Breaking Through: How LA's Public Courses Opened Golf to Everyone

Los Angeles built golf's grandest stage. The Los Angeles Open debuted in 1926, sportswriters dubbed Riviera “Hogan's Alley” after Ben Hogan won there in 1947 and 1948, and the same club will host Olympic golf in 2028 and the U.S. Open in 2031. But the most consequential golf history in this city didn't happen behind private gates. It happened on public courses — a county-owned track on Western Avenue, a city muni called Rancho Park, and the fairways of Griffith Park — where golf's color line cracked, and where, one January morning in 1938 at Griffith Park, its gender line cracked too — decades before the rest of the sport caught up.

This is the story of Black golf history in Los Angeles, and of the women who forced their way into the field — told through the public courses where it happened.

Western Avenue: The Capital of Black Golf in Los Angeles

Every movement needs a home ground. In Los Angeles, it was the course at 1930 W. 120th Street, near Western Avenue. It opened in 1928 as La Avenida Golf Club and became Western Avenue Golf Club in 1931. In the decades when private clubs were closed to Black members and the PGA of America's constitution restricted membership to golfers “of the Caucasian race,” Western Avenue became the hub of the African American golf community in Los Angeles — the place where the best Black players in the country came to compete.

Longtime member Larry Clemons put it plainly: “All the best Black players all across America would come here... and play. We used to get a hundred people here on Mondays for the skins games. Lee Elder would come here and play and couldn't win a skin.” NFL Hall of Famer Jim Brown played golf here too — and when Maggie Hathaway was arrested at a protest, it was Brown who bailed her out of jail. Yet even here, breaking through wasn't simple. When Hathaway tried to join the course's all-white women's club, she recalled in her memoir, “Those Western Avenue women voted against me for being a troublemaker.”

The course itself nearly disappeared. In 1953 the land faced subdivision, until Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn — who understood what the course meant to the community — arranged for the county to take ownership on January 1, 1954. In 1982 it was renamed Chester Washington Golf Course in honor of Chester L. Washington, the pioneering Black newspaper editor and publisher. In April 2020, Los Angeles County designated it a historic landmark. It remains the heart of Black golf in LA today.

Bill Spiller, Joe Louis, and the War on the Caucasian Clause

If Western Avenue was the movement's home ground, Bill Spiller was its point man. Born October 25, 1913, in Tishomingo, Oklahoma, Spiller left low-paying teaching work in Texas and moved to Los Angeles, where he made his living as a railroad porter — and discovered competitive golf in the 1940s after a fellow porter introduced him to the game. He turned out to be very good — good enough to compete with anyone. What he couldn't do was join the PGA.

In 1948, Spiller and fellow Black professional Ted Rhodes earned entry to the Richmond Open in Northern California with their high finishes at that year's Los Angeles Open — then were barred from the field under the PGA's whites-only membership rules. They sued, arguing the exclusion violated labor law. The PGA pledged to stop discriminating and the suit was withdrawn — after which the association simply relabeled its tournaments “invitationals” and went on excluding Black players anyway.

The fight came to a head in 1952 at the San Diego Open, when PGA president Horton Smith moved to exclude Spiller and boxing legend Joe Louis from the field. Louis was the most famous athlete in America, and the attempt to bar him caused a national outcry. Under pressure, the tour relented: Louis received a sponsor's exemption and teed it up as an amateur, billed at the time as the first African American to play in a PGA Tour event. That billing was wrong — Howard Wheeler and other Black professionals had played PGA-sanctioned events in the 1940s, and Spiller and Rhodes had earned their way into tour fields through the LA Open itself — but the moment still mattered: after the public showdown with Horton Smith, a Black golfer was finally teeing off with the PGA's open acquiescence. Louis's role went far beyond one tournament — he personally bankrolled Black professionals including Spiller, Rhodes, and a young Charlie Sifford, keeping them on the road when purses were closed to them.

The endgame ran through public courses like LA's. In 1960, California Attorney General Stanley Mosk warned the PGA that if it continued to discriminate, it could be barred from staging tournaments on the state's public courses — the very municipal venues, like Rancho Park, where the tour made its money each winter. In November 1961, the PGA finally struck the Caucasian-only clause from its constitution. Spiller, whose prime had been spent fighting rather than winning, died in Los Angeles in 1988. The PGA granted him posthumous membership in 2009.

1938: Babe Zaharias Crosses the Gender Line at Griffith Park

Golf's gender barrier cracked in Los Angeles too — in Griffith Park. Babe Didrikson had become a national sensation in this very city, winning gold in the 80-meter hurdles and javelin (plus a silver in the high jump) at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Six years later she returned to make a different kind of history.

