updated 4:53 p.m. ET April 1, 2009

ATLANTA - William Lewis started playing golf with nothing but a 9-iron and he never stopped swinging, even when his favorite sport doled out a racist hazing.

Now a graying golfer, he spreads that same passion to dozens of kids from a predominantly black neighborhood in Martin Luther King Jr.’s hometown.

Somewhere in the nearly 50-year span of his career, he thought it would get easier. But there’s just that one role model.

Tiger Woods.

“It really is surprising,” said Lewis, who teaches the sport to inner-city youths at The First Tee Atlanta.

So many expected Woods’ historic victory in the 1997 Masters — and the 13 majors since then — to inspire other African-Americans to follow him into a game that was reserved for whites over more than a century.

“I’ll see him hitting from the tee box, and he hits it on the green,” said 12-year-old Tadesse McKinney, one of Lewis’ pupils. “I’m like, wow, I just want to go out there and try that. I want to try to be like Tiger Woods, make a hole-in-one and stuff like that.”

Yet in the dozen years since Woods slipped on a green jacket at Augusta National and paid tribute to the black pioneers who broke down golf’s racial barriers, no other African-American has earned PGA Tour membership.

Not a single black woman plays on the LPGA Tour.

Neither of the top two developmental tours have black golfers in the pipeline, either.

“Tiger was the greatest gift ever for the PGA Tour,” said Orin Starn, who heads the cultural anthropology program at Duke University. “With him as its face, the PGA Tour didn’t have to deal with issues of diversity, or worrying about the tour looking like the rest of America. They could say, ’See, the problem is fixed. We have an African-American who is No. 1 in the world.’

Andy Lyons / Getty Images file Charlie Sifford became a PGA Tour member in 1961.

“But the problem still exists,” he said. “If anything, it’s gotten worse.”

There were eight black players on tour in 1975, the year Lee Elder was the first black golfer in the Masters and the year Woods was born.

Now there is only Tiger.

“I think it’s become harder to play out here,” Woods said when asked to explain the decline of African-American golfers on tour. “Playing opportunities and development and being able to learn the game and mature in the game has become more difficult.”

He mentioned the preponderance of golf carts, which has eliminated the kind of caddie programs that produced players from Lee Trevino to Charlie Sifford.

“And then the cost of getting involved in the game, and then the maintenance of a person trying to play day in and day out,” Woods said. “It’s not easy.”

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