GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA | Golf history isn’t limited to places such as St. Andrews, Augusta National and the game’s various museums around the world.
It happened at Gillespie Golf Course, a nine-hole municipal course just down an industrial road crowded by large metal buildings and the heavy trucks moving back and forth in this golf-rich city.
Six days after Rosa Parks changed the course of American history in 1955 by refusing to sit at the back of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, six Black golfers paid their 75-cent green fees and teed it up at Gillespie, defying a whites-only rule in place at the course that was built on city land.
Those six golfers, called the Greensboro Six and led by local dentist Dr. George Simkins Jr., were arrested later that evening, but they had made their point. It was an important civil-rights moment in a place that would draw national attention in 1960 when four Black college students demanded service at a Woolworth’s lunch counter a few miles away.
Gillespie Golf Course still has much of what designer Perry Maxwell constructed there in 1941, but the place itself has changed dramatically, and more changes are on the way.
Wyndham Rewards, title sponsor of the Wyndham Championship this week at Sedgefield Country Club, presented a $200,000 check on Monday that will go toward the Central Carolina First Tee facility, including a mural that will celebrate the Greensboro Six and their civil-rights actions in 1955 at Gillespie, which is also home to the Central Carolina First Tee program.
Additionally, a pre-tournament youth clinic was held at Gillespie for the first time this week, coming to the youngsters whom it is intent on reaching rather than asking them to find their way across town to another site.
“The First Tee suggested that if we moved the event to Gillespie, we would be able to have more children participate and open it to a wider audience. We felt we could have a larger impact within the community,” said Lisa Checchio, chief marketing officer for Wyndham Hotels and Resorts.
In other words, go where the youngsters are.
“It’s meaningful to bring the tournament and the players to the kids. This is our home base,” said Ryan Wilson, CEO and executive director of the Central Carolina First Tee.
As part of the continuing revitalization of Gillespie Golf Course and the First Tee facility, the mural will cover an outside wall of the clubhouse and celebrate what the Greensboro Six did nearly 70 years ago.
“We have 30-50 kids here every afternoon. They never go over to the clubhouse, so they don’t see the Greensboro Six markers over there. The concept is to add character to the building and tie it in with a history lesson,” Wilson said.
The mural may also include the image of Charlie Sifford, who became the first African-American to play in a PGA Tour event in the South at the 1961 Greater Greensboro Open.
For several years, the United Golf Association, an all-Black professional tour, played the Gate City Open at Gillespie, tournaments that featured Sifford, Jim Dent, Jim Thorpe and Lee Elder, among others.
“The story of Gillespie is a unique story relative to the city of Greensboro but not unique relative to golf in the South and African-Americans who wanted to play golf in the South,” said Richard Watkins, the men’s and women’s golf coach at nearby North Carolina A&T. “This is our story.”
The mural is being developed along with Greensboro Public Art and the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro.
The First Tee has been running programs at Gillespie since 2009, and the development continues. With the support of local leader Jim Melvin and the J.M. Bryan Foundation, a new driving range, putting green and a short course have been constructed, adding to the course that hosts approximately 17,000 rounds per year.
The city of Greensboro recently committed $2 million for course work at Gillespie. With two sets of tees to make the same nine holes play differently, Gillespie is approximately 6,400 yards, and it looks dramatically different than it did just more than a decade ago.
“The clubhouse building was the Parks and Rec maintenance facility. There was no practice area, and what is now the short course had a 10-foot fence around it. The city’s junk was parked there,” Wilson said.
The Wyndham Championship is the final “regular-season” event on the PGA Tour and has used that fact to its advantage. With the FedEx Cup playoffs now limited to the top 70 on the points list after the Wyndham Championship, the event has taken on a greater urgency for players.
For Wyndham, in its 17th year as title sponsor of the Greensboro event, it’s another point of connectivity in a community that Checchio says is the New Jersey-based company’s “home away from home.”
The Wyndham Championship is the final “regular-season” event on the PGA Tour and has used that fact to its advantage. With the FedEx Cup playoffs now limited to the top 70 on the points list after the Wyndham Championship, the event has taken on a greater urgency for players.
It also continues to enhance the fan experience, which plays to the company’s brand. There is a sandy beach created along a large lake on the back nine, an enormous sand-castle structure this year with miniature golf holes built in the Margaritaville pavilion, which is a central gathering point for fans.
“We build the Wyndham as the place to be. We love being able to turn Sedgefield into inspiration for the 50,000 places Wyndham Rewards can take you around the world,” Checchio said.
“We pride ourselves on being a fan favorite on the tour. That’s what we want. We want the event to be a place to be.”