Pete Brown Is Black History

While Charlie Sifford is widely celebrated and credited for being the man who broke golf’s color barrier, far less is known about Pete Brown, the first Black man to win a PGA TOUR event.

“This is not just Black history, it’s American history,” says Dr. Michael Cooper, a former club professional and golf administrator who now serves as an advisor to the United States Golf Association. “And sometimes our stories don’t get told the way they need to get told.”

Pete Brown’s road to this historic win was filled with challenges that he somehow, miraculously, would overcome. He is not a footnote in history. His story deserves to be told and re-told.

Pete Brown came up in the Deep South; Jackson, Mississippi, to be specific. He was born in 1935, smack dab in the middle of the Great Depression, in the poorest state in the union, and he was born Black in a period when Jim Crow laws ruled the world he knew. The odds that someone from this particular place and time in American history would one day win a professional golf tournament were astronomical.

Brown’s father, George, was a minister, and his mother, Etta Mae, was a homemaker who also worked the fields at times to help the family make ends meet. There was little opportunity for a young Pete Brown in Jackson outside the fields, but he found it at the golf course.

Brown was first exposed to golf at the Jackson Municipal Golf Course. Drawn by the prospect of making a few dollars a day caddying, Brown took to the game naturally and would practice on the fields around Jackson with a shag bag full of balls he had found around the course. Blacks couldn’t play at the golf course so the fields were all he had. “He was pretty good, pretty young,” his wife, Margaret Brown, shared in an interview with me.

Brown started to play golf with other Black players in the area, and would even hit the road and compete in some of the United Golfers Association tournaments, which was basically the golf equivalent of baseball’s Negro Leagues. It was at a tournament in Houston that Brown met Randolph Wallace, a man who became an early benefactor of Brown’s golf aspirations.

The choice Wallace gave Brown was simple: stay in the Jim Crow South or join the Great Migration of Black people to Detroit, where Wallace had found success in the hotel business. Brown would have a chance at an education and lodging, paid for by Wallace, and would also have a shot at all the money games and hustlers that frequented Detroit’s Palmer Park, a haven for Black golfers in the city. Brown chose Detroit.

Shortly after his arrival in Detroit, polio would take all of Brown’s skill and his ability to walk. He was bedridden for over a year. “The doctor told him he was going to have to find something else to do other than golf,” his wife Margaret told me. But Brown wasn’t having that.

“He didn’t want to live like that. He knew what he wanted to be. He wanted to play golf,” Margaret said, the love and admiration for her husband still evident in her soft voice. Brown moved back home to Jackson, then later to Los Angeles, where he began to put his life and game back together.

Just as Brown’s story is worth knowing, so is the tale of the Waco Turner Open.

From 1961-64, the Waco Turner Open was held at Turner’s Lodge in the small town of Burneyville, Oklahoma, on the banks of the Red River, which forms the southern border of the Chickasaw Nation.

The Chickasaw Nation was created by the United States government as a product of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Chickasaw Tribe, native to northern Mississippi and parts of Alabama and Tennessee, was forced to relocate to Oklahoma. This not-so-great migration is what we now call the Trail of Tears.

Waco Turner, the namesake of the tournament, was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, squarely in the middle of the ancestral lands of the Chickasaw Tribe. He left as a young boy when his father was assigned to teach in the Chickasaw Nation schools in Oklahoma. Like his father, Waco Turner was also an educator, but he made a fortune in the oil business and built Turner’s Lodge. Today it is known as Falconhead Resort and Country Club.

The Waco Turner Open was also known as the Poor Boy Open, as it was an opposite field event to the Tournament of Champions, which, back in 1964, was held in Las Vegas. Most of the big names like Nicklaus and Palmer—or any other 1963 TOUR event winner—wasn’t going to be at Turner’s Lodge. That left all the prize money at the Waco Turner to the poor boys of the tour. It’s like our modern-day Sanderson Farms Championship.

The field in the 1964 Waco Turner Open was not without some household names, including Raymond Floyd, Miller Barber, Tommy Aaron, Charles Coody, to name a few. There was also a strong contingent of Black players in the field led by Charlie Sifford, Cliff Brown and Pete Brown (no relation.)

The tournament was well-attended because Waco Turner not only had a respectable purse, but he also paid players bonus monies for birdies and eagles. It was hard not to make at least a little bit of money at the Waco Turner Open.

