 21. His backers from the club set up a reserve from his earnings to pay his taxes and an investment account.

In the title rematch, the judges gave the 5-foot-6, 135-pound Walker 11 of the 15 rounds for a unanimous victory over Montgomery to reclaim the lightweight championship. When Walker arrived at the Park Lane Hotel for the post-fight celebration, he was met with an embrace by Roberts, who had passed the hat around to the members to raise the $500 for him to leave Georgia to train in New York. Other backers crowded around him, shaking his hand and pouring on the affection befitting a champion who had regained his title.

For Amsterdam News columnist Dan Burley, who was there for the post-fight festivities at the hotel, the appearance of Walker’s white Augusta National backers made for an interesting social experiment. “Instead of ripping at the social structure of Augusta and the South, they obtained their objective by sponsoring their racial ward in the North where certain things can be done; things like fighting a white man in a ring,” Burley wrote. “Development of the viewpoint that brought these men to the side of an illiterate shoe shine boy could very well bring them to the side of other boys — our boys — and develop in truth the new tomorrow.”

These Augusta National members undoubtedly held paternalistic and racist ideas about African Americans. But holding these attitudes didn’t mean that Walker couldn’t be their sports hero.

When Jones came home to Atlanta after winning the first three legs of golf’s Grand Slam, he received a ticker tape parade through the streets of the city. The Black Elks band and 300 Black caddies led the parade. The caddies carried signs that said “Welcome Home Mr. Bobby” and “Welcome Home, Mr. Bob. You Sho’ Brought Back the Bacon.” Now in New York at Walker’s fights, Jones could celebrate the success of one of the club’s Black servants. Yet, Jones and his fraternity of white business and golf elites could have never imagined a world where Black people had equality with white people.

In Roberts’ book, The Story of The Augusta National Golf Club, he recounts the club’s support of Walker with a sketch from the cartoonist, Billy DeBeck, who is best known for the Barney Google comic strip, which was popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Debeck was perfect to create a sketch that caricatured Black people as buffoonish and servile. Sunshine was DeBeck’s most famous African American character. He was Barney Google’s simple-minded servant, whose favorite expression was “You sho am a smaht man, mistah Google.” In the sketch for Roberts’ book, DeBeck depicts Walker as an ape on stage carried by his Augusta National backers.

Walker had a record 21 fights in Madison Square Garden, where he fought Montgomery for a fourth time on Aug. 4, 1944. Five months earlier in March, Montgomery had regained the title in a split decision over Walker in their third fight, but now they were battling for something bigger than themselves. World War II was still a year from ending and these two Black men, both in the U.S Army, were fighting for the cause. There was no purse. The admission price was a war bond, starting at $25 for the least desirable seats to $100,000 for the best ones.

In a 10-round split decision, Walker rallied with a flourish of punches to take a close fight —bringing their record to 2-2 after their final bout. He’d relied on his deadly bolo punch with his powerful right hand. No title was at stake, but the fight, which drew hundreds of wounded veterans, raised $36 million in war bonds from 15,822 spectators.

“They fought to cleanse America of her color and race hates and prejudices,” the Pittsburgh Courier said in an editorial. “They fought to repudiate forever the damnable lie that there is a Master race. They fought to make America a true symbol of tolerance and goodwill. They fought for all the ideals dear to the hearts of downtrodden people everywhere.”

During World War II, Walker was one the biggest draws in pro boxing, a fighter with a stamina and determination that led him to 13 victories in 1942. Yet he would never reach these heights again in his career. He developed a bad knee and by the late 1940s he was a shadow of his former self. He retired at 34 in 1955 with an 83-24-5 record, including 40 knockouts.

As the Masters evolved into one of the most prestigious sports attractions, Walker clung to his roots at the club. Even during the height of his career, he made appearances at the club and took on some of his old duties as a clubhouse attendant, shining shoes and giving massages. For years after his boxing career ended, he shined shoes at the barbershop in the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach, where he served famous entertainers such as crooner Frank Sinatra and singer Sammy Davis Jr., and worked as a restroom attendant. “Come and have your shoes shined by the former lightweight champion of the world,” read a sign outside the barbershop door.

