Last week, I found myself rooting for Joe Hooks, a golfer whose name and story were new to me. The PGA Tour had splash landed at the Detroit Golf Club for the Rocket Classic, and this likable player — dynamic, talented, new to the scene, a Detroiter through and through — was playing in his first Tour event. We humans are hardwired for the new and the promising, aren’t we? Also, Hooks was one of three Black golfers in the field. 

The Rocket tournament reserves one spot in its 156-player field for a male Black golfer, pro or am, who earns his place by winning an invitational named for John Shippen, a Black professional who played in the second U.S. Open, a 36-hole event held at Shinnecock Hills in 1896. The 2025 John Shippen was a 36-hole event played late last month at Detroit G.C. This Joe Hooks won it, which got him Thursday-Friday tee times with Thriston Lawerence of South Africa and Jackson Suber, a former star golfer at Ole Miss.

Hooks is 32 and he’s been knocking around pro golf’s various minor leagues for close to a decade. Now, by way of John Shippen, he was going to make his Tour debut on a course he had played hundreds of times. One of his golfing mentors from the club would be his caddie. The story writes itself, right? Act I: Getting Good. Act II: Getting In, Fitting In. Thirds acts are always tricky.

As for the John Shippen story, it deserves its own spotlight, particularly as we take our annual slide into summer and Independence Day, No. 249 in this continuing series. The 1896 U.S. Open was a one-day, mid-July event with 35 golfers in the field. Some of those players, all born abroad, objected to Shippen’s place on the tee sheet, along with the spot taken by Oscar Bunn, a Shinnecock Indian. As the story has been handed down through the years, the USGA’s first president, a sugar tycoon named Theodore Havemeyer, offered this terse option to the protesting players: “Gentlemen, you can leave or stay as you please. We are going to play this tournament tomorrow, with them, and with or without you.” Pee Wee Reese, legendary Brooklyn Dodger shortstop, did nearly the same thing when Jackie Robinson broke through baseball’s color line about a half-century later. Reese stood up to the bigots while Robinson stole home, and fans — that is, Dodger fans at Ebbets Field — waved their fedoras. Men wore proper hats then. Ballplayers wore baseball caps.

The John Shippen is played annually at the Detroit Golf Club, where there are two Donald Ross courses and, over the decades, more than a few members with the surname Ford. Hooks, an only child, grew up in Detroit, and his family, owners of a city supermarket, had a membership at Detroit G.C. Hooks started playing there at age 7.

Also at age 7, young Joe started bagging groceries at the family’s supermarket, Metro Foodland, where about 40 percent of the customers, Hooks told me in a recent phone interview, paid for their food with the help of the federal SNAP program. For high school, Joe attended an academically elite boys’ private school, Detroit Jesuit. Joe’s father tried to keep his son out of the money games that are part of Detroit’s public-golf golf culture. He was successful — to a degree. Joe Hooks crosses real-world borders in ways few modern pros do. Then came last week, the Rocket Classic, where Joe made his Tour debut on his home course. The goal was to get to Sunday, get some TV time, family and friends on the rope line, maybe even. . .

“It sounds like a bad movie,” Joe said.

“I’d watch it,” I said.

“I would, too,” Joe said.

It’s asking a lot, for a player who has never made even a Korn Ferry start, to play four rounds in his PGA Tour debut.

TOURNAMENT GOLF HAS ALWAYS had high boundary walls, lined with invisible razor ribbon. American country-club golf, the same. The social obstacles, rooted in racism, have hurt the game, immeasurably. Charlie Sifford never played in a PGA Championship in the prime, in his 20s and 30s, not because he didn’t have the game but because, as Black man, he didn’t have the opportunity. He was kept out. Elin Nordegren and Tiger Woods named their son for Charlie Sifford, one of Earl Woods’s heroes.

The Tour’s Los Angeles stop — the Genesis Invitational, Tiger Woods presiding — offers a spot each year to a minority golfer, in recent years in Charlie Sifford’s name. J.J. Spaun got one of those spots at Riviera in 2016. Spaun is Filipino and Mexican on his mother’s side. Like Tony Finau, like Notah Begay, like Vijay Singh, like Calvin Peete, Spaun is a golfer of color in a predominantly white game. Spaun is now on the very short list of non-white golfers who have won men’s U.S. Opens. Tiger, of course, three times. Michael Campbell, a Māori golfer from New Zealand. (Once, at Pinehurst in 2005. Campbell’s golf was as hot as the weather.) Spaun’s win at Oakmont makes three.

Charlie Sifford, you may know, won the L.A. Open in 1969, when he was 47. Forty-seven! Before that, he had won the National Negro Open six times. Al Besselink, with his blond hair and blue eyes and white skin, played in the Negro Open, the U.S. Open of a Black-run golf organization, the United Golf Association. As did Hubert Green and other white golfers. “They were happy to have me,” Besselink once told me. Happy to have his entry fee, too. He and Sifford were exact contemporaries. Besselink knew how much game Sifford had. He saw it a close range. They both knew the Philadelphia-Atlantic City 1950s golf scene. You could get action anywhere.

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The road gets rocky here, and I’m going to scramble the order of these well-circulated words in a naïve attempt to steer clear of politics. Equity, inclusion and diversity are core American values. (Soapbox remarks courtesy of your correspondent.) Through the lens of golf, you could say that country-club life (which I am lucky enough to enjoy) is exclusionary by nature, but that is rooted more in economics than anything else. Modern golf seeks to be inclusive.

