A New Challenge Puts Kids on the Right Course

It is an impossibly perfect January day: bright, nearly windless, the temperature hovering around 80. At the Golf Center inside Hollywood Park racetrack in Inglewood, some 100 golf enthusiasts are taking full advantage.

First-time golfer Lloyd Alex, 16, is among those dead set on honing his skills. Time and again, he settles his lanky frame into a slight crouch at the tee, positions his shoulders, trains his eye on the ball with hawk-like intensity before winding up and letting go a swing. WHOOSH. He began with a promising 200-yard drive on the first tee-off, and while he hasn’t matched that since, Lloyd admits he’s hooked.

“It’s fun,” he says after nearly two hours of practice under the tutelage of experienced golfer and TV weatherman Christopher Nance. “If I keep at it, keep doing what Christopher tells me. . . .” He grins and shrugs as if the possibilities are too vast for words.

Like the other golfers here, Lloyd is young and African American. These are hardly the demographics associated with golf’s genteel--and overwhelmingly white--image, but the Young Golfers Assn. of America, which sponsored today’s Youth Day event, is out to change that.

YGAA founders D’Andre White and Marvin Finley, avid golfers both, say that golf has too long been perceived as the exclusive domain of country clubbers and corporate kings. They say it can be particularly beneficial to black youngsters because it is a highly individual sport that, unlike traditional inner-city sports such as basketball and football, relies more on mental and emotional acuity than sheer physical prowess.

“Everybody can play golf,” says White, a self-described ex-jock who has an engaging, blustery manner. “But it’s also a very humbling sport. You take all the glory, or all the embarrassment. The challenge is always gathering up your focus and concentration and moving on.”

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For all the whiffed balls and elbows cocked at ungainly angles, no one gives up today. No one tosses a club in disgust or laughs at anyone else’s efforts. They all appear far too busy--from the few 5-year-olds on up--simply trying to hit the ball straight.

“Kids say it’s weird at first, then they try it and like it,” says 12-year-old Joi Lynn Hart, a five-year veteran golfer who instructs newcomers at these monthly association clinics. “I like it because I get to travel and meet new people. And it calms my nerves when I’m mad.”

The Youth Day, which functions as a regular open house for the association, is doubly special today: the Megacities Special Olympics organization is starting a partnership with YGAA to train developmentally disabled athletes in golf. Twenty Special Olympians have come out today to work with association players and celebrity volunteers such as Nance and L.A. Dodger legend Maury Wills. Like most of the YGAA players, the Special Olympians hail from central Los Angeles and have had little to no exposure to this sport; and, like them, they appear to be taking to it just fine.

“You know, golf has been a part of other Special Olympics branches for a long time, but we were always discouraged from taking it on,” says Megacities Director Trudi Stewart, whose athletes plan to enter a regional golf competition in April and a state competition later. “We met up with the YGAA just at the right time. This is a very, very important day to these athletes.”

YGAA has turned out to be pretty important to the hundreds age 18 and younger who have participated since it started nearly six years ago. Many have been steered into junior golf leagues, others have nabbed full golf scholarships for college. Finley and White say they encourage participants to see the full spectrum of opportunities the sport offers, from self-esteem enhancement to amateur league touring to careers in golf management.

“Our real goal is to expand kids’ educational goals,” explains Finley, who plays genial straight man to the effusive White. “Golf is a vehicle. We say, let’s try golf because it’s something they haven’t been exposed to.”

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The association came about in 1990 after White met Finley at the Chester Washington golf course in the Athens area, one of the few public courses in central Los Angeles, where they were both regular players. Finley, owner of a real estate investment company, and White, a fleet services operator who once played football for the San Diego Chargers, struck up an immediate friendship.

Their first conversation was about the deplorable state of the Morningside High golf team, which was out practicing on the course that day. The team had only six members, five boys and a girl. “They were wearing raggedy street shoes,” recalls White, and lacked good clubs.

As happens on many a golf course, White and Finley struck a deal: They agreed to come up with a program that would properly acquaint young people with golf. Their tactic at first was to sponsor one player--Eric Clark, a talented 22-year-old who also frequented Chester Washington. But they quickly realized that such an approach was too limiting.

Sponsoring a single player, Finley says, is a risky proposition at best, even at the Professional Golfers Assn. level.

“Oh, it’s a horrible, horrible investment,” says Finley, laughing. “Most often you lose money. It’s no accident a lot of pro players have golf backgrounds--country clubs, corporate dads. That’s not so for African Americans. We realized that we needed to set up a nonprofit association that invited corporate help.”

A growing number of corporate and business sponsors donate everything from equipment and clothing to club refitting; chief among them are Cleveland Golf, Home Savings & Loan, Hollywood Park, Culver City Golf and Paul Mitchell Systems. These and other companies enabled YGAA to not only help participants, but outfit players and expand golf programs at schools such as Morningside.

The real payoff, Finley and White say, is teaching some rough-edged teenagers to adapt to the game and its etiquette. Those who grumble about having to tuck in their shirts and turn the bills of the caps forward are very soon compliant. Macho posturings about the sissified nature of golf soon disappear.

“I’ve heard guys say, ‘I’m not interested in golf, that’s weak,’ ” recalls White, grinning in clear satisfaction. “I play along with that and say, ‘Oh, you’re a football player, huh? Great! Then I’m sure a big, strong guy like you can hit this little ball.’ They can’t, not at first. And often the girls are outdoing them to boot.”

Golf, Finley adds, “demands that you maintain excellence. I can see a transformation in kids in about 20 minutes. Kids tend to rise to your expectations. Too often in black communities they aren’t motivated to try.”

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Yet the YGAA’s biggest challenge is to sustain the young players’ involvement in a sport that constantly requires money, even for public course time. To that end, White and Finley are working with the Ladies’ Professional Golf Assn. and the Western States Golf Assn. to offer free instruction to promising golfers. They are also looking to turn the Jack Thompson golf course on Century Boulevard into a permanent youth facility. A fund-raising banquet and golf tournament are planned for June.

All of this is in the hopes of helping along players like Nakia Whitaker, a 20-year-old golfer who won a full scholarship to Southern University in Louisiana two years ago. Whitaker has been playing nine years, many of them at Chester Washington, where she was introduced to the sport by family members.

“I’m getting a college education from [golf],” she says, surveying the groups of youngsters carefully practicing the swings she coached them on at this Youth Day. “I’m traveling throughout the South now on the NAACP circuit. But,” she says, suddenly radiant, “my real dream is to be one of the first African American women to play in the LPGA.”