In the 1980s, Sports Illustrated’s Gary Smith found Walker living very modestly in Miami and training fighters at the city’s Fifth Street gym. One of his children told Smith that his father played broke and that despite his manager ripping him off, he owned land and had other investments.

Walker didn’t ask for pity. For him, there was dignity in labor and a job well done. “It’s an honest job and a good living — and I met a lot of nice people,” he once said of shining shoes. In one photo at Augusta National, Walker, who died in 2000 at 78, is giving Masters champion Byron Nelson a shoeshine during the 1946 tournament. He has the look of a proud and dignified Black man.

It’s not the kind of image you see nowadays of Black excellence, but it shows all too well the tremendous effort that it took for Beau Jack to emerge from those battle royals at the Bon Aire Hotel to fashion a life that had to overcome invisibility and darkness.

Sifford and Elder were two of the best African American golfers during an era when the PGA of America’s Caucasian-only clause had relegated them mostly to the United Golf Association. During one stretch in 1966, Elder won 21 of 23 events that he played on the all-Black tour. Five years earlier, Sifford held the distinction of being the Jackie Robinson of the sport, becoming the first Black member of the PGA Tour in 1961.

Sifford and Elder were heroes to generations of Black golfers — pro and amateur. Sure, they weren’t the only Black golf pioneers, but they were the ones that we knew best. Everybody had a story about the greatness of Bill Spiller and Ted Rhodes, who pressured the PGA to end the clause, but they were two Black golfers who never got a real opportunity to play the PGA Tour.

By 1997, Elder and Sifford had been followed by many Black players on to the PGA Tour, but they are the ones in a Nike commercial with Tiger Woods. The commercial, which first aired that June, is set against the backdrop of Woods’ historic victory that April in the Masters Tournament, where a mere eight months before his birth in 1975 Elder had become the first African American to play in the tournament. In the commercial, Woods, Sifford and Elder enjoy a conversation as they walk down a fairway.

“Thank you, Mr. Sifford,” Wood says. “Thank you, Mr. Elder. I won’t forget. You were the first. I refuse to be the last.”

I first saw this commercial on my parents’ Zenith floor model TV: the same kind of TV where I had seen other seminal sports commercials such as “Mean” Joe Greene’s 1979 Coca-Cola spot and the Mars Blackmon It’s Gotta Be The Shoes ad with film director Spike Lee and NBA star Michael Jordan in 1991. But what made the Woods-Sifford-Elder commercial special was how it masterfully crystallized the journey of African Americans in the game in a 30-second spot.

For me and many others, it was as much a history lesson and public service announcement as much as it was marketing for Nike products. I didn’t have to imagine the links across generations — from slavery to Reconstruction to the Jim Crow era to the Civil Rights Movement — I could see it through these three Black men.

Woods’ announcement this week of his split with Nike after 27 years was a reminder for me of the symbolic power of that commercial. Perhaps, his most enduring legacy as an ambassador for the shoemaker is that by wearing its iconic swoosh logo he was able to tell a story about race in America and the game of golf in a way that was accessible and inspirational.

Maybe the best part of the 15-time major winner’s career with Nike is that it didn’t become so large that it overshadowed his main brand as a Black man who defied racism and structural barriers to become the best player of his generation and one of the all-time greats. We won’t remember Woods’ products at Nike in the way that Air Jordans have come to define Jordan’s entire career. The swoosh, never meant to overshadow the athlete, receded more into the distance as the golfer’s story has unfolded over the years and the company has discontinued its club and ball businesses.

Yet since signing Woods to a reported $40 million deal after he turned pro in 1996, Nike has been an important piece in the creation of the Tiger Woods brand and the role of race in his self-making and how he is perceived by the public.

