To look back on 75 years of golf, since the first issue of Golf Digest went to print in 1950—it ran 16 pages and cost 15 cents—is to see so many stories that can be defined by a word that usually carries positive associations: progress. Finding those stories isn’t hard, and telling them isn’t hard. What’s hard is trying to understand how progress actually works and how it doesn’t always stop at the convenient moment or deliver the happiest conclusion. Instead, it seems to flow onward, on currents of money, bending against our natural desire for a clean ending.

Let’s talk first about two black men from North Carolina. The late Charlie Sifford came from Charlotte, the son of a laborer who found a job as a caddie making 60 cents a day and became a world-class golfer. In 1950, the year William H. Davis launched the publication you’re reading today, Sifford was 28 years old and couldn’t play with the touring pros of the PGA. Instead, he won tournaments like the Negro National Open and made his living as a teacher.

Listen to “Revolutions,” a three-part podcast examining Golf Digest’s 75-year history Local Knowledge Podcast Part 1: Arnold Palmer, IMG, and the early disruptors Local Knowledge Podcast Part 2: The Tiger Slam, AKA the best golf ever played Local Knowledge Podcast Part 3: Life After Tiger Woods, the Great Schism

Baseball and football had already been integrated, and the NBA was integrated that same year, but it took until 1961 before the PGA got rid of its Caucasian-only clause. Once Sifford finally joined his white colleagues, his reward was going through hell—racist fans, a cold reception from some players and discriminatory practices, particularly in the American south. Everything he did to forge a career was calculated through a lens of self-preservation and fear. When he bought a new Buick Wildcat, he would travel between tournaments with a white player as his passenger. That way, if a cop gave him trouble, he could say he was just the hired driver.

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TOUGH FIRST STEPS: Without Charlie Sifford, there is no Tiger Woods.

Augusta National

What Sifford endured paved the way for other black golfers, including the most famous of all, Tiger Woods, who became a global superstar and arguably the greatest player in the game’s history. Tiger understood what Sifford had done for him and named his only son “Charlie.”

The other black player from North Carolina, Harold Varner III, grew up in Gastonia. In superficial ways, his story seems like the logical end point of the progress that Sifford initiated, and Tiger perfected. Varner, too, came from a poor family—his parents sometimes didn’t have enough to pay the electricity bill in their 900-square-foot home—but because of a $100 summer package at a local municipal course, he had access to golf and, like Sifford, beat the odds to become a PGA Tour professional. He never won on tour, but he earned more than $10 million.

Then progress threw a wrinkle: In August 2022, at 32, Varner signed with a rival league called LIV Golf for $15 million. The windfall from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund came as part of a campaign that created a major schism that continues to damage the popularity of professional golf. “It’s all about the damn money,” Varner said at the time, showing more honesty than many of his fellow defectors. Yet as gaudier sums are thrown at players from all sides and the very structure of the sport is altered to reflect a game at war with itself, the uplifting individual part of Varner’s story became hard to disentangle from the larger disruption.

You could argue that Charlie Sifford paved the way for Harold Varner, who now plays a small role in paving the way for professional golf’s upheaval.

Progress doesn’t stop where we’re most comfortable.

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PARADOXICAL SUCCESS: Harold Varner left the PGA Tour to make more money with LIV Golf.

Chris Hyde

Take the story of an Ohio pharmacist’s son. In the early 1960s, with Golf Digest still in its relative infancy, Jack Nicklaus intended to remain a lifelong amateur like his hero Bobby Jones. Mark McCormack, founder of IMG and Arnold Palmer’s agent, brought him to his senses with visions of how much money he could make, and as the amateur idealist gave way to the entrepreneur, one of the greatest professional careers in golf history began. By 1968 his tune had changed so completely that he teamed up with Palmer and other top pros to break away from the PGA of America, which stubbornly refused to pay them what they deserved, to form the precursor to the PGA Tour. In 1983, his capitalist instincts led him to instigate an attempted (and failed) coup against tour commissioner Deane Beman on the grounds that on issues like TV rights, course design and marketing opportunities, the growing tour was abandoning its member-first principles and, more importantly, cutting into his earning potential. Today, at age 85, Nicklaus is involved in a bizarre lawsuit regarding his image and likeness that pits him against, among other entities, an AI version of himself.

Progress takes us in strange directions.

MORE: Look back at your favorite Golf Digest issues in our archive

Golf Digest has been there every step. In these pages, Larry Mowry told the harrowing story of driving through the night in Georgia with Charlie Sifford. Writer Tom Callahan traveled to Vietnam to find Tiger Woods’ namesake and reveal how Earl Woods’ experience in that country influenced a worldview that would shape a legend. In his only Golf Digest cover story, Harold Varner relayed the story of his childhood to interviewer Mark Whitaker.

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While little looks the same today as it looked 75 years earlier, the changes in Golf Digest over the years have been particularly profound. Golf Digest began as a regional publication in 1950, the brainchild of William H. Davis, a World War II naval officer and Northwestern graduate with a vision for a magazine geared toward the golfer, rather than the golf fan—a market already covered by Golf World, which would eventually come under the Golf Digest umbrella 38 years later.

