Pete Brown and his landmark victory at a course with no name

In May 1964, golf history was made in remote Burneyville, Oklahoma at a PGA Tour event called the Waco Turner Open. The tournament ran from 1961 to 1964 at a venue then known only as “Waco Turner’s golf course,” and it combined professional golf with elements of the Wild West and Las Vegas prop betting. According to all accounts, the paucity of crowds at this event would not be seen again until the summer of 2020, when the PGA Tour resumed its schedule – without spectators – during the COVID-19 pandemic. It could well have been the strangest tour event ever staged.

The main principals in 1964 were two nonwhite men, both born in Mississippi. One was the sponsor, Waco Turner, a member of the Chickasaw Nation. He was a wealthy, peculiar septuagenarian who carried pistols that he showed a willingness to use. The second was Pete Brown, a quiet, friendly sharecropper’s son who became the first Black golfer to win an official PGA Tour event.

Waco Franklin Turner was born in 1891, in Holly Springs, Mississippi. As...