In Nike’s I am Tiger Woods commercial, which aired in 1997, children project a utopian view of golf as democratic and inclusive. These kids are not affluent country club kids. They live in cities and take public transportation to the course. They represent the melting pot that is America. Their parents, like Woods’ parents, Earl and Kultida Woods, didn’t grow up playing golf. They taught themselves to play the game with books and videos, so that they could teach their kids to play.

I am Tiger Woods and his first Nike ad, Hello World, evoke Langston Hughes’ I Too poem in how African Americans have set out to announce their place in a world that might deny them fairness and equity. The outsider — “the darker brother” who eats in the kitchen — shows the world his worthiness. “They’ll see how beautiful I am/And be ashamed — I, too, am America,” Hughes writes. Woods is similarly bold in these ads — ready for the world, unflinching and confident of his future in golf.

With Nike, Woods showed millions of people through these commercials how the darker brother, this invisible man, this man who could have been a caddie or a cook at a club, changed the game of golf.

Near the end of the commercial in 1997 with Sifford and Elder, Woods tells them, “There’s a jacket in Augusta with my name on it. There’s a jacket in Augusta with your soul on it.” Woods will go on to wear a different logo on his chest and endorse other apparel for the rest of his career, but he won’t ever be able to shake the stories he told for generations wearing the swoosh — stories of American history.

When the Indians signed him in 1948, they recorded in the team yearbook that he was born somewhere between 1900 and 1908. Called the Methuselah of baseball by the Pittsburgh Courier’s Wendell Smith, Paige skillfully used his advancing age in a young man’s game to burnish his legend as one of the greatest pitchers of all time.

“They want me to be old,” Paige wrote about the media and fans in one of his memoirs. “So I give them what they want. Seems they get a bigger kick out of an old man throwing strikeouts.”

During World War II, Paige was on a barnstorming tour through Kansas when he met a 12-year-old catcher named Earl Woods at a game in Manhattan, Kansas. Paige’s catcher, Roy Campanella, who would later player for the Brooklyn Dodgers, let Woods warm up the famous pitcher. Woods promised Campanella that he had a “major-league arm,” and he proved it to the future Hall of Famer when he blew Paige off the mound when he threw a pitch down to second base.

“I did have a good arm,” Woods told Golf Digest in 2003. “And I can say that I caught the great Satchel Paige.”

Woods’ son, Tiger, is 47 and like Paige, his age at this stage of his life is now on full display for the world. For a long time, Tiger Woods was a prodigy who would seemingly stay young forever. He was a Masters champion at 21, and at 25 he became the first golfer to hold all four pro majors at the same time. Where Paige cunningly tried to keep his age a mystery, Woods has carefully marked his career milestones in the chronology of his life.

Before injuries racked his body, Woods used aging as a sign of progress.

“Aging is not fun,” he said in 2020. “Early on in my career I thought it was fantastic because I was getting better and better and better and now I’m just trying to hold on.”

Many of us who have watched Woods’ rise over the last 30 years don’t want him to get old. By any measure — from TV viewership to tournament attendance and purses to greens fees at local municipal courses — Woods is important to the overall vitality of the sport.

On Sunday, Woods finished 18th out of 20 golfers in the Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas. It was his first competitive individual tournament since pulling out of the Masters last April during the third round with ankle and foot pain. Later that month, he underwent fusion surgery on his right ankle.

In the Bahamas at the Albany Golf Club, Woods was understandably rusty but mostly pain free. It wasn’t the old Tiger who won 82 PGA events and had a record 142 consecutive made cuts on the tour or even the one that miraculously won a fifth Masters title in 2019 at the age of 43 after a nearly 11-year winless drought in major championships. With a four-day total of even par on Sunday, he finished 20 shots back of the winner, Scott Scheffler, who is the No. 1 ranked golfer in the world.

But Woods gave his fellow players, fans and the media what they wanted by showing up to play, despite injuries that have made the mere act of walking a golf course a burden for the 15-time major champion. This was one of his annual tournaments and he invited Scheffler and 18 other players to play. And by coming, they were paying homage to their aging hero.

