The Roar
The Roar

Advertisement

Gary Player: The Man in Black's early years

Roar Guru
11th November, 2014
0

I note with interest a story published on the weekend in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, in which South Africa’s greatest ever golfer, Gary Player, claims how he was attacked at a US tournament because of his “opposition” to apartheid.

Player is quoted as saying, “I was demonstrated against because I was a South African. For years they wanted to kill me.

“I lost the 1969 PGA Championship to Raymond Floyd at Dayton, Ohio – they threw ice in my eyes, they charged me on the green, they threw telephone books in my back when I was swinging, and they screamed at me when I had a short putt.

“I lost the PGA title by one shot. These are the conditions I had to play golf under – no golfer’s ever played under the same conditions I had to endure.”

The opposite is true.

Player was attacked by the NCAAP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) protestors because of his “support” for what he termed “separate development” (that is, apartheid).

Player was later cited by the United Nations for backing the South African government’s Committee for Fairness in Sport, which was an effort to counter sporting sanctions.

Why the South China Morning Post editors ran the story, without checking its veracity, is beyond me. A check on the internet would have been easy and an article by George Monbiot in the Guardian newspaper makes clear Player’s history about his early views on apartheid.

Advertisement

This is no character assassination of Gary Player. I have always been one of his admirers. As a youngster, I watched the little doctor of golf (GP, I called him) play in the South African Open at my home course in East London, South Africa.

Over the years that I wrote about golf, I had dinner at Player’s home near Johannesburg on several occasions and was there when Gary hosted a dinner for black golfer Lee Elder and Taiwan’s ‘Mr Lu’ (Lu Liang Huan). I have always liked the man. Always prepared to give me a quote and made time to talk to journalists.

With nine major titles in is trophy cabinet, Player continues to be an inspiration to golfers who have followed in his spike marks.

Player was never racist. I believe that he succumbed to government pressure amid the sporting sanctions. Gary was simply being patriotic. And he was not alone in those days when most white South Africans supported apartheid.

I would be unfair to depict Player as racist for comments he made in his book, Grand Slam Golf. He has long changed his outlook and has for many years done a great job helping disadvantaged people in South Africa and all over the world.

But this is what he said, “I must say now, and clearly, that I am of the South Africa of Verwoerd and apartheid… a nation which is the result of an African graft on European stock and which is the product of its instinct and ability to maintain civilised values and standards among the alien barbarians.

“The African may well believe in witchcraft and primitive magic, practice ritual murder and polygamy; his wealth is in cattle. More money and he will have no sense of parental or individual responsibility, no understanding of reverence for life or the human soul which is the basis of Christian and other civilised societies.

Advertisement

“A good deal of nonsense is talked of, and indeed thought about ‘segregation’. Segregation of one kind or another is practised everywhere in the world.”

Journalists in South Africa pointed me to allegations that Gary Player was used as a kind of global ambassador by the apartheid government. In 1975 he collaborated with the Committee for Fairness in Sport, which was set up by the government to try to overcome the global sporting boycott. In 1981 he featured on the UN’s blacklist of sports people breaking the boycott.

Player now says he did not read the manuscript and that a quote about apartheid was inserted by the ghost writer. Whether the writer made up the quote is open to question. If Player made a mistake in his early years, just own up to it. Say sorry. People can be very forgiving.

Telling Tiger Woods at a tournament in South Africa that he “fought apartheid all my life, but what can one man do?” was silly. Any South African sport writer in the good old days before that comment will tell you how Player on many occasions pronounced his support for separate development.

But dwelling on his past and sitting in judgment is inappropriate. Gary Player has done so much good for others in his later years that he should continue to be admired, not castigated.

close