Because of the relevance of the visit next week of Professor. Jeffrey Sammons (pictured) for the PGA Grand Slam featuring the year’s four major champions and the free public lecture he’ll be giving at the Ocean View Golf Club on ‘Kid’ Corbin,’ we thought it would be timely to reproduce the feature I wrote for the Mid-Ocean News headed ‘How blacks overcame their major golf handicap’, and published on April 9, 1998.Here are excerpts:There could hardly be a better time than now to turn the historical spotlight on the “good old very bad days” of golf in Bermuda when blacks could not darken the front doors of golf clubs anywhere, and when blacks dared not even attempt to play a round of golf in the broad daylight hours on any of the course.Their role was to function as caddies, and if they stepped out of line they faced serious trouble. From Somerset to St George’s, if blacks wanted to hit a ball, they had to do it in the parks and at any other open spaces.Maurice Bill Pitt and O’Neil (Popcorn) Virgil as boys virtually grew up on the golf links. Like scores of their contemporaries, and the generation before them, they started out as caddies at the age of 12 on the neighbourhood golf course. Caddies were very much in demand then. Kids wanting to make a hustle and have a few pennies or dollars or cents in their pockets either sold newspapers and rum bottles or they gravitated to the golf courses.The really smart ones like Maurice Bill Pitt, for instance, made it a profession, combining it with his life long career in the hospitality industry. He took the initiative along with Erskine (Dayton) Simons and the George Lowe, and secured the Ocean View Golf Club for blacks.Bermuda was notoriously segregated until the Theatre Boycott in 1959 resulted in desegregation of theatres, hotels, restaurants, and other public places. Aside from the hotels, the areas where Bermuda’s unwritten “lily white” rules frantically applied were the golf, tennis and beach clubs. Blacks, no matter what their social, professional or financial status were neither invited nor welcome. And if they had any business to transact, entry had to be gained through the back door.Obviously the operators of the golf courses realised somewhere along the line that it was in their symbiotic interest to make concessions to blacks, if only for the purpose of enabling them to become “better boys” at caddying (and here we are talking about grown men)So they turned a blind eye to any of them who were prepared to get up at four or five o’clock in the morning and play a round from daybreak and be off the course by 8am when the regular guests and members usually began their day.Virgil called this ‘running golf’. They literally had to run around the course to complete their rounds before the cut off time. Even under these circumstances, he said the fellows regularly turned in some excellent scores of six, seven and eight under par. Imagine what it would have been like, he said, if they had the benefit of time and concentration.There was another restriction blacks found most irksome, which was that they play only up to the 17th hole. They were barred from playing the 18th hole, because, in the words of O’Neil, “that would put us too close to the front door”. He said he was told of one incident when “all hell broke loose”. It was when a group of blacks trying to bring a competition among themselves to a logical conclusion, ventured to play the 18th hole and were confronted by the furious white management who called the police.Despite their unnatural handicaps, Virgil said some great golfers emerged from that period like William DeShields, Rusty Kennedy, Earl Anderson, Roger Liburd, Herman Santucci, Earl Lowe, and two Portuguese, Louis Moniz and Joe Burner DaCosta.Blacks in the United States were in a similar position to their brothers in Bermuda as far as opportunities to access golf courses were concerned. But there were tournaments they were able to organise, one of which was the Joe Louis Open. Joe Louis was then the world heavyweight boxing champion, known as the “Brown Bomber”.His Bermuda connection began when at the height of his fame his wife Marva came here and spent a highly-publicised vacation at a guest house in Southampton. Also, a young Bermudian known as Louis Rafael (Kid) Corbin, who divided his time between here and the US, got to know Joe Louis and ended up teaching him some of the finer points about golf. Corbin, incidentally, was a golfing fanatic who perfected his game as a caddie at the St George’s golf course. He also had a flair for journalism, and published a paper called ‘Snooping Around’, which was a gossip sheet of the Walter Winchell variety. Corbin, I am told, opened the door for the best Bermudian compatriots to enter the Jose Louis tournament, and Bill Pitt was one of the first to enter. Other regular participants included Herman Santucci Bascome, Earl and George Lowe and, of course, Kid Corbin.Returning home in 1949 from competing in Detroit, Bill said he was completely fed up with having to rise at four and five in the morning to play on local courses. He realised the Prospect Garrison was being phased out by the British, and their links there which were leased to businessman Frank Wilson were falling in disrepair.“I lived next door to David Tucker, a lawyer who was a Member of Parliament, and discussed the idea of accessing that course. As a result of representations he made for me to Brigadier Arden, the blacks were given a lease to the property.”The first thing they did was build a wooden clubhouse. When that building was destroyed by fire of suspicious origin, they put up another wooden structure, and that too was set on fire. Finally, they acquired a stone building which stamped them forever on the Bermuda map.By now the three prime movers, Bill, Dayton and George Lowe, swelled their ranks with the likes of Horace Tucker, Jiggs Todd, Vernon Lowe and Cyril Smith, Lew DeRosa, Hubert Simmons and Harrison Simons (to name a few) helped put Ocean View on an irreversible course.