Should Tiger Start Using A Cart?
Lessons from golf, its icons, and when the game collides with the law
This past week, the United States Golf Association held the 125th U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club in western Pennsylvania. The tournament had a thrilling ending, with J. J. Spaun winning his first major championship with a birdie-birdie finish late Sunday.
The Open was held without golf’s greatest player of at least the last several generations, Tiger Woods, who ruptured his Achilles tendon in March and is currently recovering from surgery to repair it. The injury is expected to keep him out of the PGA Tour for the rest of 2025, and maybe into the 2026 golf year.
The 125th Open is not the only significant golf milestone being celebrated this year. Twenty-five years ago, Woods put on one of the greatest performances in men’s golf when he won the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach Golf Links in California by 15 strokes, the largest margin of victory in major championship golf history. In many ways, Woods’ victory’s was made possible by Lee Elder, who 25 years earlier, in another milestone — 50 years ago this year — became the first African-American golfer to compete in the Masters Tournament at the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia. Elder’s career was filled with historic achievements, including four PGA Tour wins and a groundbreaking Ryder Cup appearance, and he was an inspiration to generations of Black golfers, including Woods.
But Elder’s impact extended beyond competition. He dedicated himself to expanding access to the game, ensuring future Black golfers had the opportunities to compete, opportunities he had to fight so hard to attain. Elder’s commitment to growing the game led him to the Langston Golf Course, here in Washington, a sanctuary for Black golfers during an era when they were excluded from so many places. Langston is named for John Mercer Langston, Howard University Law School’s first dean and Virginia’s first Black congressman.
In 1978, Elder took over the management of Langston, working to revitalize the course and launch programs to support young Black golfers. If you ever come to D.C., it’s worth a visit. When NBA star Steph Curry announced, a few years ago, a seven-figure gift to sponsor the creation of men’s and women’s golf teams at Howard, he did it at Langston and with the hope that the facility would be the team’s home course.
Woods has been injured several times during his career and has attempted comebacks over and again. Three years ago was one, and he did it at the Masters. The tournament was his first appearance in competitive golf since a February 2021 car crash, in which he was seriously injured and nearly lost his leg to amputation. Before the tournament, Woods made clear that he was hitting the ball great and that his ball-striking would be enough to compete in – if not win – the tournament. His only worry was whether he could walk the golf course.
That same week in 2022, Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed as a justice of the United States Supreme Court. Like Elder’s and Woods’, Jackson’s achievement was a milestone, and she was similarly a groundbreaker. Justice Jackson is now an icon too, a celebrity of sorts, which for me, is all a little strange. I have known Justice Jackson since she was a young lawyer, still defining her way in the profession. She was later a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission. She was always bright and curious, personable and friendly. But iconic? Not back then.
There was once a greater mystery and an elusiveness to the Supreme Court. The members of the Court weren't well-known public figures, if they were known at all. Their confirmation hearings were not must-see-TV. They worked silently behind the walls of the stately and majestic Supreme Court building. They spoke in written opinions, largely indecipherable to the public, often sprinkled with unnecessary Latin. There were procedural vagaries and impenetrable “doctrine.”
But for someone like me who grew up in the 1960s and 70s in a liberal household, the Court – like Lee Elder – was heroic: a liberator of those unjustly barred from the mainstream of American life; a guardian of civil and human rights; an institution prodding the country to find its better angels and to bend the arc of the moral universe towards justice. It all added up to both obscurity and yet undeniable reverence.
That all has changed for me, slowly but steadily over time. It hasn't just been that the Court's membership has changed ideologically. The obscurity of the Court began to lessen – because of C-SPAN, cable news, my own education, and lots more – and law school made the Court's opinions more approachable. With that, the mystery began to diminish, and the decisions often seemed far less principled.
A big moment in this transformation, oddly enough, came in May 2001, about six weeks after Tiger Woods won his second of five Masters' green jackets. The worlds of law and golf collided again, when the Court handed down its decision in PGA Tour v. Martin. I was a mid-career lawyer. And I was a committed, if not-yet-flourishing golfer.
