Treasure of Golf’s Sad Past, Black Caddies Vanish in Era of Riches

AUGUSTA, Ga. — For decades, the black caddies at Augusta National Golf Club — required by the club’s rules and treasured for their nuanced knowledge of the course’s topography — stood as a striking symbol of the sport’s segregated state.

Augusta National/Getty Images

Arnold Palmer, center, and Ben Hogan, right, at Augusta, where black caddies were once required. 

“As long as I’m alive,” said Clifford Roberts, one of the club’s founders in 1933 and a longtime Masters chairman, “all the golfers will be white and all the caddies will be black.” 

In 1997, 20 years after Roberts’s death, Tiger Woods, with a white caddie, won the first of his four Masters championships, shattering the mirror that Roberts’s vision reflected. Woods, who has won 14 majors, changed the face of golf in more ways than one. Not only is the best golfer of this era not white, Woods’s success has helped pushed the black caddie to the brink of extinction.

Why Bilinguals Are Smarter

SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age. 

This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.

Obama: GOP plan 'a prescription for decline'

President Obama plans to blast the proposed Republican budget today as "a Trojan Horse" that is promoted as a deficit reduction plan, but is "really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country."

"By gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that's built to last -- education and training; research and development -- it's a prescription for decline," Obama plans to say, according to excerpts released by the White House.