“I’m curious to see what this is going to look like,” Woods said after his final round on Sunday. “I haven’t done this in a while. I spend more time in the treatment room and the weight room than I do on the golf course. That’s just a part of wanting to hang around as an athlete.”

Pro athletes fight for longevity. Golfers can hang around longer than most any sport. Only in golf could we be talking about a person still trying to win major championships approaching his 50th birthday. For Woods, who plans to play one tournament a month in 2024, it’s the way he’s built. All he’s known since he was a toddler was how to hit a golf ball.

It was the same way with Paige about throwing a baseball. In 1965, Paige pitched in his last major league game with the Kansas City A’s, where at 59 years old he gave up only one hit while pitching three scoreless innings in a September game against the Boston Red Sox on Satchel Paige Appreciation Night at Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium. To help him earn enough time for a league pension, the A’s owner, Charlie Finley, gave him a contract at the end of the season. A showman in his own right, Finley staged Paige before the game in a rocking chair in the bullpen with a nurse rubbing liniment in his right arm. Paige, who died in 1982 at the age of 75, couldn’t have chased down a bunt, but on the mound he still had command of his pitches and threw in the high 80s. His performance was all the proof that the batters he faced needed to know that he still had the stuff to get out big league hitters.

Desperate for a pension to take care of his growing family at a time when the life expectancy of Black men was a little longer than his age, Paige wanted to prove that he could still pitch. “Now I’ll stay in shape,” Paige said after needing only 28 pitches over the three innings, “because now they know what I can do.”

Aging can often force people to do difficult and outrageous things to prove something to themselves and others. Built like an NFL safety, Woods is a fanatical gym rat who works out regularly between 3:30 a.m. and 5 a.m. At a recent event for one of his sponsors, Woods explained that he makes 1,000 contacts with a club per day when he’s getting ready for a tournament. In the Bahamas, many were relieved that Woods’ ball speed consistently hovered over 170 mph and that he showed a lot of power with his driver. It was a sign that the old man could still hit it out there with the kids.

“Every day I got faster into the round,” Woods told reporters in the Bahamas. “The first day took me a while to get a handle on it, the second day was faster, today was right away. And that eventually, when I play on a regular basis, that’s normally how it is. It usually takes me during warmup before I get a feel for the round.”

In that final major league appearance with the A’s, Paige took just 10 warmup pitches. His decades of experience had taught him how to beat batters with precision and touch. In his own way, Woods will have to lean on his experience, finesse and unmatched work ethic in this season of his career to beat younger players who haven’t had his nagging injuries. The younger generation might like to see him compete in tournaments and are awed by his accomplishments, but they also want to beat him. They will have their chance at next year’s major championships, where Woods could play all four for the first time during a season since 2019.

Woods, who will turn 48 on Dec. 30, could use his father now. Earl Woods, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1998, died from a heart attack in 2006 at the age of 74. He poured all of his years into his son: how to play golf, the work ethic and mindset to be a champion and the audacity to believe that he could transcend the sport. He couldn’t show his son the process of aging as a pro athlete with the entire sport watching his every move.

Paige offered a lot of advice for staying young, such as avoiding running at all times and fried meats, but his best line on the subject may be that, “Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.”

While all of these solutions may not be appropriate for Woods, he would do well to embrace aging with some of Paige’s fun and wit. It could be his greatest asset.

I wrapped my fingers around the shaft of the 8-iron and swiped the artificial turf of the hitting mat before sending the ball through the humid North Carolina air. The ball landed at the 75-yard mark and within six inches from the pin.

Not bad, I thought as I placed another ball onto the turf. This time, the ball sailed to 100 yards. Another ball landed eight inches away from the pin in the middle of the range. My fourth attempt sailed 80 yards to the right. For someone that’s never picked up a golf club or even thought about it before this random weekend in July, I couldn’t believe that I was smashing these balls like I’ve been playing for years.

The cynic in me believed that these shots were a fluke, and there was no way that I could replicate this streak. The competitor in me wanted to turn beginner’s luck into a full round and into a valuable hobby. But it was the journalist in me who started it all.

