An Obscure but Noteworthy Centennial: The United Golf Association

Photo: The organizers and winners of a United Golf Association tournament, circa 1930; John Shippen third from the left. (Courtesy Kevin Casey / Remarkable Stories of NJ Golf)

By Kevin Casey

This year, as New Jersey Golf celebrates its 125-year anniversary, we also note a much less-known golf organization with strong Garden State ties upon its centennial. This association’s brief but important story deserves to be kept alive.

American sports fans today are familiar with the professional baseball leagues for Blacks, the Negro Leagues. Especially active from 1920 to the late 1940s, these leagues were a response to the era’s ubiquitous racial segregation, which prevented Black players from playing in Major League Baseball.

Few golfers realize that a Black professional golf tour existed during this same period. As in baseball, segregation in the United States excluded Black professional golfers from mainstream competition.

The United Golf Association (UGA) was founded in 1925 as a response to racial barriers imposed by the Professional Golfers Association of America (PGA). Its “Caucasian-only” practice, formalized into policy in 1934, prohibited Black golfers from participating in PGA-sanctioned events, effectively barring them from competing at golf’s highest levels.

Baseball has its Satchel Paiges and Josh Gibsons, ball players deprived of the opportunity to compete at their peak against the likes of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig because of their race. Charlie Sifford and Lee Elder were two UGA veterans who overcame systemic prejudice to successfully ply their trade late in their careers on the PGA Tour.

The UGA organized tournaments for Black professionals and amateurs across the U.S., with its most prestigious event being the UGA National Negro Open. This tournament served as the national championship for Black golfers and attracted some of the day’s best Black players. In addition to the National Negro Open, the UGA also organized regional events that together formed a competitive circuit for Black golfers.

The Jersey Connection
New Jersey played a significant role in the UGA’s creation and operation. In the Garden State, Blacks had access to public golf, but in great swaths of the country that was not the case. In addition, many of the nation’s best Black golfers were caddies at New Jersey private courses. Most New Jersey private clubs would let their caddies play on Mondays, providing quality practice time for UGA players.

One golf club in Union County’s Scotch Plains – Shady Rest Country Club – supplied many of the ingredients for the UGA to thrive. The first golf club in America formed by and for Blacks, Shady Rest was founded in 1921 by a group of prominent local Black investors. It soon became a hotbed for Black culture. Celebrities such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, boxer Joe Louis, Wimbledon victor Althea Gibson, and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois frequented the club, cementing its cultural importance beyond the realm of golf.

Another less well-known Black celebrity often dropped by Shady Rest. Golf professional John Shippen, our country’s first American-born golf professional, was among his generation’s best American golfers. Shippen was well known in the professional ranks, having competed in six U.S. Opens between 1895 and 1913 (with two top-tens to his credit) over the course of two decades of professional events.

Like almost all professionals in that era, Shippen was affiliated to clubs for most of his career. Shippen worked in the pro shop, taught, and played at some of America’s finest clubs: Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, the National Golf Links of America, the Maidstone Club, Aronimink Golf Club, and New Jersey’s Spring Lake Golf Club. As an instructor, Shippen developed an impressive list of clients, including New Jersey Senator J. S. Frelinghuysen. But the PGA’s non-Caucasian clause applied to club professionals as well as touring pros.

By 1925, between the combination of withering opportunities to compete due to segregation and age (he was 46), Shippen had effectively retired from competition, but still worked as a non-PGA instructor and professional. That year, Shippen and his fellow Black pros pulled together an inaugural “International Golf Championship Tournament,” held at Shady Rest. Its success morphed into an annual national tournament beginning in 1926 under the auspices of the “Colored Golfers Association of America.” Within a year, this organization was renamed the United Golf Association; the tournament became known as the National Negro Open.

Key Figures
The UGA held its tournaments across the country, often at Black-owned or Black-friendly golf courses, as segregation prevented Black golfers from accessing many of the premier White-owned courses. The layouts were usually average and the amenities often shabby. Yet, these professionals endured poor conditions in pursuit of the lowest score, and with it, first-prize cash.

The UGA fostered Black players careers for years. With six U.S. Opens behind him, Shady Rest’s Shippen was the UGA’s biggest early draw, but the association eventually nurtured the games of well-known golfers such as Ted Rhodes and Bill Spiller, who together brought suit against the PGA to end its exclusionary clause; and Lee Elder, who, in 1974, became the first Black to compete in the Masters.

Charlie Sifford won the UGA’s National Negro Open six times in the 1950s and was the UGA’s most illustrious alumnus. Once the PGA Tour allowed Sifford to compete, he captured the Greater Hartford Open in 1967, the Los Angeles Open in 1969, and the PGA Seniors' Championship in 1975. Sifford was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2004, awarded the Old Tom Morris Award in 2007, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014, and presented an honorary doctorate from Scotland’s University of St. Andrews.

The success of these players underscored the level of talent that existed within the UGA.

UGA Legacy
The UGA kept Black professional golf alive and proved that race should not be a barrier to participation in the sport. The pioneering work of Shippen, Spiller, Sifford and Elder and others helped open doors for future generations of Black golfers, including Tiger Woods, whose dominance in professional golf has inspired countless others.

While the organization no longer exists, the UGA’s legacy lives on through the successes of Black golfers in the sport today and as a testament to the resilience, skill, and determination of Black golfers who refused to be denied their rightful place in the game.

Postscript

• The UGA remained viable until the PGA removed its “Caucasian-only clause” in 1961 and as desegregation measures opened public golf courses to all golfers. As barriers to advancement came down, the reason for its existence waned and the UGA tour ceased to exist in the 1960s. 
• In 1931, John Shippen became Shady Rest’s head professional and groundskeeper. Living in a small room on the third floor of the clubhouse, he remained on staff there until 1964, when the club became a municipal course known as Scotch Hills Golf Club. Shippen died in Newark in 1968 at the age of eighty-eight and was buried in Linden, New Jersey. He was inducted into the inaugural class of the New Jersey Golf Hall of Fame in 2018.
• In December 2021, at a gala celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of America’s first Black-owned and operated golf club, the Township of Scotch Plains renamed the course in honor of its heritage: Shady Rest Country Club.

To learn more about John Shippen and Shady Rest go to https://preserveshadyrest.org. For more information on their collective influence on New Jersey golf, go to Remarkable Stories of New Jersey Golf, www.njgolfstories.com.