As a boy growing up in Brooklyn, the idea of interracial marriage was so taboo that if a black man and white woman were seen holding hands it would cause a crowd stir. Miscegenation was a long, scientific term for racial cohabitation that was so abhorrent that it was not until I got to college in the 1950s that I began to think it might be okay. Country clubs are just now beginning to admit token blacks. People of even a slightly darker skin, the Mediterranean Europeans, were down the scale. You say golf is only a GAME, and I am being ridiculous in citing Tiger Woods's achievement as breaking down racial barriers, fails to take this history into consideration.
Golf is the most intellectual of all physical sporting endeavors.
Instead of swinging at a ball coming at you at 100 mph, you swing at a ball at rest. Your intellect is dominant. The fact that Tiger is a mere 170 lbs in weight and can average drives of twice that number in yardage is testimony to his intellect, the way his brain has flowered from little up, rather than his physical strength. Racists will always acknowledge that some blacks will be more intelligent that some whites, because it is now too obvious they are. It was only a century ago that Booker T. Washington became the first black intellectual invited to address a prestigious all-white audience.