Teeing off

Some people turn to golf as a substitute for another sport they couldn’t play anymore but needed that shot of competition. That wasn’t my case. I played basketball and I’m still a bucket. I can still get out there and compete. I don’t need golf to fill that void. I never thought I’d be interested in playing golf at all. I respected it, but I didn’t really have a strong interest in it.

It was a story that I wrote for Andscape that made me take a closer look.

In July, I interviewed Floyd Glenn, a 90-year-old man with an amazing story about playing golf during the Jim Crow era of segregation, becoming a craftsman and opening a golf shop in San Francisco that’s holding its own against advanced technology.

Glenn’s story was a remarkable testament of courage and perseverance. It was the ease with which he described the game, however, that stood out to me. I asked him about being a scratch golfer, who shoots part or better regularly, and he talked about it as if it wasn’t much of an accomplishment. I remember him talking about how much he practiced to get to that level, and how anyone could get to that level by doing just that. He made achieving scratch status sound so simple. Just practice and playing. Nothing about the trials and errors that golfers generally face.

Practice, y’all. He talked about practice as if that’s all you needed. That’s how simple he made the game sound, and it made me want to see how “easy” the game was for myself.

Fighting through the rough

From the beginning, my goal was to consistently hit the ball straight and far enough before attempting a round. During my first time at a driving range, I didn’t pay attention to my stance or my grip. All I knew is that I made contact and that was something that I didn’t expect to do right away.

Three weeks later, I found myself wishing I remembered what I had done to strike those balls so well. I had no reference point. My mechanics were unknown, and my results were subpar. Instead of hitting the stationary driver balls at Marion Lake Club, I was tearing up chunks of the course’s grass with my 7-iron. Or I was either hitting on top of the ball or missing the ball altogether.

I’d get a few good hits from my iron and driver, but it was mostly a steady string of hacks and whiffs. My aggravation was mounting and my patience was getting thinner. I had moments when I thought about giving up. It was cool to venture out of my comfort zone, but I wasn’t improving fast enough. It was the competitor in me, however, and a parallel I made between golf and my sports media career that kept me motivated to learn.

If I had given up when I heard the no’s of managing editors, I wouldn’t be where I am and you wouldn’t be reading this piece now. If I’m still hustling and fighting for a career breakthrough, I should be able to keep that same energy in learning something new. It’s on now. I’m getting something out of this game.

With a new perspective, I dug my heels in. I started to experiment with my stance, my grip, and adjusting my swing to various points. I began to seek out clips on YouTube to improve my swing. I even tried to emulate something called a butterfly grip because it was mentioned on the first episode of Niiice Shot, Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry’s show on Golf Channel. I continued to come to the range frequently, with only an old driver and a 7-iron, going through buckets of balls at a time.

Now, it didn’t matter how many whiffs I had. I was determined to get out there and hit.

Learning among friendly strangers

It takes some vulnerability to expose yourself to failure in this way. You’re sharing your stumbles and falls with those around you and opening yourself up to ridicule. Granted, golf is a game that no one can truly master, but it’s still intimidating trying to learn around those who are more experienced.

The people I’ve encountered on the course have been welcoming and very helpful. It’s also a positive that I frequent a course that’s open to all experience levels. Men who have been playing golf for years volunteer their help. I was told to strengthen my grip. Another told me to flex my wrists and to shorten my swing because it was too wide.

While those tips were beneficial, what helped me the most was relaxing and trying not to overthink. It’s easy to get in my own head about things that might not be going right. When I observed the golfers around me, I realized that their swings failed to line up correctly and tended go to the left or right at times or didn’t have the lift they wanted. Knowing that they are working through issues made it that much more comfortable for me to work through my own.

Putting it together

Using a stronger interlocking grip and a more compact swing, I am now striking the ball straighter and farther than when I started. Whenever I made contact with the ball in the beginning, the ball would shank wide right. Now whenever it veers to the right, it’s only a few inches from the fairway.

