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Kobe Narcisse plays football in high school mainly because his friends are part of the team, but he prefers to crush the workouts than to deliver sensational hits.
At the age of 5, his father, Robert, introduced him to golf in adulthood after Tiger Woods' 1997 Masters win. This spring, Kobe Narcisse, an African-born American, has recruited five more students, most of them are baseball players, to form a golf team in his public high school outside of New Orleans.
But at the start of the regional school championships, Narcisse, 14, a freshman, was the only golfer left.
Most of his teammates, he said, "decided that they were not ready to play."
There must have been dozens of Kobe Narcissus at all levels of golf. The minority kids who did the sport after Woods broke the barrage with his dominant game as a junior and his career unparalleled as a pro – or at least a lot more than it was. there is. Woods, who is Thai and African-American, brought fake turtlenecks, celebratory cutouts and chiseled physique to the golf, dramatically altering the game's appearance. But the predictions that his superstardom would diversify did not come true.
The lack of easy access to golf courses and the high costs associated with competition have proven to be problems that even the rise of a single star in the century like Woods, or the daily benevolence of educational professionals, can not solve.
Woods said Tuesday that investment in golf time has limited its appeal to today's children, regardless of their background. "There are so many different things kids can come in and go to. Playing five hours and five and a half hours of a sport does not seem very appealing, "said Woods, who could have talked about his daughter. and his son, the two football players.
Twenty-two years after Woods' victory at Augusta National, there are only three players of African-American descent on the PGA Tour (and four having the same status as the L.P.G.A. circuit or minor league circuit, including Woods' niece, Cheyenne Woods).
According to statistics provided by the N.C.A.A. 6% of all CNAs.A. golfers were black, Latino or Native American. Asians are the only minority group to have experienced a significant increase in participation numbers; they accounted for 5.9% of all players in 2018, compared to 3.1% in 2008.
The pipeline is crackling as some 2.6 million people have tried golf for the first time in 2018, the fourth consecutive year of increasing the number of beginners, according to the National Golf Foundation.
Narcisse, who recently played in a pro-am with Jason Day, the 2015 P.G.A. champion, is a product of The First Tee, a program for underserved children, especially girls and minorities. There are others, such as American golf and the Youth on Course program, which have an impact: 35% of newcomers were women, 26% of non-whites and 70% of under 34s. Yet, if golf has progressed in introducing the game to new players, keeping them is a challenge.
"It's a tough sport," said Narcisse.
Woods was not a country club kid. He learned a Level 3 public course in Long Beach, California, and his father, Earl, said he had a second mortgage. support the development of his prodigy.
It was a good investment. When Woods became a professional, he signed a $ 40 million deal with Nike. Its president, Phil Knight, said: "What Michael Jordan has done for basketball, Tiger can absolutely do it for golf." Nike has become Woods' most enduring sponsor.
Woods' success has allowed more money to be invested in the sport, unleashing an arms race that has, in some ways, made it more difficult for golfers to be trained for children, especially if they come not from suburbs, where public courses are more numerous.
The First Tee, a partnership between PGA and L.P.G.A. Tours, the United States Golf Association, the Augusta National Golf Club and the P.G.A. of America, the host organization of the week P.G.A. Championship at Long Island's Bethpage National Park, offers free classes, free access or heavily discounted rates for affiliated courses. But the very people that these programs are supposed to serve often face major obstacles in pursuing the sport steadily.
Consider the First Tee chapter of Kansas City, Missouri, which extends for a distance of 7 km flying bird, but more than an hour away by bus, from the side is impoverished where Chris Harris, 50, grew up. A natural athlete, Harris loved basketball, football and baseball, but had never played golf. "Because I did not have access to it," said Harris, who moved the Earth to change that landscape.
Over the past two decades, Harris has bought troubled properties in his old neighborhood. With the help of donations and the free time he had to find housing for the homeless, he turned the field into a sports complex with a pitch-and-putt course. The facility will become the local headquarters of First Tee.
But exposing children to the game is only the source of development. There are tournament fees and travel expenses for a seemingly endless program. And a set of clubs, even at a discount, costs a lot more than a basketball or a tennis racket.
Cameron Champ, 23, winner of the PGA Tour of African-American descent, was able to turn his participation in Youth on Course into a tour, but it was not easy. He stated that he had not contested his first event of the American Junior Golf Association before his 15th birthday, as his parents, who run a screen printing company in Sacramento, could not afford he. His father, Jeff, played baseball in the state of San Diego and in the Baltimore Orioles organization. He said they were thinking of moving to the suburbs but had chosen to stay in their neighborhood less expensive and to make a difference in golf fees, which, according to Jeff, often amounted to $ 30,000 per month. year.
When Woods began traveling for tournaments, his father booked their hotel for the day the event began to eliminate an extra night. Earl Woods loosened the strings of the purse after his son had said that he felt at a disadvantage because he could not see the course before his first lap.
Alexis Vakasiuola, 11, and her sister, Alyzzah, 17, know this feeling. Alexis took his first flying in April, and only then because his trip was covered by the organizers of the event, after his qualification for the final of the contest Drive, Chip and Putt at Augusta National. The Vakasiuolas, of Tongan origin, usually go to tournaments with their father, Danny. Until recently, the family car was a 1992 Toyota 4Runner, which also served as a sleeping cabin.
"We would go to a gas station, park and sleep, go to McDonald's in the morning, have breakfast and wash in the bathroom," said the father.
They are now able to stay in budget hotels because Steve Dallas, who owns two public courses in the Phoenix area, is subsidizing their travel expenses through: donations for scholarships that are then distributed by the Arizona Junior Golf Association. Dallas, who was the first Hall of Fame instructor, Fred Couples, also allowed them to practice and play for free at his classes, Las Colinas and Apache Creek, and that he's the most close to a swing coach..
The generosity of people like the course builder, Harris, and the course owner, Dallas, is the caulking that keeps the game from running away from more participants. But some holes can not be filled.
"There are girls I play with who say they've just switched to another swing coach or have a new putting coach and think it works," said Alyzzah, adding :" It's a little difficult. You start to think that I may need it too.
Like Woods at 14, the Vakasiuolas do not have a strong coach. Woods' first exercise program cost $ 2.50, which was the price of the January 1990 issue of Golf Digest, which included the article entitled "How to put your golf muscles in shape this winter". His obsession with exercise has raised the bar of sports the cost of success.
It's the world that Isaac and Mary Pat Rodriguez watch when they see what their son Marshall, a freshman who became obsessed with golf last year, could become. The same Sunday that Woods won his 15th major championship, Marshall, 6, scored 40 holes for the first time for the first time on a course that had age-related distances – a configuration equivalent to that used by Woods' first coach and referred to as "Tiger by".
Isaac Rodriguez searched nearby golf courses and fell on Tenison Park, east of downtown Dallas and a few miles from their home. Jess Robinson, a teacher professor, was working on the stove from the first day Marshall was introduced and has been with her since. As Woods' first instructor, Rudy Duran, Robinson emphasizes the pleasure of playing and not the science of swing.
The Rodriguez, who have two other children, calculate the development costs of Marshall's game. They juggled schedules to organize tournaments and took them to country club clinics where membership would be unreachable. They are grateful to have found at Robinson an instructor willing to spend many more hours working with their son than they could afford.
While his parents are trying not to worry about where their son's passion for golf could lead them, Marshall is resolutely turned toward the future.
He can not wait for the school to allow it for the summer. "Then I can play golf all the time," he said.
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