Weekend America

From Golf Hustler to PGA Pro

Charlie Schroeder

APRIL 12, 2008

Pro golfer Alton Duhon

(Charlie Schroeder)

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Al Duhon shows how it's done...

(Charlie Schroeder)

One weekend back in 1950, Al Duhon decided he'd go play golf, so he went to his local public golf course. "This guy jumped on my back," he remembers. "He said, 'Come on, let's bet.' I didn't know what betting was. I said 'OK ' -- I thought you had to say 'OK.'"

Duhon was 25 at the time and hadn't played the game very much. Furthermore, he didn't really "get" golf -- especially the people who played, no matter what the weather. "I thought they were crazy!" he says.

Duhon wasn't much competition for his opponent. When the round was over, he owed his playing partner $25. "I said 'Twenty-five dollars? You gotta be kidding me!'"

Duhon paid up -- it was his last money -- and as he did so he had an epiphany: There was money to be made in golf.

For the next six months, Duhon practiced in his South Los Angeles yard. He'd hit chip shots back and forth over his car and launch balls over his neighbor's homes onto a schoolyard more than 200 yards away. Then, once his game was in shape, he went back out to the golf course. "And beat that guy out of my $25."

The game Duhon once labeled crazy had bit him. Hard.

"Golf is just like taking dope," he says. "A guy falls in love with it so much it's something you can't get away from."

That Al ever started playing golf might surprise most people. He grew up in Depression-era, segregated Beaumont, Texas. "My family was so poor we used to put cardboard in our shoes," he says. "People gave them to use so they were always too big. I had to walk on my heels from my house to the paved street just not to walk in the water."

When his father was blackballed from the local oil refinery for unionizing, Duhon started hustling to help his family. He was just 7-years-old. One day, after the local Baptist church refused to give him bread (Duhon's family was Catholic) he enlisted his dog, Black Beauty, for help. "My dog came in with me (to the church) and they tried to take that bread away from me," he says. "That dog raised all kind of hell. So I took the bread and went home with it."

In 1960, 10 years after Al placed his first bet on a golf course, there weren't any African Americans on the PGA Tour. In fact, there wouldn't be for another year, when Charlie Sifford finally broke the color barrier. In 1960, Duhon was making $105 a week working at a plastics factory. But he was making nearly that much in one day on the golf course.

Later that year, the plastics company was sold. Rather than getting another job, Duhon turned to hustling golf full-time. "I just said 'I'll play golf,'" he says. "I knew I could win at least $150-200 a week."

The idea that golfers hustle might seem a bit strange. Hustling, after all, is usually associated with pool halls. But on any given day, Duhon could play in games where $1,000 was on the line -- games that mostly took place at Chester Washington, a golf course in South Los Angeles known as a hustling hotbed. "You didn't have to worry about getting your bags out of the car," he says, "They'd help you get your bags out of the car."

Duhon became such a savvy hustler that he developed a pre-match betting strategy. "My method was, if I shook a guy's hand and he had calluses he was dead. I knew I was going to beat him."

Golfers who don't hold the club properly often struggle with their game, Duhon says. "In one position he had the wrong grip, in the next position he had the club in his hand too weak, because it's rubbing up and down -- or either had it too tight and it gets away from him." Hence the calluses.

Despite making his living on the golf course, Duhon desperately wanted to be taken seriously. It finally happened for him in 1982, when he was 52- years-old. That year, he was the only black golfer competing in the U.S. Senior Amateur in Tucson, Ariz. During his practice round, a reporter approached him and asked him what he was doing there. "I said 'I'm here to kick somebody's ass.' So the guy wrote it up in the paper and everybody quit speaking to me."

Turns out, nobody had to speak to him -- Duhon won the tournament, to become only the second African-American to win a USGA title. "When I got done playing 36 holes that day, I drove all the way back to L.A. without even getting sleepy thinking about what happened in my lifetime. That was the greatest moment of my life."

At the age of 65, Duhon finally turned pro. He played a few years on the senior tour, continued to hustle and in his spare time taught kids in South Los Angeles about the game. At 83, he still teaches things like how to hold the club, respect on the course and how to dress. "If you dress like a fool," he says. "They're going to treat you like a fool."

Duhon doesn't hustle any more. But that doesn't mean he's totally hung up his hat: "If a guy wants to bet me, I'll bet him."

My money's on Al.

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