The Los Angeles Open was played on the Wilson Course at Griffith Park from 1937 to 1939, and in January 1938 Didrikson entered the field — the first woman ever to play in a PGA Tour event. She shot 81 and 84 and missed the cut, but the tournament changed her life anyway: she was paired with a professional wrestler named George Zaharias, and eleven months later, on December 23, 1938, they were married.

Babe Zaharias wasn't finished with the LA Open. In January 1945, when the tournament was played at Riviera Country Club, she shot 76-76 to qualify and then 76-81 to make the two-day cut before missing the three-day cut. That month she made the initial cut in three straight PGA Tour events — the first woman to do it, and still the only one.

1969: Charlie Sifford Wins the LA Open at Rancho Park

No moment in this story lands harder than January 12, 1969, at Rancho Park Golf Course — the city-owned muni on Pico Boulevard that hosted the Los Angeles Open seventeen times (1956–67, 1969–72, and 1983 — the 1968 edition went to Brookside in Pasadena), more than any other course, and where a 21-year-old Jack Nicklaus had collected his first professional paycheck (less than thirty-four dollars) in 1962.

Charlie Sifford had spent a career waiting for a fair chance. Born June 2, 1922, in Charlotte, North Carolina, he started caddying at thirteen and dominated the segregated circuit, winning the United Golf Association's National Negro Open six times, including five straight from 1952 through 1956. He won the 1957 Long Beach Open — not an official tour event, because Black players still couldn't be members. Only in 1961, at age 38, did Sifford become the first African American member of the PGA Tour.

At the 1969 Los Angeles Open he was 46 years old. He opened with a 63, hung on through three rounds of 71, and finished at eight-under 276 — tied with South Africa's Harold Henning. On the first hole of sudden death, Sifford made birdie to win. A Black man had won the Los Angeles Open on a public golf course, in front of a public gallery, two years after his breakthrough victory at Hartford. Sifford went on to become the first African American inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2004, and in 2014 President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Maggie Hathaway: The Conscience of LA Golf

The person who spent five decades making sure Los Angeles never got comfortable was Maggie Hathaway. Born July 1, 1911, in Campti, Louisiana, she came to Hollywood as an actress and singer, and found her way to golf in 1955 on a dare: at a Griffith Park pro-am she watched Joe Louis flush a tee shot and scoffed that anybody could do that. Louis handed her a club and promised her a new set if she reached the green. She did — on her first swing.

Hathaway turned the game into a platform. She began writing golf columns for the California Eagle in 1958 and later the Los Angeles Sentinel. In 1963 she founded Minority Associated Golfers (MAG) to support young Black players. In 1962 she co-founded the Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch of the NAACP with Sammy Davis Jr., and in 1967 she co-founded the NAACP Image Awards. She picketed the Long Beach municipal course in 1963 over the lack of golf jobs for Black professionals, and was jailed twice for protesting exclusion at LA courses. When Lee Elder finally broke the Masters color barrier in 1975 — after Hathaway petitioned for his invitation — she reportedly fainted from excitement. She was inducted into the National Black Golf Hall of Fame in 1994.

In 1997, Los Angeles County renamed the Jack Thompson par-3 course in South LA the Maggie Hathaway Golf Course — a public course, fittingly, named for the woman who fought to make public golf mean what it said. She died on September 24, 2001.

The Maggie, Reborn

Hathaway's course is now the freshest chapter in this story. After years of neglect, a coalition including the SCGA, The Los Angeles Country Club, the USGA, LA County, American Golf, and the Western States Golf Association mounted a roughly $20 million campaign to rebuild it — $7.8 million in county funding and $12 million in private donations — with renowned architect Gil Hanse leading the golf course renewal and two-time major champion Collin Morikawa serving as honorary chairman. The reimagined par-27, 835-yard course reopened to the public on March 28, 2026 — built to expand programming for underserved youth in South Los Angeles, just two years before Olympic golf arrives at Riviera.

Walking the Ground Today

That's the quiet miracle of this history: you can still play all of it. Chester Washington is still the gathering place it became a century ago. Rancho Park still runs city-course green fees over the ground where Sifford out-dueled the field. The Wilson Course at Griffith Park still plays where Zaharias teed off in 1938. And the Maggie is new again, teaching the next generation on Western Avenue — a few miles and a hundred years from where the door first cracked open.

Los Angeles gave golf its biggest stage. But it was the city's public courses that opened the theater to everyone.