Kamaiu Johnson: A Cool Story Featuring Humanity At Its Best
By Ken Reed
Kamaiu Johnson was on a path likely heading nowhere.
He’d dropped out of school by age 13. His father had skipped town and his family was loving but poor. At times, Johnson lived with as many as nine other family members in a cramped two-bedroom apartment.
“I was so lost in life,” Johnson said. “So depressed at a young age.”
But then Jan Auger entered his life.
Auger was an assistant golf professional at Hilaman Golf Course in Tallahasse, Florida. She was playing a round at Hilaman with some friends when she saw Johnson swinging a stick just outside the golf course, imitating the golfers he saw go by on the course. Auger noticed his smooth swing as she got closer. Auger said:
“When you’re around golf you notice people who have a fluid swing. Not mechanical. And as I got closer, I realized that he wasn’t swinging a golf club. It was just a stick.”
Auger walked up to Johnson and asked him if he wanted to swing a real golf club instead of a stick.
“He did look a little sad to me when I walked up to him,” Auger said. “It was just something to brighten his day, I guess.”
That not only brightened Johnson’s day, it changed his life.
After hitting an initial bucket of balls on the driving range that Auger brought him, Johnson received another offer from Auger: Do chores around the course and you can hit range balls for free and play for $1 a round. Johnson hopped on it.
“It was like, all of a sudden I had purpose,” he said. “Y’know all of a sudden I wanted to be as good at golf as I could be.”
Well, jump ahead several years now and Johnson has just finished playing in the PGA Tour’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am tournament.
I kid you not.
Johnson won The Advocates Pro Golf Association (APGA) Tour championship last fall. The APGA was created in 2010 “to prepare African Americans and other minority golfers to compete and win at the highest level of professional golf.” After winning the APGA championship, Johnson earned a sponsor’s exemption to play in the PGA’s Farmers Insurance Open. But his excitement was taken away when he had to sit that out that event when it was discovered shortly before starting the tournament that he had tested positive for Covid. Fortunately, a few weeks later, the AT&T at Pebble Beach tournament stepped up and gave him a chance to compete in his first PGA Tour event.
Johnson missed the cut at Pebble Beach but that fact takes very little away from this cool story.
A white woman sees a young Black child swinging a stick like a golf club near a golf course. She offers him a job and chance to practice for free and play for a buck. The inspired and generous offer ignites a passion in the youngster. He proceeds to put his heart and soul into the game of golf and ends up playing in a PGA tournament on perhaps the most famous golf course in America against some of the best players in the world, including Phil Mickelson and Jordan Spieth.
Today, Johnson considers Auger his second mom.
“It just kind of tears me up,” says Auger. “I just want him to be proud of himself and to realize what he’s done.”
It’s a beautiful sports story. One driven by the soul, not the ego.
— Ken Reed, Sports Policy Director, League of Fans

Sports Forum Podcast
Episode #28 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: A Chat With Mano Watsa, a Leading Basketball and Life Educator – Watsa is President of PGC Basketball, the largest education basketball camp in the world, with over 150 camps in 30+ U.S. states and Canada. We discuss problems in youth sports today, including single sport specialization, the growing gap between the “haves” and “have-nots,” the high drop-out rate in competitive sports, and the growing mental health challenges young athletes are dealing with today.
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Episode #27 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Kids’ Sports: How We Can Take Back the Game and Restore Quality Family Time In the Process – Linda Flanagan is author of “Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports and Why It Matters.” We discuss how commercialized and professionalized youth sports are hurting kids and their families.
Episode #26 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: How Can We Fix Youth Sports? – John O’Sullivan is Founder and CEO of Changing the Game Project and author of “Changing the Game: The Parents Guide to Raising Happy, High Performing Athletes and Giving Youth Sports Back to Our Kids.”
Episode #25 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Physical Education Should Be a Critical Component of K-12 School Design – Michael Horn is co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation.
Episode #24 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Mental Health and Athletes: Ending the Stigma – Nathan Braaten and Taylor Ricci are the founders of Dam Worth It, a non-profit created to end the stigma around mental health at colleges and universities through sport, storytelling, and community creation.
Episode #23 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Olympian Benita Fitzgerald Mosley Talks Title IX, Youth Sports and the Olympics.
Media
"How We Can Save Sports" author Ken Reed appears on Fox & Friends to explain how there's "too much adult in youth sports."
Ken Reed appears on Mornings with Gail from KFKA Radio in Colorado to discuss bad parenting in youth athletics.
“Should College Athletes Be Paid?” Ken Reed on The Morning Show from Wisconsin Public Radio
Ken Reed appears on KGNU Community Radio in Colorado (at 02:30) to discuss equality in sports and Title IX.
Ken Reed appears on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour (at 38:35) to discuss his book The Sports Reformers: Working to Make the World of Sports a Better Place, and to talk about some current sports issues.
- League of Fans Sports Policy Director Ken Reed quoted in Washington Post column titled "What happened to P.E.? It’s losing ground in our push for academic improvement," by Jay Mathews
League of Fans is a sports reform project founded by Ralph Nader to fight for the higher principles of justice, fair play, equal opportunity and civil rights in sports; and to encourage safety and civic responsibility in sports industry and culture.
Vanderbilt Sport & Society - On The Ball with Andrew Maraniss with guest Ken Reed, Sports Policy Director for League of Fans and author of How We Can Save Sports: A Game Plan
Sports & Torts – Ken Reed, Sports Policy Director, League of Fans – at the American Museum of Tort Law
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