I'm Darin Heflin. I'm 37 and I drive a package truck in Charlotte, North Carolina, about a hundred and fifty stops a day, rain or shine. Before April of 1997 I had never swung a golf club in my life. Golf was something on TV on Sunday afternoons when there wasn't a football game. It was old white men in sweaters, and it was quiet, and I changed the channel.

Then came Sunday, April 13, 1997. My son Martin was ten. He was flipping channels and stopped on the Masters because, he said, there was a Black guy winning. I sat down to see. I didn't get up for three hours. I watched a 21-year-old kid walk up the 18th fairway at Augusta with the biggest lead anybody had ever had there, and hug his father, and I looked over and Martin was standing up in front of the TV. I don't think I'd ever seen him stand up for anything on TV that wasn't a cartoon.

The next Saturday I bought a used set of clubs at a yard sale for forty dollars. Irons, three woods, a putter and a bag with a broken zipper. Martin and I took them to the range and hit a bucket. I missed the ball completely four times in a row and a man two stalls over had to stop and look at me. Martin hit it better than I did. I was hooked anyway.

Two weeks later I played my first round, at the city course on the west side. You can read about that, and every round I've written down since, on my scorecard page. It's honest. Some of it is painful.

The PGA Championship this year was at Medinah, outside Chicago, and the final round on Sunday, August 15, was the best golf I've watched since Augusta. Tiger had what looked like a safe lead on the back nine, and then a 19-year-old from Spain named Sergio García started chasing him down. On the 16th Sergio's ball was sitting right up against the trunk of a tree, and instead of chipping out he took a big hard swing anyway, and the ball went onto the green, and he went running up the fairway and jumped in the air to see where it landed. I yelled. Martin yelled. The dog left the room.

Tiger hung on and won by one, 11 under to 10 under. His second major. I was glad he won, but I'll tell you, I've got a soft spot for Sergio now too. That kid plays like it's fun, and it's supposed to be.

I'm a Black man who plays golf. Three years ago I couldn't have written that sentence, and part of the reason is that I didn't think golf wanted me. Here's a little history I didn't know until I started reading up:

• Until 1961, the PGA had a rule that only white players could be members. Charlie Sifford fought that for years, got on tour once it was gone, and won tournaments anyway, in the late sixties, with people saying things to him I won't put on this page.

• The first Black golfer to play in the Masters was Lee Elder, in 1975. That's not ancient history. I was in first grade.

• Calvin Peete won a pile of tournaments in the 1980s, one of the straightest drivers there ever was, and most people never heard his name.

• Augusta National didn't have a Black member until 1990.

And then in 1997 a 21-year-old walked up that same 18th fairway and won by twelve. I'm not going to put words in Tiger's mouth. He's made it clear he's proud of his mother's side and his father's side both, and how he describes himself is his business, not mine. All I can tell you is what it looked like from my couch, and what it looked like was the door opening.

At my course, it's changed. When I started, I'd get paired with three strangers on a Saturday and sometimes I'd see the look, just for a second, when they saw me. I still see it once in a while. But I also see Black kids at the range now, a lot of them, and Black dads with them, and last summer Martin did the junior clinic with eleven other kids and four of them looked like him. That wasn't true in 1996. You can argue about a lot of things, but you can't argue with that.

The man who taught me the most about the game at my course is Harold Ardis, who's 71 and has played that course since the first year it let Black golfers on it. He says he never thought he'd see the day, and he's said it about a dozen times, and every time it means something.

Duffer Dan's Golf Page is Dan's page down in Myrtle Beach: scorecards, swing tips that mostly don't work, and his hole-in-one. He calls it a page for the 19 handicappers, and I'm almost there, Dan.

Tiger at Augusta - April 1997 is a page somebody put up the week it happened: twelve strokes, eighteen under, twenty-one years old, and the long road from Lee Elder to Tiger. If you want to feel that Sunday again, start there.