Six HBCU golf programs to compete at Quail Hollow in new Charlie Sifford tournament

Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte will host the Presidents Cup next month. Before then, organizers are using Monday's media day to launch a new exhibition tournament for golfers from historically Black colleges and universities.

The event is the Charlie Sifford Centennial Cup. It is named for the Charlotte native who died in 2015 and who was the first African American to play on the PGA Tour and to win a PGA tournament. Sifford would have turned 100 this year, which explains the "centennial" in the title.

Six schools will take part. The Division I programs are Howard, Florida A&M, Alabama State and Texas Southern. Livingstone College represents Division II, and Johnson C. Smith University, the local host school, is also in the field.

Adam Sperling, the PGA Tour's executive director, said Johnson C. Smith was always going to be included as host. The other five qualified through the Golfstat season rankings, with the top four Division I programs and the top Division II program joining the host. The six schools will be split into two teams of 12 golfers, with three programs on each. One side is Team Charlie Sifford. The other is named for James Black, whom Sperling described as another influential local pioneer of the game. Black is from Charlotte, has strongly supported golf and played with Sifford, and organizers plan to welcome him to the event.

Sperling said the Tour has marked the centennial all year, flying a flag at its events each week. It has held larger tributes at the Genesis Invitational, the tournament Sifford won in 1969 when it was the L.A. Open, and at the Memorial in Ohio, where Sifford later lived. Another was held at the Travelers outside Hartford, where he earned his first Tour win at the 1967 Greater Hartford Open.

Asked whether the event would draw significant public interest, Sperling said it was hard to predict. He said the focus was on creating an experience for the 24 student-athletes. Few people get to play a course of Quail Hollow's caliber, he noted, and fewer still compete on it. The annual PGA Tour event there is limited to 156 professionals, and only 24 professionals will compete in the Presidents Cup. He said the Presidents Cup setup includes more than 500,000 square feet of infrastructure around the property, and he called the chance to play in it a memory the college golfers should carry for the rest of their lives.

Sperling was also asked what he hoped the golfers and aspiring Black players would take from the event. He said he was less focused on what the athletes take away than on what everyone else does. The goal, he said, is to celebrate their success as collegiate athletes and to encourage others to think about how access to venues and platforms can advance underrepresented minorities in golf. He tied that to diversity, equity and inclusion in business practices more broadly.

Sifford's son, Charlie Sifford Jr., will be in Charlotte throughout the weekend. He is scheduled to hit a celebratory first tee shot Monday morning, which Sperling said should be a moving moment. Organizers also plan to bring him back for the Presidents Cup at the end of September, and Sperling said the time the students spend with him should be as valuable as anything others can share.