‘Hopefully One Day There Won’t Be A Need For Black History Month’

There were four of us – Tony Johnson, Daryl Oxley, Tony Irish and myself – right at the start. Our main club was at Harefield Place, a municipal, and we would play anywhere where we could get on and we would book a time and queue early in the car park before playing. We then moved on to playing with the Viking and George & Dragon (pub) societies which gave us access to private golf clubs during the week. 

And in time the four of us would go on trips – the first to St Andrews was particularly memorable as we played the Jubilee, Eden and then finished on the Old Course. We stayed at a B&B ran by Frank Coogan in the town and it was great.

The next year we went to Cork and people’s interest in golf was on the up. Europe were now winning the Ryder Cup as well as The Masters year after year and our friends, most of them cricketers, would hear our stories and they got enthused about it. So then we realised that we were organising our trips better than the other societies and decided to form our own.

To form a society in 1993 you had to have 12 golfers so that's what we did. It was called the Afro Caribbean Golf Society (ACGS) which was later changed to the African Caribbean Golf Association (ACGA). Our first event was at Stapleford Abbotts in Essex but it chucked it down so we phoned around and managed to go to London Hatfield which has since become Essendon.

We've always been based around London and the surrounding areas. At one stage we had over 100 members and around six pros playing with us, now we have an event every month from April to October with 48 playing. In the past couple of years there's been more interest as more people have realised that getting out is good health wise.

Our days have a great atmosphere with a lot of laughter. Some of them have been legendary. You can have a wager and, if you have the worst score in the group, then you’re the first at the bar. It's all a bit of fun but the competition is good and you have to raise your game to do well. If you win the Order of Merit then you will qualify for the Hall of Fame. People arrive and think they’ll do well, then they see the level and realise that they have to get better. One of our members, Rory Bennett, is currently at Lamar University in the States and trying to make a career out of the game.

In recent years we've supported Prostate Cancer UK as that can affect a lot of our membership, my dad actually died of it. We've also supported Daniel De Gale, Great Ormond Street and we're now raising funds for Wellbeing of Women.

This month is Black History Month but you do think why should we have a special month? Every day is black history. Going forward we will see people for what they are and their ethnicity really shouldn’t be an issue, as in other sports. Traditionally we weren’t involved in golf, you might see one black golfer in a fourball but, generally, it wasn't one of our sports. It was the same thing with football in the 80s, you might have one black player in a club, now there is a proper pathway. 

We were cricketers and there were barriers there too. In some places if you weren't from a certain school or background then you wouldn’t make it. The big thing was to look for fast bowlers but some players from working-class backgrounds never got a look in.

When we started out playing golf there were four us, all black guys. You would roll up at a golf club and you would get the silence. I always relate it to the old westerns where the bad guy enters a bar through the swing doors and you could hear a pin drop. We had a bit of that. 

We were on a trip to Cornwall and it was a lovely sunny day and everyone was on the patio and the glasses were clinking. Then it all went quiet as we all teed off, we all hit it straight down the middle and then all the chat started up again. One guy, a military type, came up and asked where we normally played our golf and TJ replied Royal St George’s as that was where he was working for a courier company and they had just had a big society day there!

When we started out we didn't have the social media tools that there are today. When Tiger Woods won The Masters in 1997 we were the only black golfing society so the magazines and BBC would get in touch. Now things are different. Black British Golfers was launched in 2021 and they now have the tools that we didn’t have back in the day. If you do things for the right reasons, people will acknowledge it and that's what's now happening with them.

My own golfing journey began when a work colleague took me for nine holes at Magpie Hall Lane (now Bromley Golf Centre) where you could hire clubs to play. I started straight on the course, we had a Jack Nicklaus book to learn from and I would just keep him company. Then I got the bug and my handicap is now 8 which I've always been around. Someone said that I’ve got more moving parts than a cuckoo clock but I can get it done.

I've travelled with the game and met some incredible people. I've become good friends with Sir Garfield Sobers and I can still picture a 1-iron that he hit off the deck at The Hertfordshire which was phenomenal. Nobody could have hit that shot better. I've played in his tournament in Barbados and I've sat round a table with him, Fred Trueman and Brian Close because of golf.

You don’t know who you are going to meet on a golf course and they can become friends for life. You see the true character of the person in a round of golf and you quickly realise that we all have a lot in common. When you delve into someone's background, we're really all the same. We might come from different areas in the world but we have the same challenges and golf is a great communicator.