PHOENIX — Kenny Thomas hit a golf ball 10 years ago and he was never the same.
"At home, I'm chipping at home in the living room," Thomas said, teeing up on the driving range at Encanto Golf Course. "My wife's going, stop that!"
You might say he's addicted.
"It's contagious, it absolutely is," he said.
Thomas tees up another ball, just so he can hear the sound of the club hitting it.
"It's amazing," he said. "Let's hear that sound again, shall we?"
Thomas is a member of the Desert Mashie Golf Club, the first club in Arizona that allowed minorities as members. It was a club born out of necessity...and discrimination.
"In May of 1946," current club president Booker Evans said, "10 local guys, all African-American guys and two friends of theirs from LA and they came to play Encanto."
They played Encanto, Evans said because they didn't have another choice. No other course in Arizona would allow minorities to play. On the third hole, as the legend goes, one of the players made a hole-in-one with a club called a "mashie." Now before you start to scour the internet to look for the club, hold on, it doesn't exist anymore. It essentially became what is now known as a 5 iron.
At the end of the round, they were back at the clubhouse. One of the LA golfers said the locals should start their own club. That club became the Desert Mashie Golf Club, which has been around ever since.
"To me it's historic, it's legendary," Carline Suttles, a former club president said. "I just enjoy the idea that we can come together and just socialize and have fun."
The club now has 180 members, a monthly traveling tournament and a slate of community and youth-oriented projects. Even though the golf courses have changed and are more inclusive, Desert Mashie still considers Encanto their home course.
"I think the impact more is on the kids when they see it," Suttles said. "They know there's no boundaries."
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