Stephen Curry knows the importance of his work in trying to diversify golf. On Tuesday, his Underrated Golf Tour concluded in San Francisco, giving 26 athletes from Black and brown communities experience in a pro-style tour across the country.
The Golden State Warriors’ guard, who fully funded the tour, paused when trying to pinpoint a moment that encapsulated his feelings. He settled on one from just a couple of hours before.
“One of the girls came up and immediately started crying,” he said, standing at the 16th hole at TPC Harding Park after a series of video and photo shoots. “Right before one of the biggest rounds in her life, but she let that emotion out and how much it means to her that we’re creating that opportunity.”
Tuesday concluded the two-day event at Harding Park, where Ashley Shaw and Roman Solomon took the girls’ and boys’ Curry Cup titles, respectively. The 26 athletes invited to compete following a four-stop tour were split evenly: 13 girls and 13 boys between 8 and 18 years old.
Curry has long been an advocate for gender equity in sports. In 2018, he penned a Players’ Tribune piece about gender pay equity. In 2021, he donated an undisclosed amount of money to Davidson University, his alma mater, for a women’s sports scholarship foundation.
He authored a thesis on advancing gender equity through sports to graduate from Davidson, 12 years after he played there. He has formed a bond with WNBA guard Sabrina Ionescu, who is from the East Bay, while championing the league and women’s basketball.
“It’s intertwined in everything that I do,” Curry said. “Especially with the Underrated brand, with basketball and golf, we have even participation with girls and boys. That’s a non-negotiable with how we want to do everything. We use the word equity for a reason.”
The Underrated website lists equity as one of its three main pillars, along with access and opportunity, all words Curry repeated Tuesday. Just 8% of pro golfers are women — 9.5% are Black and 14% are Latino.
In 2019, Curry donated more than $1 million to Howard University, one of the country’s most prestigious historically Black colleges, to get its Division I men’s and women’s golf programs off the ground. The school hadn’t hosted varsity golf since the 1970s, when it was a Division II program. Curry pledged to support the program for six years.
Golf has an exclusionary history, something about which Curry has spoken at length since adding the sport to the Underrated brand, which had already worked in basketball. His objective for the Underrated Golf Tour is not only to give opportunities to kids in communities that traditionally haven’t had equal access, but also to open a pipeline to the pros.
Shaw, 14, plays out of Arizona and has dreams of playing in the LPGA, or someday even the PGA, “because they make the most money there.”
She started playing when she was 7, but said she started taking it seriously when she was 10.
Underrated’s varied pool of players includes stories like hers and that of Hope Hall, who is headed to Dartmouth this week to compete for her golf team.
Hall, who placed second, two strokes behind Shaw, was introduced to golf when she was 3. Born premature at 28 weeks, her parents gave her a plastic golf club to help with her motor skills.
“We had to move it outside when I started denting the walls,” said Hall, whose sister, Alana, also played Tuesday. “I can’t remember a time where I wasn’t practicing in the yard.”
Siham Ibrahim plays golf with her family in Southern California. When her parents found the Underrated tour, they signed her up right away.
“I want to get a scholarship and play in college,” said Ibrahim, a ninth-grader on the Culver City High team. “My season is coming up, so I’m just going to keep practicing.”
Dartmouth coach Alex Kirk was on hand to watch Hall play. Shaw and Ibrahim had their families waiting for them at the 18th hole.
Underrated covered all the travel expenses for the players on the tour, which had stops in Chicago, Phoenix, Houston and Tampa, Fla., before San Francisco.
“Everybody knows how expensive golf is to get in,” Curry said. “Between the access to the right facilities and programs and coaches, equipment, all that stuff, a lot of kids can be left behind, and there’s a lot of talent.”
Marisa Ingemi is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected]