Mark Wagner
Special to ICT
“If you let your white man tongues say what is in your Indian heart, you will do great things for your people.” Fred Lookout, Osage tribal chief, 1926-1949, great-grandfather to Walter Acey Junior Hopper
In Martin Scorsese’s film “Killers of the Flower Moon,” there is a brief clip of Osage tribesmen in ceremonial blankets out on a track flailing away at golf balls. The film implies that with the rush of oil money, the Osage discovered golf. Wealth = golf, the rich man’s game. But the history of golf in the tribe goes back well before the oil rush. For the Osage, golf has long been a way to connect to the land, their people, and that history can be seen in the transformational golf instructor Walter Acey Junior Hopper.
Money is, as we know, the dirtiest thing in the world. Cash picks up the scents and soils and biomes of the germed – murderers, grifters and thieves among them. The Osage Nation’s experience with sudden wealth in the 1920s proves this to a tragic fault: the oil wealth brought in every manner of murderous crook and criminal and conniver, and the names associated with the crimes are still being sorted. And it’s true that during the Reign of Terror, Chief Bacon Rind and the Osage hired Perry Maxwell to build a nine-hole course in Pawhuska.
The ghost of Maxwell’s nine-hole sits on the hill in Pawhuska, a large area that is senior housing now. At the time, you could see the oil derricks from the course. Now, there’s a K-8 language immersion school where the Osage language survives. People remember a time when the tribe wanted to purchase the course back.
“It’s still there. I mean, the greens are, but it hasn’t been used for golf in a long time,” said Anthony Shackelford, who runs Prevention and Primary Treatment at Osage Nation. Its programs offer a series of community and school events on life skills and to promote suicide awareness and prevention. Shackelford is also first cousin to the late Walter Hopper, whose life in golf helped to overcome incorrect representations of the tribe’s history with the game. Hopper died Nov. 10, 2022.
“My dad’s grandfather went to school at Carlisle in 1872,” Shackelford said. “My dad used to talk about his grandfather. The old man was always very proud that he learned how to play golf. He was 10 when they moved down here. Walked a path down here from Kansas. Literally walked. Of all the things he did in his life, he talked with pride that he learned how to play golf.”
Shackelford’s pride in this history runs deep. His father, who studied with Charles Banks Wilson, created the Osage Nation Seal. Shackelford recalls the day Notah Begay visited.
“Notah Begay came in. A friend of ours went to Stanford. Notah is well known in the golfing industry. … He’ll go into communities that are underserved that affect Native American youth across the country. And it was the largest participatory soccer clinic in the history of Osage Nation. University of Oklahoma women’s soccer was here, and we had 180 kids. Roaring success. I got to play nine with Notah.”
Golf and basketball are the tribe’s two favorite sports. Soccer is growing as well, and sports have been a way to keep the young ones out of trouble. No one knew this more than Walter Hopper, whose life in golf helps to overcome incorrect representations. Hopper also was known as Junior.
“Junior is my first cousin,” Shackelford recalls, noting their blood lines go back to tribal Chairman Fred Lookout and to Lookout’s father, and beyond that, to the hundreds of years of our first nation’s history. Hopper’s great-grandfather on his mom’s side was Chief Fred Lookout, and on his dad’s side his great-grandfather was Chief John Oberly.
Shackelford and his family have lived out the legacy of the Osage Nation over many generations, and that continues to this day. When I ask him about the clip in Scorsese’s film of the Osage in blankets playing golf, he laughs and says, “Akin to Scottish kilts, the blankets. Even during heat of the summer months. Same as putting on a scarf and hat. Just part of what they wore.
“Work was slow,” he continues, reflecting on the 1920s. “Then all of a sudden, money rolling in like crazy. Yeah, and when the money was coming in, the country was in a depression, there was no middle class. It was haves and have nots. Tens of millions in today’s market. But it was a double-edged sword. Less than popular choices are drinking and drugs. And then they put a target on our backs. Now it’s been glamorized on the big screen. Osages were victims, victims of the government entrusted to look out for our wellbeing. Even the government wanted to get their hands on our money. Guardians and all that. It was like winning the lottery. If you didn’t have an attorney, a lot of money … flipped sides. But some were studious and saved and planned and helped facilitate a good lifestyle. They worked and left things to their kids. … There was the other side of it, too. People focus on the bad side. There was a good side, too. But overall, the government fumbled the ball in taking care of our people.”
Shackelford sees the loss of Maxwell’s golf course as a shame, “I mean, it was a nice course like that in a town of 3,000. Very unique. A wonderful setting. Crying shame of course. The new owner tried to open up a disc golf course. That fell to the wayside. Granite markers that are still there. … You drive by and don’t even want to look over there. It’s all gone to seed.” An eye sore from the Reign of Terror, the neglected course obscures the fact that golf was in the DNA of the tribe long before the 1920s oil rush.
