John Merchant, the first black person to be elected to the USGA’s executive committee and a former unpaid counsel to Tiger Woods, died Thursday at age 87 after a long illness, his daughter, Susan, announced on Facebook.
“My dear Pop left peacefully to play the back nine,” she wrote. “My heart is heavy and I will miss him beyond measure.”
In the aftermath of the Shoal Creek controversy at the 1990 PGA Championship, former USGA president Sandy Tatum made it “a personal mission” to diversify the association’s Executive Committee. In 1992, he recruited Merchant, a lawyer and consumer counsel for the state of Connecticut, making him the first black person to be elected to the USGA’s most powerful committee.
Merchant had been a pioneer before. He was the first black graduate of the University of Virginia law school, arriving on campus in 1955, one year after Brown vs. Board of Education.
“When he entered a courtroom, lawyers would get to their feet to shake his hand and were always met with a pat on the back and his wide, toothful grin,” read an obit for Merchant in The Connecticut Post.
Merchant learned to play golf while in the Navy but while he played at a number of courses in the area, he was blocked from playing in tournaments because he was black.
“You couldn’t get a certified handicap to play in any of the sanctioned events because you had to be a part of the men’s association and they wouldn’t let blacks join the men’s association,” he said in an interview with The Connecticut Post in 2010.
Merchant used the power of his position with the USGA to bring together industry leaders and minority advocates to address the issue of under-representation. He believed that if people sat down and talked, something positive would happen.
Forthright and charismatic, he worked tirelessly to convert what was to what ought to be. “It’s not necessarily the fight that I like,” he said when he returned to UVA in 1994 to deliver the commencement address at his daughter’s law school graduation. “It’s being able to do what I can to make the fight a fair one and provide all people with an opportunity to achieve.”
Like a true lawyer, Merchant recalls spending 274 hours organizing golf’s first minority symposium in 1992. The gathering represented the first time minorities sat at a table with the industry establishment for an open dialogue. Blacks from 17 states attended, including Earl Woods and Renee Powell, one of three black players ever to compete on the LPGA.
Out of those discussions was the formation of the National Minority Golf Foundation. To serve in the role as NMGF’s executive director, Merchant stepped down from the USGA Executive Committee. He wrestled with the decision, but he had drafted a piece of paper with his road map for the NMGF and jumped at the opportunity to implement it.
Merchant never got his chance. In January 1996, the Connecticut State Ethics Commission fined him $1,000 for claiming to have been conducting official business while he was attending four out-of-state golf tournaments as a member of the USGA Executive Committee. The episode made front-page news in The Hartford Courant.
But it could do nothing to diminish the importance of the conversation he had started in the game, which lead to the eventual creation of The First Tee. Merchant also served as a rules official in several of golf’s major championships, including the Masters. In recognition of his service to the game he loved, Merchant was inducted into the National Black Golf Hall of Fame in 2010.
“The National Black Golf Hall of Fame brings a level of truth and completeness to golf’s American history,” Merchant said at the time, “but I’m troubled by a level of unfinished business. We’ve failed to adequately define golf’s own history with African-Americans as part of that history. One more step must be taken. Golf must apply its standards of integrity to preserving its history.”