Was his experience representative of the time? But, when he came back from World War II, he wasn't welcome on the same courses where he'd played when he was a student. Powell, who died in 2009, is the subject of a forthcoming short documentary produced by the United States Golf Association. His daughter Renee Powell and USGA historian Michael Trostel joined Bill Littlefield.īL: Michael, Bill Powell worked as a caddie as a child in Ohio, and he founded his high school’s golf team - he was also the captain, he was also the coach, he did all the scheduling. Though he served in World War II, Powell was denied a GI loan to help build his golf course, so he did it on his own, in between shifts as a security guard at a local steel plant. Powell opened the first integrated golf course in the United States in East Canton, Ohio in 1946. "There were incidents of vandalism in the course's early years - flag sticks were removed and ethnic slurs scrawled - but the course flourished."įor Bill Powell, the motivation was simple: "I did not want other people who wanted to play the game of golf to have to suffer the indignities that I had." Not everyone saw it that way, as The Times recounted in a story published after his death. It only seems fitting that each hole has a photograph of Clearview's founder on the marker.Īs one media report recounts, Powell stated before his death in December 2009, "The holes fit your eye, not fight it, like so many of the courses do today."Ĭlearview Golf Club developed a reputation for serving as "a course where the only color that matters is the color of the greens." Without any formal training in landscape architecture or golf course design, Bill Powell focused on embracing the land's terrain and making detailed adjustments with the course's natural features. Renee Powell recalled when visiting Scotland how much of Clearview obviously resembled the Old Course that her father had encountered in the 1940s. "So how was I supposed to be satisfied to be treated like dirt?" he added. So I said I'll just build a golf course."Īfter all, Powell had just left a country where he was treated like a human being. "It's distasteful when you get turned down," he said. loan despite his military service overseas. Clearview opened to the public in 1948, with him expanding it to 18 holes decades later.Īs Powell, in a 2009 interview with The New York Times, explained, no local banks would grant him a G.I. However, while being welcome on virtually every golf course in Great Britain, Powell didn't receive the same courtesy when returning home to the Minerva area, so he built Clearview.ĭuring the day, he built the first nine holes on a former dairy farm, while working security at night. He went on to attend Wilberforce University in Xenia, where his team brought home the win when playing Ohio Northern University in the first interracial collegiate golf match in American history. After fighting during World War II in the European theater, he found that he was denied the right to play at local courses based on the color of his skin.Īfter discovering the game at age 9 by caddying at Edgewater Golf Course, he served as coach and captain for the newly created Minerva High School's golf team. Powell, the grandchild of Alabama slaves, was inspired to build the course due to a love for golf and a sense of parity. The United States Golf Association has a tribute to Powell's Clearview Golf Club on display at its headquarters through 2017, according to Powell's golf professional daughter, Renee. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the birth of Clearview Golf Club, which Powell opened and is one of several golf courses on the National Register of Historic Places.Ī glance around the course's 130 acres features "lush rolling hills decorated with dogwoods, sassafras, oaks and maple once shrouded on a dilapidated dairy farm where chickens strolled in the weeds not far from a house that had no heat and no plumbing," the Professional Golfers Association of America detailed in a 2009 tribute to Powell. However, Bill Powell poured his blood, sweat and tears into changing that 50 years later, creating "America's course." When golf courses first emerged on American soil in the 1890s, history didn't find them very welcoming places except to white men.
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