Forty years ago, the tony, old-line Detroit Golf Club had no Black members. Now it has 120. Diversity in golf is a growth industry. Any visit to a driving range will show you that. For several years now, Baltusrol Golf Club has had a significant DEI program, in the name of membership recruitment and staff hiring. The New Jersey club, in deference to this charged moment, doesn’t use those three letters anymore, but the initiative has not lost any steam. USGA officials, in recent months, have urged Baltusrol’s leadership to keep at it. The USGA is doing the same.

To me, the single greatest thing about tournament golf is its inherent fairness, its equity. If you play by the rules and shoot the scores, the prizes are there for you, as is the heartbreak. (We’re not talking about being on the unlucky side of the draw — that’s rub of the green and part of the game’s peculiar charm. Tiger once told me that he’s had rounds where every bounce was a bad one, but that over the course of a life in golf it all evens out.) When tournament golf was segregated, it was not equitable, and that is a stain on the game, and its record books, that will never be scrubbed away. But access to golf for people of all backgrounds is improving and has been for decades. Joe Hooks is living proof of that.

THIS PART IS NOT EASY to sort through. For a long while now, I have been ambivalent about reserving places in PGA Tour events where a qualifying mark is of the color of the player’s skin. I realize, of course, it is an effort to reverse the many and painful years during which the color of your skin could be a disqualifying mark. It is an effort to create models for the next generation. But if your starting point, and finishing point, is the value of a golfer’s by-the-book score, should skin tone be a path into a tournament field? Is that not a form of tokenism?

I called (among others) a new friend with earned insight into this question. The gent’s name is J.B. Brown. He grew up on a family farm on the outskirts of Birmingham, Ala. One night, as a teenager in 1962, local police had J.B. in a choke hold in a squad car, for the crime of being a Black kid at a party with a white girl. J.B.’s father came racing into this hysterical scene yelling, “You are not gonna kill my son tonight.” Two years later, J.B. graduated from his all-Black high school and boarded a Greyhound for Detroit with $18 in his pocket. Before long, he had an assembly-line job at (as he calls the company) Ford’s, he took up golf, he became (years later) a two-time winner of the Detroit Open, in its senior division. He’s played everywhere and with everyone, and the Mercedes he drives was once owned by Isiah Thomas, the Detroit Pistons basketball legend.

For some years, J.B. represented Michigan in a Michigan versus Indiana team match.

“You must have been one of few Black golfers,” I said.

“I was the only Black player,” J.B. said.

I can talk to J.B., with the guardrails down, about anything. I told him about my uncertainty about reserving a place in a PGA Tour field for a Black golfer.

“I get that,” J.B. said. “Maybe someday you won’t need it at all. But look, all these tournaments have sponsor’s exemptions. They can invite anyone. Annika, playing Colonial, way back. So here they have a tournament for an exemption. It’s got rules. One of them is you have to be Black. So the kid won the tournament, following the rules. One spot, out of 156. Good stuff can come out of it. He earned that spot.”

How sound is all that?

By the way, is it Joe Hooks’s fault that he was a country-club kid (and hardly a typical one)? Of course not. Could you have a different kind of John Shippen, where you are able to play in the qualifier only if you grew up in abject poverty? I suppose you could, messy though the application process would be. The main point here, the main point of the Shippen and the Charlie Sifford exemption, is that we can’t fix the past, but we can improve the present and plant seeds along the way. Joe Hooks made $20,000 by winning the Shippen, the best payday of his professional career. 

He has the same goal that every struggling touring pro has, to make more money than he spends. It’s hard. Golf is hard.

HOOKS SHOT 68-66, 10 UNDER, to win the Shippen and earn his spot in the Rocket Classic. The rough was a little higher, and course was a little longer, when Thursday and Friday, the first two rounds of the Rocket, finally arrived. Hooks could not believe how fast he was swinging, how amped up he was. His parents and so many friends and supporters watching him, his familiar course suddenly not so familiar.

“You’ll settle down,” Jackson Suber told Hooks as they walked down an early-round fairway together. “By the 3rd or 4th hole, you’ll feel like yourself.”

Hooks started with three pars, then made two birdies. The script was writing itself. Two under through five. But Hooks made a double on his 10th hole and a bogey on the next. Golf.

“On the PGA Tour, everything happens so quick,” Hooks told me.

He shot even-par 72 the first day and 76 the next. He missed the cut by a bunch and, at 148, beat only five other players. Golf in the bigs. You can shoot 10 under over two rounds when you’re in your comfort zone — and four over when you’re not. As Tiger likes to say, baby steps. You get better at golf taking baby steps.

But in a single week, Joe Hooks offered a great shining example to the golf-following world. He arrived where he is by way of talent, work, love of craft — and opportunity. He has had more, way more, than most. But if his path to the Rocket Classic encourages more young golfers of color to seek out the opportunities, and encourages golfers of any age to provide them, then it really is good. It’s all good. We’re talking about one spot, out of 156.

Joe’s maternal grandmother was a sharecropper in Oklahoma who settled in Detroit for the opportunity it presented. She found her way to Detroit pretty much as J.B. Brown found his way to Detroit. Golf came later, for J.B. and for Joe. Golf became part of the good life, a place to still your mind and challenge every fiber of your being. J.B. told me about hitting balls on summer nights at the Detroit Armory on East Eight Mile Drive, in a giant field there. He’d roll down the windows of his car, turn up the radio, and hit one ball after another. He played all the courses in Detroit, public and private. He got to know himself and his adopted city with golf as his passport.

For Joe Hooks, the same. He played all the courses in Detroit, public and private. Played in all the events. He played two rounds of the 2025 Rocket Classic, at the course he grew up playing. It can be done. It can be done!

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com

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