I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It by Charles Barkley Page A

recently that Lee Trevino went to that clubhouse only once. Somebody wanted to throw him out the very first time he went there to play and he never wanted to go there again. They made him feel so uncomfortable being there he went out back and changed his shoes. He changed his shoes in the trunk of his car like he was some weekend hacker at a public course. Lee Trevino, one of the greatest golfers of all time. Can you imagine that? And you know there are people running around saying, “How can Lee Trevino be bitter toward Augusta and the Masters?” The people who ask that question, with disgust in their voices, were probably never turned away from someplace or asked to leave or enter a back door because of their color. I was down in Alabama playing golf one day in May, not long after the
Sports Illustrated
article ran, and I ran into some guys who said, “Hale Irwin said your views about Tiger and Augusta National were silly.” I said, “Listen, I like Hale Irwin. But Hale Irwin doesn’t live in Alabama where y’all are rednecks. Hale Irwin flew in here in a private jet for a few days, maybe a week. He played at the finest country club and he stayed in the most luxurious hotel he could find, which didn’t exactly give him a taste of what it’s like to be poor and black in Alabama, or poor and white in Alabama for that matter. Of course he’s going to feel what I said was silly. But did you ask him if he disagreed with me that blacks and poor whites and Hispanics in this country are treated like shit?” Of course, the guy didn’t ask him. He couldn’t even connect with the sentiment I was expressing. The larger question would never cross the guy’s mind. I’m not saying he was a bad guy. But it simply wouldn’t cross his mind.
    It’s interesting that golf courses are places where guys really talk now. You’ve got all kinds of people playing together and eating lunch in the clubhouse together, and some of those guys would never meet people different from themselves if it wasn’t for the golf course. You’ve got to think some of the people coming into golf now are there because of Tiger, right? I’m not talking about just black people, but white people and Asian people and Hispanic people who didn’t think golf was open to them. A lot of people just started to look at it differently because of him. It’s like the game is okay for everybody to participate in.
    And a lot of us are always going to remember what we were doing or where we were when he won the Masters for the first time, in 1997, when he just kicked everybody’s butt, set the record (270) and the next guy—was it Tom Kite?—was something like 12 strokes back (282). Man, that’s a day that changed golf forever. It changed the direction of sports in this country. The day Tiger won, I was playing for the Houston Rockets and we had a Sunday afternoon game. I remember I was nervous as hell. Black people aren’t always happy for other black people when they achieve goals, which is something that really bothers me. There’s often jealousy involved, and I just don’t understand why that is or how something like that got started. But sometimes guys come up to me and say—and they’re talking about athletes or entertainers—“Man, you guys have it great.” And yeah, the end result is great. But I tell them, “Man, getting there involves some shit you don’t want to know about and I don’t want to talk about.”
    But I’m sure that other successful black people, people who have had to negotiate some serious situations to get where they are and appreciate all the BS that comes with trying to climb the mountain, are happy for other successful black people. There’s a kinship there because people have gone through similar experiences to achieve something even if their professions aren’t the same and don’t have much in common. I know successful black people were happy for Tiger in a way that had to be different from people of other races who