updated 2:39 p.m. ET April 1, 2007

When Tiger Woods won his first Masters a decade ago, the waiters, dishwashers and locker room attendants at Augusta National cheered as loudly as the fans.

The victory was about more than golf. It was about breaking down barriers.

There was symbolism in a young black man winning a big tournament at Augusta National, a country club in the Deep South that was notoriously slow to accept social change — and where blacks still largely were considered employees, not equals.

That one Masters moment was sure to lead to many more. Or so the theory went.

Ten years after that breakthrough, though, there has been little progress. Woods will be the only black player in the field at Augusta National this coming week.

“It’s a travesty, no doubt about it,” said Pete McDaniel, a black author and journalist who has chronicled the history of blacks in golf. “We’ve got a $60 billion-a-year industry. That’s a pretty big pie. Here it is in 2007 and we don’t get a sliver of the pie. We get table scraps.”

Woods on his own has engendered a surge in popularity that has led to about a threefold increase in prize money, which derives mainly from more lucrative TV and sponsorship deals. But it has yet to trickle down.

It hasn’t even led to any other black playing regularly on the PGA Tour.

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In fact, there are only a handful of black golfers currently circulating in the minor leagues of pro golf, not really hoping they can be the next Tiger — nobody dreams of that — but thinking they might get to join Tiger on the Tour some day.

One of them, Tim O’Neal, is starting his third straight year on the Nationwide Tour, the step below the PGA Tour.

“There’s no extra pressure on me,” O’Neal said. “Not at all. I think of myself as another player out there trying to make it to the PGA Tour.”

Another, Andy Walker, was on the NCAA championship team at Pepperdine in 1997 and is now on The Gateway Tour in Arizona.

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Still another, Kevin Hall, was the first black golfer to earn a scholarship at Ohio State. He is deaf — someone who easily could capture the nation’s imagination — but is still trying to break through and make a living playing golf.

“They’re coming. Things don’t happen overnight,” said Gary Player, who was encouraged when he saw blacks flocking to watch Tiger at the Presidents Cup in Player’s native South Africa in 2005.

Player guesses it will be several years before a big influx of blacks hits the PGA Tour.

Indeed, the powers that be in golf would like to believe a base of players is building — a grass-roots group of kids who might have picked up their first club at one of Tiger’s charity clinics, or at a driving range built by First Tee, the foundation funded in part by the PGA Tour and aimed at getting underprivileged kids onto the golf course.

But it will take a while to find out.

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