![[original_title]](https://rawnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/john-long-1024x576.jpg)
John Lengthy’s First Tee program serves greater than 200 youngsters.
Courtesy USGA
When John Lengthy was a boy rising up on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in South Dakota, he didn’t consider golf as a silly sport. He didn’t consider golf in any respect.
This was within the Nineteen Eighties. Basketball and wrestling had been Lengthy’s sports activities. The one course that he set foot on was a 9-hole, sand-greens layout that native residents had scratched out of the badlands. Few individuals performed it. Lengthy by no means did.
“However as youngsters, generally, there’d be a little bit event,” he instructed me by cellphone the opposite day. “The adults would pay us 5 bucks to rake the greens.”
Then, as now, each greenback counted round Pine Ridge.
One of many largest reservations in the US, masking greater than 11,000 sq. miles, the house of the Oglala Lakota Nation is a starkly lovely expanse that doubles as a supply of gloomy socio-economic stats. Its inhabitants of roughly 19,000 ranks among the many poorest demographic teams within the nation, with an unemployment price north of 80 %. Life expectations are brief. Crime counts are excessive.
The second-youngest of 9 youngsters, raised by a single mother, Lengthy went to school, a rarity amongst his friends. His plan was to change into a trainer. However on a go to dwelling, in his early 20s, he crossed paths with a pal who was working as a police officer. Just a few ride-alongs later, Lengthy switched his focus to legislation enforcement, patrolling tribal land, a path he adopted for practically 30 years.
The job was by turns gratifying and grim.
“Alcohol is illegitimate on the reservation, and a number of the crimes are alcohol-related,” Lengthy mentioned. “Assaults. Home abuse. Homicides. Most of the deaths had been individuals I knew rising up, in order that was difficult. It was essential for me to search out methods to separate myself from work.”
A kind of methods wound up being golf. Lengthy’s introduction to the sport got here by means of colleagues on the drive, who invited him to fill out a foursome in a scramble. It wasn’t love at first swing, but it surely was love quickly sufficient. Weekend rounds turned Lengthy’s common escape. The extra he performed, the extra he grew attuned to golf’s connective energy. A catalyst for friendships, the sport opened the doorways of alternative, too.
If Lengthy had his method, extra individuals at Pine Ridge would have benefited from it, especially kids. However golf carried no weight across the reservation.
“I might in all probability have counted the quantity of people that performed on one hand,” Lengthy mentioned.
His personal son, Tristen, discovered the sport when he was 9, within the early 2000s, and went on to play on scholarship at Dickinson State College, in North Dakota. However like his father earlier than him, Tristen was an outlier at Pine Ridge.
“Most children on the reservation play basketball, and a number of them go into the navy,” Lengthy mentioned. “Nothing mistaken with that. However I needed to indicate them another choices, give them one thing to do this would hold them busy, keep out of bother, and so they’d study some worthwhile expertise alongside the best way.”
Years flew by. In 2017, Lengthy retired. He’s 56 now, and golf retains a agency maintain in his life. That hasn’t modified. What’s completely different as of late is that golf has discovered buy at Pine Ridge. Although the sand-greens course has been gone for many years, and there’s no different place to play on the reservation, the seeds of the sport have sprouted within the badlands. Beneath Lengthy’s stewardship, junior golf has taken root.
Courtesy USGA
His efforts started at Purple Cloud Excessive Faculty, the place he signed on to educate three years in the past, mustering sufficient curiosity to fill out rosters for a boys’ and women’ crew. Then, final fall, he broadened his marketing campaign by launching a First Tee program, the primary at Pine Ridge.
Funding for it comes from a USGA grant, which covers gear and various incidentals, however the power for it’s provided by Lengthy, a one-man operation, working lessons and clinics at three of the 13 faculties on the reservation. It was slow-going at first.
“Some faculties had been receptive,” Lengthy mentioned. “However others hesitated as a result of they don’t find out about golf on the First Tee. I’ve needed to clarify it to them. It’s not simply concerning the sport. It’s about honesty, integrity. There’s much more to it than simply hitting a ball.”
Greater than 200 youngsters are actually a part of this system, studying swing fundamentals and life expertise in barebones indoor and out of doors amenities. Principally, Lengthy makes use of highschool gymnasiums, and a subject subsequent to a church as his observe vary. When schedules permit, he drives his pupils to the closest green-grass course, 24 miles away, in Nebraska.
His cost is available in indicators of progress. One woman in his program, now in her second yr of enjoying, certified for the state championship and has earned a scholarship to a neighborhood school. Lengthy’s daughter, Ruth, 11, who can be in this system, completed second this month at a South Dakota Golf Affiliation junior occasion.
In golf, as in life, nothing is promised. However potentialities abound. Simply this week, Lengthy was supplied a second teaching job — at Lakota Excessive Faculty — a task that he’ll tackle, at the same time as he continues to develop the First Tee program. In Lengthy’s wildest desires, native leaders would discover cash to construct a modest golf course on the reservation, a prepared outlet for recreation and a portal to carry extra youngsters into the sport. However he’s sensible.
“At minimal,” he mentioned, “I’d love for us to have a placing inexperienced and a driving vary.”
