When Beth Daniel received her first invitation to compete in the Sun City Million Dollar Challenge she was thrilled. It was the 1980s, and Daniel was among the first group of women invited to play in the extremely limited-field event at the Gary Player Country Club in Bophuthatswana.
While there, Daniel went on safari in South Africa and toured Cape Town. It wasn’t long after, however, that Daniel learned from her agent that a letter had arrived from the United Nations informing her that she’d been blacklisted.
“You can call it naïve, ignorance,” said Daniel. “I didn’t realize going over there the apartheid policies and how it affected the people of that country. When I went over there and saw some of it, I was mortified by it.”
Daniel, 65, relayed the ordeal at the recent KPMG Women’s PGA Championship, where the LPGA and World Golf Hall of Famer was onsite at Congressional Country Club as a past champion. The talk that week, and every week it seems, focused in part on LIV Golf and the impact that Saudi-backed money might have on the LPGA.
This was Daniel’s plea for players to learn from her mistake and look at the big picture.
“I grew up in the South,” said Daniel, “and what I saw over there was worse than what I saw growing up in the South.
“It ended up being a tremendous learning lesson for me.”
Daniel, who felt terrible for going, kept writing to explain that she didn’t agree with South Africa’s racist policies and traveled there simply to compete in a golf tournament. After three years, she was removed from the list.
Practically speaking, the only event Daniel was forced to miss in that time was the LPGA-Senior PGA Mazda Championship in Jamaica.
The Million Dollar Challenge, now known as the Nedbank Golf Challenge, began in 1981 with a field of five that was expanded to 10 the following year. In the beginning, the total prize money was $1 million, but in 1987 it was changed to a $1 million check for first place. During this time, non-white South Africans were denied basic human rights, such as the right to vote. Apartheid in South Africa was dismantled in the early ’90s.
Knowing what she knows now, Daniel said, if she was still in the prime of her career and offered an invitation (and appearance fee) to compete in Saudi Arabia, she wouldn’t accept on the basis of human rights violations.
“Now, that’s easy to say from here,” said Daniel, who retired from the tour 15 years ago with 33 LPGA titles.
One week after the inaugural LIV Golf Invitational Series was held at Centurion Club, the Aramco Team Series London presented by Public Investment Fund event was held at the same course.
The Saudi-backed Aramco Series is part of the Ladies European Tour, which falls under the LPGA umbrella. There are two events on the LET schedule currently staged in Saudi Arabia.
Many wonder what will happen to the LPGA if a similar LIV Golf league is formed for top female stars.
When Meg Mallon, a four-time major winner who was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2017, spoke to LPGA players early in the year, she noted that when the LPGA founders laid the foundation for the tour in 1950, it was made clear that there would be no discrimination.
“And that wasn’t happening across the board in sports or most organizations,” said Mallon, “so our founders, from the beginning, had a conscience and looked toward the future of the women’s game and decided then that they weren’t going to discriminate against anybody.
“If they had the character then, I think they would’ve had the character not to do this today either.”
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