Brown opened his historic week with a steady 35-36 for 71 and was T-14. He was four shots behind first-round leader Bert Weaver, who torched the back nine for 31 en route to a 67. Raymond Floyd was two shots ahead of Brown, and Sifford was one ahead at 70. In the second round, Brown again shot 71, and climbed the leaderboard to T-9 behind new leader Moon Mullins, whose 67 was low round of the day.

Saturday was “moving day” and Mullins had lost his shine and struggled to a 73, while Brown surged to 3rd place with a 67 of his own, tying for low round of the day. Floyd shot 73, which dropped him out of the top 20, while newcomers Charles Coody and Bruce Crampton ensured the final round would be hotly contested. Sifford remained steady, shooting his third consecutive round of 70.

And so it was that in 1964 two men born in Mississippi found themselves at the doorstep of golf history. Pete Brown, the 29- year-old pro from Jackson, had three feet for the title and $2,900 that came with it, and Waco Turner, the 73-year-old educator-turned-oil-millionaire from Holly Springs, watched from the side of the green. Somehow, because history can be awkward and poetic, Charlie Sifford (who finished in 5th place and a group ahead of Brown) was tending the flag as Brown reached the 18th green and faced the putt that could make him a champion.

A three-foot putt for the formerly bedridden polio survivor would make him the first Black man to win a TOUR event. If he missed, he faced a playoff with Dan Sikes, a 6-time PGA TOUR winner who had turned in a tidy 67 to storm up the leaderboard. Brown made the best stroke he could. That’s all he could ask. And he cashed the putt. History was made.

A week later Brown would make history again, becoming the first Black player to tee it up in The Colonial. Later that summer he would become the first Black player to play in the PGA Championship in 1964. In 1970 he would win again on TOUR, claiming the San Diego Open title in a playoff over Tony Jacklin. All of this to say he was no one-hit wonder.

His health, sadly, started to deteriorate again. By the time he reached his forties, he had trouble walking, his back was seemingly always in pain. He wasn’t going to be able to compete in this condition. It was time for a new chapter.

Brown retired from TOUR play and became the golf professional at Madden Golf Course in Dayton, Ohio. The Browns stayed in Dayton for over 20 years before they moved to Evans, Georgia, for the milder climate that would help with Brown’s continuing health struggles. They lived in a home owned by the former Tour professional Jim Dent, whom Brown had mentored.

In his later years he suffered from numerous strokes and other ailments. Brown finally left this world on May 1, 2015. “He was always a good man, a loving husband, and he knew his Bible,” Margaret told me.

Pete Brown was more than that. He was a trailblazer. He was a courageous, if unknowing, foot soldier on our path to Civil Rights. Pete Brown’s career said, “We belong, and we can win.” He is survived by his wife, Margaret, his daughters and grandchildren, and is remembered fondly by almost all who played with him.

In 2019, Jackson Municipal Golf Course was renamed the Pete Brown Golf Facility in his honor. In 2020, Brown was inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame. On May 1, 2024, Falconhead Resort and Country Club held the Pete Brown Diamond Jubilee to honor their historic champion. The jubilee was attended by Dr. Michael Cooper, former PGA Tour player Jim Dent, Sandy Cross of the PGA of America. The museum to honor the rich history of Turner’s Lodge serves as a shrine to the historic win of Pete Brown.

You’ll hear people, even younger Black players, share rhetorical thoughts like

“Why do we need to make this about race” or “Why can’t I just be a golfer.” And the answer is this: Your ancestors came to these Americas bound in chains in the hulls of ships. If they were lucky enough to survive that Middle Passage, they then were separated from their families, raped, beaten, then bred and sold like livestock for about 400 years. After that, written and unwritten laws made sure that Black people never forget where they came from, what they are worth, and how they fit into these Americas.

So, because Pete Brown survived the Jim Crow South, because he didn’t get lynched (as Emmit Till did about 200 miles from where Brown grew up), because he endured death threats and verbal abuse because of his skin color, because the game was segregated, that is why Pete Brown’s story is remarkable. That is why he, or any other Black player, can never be just another golfer. It’s because America made it that way.

Carl Seldon, Lee Elder, John Bailey, Calvin Peete and Pete Brown (clockwise from bottom left) in the PGA TOUR Pavilion during the first round of the TOUR Championship at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, Georgia on November 3, 2005