Renee never played high school golf (in those pre-Title IX days, most high schools had a boys golf team, but few, if any, had a girls team), but she was captain of the team at Ohio University and later at The Ohio State University. … You want the ball to roll, so there’s a lot more care being taken there.” The greens are very delicate parts of the course. “I learned to drive the tractor,” recalls Renee, who even now can be found fixing lawn equipment at the course. In addition to honing her skills on the course, Renee helped maintain it. “My dad’s team was my mom.”Įventually, all of the family got into the business. “Jackie Robinson and Marion Motley and Bill Willis had a team behind them,” she says. Renee notes that Clearview Golf Club opened two years after the NFL integrated, and one year after Major League Baseball did. Renee Powell poses with the Clearview Golf Club's Ohio Historical Marker. As you can imagine, it’s a lot of exercise.” He seeded the course by walking around with a seeder around his neck and he walked back and forth to seed each fairway. “He plowed the land and took out the rocks. “He built the course by hand,” Renee explains. William designed a course with British influences and would work a full shift at Timken before heading out to his property and patiently working to turn those plans into a reality. When banks turned him down for a loan, he secured financial backing from his brother and two African American doctors. Route 30 with gentle rolling hills that were reminiscent of England and Scotland. So I said I’ll just build a golf course.”Īnd that’s what he did. “You say the hell with them,” he told The New York Times in 1996. William was denied the opportunity to play the same courses he had as a high school athlete. “He felt as a veteran coming back from World War II that the prejudice and racism in the United States the same as when he left, and he’d be able to play golf. He came back home to play golf,” Renee says. “He didn’t come back home to try to build a golf course. He thought he would be able to do the same upon his return home. Army Air Corps in England during World War II and spent his spare time there playing golf at local courses. He caddied at local golf courses and was the captain of the golf team at Minerva High School and then at Wilberforce College, where he was part of the team that played the first collegiate golf match by a historically black college against a white college, Ohio Northern University. 22, 1916, and his family relocated to Ohio when he was a child. The great-grandson of slaves, William Powell was born in Alabama on Nov. William worked a full shift at Timken in the daytime before returning to the golf club property to bring his plans to fruition. “My dad said everyone should have an opportunity to play the game of golf,” Renee says. They continue their father’s mission of inclusiveness with outreach efforts toward urban and rural youth, women and veterans. Her brother, Larry, is the course superintendent. His daughter Renee, who used a club her father cut down for her to hit golf balls as a 3 year old and grew up to be the second African American on the LPGA tour, is the club professional. William died in 2009 and his children now carry on his legacy. To this day, Clearview Golf Club is the only golf course designed, built, owned and operated by an African American. Board of Education integrated public schools and 13 years before African Americans were admitted to the PGA Tour. The course debuted three months before President Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces by executive order, six years before Brown v. (It expanded to 18 holes 30 years later.) When he faced racial discrimination on the course following World War II, he designed and built his own place to play, opening the nine-hole Clearview Golf Club to the public in 1948. William Powell, the family patriarch, first fell in love with the game as a caddy and then as a player during high school and college. The whole family has such a great story.” “We’d never given more than one person the award in a year, but it just made sense. “Golf has so many positive stories to tell,” explains Darren Davis, immediate past president of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America and course superintendent at Olde Florida Golf Club in Naples. The honor went to the Powell family of East Canton’s Clearview Golf Club. In 2019, for the first time in the award’s history, it wasn’t given to just one person. Ever since the first Old Tom Morris Award was given to Arnold Palmer in 1983, recipients of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America’s highest honor have been a who’s who of the game, from players such as Annika Sörenstam and Jack Nicklaus to famous supporters of the sport, including Bob Hope and Dinah Shore.
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