Before Lindsey Mason III ever gave a lesson, he was learning from the bags he was carrying.
As a caddy at the Country Club of Detroit and Grosse Pointe Farms, young Lindsey was a kid from the east side, watching how the world worked from a few steps behind. What he noticed stayed with him: he was on the bag for former Detroit Lions owners William Clay Ford and his wife, Martha Firestone Ford, along with Peter Stroh of Stroh Brewery.
"I learned at a very early age," he says. "All people in power play golf."
He filed that away. And after two years pursuing a music degree from Morris Brown College in Atlanta, he returned home for a job at Detroit Golf Club.
It was time to unpack what he’d filed.
His boss there, head pro John Traub, asked him why he wanted to become a golf pro. Lindsey's answer was simple: "I want to be like you." He worked his way through the ranks. Joined the Michigan PGA. Managed courses. Eventually built Mason Golf and Golf Clinics, now based at Cherry Creek Golf Club in Shelby Township and an indoor dome in Clinton Township.
Thirty-eight years in, he’s still teaching six days a week. And for this issue, it’s of particular note who he teaches.
In the early 1990s, Lindsey made a decision that set him apart from every other golf pro in the area. He put up billboards around metropolitan Detroit: golf lessons for women.
"I knew that would separate me from the rest," he says. He wanted to give an equal chance to “women in business, women who were driving the beverage cart at corporate outings and deserved to be playing."
The clients came: political figures, doctors, executives. Women who understood that a lot of decisions get made on golf courses, and who were tired of being on the outside of that conversation.
Lindsey estimates that over the past twenty-five years, most of the African-American women in Detroit who took up golf learned from him. He says it the way you'd report a weather forecast: neutrally. It’s just a fact.
"I opened some doors," he says. "And seeing ladies get out there, knowing how to keep score, how to network, how to compete… that's a good feeling."
What he teaches women, he's quick to say, isn't different from what he teaches anyone. Grip. Full swing. Short game. Pace of play. Work through the whole bag. And practice—actually practice, not just show up for lessons.
"You teach them to believe in themselves," I suggest at one point.
He pauses. "What you're really doing is teaching them to put in the work. So they have muscle memory. The belief comes from that."
It's an important distinction for Lindsey. Confidence isn't something he can hand someone. It arrives on its own, after enough repetitions, when the ball jumps off the sweet spot and they see it for themselves. "That's when we go to another level," he says.
At Cherry Creek, his ladies’ leagues run four or five groups strong, twenty-five players each. They play in the rain. They run skins games. They show up to compete, not just socialize.
Lindsey takes none of that for granted. These women put in the work: buckets at the range, short game repetitions, showing up week after week. The ones who do that stop worrying about whether they belong. They know.
And Lindsey doesn't ask anything of his students that he doesn’t always ask of himself.
He was named to the African-American Golfers Hall of Fame in 2023. More than 20 of his former students are on college golf scholarships. One could understand him resting on his laurels.
Yet the morning we spoke, where was he? On vacation in Hilton Head… but at the driving range, working on his short game on the lush March grass. Firing those same shots he'd been hitting on a school playground on the east side of Detroit, with a shag bag and a flag marker and nobody watching.
The belief comes from the muscle memory. No one knows it better than him.
Lindsey Mason III and Mason Golf can be reached at masongolf-golfclinics.com or lmasongolf@hotmail.com
"Seeing ladies get out there, knowing how to keep score, how to network, how to compete… that's a good feeling."
"I knew [golf lessons for women] would separate me from the rest…I wanted to give an equal chance to women in business, women who were driving the beverage cart at corporate outings and deserved to be playing."