John Long's First Tee program serves more than 200 kids. Courtesy USGA When John Long was a boy growing up on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in South Dakota, he didn’t think of golf as a stupid game. He didn’t think of golf at all.
This was in the 1980s. Basketball and wrestling were Long’s sports. The only course that he set foot on was a 9-hole, sand-greens layout that local residents had scratched out of the badlands.
Few people played it. Long never did. “But as kids, sometimes, there’d be a little tournament,” he told me by phone the other day.
“The adults would pay us five bucks to rake the greens.” Then, as now, every dollar counted around Pine Ridge. One of the largest reservations in the United States, covering more than 11,000 square miles, the home of the Oglala Lakota Nation is a starkly beautiful expanse that doubles as a source of gloomy socio-economic stats.
Its population of approximately 19,000 ranks among the poorest demographic groups in the country, with an unemployment rate north of 80 percent. Life expectancies are short. Crime counts are high.
The second-youngest of nine children, raised by a single mom, Long went to college, a rarity among his peers. His plan was to become a teacher. But on a visit home, in his early 20s, he crossed paths with a friend who was working as a police officer.
A few ride-alongs later, Long switched his focus to law enforcement, patrolling tribal land , a path he followed for nearly 30 years. The job was .