I still feel like I’m a few months away from playing a full 18 holes, but it’s fine. I’m in the moment, I’m learning, and even celebrating the small victories. Whenever I get a good hit, I’d dance a little and pump my fist. I might look goofy, but I don’t care. I deserve it because I’ve worked so hard to get to this point. While I’m not close to competing yet, I can work on the fundamentals of chipping and putting.

I’m now hitting the ball with confidence. I’ve established a swing and a grip. I’ve also been blessed with nearly a full set of clubs that I didn’t have to buy. While I didn’t need golf to fill a void of competition, I realized I needed it for more. I needed the game to extend my network and to expose myself to a variety of people. I needed the game to also strengthen my patience and renew my sense of determination and hustle.

Looking around the golf range and practice putting area and seeing dozens of Black golfers and people of color.

“For me, that was one of the coolest experiences,” said Hulede, at the time competing in the PGA Minority Collegiate Golf Championship (now PGA Works) as a member of the Towson University golf team. “That was the only tournament I played in college where I was able to see other golfers who looked like me.”

Growing up in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and playing at the Enterprise and later the Country Club at Woodmore, most of Hudele’s golf experiences were with Black people — Prince George’s County long held the title of the richest majority-Black county in America until it was replaced by Charles County, Maryland, around 2019. The isolation he felt as a Black collegiate golfer led the first-generation Ghanaian American to launch the Hulede Collegiate Golf Scholarship last year. Nine $2,000 scholarships have been awarded to people of color in two years in an effort to support student-athletes.

“Why did I launch the scholarship? I just essentially wanted to be the representation that I wish I had in college,” Hulede said. “When I was in school, I was trying to figure out who I was as a Black male playing a collegiate sport that was dominated by whites.”

“The ultimate goal? To become the biggest minority golf scholarship.” — John Hulede

You can’t award a scholarship unless you have money. Hulede has raise money for the scholarships using his own money, an annual commitment from several golfers from the Country Club at Woodmore, and a matching gift from Adobe, where he began working in 2022 as a mid-market field account manager.

“I had a bunch of big tech interviews in my latest job search, and I found out that Adobe does a company match up to $10,000 for charity,” said Hulede, who went into tech sales after graduating from Towson in 2017 and earned his master’s degree from the University of Maryland in 2020. “I started to Google how to start a scholarship, and that’s how it started.

“I’m a spiritual person,” said Hulede, who got his start in golf through the First Tee program when he was 8. “I felt like I was entering another chapter of my life, and that I had to do my part to give back.”

And that’s one of the traits Hulede seeks in awarding scholarships — student-athletes who are willing to give back. Applicants must have a 3.0 GPA and submit an essay that touches on their extracurricular activities outside of golf, and their plans to contribute to their community after graduation.

Hope Hall, who is in her second year of playing golf at Dartmouth, discovered the scholarship as she sought to supplement funds for her education. Hall is the only student-athlete who has received the scholarship both years.

Hall, 18, has been playing golf since she was 3 years old and, like Hulede, has experienced isolation as a collegiate golfer.

“It wasn’t rare to see Black people on the golf course back home” in Boca Raton, Florida, said Hall, who played in Stephen Curry’s Underrated Golf Tour in 2022. “My first tournament in college, I was like, ‘wow, there’s really no Black people here.’ ”

Hall was pleasantly surprised to see Hulede at her tournament in April, when Dartmouth played at the U.S. Naval Academy.

“Knowing that John is there offering support that’s beyond financial was great,” Hall said. “He’s inspired me in a way that when I graduate from college, and hopefully I’m not in debt, I’d like to create some ways to pay it forward.”

There have been 170 applicants for the Hulede Scholarship in two years. He wants to increase the award to $3,000 per winner next year with the help of donors and the Adobe company match.

His view for the future of the scholarship?

“In five years, I’m aiming to provide $5,000 for each winner,” he said. “The ultimate goal? To become the biggest minority golf scholarship.”