Pat Rielly was never afraid to stand up for the little guy.
In 1953, the 6-foot-tall junior reserve forward on the Sharon (Pennsylvania) High basketball team was on his way to play in the state regional finals in Pittsburgh when the team stopped for dinner in Zelienople, Pennsylvania, a borough north of Pittsburgh in the heart of coal and iron country.
Rielly noticed that his three Black teammates – Charlie Shepard, Charlie Mitchell and Edward Woods – weren’t eating and sidled over to talk to them.
“I said, ‘What are guys doing? Are you saving your $5?’ ” Rielly recalled more than 60 years later. “Mitchell said, ‘They won’t serve us.’ I said, ‘Why?’ All three stared at me and said, ‘You know why.’ ”
This sort of discrimination was illegal but still prevalent, even in southwestern Pennsylvania, and it sent Rielly into a rage. He was the eighth or ninth man on the team, a sub, but he knew right from wrong. When he approached the owner and asked politely why his teammates were being refused to be served, the owner didn’t hide his contempt. “We’re not serving any (N-word),” he said.
With the courage of his convictions, Rielly said they would not pay until the entire team was fed. The owner wouldn’t budge. Neither would Rielly.
“So, we got up and left,” Rielly said. “We stopped and got something to eat another 20 miles up the road, closer to Pittsburgh.”
To Rielly, his memory of the game, which the team won, paled in comparison to the lesson he learned that day.
“You do the right thing, and sometimes you get criticized for it,” he said. “But when you do the right thing for the right reasons, it turns out the right way always.”
In the early 1960s, Rielly was traveling with a handful of fellow Marines. They needed a few more hours of flight time and convinced the pilot to fly to Reno, Nevada, the self-proclaimed “Biggest little city in the world,” where Las Vegas-style gambling, entertainment and dining is compressed into a few city blocks. As only Rielly could do, he placed a roulette bet not even understanding the rules and won several thousand dollars at a time when that was a lot of money. He took everyone to dinner and ordered a feast. After paying the bill, he still had a wad of cash left over, so he tipped the waiters generously, loaned some money to his pals and went into the kitchen. The employees stopped what they were doing to hear him speak.
“My mother was a dishwasher,” he said. “That’s why I was able to play golf on Mondays. This game has given me everything.”
Then he handed the dishwashers in the restaurant a stack of cash from his winnings. Most of them didn’t understand a word he said, but they shook his hand and gladly accepted the money.
These two dinner stories illustrate why Rielly was the right man at the right time to be serving as the 26th President of the PGA of America in 1990 when Shoal Creek Country Club in Birmingham, Alabama, was scheduled to host the PGA Championship, and professional golf would be forced to change its rules regarding clubs with exclusionary practices. This was uncharted territory for a golf association and a watershed moment in golf’s race relations. It demanded a leader with a dose of humility just below his confidence.
“His own personal integrity matched the integrity of the game he loved,” said Rielly’s longtime friend and former PGA Tour Commissioner Deane Beman.
But it wasn’t until more than 20 years later that Rielly learned just how important his role in a long-forgotten dinner played in launching an era of inclusion. Then he insisted this story wait until after he died. Now it can be told.
