Charlie Sifford: The 1969 LA Open at Rancho Park

On a January afternoon in 1969, on a city-owned golf course across Pico Boulevard from the 20th Century Fox lot, a 46-year-old former caddie from Charlotte stood over a three-foot birdie putt to win the Los Angeles Open. Charlie Sifford made it. He beat Harold Henning on the first hole of a playoff, collected $20,000, and became a champion of one of the oldest and most storied tournaments in American golf — at Rancho Park, a municipal course any Angeleno could play for a few dollars.

Eight years earlier, the PGA's constitution had still barred him from full membership because he was Black. The 1969 LA Open is the moment Los Angeles gave Charlie Sifford the stage his talent had always deserved, and it happened in the most Los Angeles way possible: not behind a country club gate, but on a public course.

Why Rancho Park Was the Stage

Rancho Park Golf Course occupies former country-club land in Cheviot Hills that was converted into a city-run public course in the late 1940s, and it has long been described as one of the busiest municipal courses in America. It also became, improbably, a fixture of the professional tour: the Los Angeles Open set up at Rancho Park seventeen times between 1956 and 1983 — every year from 1956 through 1972 except 1968, plus a farewell edition in 1983.

The course collected history at a remarkable rate for a muni. Jack Nicklaus teed it up at Rancho Park in January 1962 in his first tournament as a professional, earning his first tour paycheck. Arnold Palmer made a 12 on the final hole in 1961 — four straight shots out of bounds after a good drive — an event the city commemorated with a bronze plaque. And the Los Angeles Open itself was already an institution by then: founded in 1926 at Los Angeles Country Club with what was then the richest purse in professional golf, it moved among LA's great venues for decades before settling at Riviera, which has been the tournament's home since 1973, with brief exceptions in 1983 and 1998.

But no piece of Rancho Park history matters more than what Charlie Sifford did there in January 1969.

The Longest Apprenticeship in Golf

Charlie Sifford was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, on June 2, 1922, and started caddying at 13. At 17 he moved to Philadelphia, where he honed his game at Cobbs Creek, one of the few public courses where Black golfers could play freely. Denied entry to the white professional circuit, he dominated the one open to him: Sifford won the United Golf Association's National Negro Open six times, taking five straight titles from 1952 to 1956 and another in 1960.

The Caucasian-Only Clause

From 1934 until 1961, the PGA of America's constitution restricted membership to golfers of the Caucasian race. Sifford got occasional starts — he played the 1952 Phoenix Open on an invitation arranged through boxing champion Joe Louis — and was met with threats and racial abuse there and at other stops. The pressure that finally broke the clause came largely from California. Bill Spiller and Ted Rhodes had sued the PGA in 1948 after being barred from the Richmond Open; the association promised reform, then dodged it for years by recasting tour stops as "invitationals." In 1960, California Attorney General Stanley Mosk — a Los Angeles judge before he was the state's top lawyer — warned the PGA it would be barred from using California's public courses unless it eliminated the discriminatory policy. In November 1961, the PGA finally struck the Caucasian-only clause, and Sifford became the first African American member of the PGA Tour.

He was 39 years old. The clause had consumed what should have been his prime. He had already shown what he could do against tour-caliber fields — he won the 1957 Long Beach Open, a PGA co-sponsored event with well-known white professionals in the field — and in 1967, at 45, he closed with a 64 to win the Greater Hartford Open by a stroke, the first official PGA Tour victory by a Black golfer.

Four Rounds and a Playoff: The 1969 Los Angeles Open

By January 1969, Sifford was living in Southern California, and the Los Angeles Open at Rancho Park was as close to a hometown event as he would ever get. He opened the tournament with an 8-under-par 63 — announcing himself immediately on a course he knew well — then ground out three straight 71s to finish at 276, eight under par.

It was enough only for a tie. Harold Henning, the smooth South African who would win 43 times around the world, matched him at 276, sending the tournament to a playoff. On the first extra hole, Sifford hit a 9-iron to three feet and made the birdie putt to win. The victory was worth $20,000 from a $100,000 purse — real money in 1969, and a fraction of what those lost years behind the color line had cost him.

What made the day sweeter was who was watching. Sifford's wife, Rose, was there, along with their toddler son Craig and their older son Charles Jr., then a student at Cal State Long Beach. A 46-year-old who had spent two decades being told to stay out was now, in front of his family, the champion of Los Angeles.

Sifford titled his 1992 autobiography Just Let Me Play. Rancho Park in 1969 is what it looked like when somebody finally did.

The Western Avenue Connection

Sifford's Los Angeles story doesn't start or end at Rancho Park. A few miles southeast, at what is now Chester Washington Golf Course, sits the other pole of Black golf history in LA. The course opened in 1928 as the Western Avenue Public Course, and during the segregation era it became a refuge — the course where Black golfers gathered when most of the city's clubs and many of its events were closed to them. Sifford played there regularly, alongside Bill Spiller, Ted Rhodes, and later Lee Elder; decades on, a young Tiger Woods trained there under his father Earl's guidance.

Western Avenue was also where the fight for access was organized — activists battled through the 1960s for equal treatment across LA County's courses, a story that runs through figures like Maggie Hathaway, the activist whose name is now on a South LA course of its own. The address tells you how that history has been honored: Chester Washington Golf Course sits at 1818 Charlie Sifford Drive. The street leading to the old Western Avenue course now carries the name of the man who broke the tour's color line. Fittingly, the course hosted one of the original events of the Advocates Professional Golf Association, founded in 2010 to build opportunities for minority golfers, and remains on the APGA schedule today.

From Rancho Park to Riviera: The Legacy

Sifford kept winning after the tour aged past him — he took the 1975 PGA Seniors' Championship, today a senior major. The honors arrived late but kept coming: induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2004 as its first African American member; an honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of St Andrews in 2006; the Old Tom Morris Award in 2007; the Southern California Golf Hall of Fame in 2011; and in 2014, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died on February 3, 2015, at 92.

His imprint on the tournament he won is permanent. In 2009, the Los Angeles Open's modern successor created the Charlie Sifford Memorial Exemption, a spot in the field awarded each year to a player who represents the advancement of diversity in golf. That tournament — now the Genesis Invitational at Riviera, played as an invitational since 2020 — has had Tiger Woods as its host since 2017, and Woods has been direct about the debt: "I probably wouldn't be here," Woods said of Sifford. "My dad would have never picked up the game… But he broke it down." Woods called Sifford the grandpa he never had, and named his first son Charlie.

The line from a muni on Pico Boulevard to the game's biggest stages runs straight through Charlie Sifford's 9-iron in January 1969.

Playing Where History Happened

Rancho Park is still there, still public, still packed — you can play the same course where Sifford opened with 63 and where Nicklaus cashed his first professional check. Chester Washington, the old Western Avenue course, is a few miles away on Charlie Sifford Drive. Between them they hold as much civil rights history as any two golf courses in America — and both will cost you less than a cart fee at a resort. That accessibility isn't incidental to the story. It is the story: in Los Angeles, the door to golf finally opened at the public course.