To Shackelford, Native people are by nature athletic. Not only Jim Thorpe and John Levis and Billy Mills, “but a lot of them went unknown. Look at the Hominy Indians, they had a professional football team. The year the New York giants were champions, 1929, Hominy Indians beat them. There’s footage of that game. And an account of it in newspaper print. That team had a bunch of our relatives on it.”
This love of the land and excellence in sports is embodied by the spirit of Walter Acey Junior Hopper. Ask any golfer in the region and most will immediately reflect warmly on an encounter wtih Hopper.
“I saw him just 24 months ago,” Jason Dochney, Cherokee, said recently. Dochney is now a PGA member and runs a teaching school, APA Golf. He lauds Walter Hopper as someone who brought golf to life for him. “Walter was very prominent in our PGA section, a figurehead for junior golf in our section, and we all learned from him. It was super cool to connect with him again.”
Since Hopper died two years ago, his wife Marilyn upholds this legacy. Her voice is soft and warm as she tells their story, and their history together started one of the biggest PGA junior programs in the nation.
“He worked with Tahlequah Wilma Mankiller, Chief of the Cherokee,” his wife Marilyn says. “He involved Indian students through several different avenues. He thought that the kids who played golf, it introduced them to being good human beings. It was the kids who played golf. They stayed out of trouble. It gave them an opportunity to advance and be good people in life.” Of the thousands of kids that came through the PGA Junior, many advanced to great heights: doctors, lawyers, etc.; and many became great golfers and are on the PGA and LPGA Tours, including Bob Tway, Matt Gogel, Bryce Molder, Tag Ridings, Brad Elder and Stacy Prammanasuh.
“Walter’s great-grandfather was Fred Lookout,” chief of the Osage from the Reign of Terror until 1949, Marilyn recounts. “Walter and his sisters are the only ones who could claim to being great-grandchildren to both chiefs of the Osage Tribe.” Lookout is a generational figure in that history. In 1926, following the downfall of Chief Bacon Rind, Lookout was elected and served until his death in office in 1949. During the Osage murders, Lookout’s family claimed he survived a shooting attempt and then hired Chicago mafia members as bodyguards.
Hopper’s life was not as dicey, but just as transformational.
“I learned how to play when Walter and I were at OSU,” Marilyn continues. “That was our pastime, going to the golf course and playing. They had two courses at OSU and we just wanted to play and be together.”
Just after he enlisted, Marilyn and Hopper made their love sacrosanct, before he left for Vietnam. Like many of our first people, he enlisted, selecting the U.S. Air Force and serving in Vietnam. He reached the rank of sergeant and received the Airman of the Month award for the 58th Airlift Command in July of ’69. When he returned, he took up work in education.
“He was director of Indian Education for Oklahoma public schools, but he just loved to play golf every day,” Marilyn recalls. “He determined that is probably what he should be doing. Golf and working with the youth were Walter’s biggest passion. After a while, he had over 1,500 to 1,800 kids every summer. He scheduled and developed and got the golf courses to create a south-central section PGA.”
Marilyn and the family knew him as Junior, but everyone else called him Walter. They started at Prior Creek Golf Course, working with the PGA in the ’70s. Somewhere around ’76 or ’77 he got his Mohawk Park in Tulsa. Marilyn recalls, “We raised our boys there, and they did all the junior golf. They all went to college on golf scholarships. They were very involved. The oldest, Acey went to University of Central Oklahoma. … Travis went to University of Nebraska and Adrian went to Paris … Texas. Adrian is still with it.”
As a professional, Hopper actually got PGA’s First Tee program started in Tulsa. Some others took it over and will take credit, but Marilyn and everyone else know Hopper started it.
Hopper achieved many awards and recognitions: 1989 – special award from the South-Central PGA for excellent work and dedication to Junior Golf; 1980s and 1990s – served on the PGA National Junior Golf Committee; 1993-1994 – PGA Service Award for dedicated service as a member of the PGA Junior Golf; Nov. 17, 1995 – the Governor’s Award for all his work providing quality fitness and sports activities that have helped Oklahomans of all ages live happier and healthier lives; November 1995 – PGA Junior Golf Foundation award for excellence; and June 2004 – Jim Thorpe Award and induction into the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame for all his work in promoting Junior Golf.
And just as golf was part of the Osage culture before the Reign of Terror, it will continue to be part of Osage history going forward.
Brian Davis followed Hopper on the South-Central Section Junior Tour, which has grown to an age 40-45 event behemoth capped by the season-ending Tournament of Champions, later renamed the Walter Hopper Championship in his honor.
“It’s not very often that you meet someone who is truly generational in their work, but that’s exactly what Walter was,” Davis said. “Every junior event I attend, I run into a parent who would ask about Walter and then proceed to smile and tell me about how he was running the junior tour when they were kids and now their kids are playing on the same junior tour.”
Hopper was also known for saying, “I never met a stranger.” All were welcome. He didn’t play in a blanket, and golf wasn’t a dirty game that arrived with the filth of the oil wealth and the murderous grifters and thieving crooks who came with it. For the Osage, golf has long been a way to connect to the land, their people and the lasting traditions of a resilient, sovereign nation.
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