For those who don't recall the case, Casey Martin was a talented young golfer from Oregon and remarkably, a teammate of Tiger Woods' at Stanford. Martin had a degenerative circulatory disorder that prevented him from walking golf courses. No one disputed that his disorder constituted a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), a law signed proudly – and incredibly – by George Herbert Walker Bush, a patrician golfer if there ever was one. President Bush was ironically known for speed golf, where he practically ran after his ball and completed rounds in two hours. Bush's grandfather, George Herbert Walker, had been President of the United States Golf Association in 1920. The Walker Cup, the trophy contested in odd-numbered years by leading male amateur golfers from the United States, Great Britain, and Ireland, is named for him.
When Martin turned pro and entered the “Q-School,” a multi-stage qualifying tournament to determine PGA Tour eligibility, he made a request, supported by detailed medical records, for permission to use a golf cart during the tournament. The PGA Tour refused, and Martin filed suit under the ADA.
Eventually, the case made its way to Supreme Court. The Court ruled for Martin. And in doing so, it took for itself the responsibility of arbitrating the rules of golf.
The ADA is rather simple in its mandate --
No individual shall be discriminated against on the basis of disability in the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation by any person who owns, leases (or leases to), or operates a place of public accommodation.
The law is clear that “discrimination” includes the failure to make reasonable modifications in policies, practices, or procedures, when such modifications are necessary to afford individuals with disabilities equal treatment. The law requires us all to make reasonable accommodations for the disabled. Bravo! The law makes an exception, though. No reasonable modification must be made if doing so “would fundamentally alter the nature of such goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations.”
The Court's ultimate decision in Casey would rest on whether using a motorized cart during a golf tournament would fundamentally alter the game of golf. And it decided, 7-2, that it wouldn't. “The Court is not persuaded that a waiver of the walking rule for Martin would work a fundamental alteration [of the game]. The use of carts is not inconsistent with the fundamental character of golf, the essence of which has always been shotmaking. The walking rule . . . is neither an essential attribute of the game itself nor an indispensable feature of tournament golf.”
Did it even cross Tiger's mind to request the use of a cart for the Masters tournament in 2022? Should he consider using a cart when he comes back from his Achilles surgery next year? I suspect that these questions have crossed the minds of some of Tiger's team. But I also suspect the questions were dismissed in seconds. For even if the Supreme Court thought that walking the course is not essential to the game of golf, it is certainly essential to the essence and brand of Tiger Woods at major tournaments.
“To say that something is 'essential' is ordinarily to say that it is necessary to the achievement of a certain object.” So said the dissent in Casey. Tiger Woods' “object” is clearly bigger than winning any one tournament, even if it is The Masters or the U.S. Open. He is a global, billion-dollar brand that at its core is about overcoming disadvantage, relentless physical perseverance, and intimidating strength and resolve.
Anyone who has carried a golf bag around a hilly track on a warm summer's day knows that walking a golf course can be strenuous and can impact your play. But is it an essential part of the game? As the dissent in Casey reminded us, this is really a silly question. “[S]ince it is the very nature of a game to have no object except amusement (that is what distinguishes games from productive activity), it is quite impossible to say that any of a game’s arbitrary rules is 'essential.' Eighteen-hole golf courses, 10-foot-high basketball hoops, 90-foot baselines, 100-yard football fields – all are arbitrary and none is essential. The only support for any of them is tradition and (in more modern times) insistence by what has come to be regarded as the ruling body of the sport . . .” It's a game. The dissent went on to note that many indeed, “consider walking to be the central feature of the game of golf – hence Mark Twain’s classic criticism of the sport: 'a good walk spoiled.'"
Throughout my legal career, I have been grappling with the reality that sometimes fidelity to the law leads to results that don't feel good. My instinct has always been to hew close to the text, because isn't it the case that law is all about not doing what you would otherwise choose to do, or doing what you would otherwise choose not to do? I have seen legal giants, though, stray from such fidelity, sometimes leading to great peril for the country, but candidly, sometimes leading to greater, if not unexpected, justice. The struggle continues.
I pray for Justice Jackson – and all the other justices too: to have the wisdom and fortitude to know when fidelity to the text and to the law is right, even when it may feel bad to them or lead to results contrary to their preferences; and to know when to stray just a bit for greater justice. And I pray for Tiger Woods, too: for a more complete recovery and for one more Sunday charge.