Davis’ lieutenants (officially “co-founders,” though nobody doubted who ran the show) were Howard Gill and Jack Barnett. As Jerry Tarde, Golf Digest’s current Editor-in-Chief, wrote in 2010, the trio’s reputation for penny-pinching was such that Dan Jenkins later claimed that Gill convinced him to write articles in the early days in exchange for Velveeta cheese sandwiches. Gill was the charmer of the group, Barnett the business-side grinder and Davis … well, Davis’ unofficial nickname among his editorial employees was the “Prince of Darkness.” He was the type of relentless boss, it was said, who could walk by a senior editor’s office, look in and ruin his life for a year. They were the definition of hustlers. They convinced players like Ben Hogan, Sam Snead and Byron Nelson to write for the magazine, and one of the early turning points for the business came when they began placing small booklets of golf tips—with subscription information included, of course—under the windshield wipers of cars in the parking lots of Chicago-area golf courses.

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SEEING GREEN: Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer transformed the business of pro golf.

Augusta National

The magazine went national within two years. The trio sold it to The New York Times in 1969, and since it has been sold twice more, in 2001 to Condé Nast and again in 2019 to the current owner, Warner Bros./Discovery. Tarde has been present for all three owners. He began reading Golf Digest in the early 1970s as a teenager and got his foot in the door as an intern in 1977 while a rising senior at Northwestern. Golf Digest offered him a job at the end of the summer, and he’s been here ever since. One of his first hires in the mid-’80s was to bring aboard Jenkins as a contributing editor.

“That turned out to be so important because it allowed us to attract so much other talent,” says Tarde, who was also responsible for one of the most important moves in Golf Digest history—outlasting Golf Magazine in a tense battle to sign Tiger Woods as playing editor in the spring and summer of 1997. Getting and retaining talent has been a key reason for Golf Digest’s growth and evolution in a media landscape that has undergone seismic changes. One cannot describe the present, while evolving into the future, without a reliable core.

There is nostalgia on Tarde’s part—how can you not look fondly on the days when writers like Jenkins, Charley Price, Henry Longhurst, Peter Dobereiner and a murders’ row of columnists defined a once-monthly magazine, or when Tarde himself, just 26 years old, could score a private interview with Tom Watson in his hotel room on the morning of the final round of the 1982 Open Championship at Royal Troon, which Watson won—but no stasis, as evidenced by Golf Digest’s expansion into video, television and all realms of digital media.

Revolutions: A re-examined history of golf, Golf Digest, and Tiger Local Knowledge Podcast Revolutions Part 1: Arnold Palmer, IMG, and the early disruptors Local Knowledge Podcast Revolutions Part 2: The Tiger Slam, aka the best golf ever played Local Knowledge Podcast Revolutions Part 3: Life After Tiger Woods, the Great Schism

The apex of this 75-year journey, or the high point of golf as human art since its advent in the foggy history of Scotland and perhaps the European low countries before, began in the summer of 2000 at Pebble Beach, when Tiger Woods unleashed a performance of such virtuosity that it seemed to stagger his competitors for a full year. June gave way to July, and Tiger followed that U.S. Open win by dominating once again, this time at one of the few courses of greater renown than Pebble. A month after he captured the claret jug at St. Andrews, he survived a stiff challenge from unheralded Bob May to win this third straight major at the PGA at Valhalla. Winter came, spring broke and at Augusta in 2001 he finished the unthinkable, pouring in a birdie putt on the 72nd hole to secure the green jacket and hold all four major titles at the same time.

The Tiger Slam is, by itself, the greatest short-term achievement in golf history. In context it is an emphatic point on the timeline exactly 50 years into Golf Digest’s existence, an indicator of progress made—remember Charlie Sifford—and a harbinger of progress to come. Everything, going back to the first Scottish shepherd who wielded a club, built to this point, and everything would be built from it.

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THE ZENITH: Golf history refracts through the Tiger Slam of 2000-2001.

David Cannon

Now that golf had a superstar like Woods, the money, the prestige and the hyper-globalization poured in. Woods was the high tide that lifted all ships, but the forces he unleashed, through no fault of his own, led to the imbroglio the sport faces today. Tiger Woods has been one of the stalwarts of the PGA Tour in the current schism, yet it’s also true that without him, LIV Golf likely does not exist.

The initial emphasis of the founders, that the magazine should be for golfers, not just golf fans, remains true. “Golf is so much bigger than just the professional game, and we’re really seeing it in this current boom where all these new courses being built emphasize recreational fun, not hosting championships,” says Max Adler, Golf Digest Editorial Director. As golf expands to remote destinations and incorporates ever-advancing technologies, the mission here remains constant: helping the average golfer with How To Play, What To Play, and Where To Play.

Progress is complicated. It is not always linear. It doesn’t have to be good, and it doesn’t have to be bad. When the Romans left the British isles in 409 A.D., the roads and aqueducts they built went to ruin for centuries, becoming mere curiosities for the natives who wondered at their purpose. It is difficult to understand golf’s place in history in 2025—that will take time and perspective—but for 75 years Golf Digest has managed the feat of looking both forward and backward to take stock of the present. Wherever this sport is going, into madness or glory or the shadows in between, Golf Digest is there to follow and to lead.

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com