This is an opinion column.

Tigers Woods tees off at 9:18 a.m. CT today. Tees off at Augusta National. At the Masters. He’s won the world’s most prestigious golf tournament five times, the last in 2019. Earlier this week, Woods, the seminal golfer of our generation, said he didn’t know if this would be his last Masters.

I remember my first.

Let’s go to the spring of 1987. That was 10 years before Woods won his first Masters, 12 years after Lee Elder teed up at the Masters, the first Black golfer to do so.

I really don’t need to dissect golf’s anguished racial history today. If you’ve read this far, you likely know it. Or most of it.

So, in the spring of 1987, I was a sports columnist with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. As such, it was only natural I’d be part of the newspaper’s (yeah, I typed “newspaper”) team covering golf’s Super Bowl, right there in our backyard.

Still, this was Augusta—still very much a whites-only private club in the most exclusionary of sports.

We were still three years away from the end of this exclusionary era, a change sparked by the late Hall Thompson, president of the Shoal Creek Country Club in Birmingham, site of the 1990 PGA Championship. Before that event, Thompson told a reporter the club did not discriminate in any way “except blacks.”

Those words touched off a national firestorm that quickly caused the sport’s advertisers to run for the hills and forced golf’s governing bodies to announce they no longer allowed private clubs with exclusionary policies to host their events.

Shoal Creek admitted its first black member that year, and other Blacks, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have joined since. In 1991, I became the first Black member of a private club in a New York City suburb.

Thank you, Shoal Creek.

Back to spring of 1987, there was little indication then that golf would soon undergo such seismic change, especially in the South.

Zero indication the young columnist driving towards Augusta from Atlanta would partake in a small corner of golf’s racial evolution. Hence, my tentativeness during the 145-mile drive. My concern as a Black man driving alone. That day, the speed limit was my co-pilot.

Race permeated everything at Augusta National. Still does, though differently.

Nineteen-eighty-seven was just four years after the club dropped its edict that Masters participants must use Augusta National caddies. Black caddies, who carried bags dating back to the first Masters, back in 1934. Who knew the course like no one else. Who helped create champions.

And were well compensated for it. For some, it was their best payday of the year.

Just 19 Black caddies carried bags in 1983, according to a wonderful account of Black caddies at Augusta National published this week by CNN.

I didn’t count in 1987. Now, never mind.

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As I arrived at Augusta National, as I passed each checkpoint, my trepidation dissipated. I walked into the Augusta National press room in the spring of 1987 as one of the few African American sportswriters covering golf, let alone covering the Masters. Some say I was the first Black writer to cover the event, but I’m not 100 percent sure so I don’t make that claim.

There was no fanfare about my arrival. No ban on Black sportswriters at Augusta, just on belonging to it. Until three years later, when television executive Ron Townsend became the club’s first Black member.

I strode through the press room door. Just inside a woman sat at a desk checking off the names of arriving reporters and handing them their coveted credentials. Her head was down as I reached the front of the line.

“Roy S. Johnson, Atlanta Constitution,” I said.

She scanned the list without glancing upward, found my name and badge, then looked up.

“Lawdy, lawdy,” she said with a drawl and a smile. “Welcome to Augusta.”

Lawdy, lawdy, indeed.

Years later, I Ied coverage of the Masters for Sports Illustrated as the magazine’s golf editor, and was there in 1997 when Woods, whom I’ve known since just before he attended Stanford University, also my alma mater—made his professional debut in the tournament.

He may be walking his last rounds at Augusta National this week. Or knowing him, maybe not.

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Roy S. Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary and winner of the Edward R. Murrow prize for podcasts: “Unjustifiable,” co-hosted with John Archibald. His column appears in AL.com, as well as the Lede. Subscribe to his free weekly newsletter, The Barbershop, here. Reach him at [email protected], follow him at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj