Last August, Kirk Triplett put a Black Lives Matter sticker on his bag for the Bridgestone Senior Players Championship.
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Triplett was prompted to show support for the cause of racial injustice because of his son Kobe, who is African- American.
“I was thinking about my son, who is 18 years old and could be driving a car in the wrong situation,” Triplett said Friday after the second round of the $3 million PGA Tour Champions major. “I wanted to make sure that’s not his responsibility to deescalate the situation.”
But Triplett knew displaying the sticker was not really taking action. An interview at Firestone Country Club and some that followed helped him discover a way to accelerate change.
One of his comments — “I actually Googled what can a white guy do?” he said — caught the attention of Hall of Fame safety Donnie Shell, who emailed Triplett and told him he had an answer to his question. The former Pittsburgh Steeler is a board member of Dedication To Community (D2C), a national non-profit that educates and empowers communities on diversity, belonging, and equity. Triplett’s partnership with the organization was announced in February.
“Putting a Black Lives Matter sticker on your bag is just kinda, ‘That’s a problem.’ But you hope people migrate from that to solutions and that’s the reason for Dedication To Community on my bag,” Triplett said. “Their main focus is law enforcement training. It’s guys that came through the NFL, worked heavily with them on their conduct policy, and the founder is [M.] Quentin Williams, he was an FBI agent and a prosecutor.
“These guys have one solution. Training law enforcement, training the communities, helping people understand each other better. Really what they work on is communication and not letting these situations escalate.”
Kirk Triplett poses with his golf bag with a Black Lives Matter sticker on it at the 2020 Bridgestone Senior Players Tournament pro-am on Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2020, Akron, Ohio, at Firestone Country Club. (Photo: Phil Masturzo/ Beacon Journal)
Triplett, who lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, and his wife Cathi have four children — twins Conor and Sam, 25, daughter Alexis, 21, and Kobe, the latter two adopted. Alexis is Latino; Kobe’s biological father is Black, his mother Japanese.
Before Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of second-degree murder in the May 25, 2020, killing of Floyd, Triplett said he had several conversations with Kobe. Chauvin received a sentence of 22.5 years on Friday.
“We’ve discussed that fairly regularly,” Triplett said of the Chauvin case. “This is not a great deal of interest to him. It became a great deal of interest to me when I talked to him and said, ‘If you get stopped by the police, you need to do this, this and this.’ I’ve got three other kids and that conversation looked completely different with them than it did with him. I thought, ‘Here’s where the patent unfairness comes in.’
“When people say systemic racism or system inequality … it’s something that’s really hard for me to visualize and understand because I’ve never faced it. When I’m having that conversation with him, I just get the little, tiniest inkling of what this might be like. I think that’s the first step, everybody understanding what sometimes these people face.”
Triplett said Kobe got the message. The Tripletts also participated in relationship training through D2C.
D2C has a partnership with the Miami Heat, training Miami patrol officers the Heat sponsor, and is involved with other professional sports.
“They have an agreement with Joe Gibbs Racing and they train the organization there. They do some stuff with the NHL,” Triplett said. “The NHL is like golf, there’s not a lot of racial issues in those sports because they’re so white, for lack of a better term, there’s not a lot of diversity.
“Most sports today that lack diversity want to create opportunity. It’s not an overnight process, but some of it starts with funding and finding ways for young people to look at a sport and instead of saying, ‘Oh, that’s the white man’s game,’ they think, ‘Here’s this APGA,’ [a non-profit tour to prepare African-American and minority golfers] or ‘I can go to school at a HBCU.’ There’s a pathway to participate in the sport.”
Triplett sees progress in that regard.
“Phil Mickelson made a large donation to HBCU golf teams,” he said. “The PGA Tour is trying to help minority access to golf through the APGA. Billy Horschel has also sponsored a tournament for the APGA. Access to health care, access to economic opportunity, all of these things.
“Golf does a great job of contributing to the community. Maybe we haven’t always done a great job in the social justice area. I don’t see any reason we can’t.”
