For the first third of its existence, Asheville Municipal Golf Course had a rule nobody posted on the clubhouse wall. Black golfers could play the Donald Ross-designed public course one day a week — Monday, known locally as Caddie Day — and the rest of the time, the fairways belonged to everyone else. That’s the world Matthew Bacoate Jr. describes when he talks about the origins of the Skyview Open.

Bacoate says the Skyview Golf Association was chartered on April 29, 1959, by eight men who had spent years playing under that rule, led by Charles Collette. The following year, they staged the first Skyview All-Negro Open (as it was then named) with 50 golfers and a $300 purse.

As Bacoate remembers it, the first tournament, in 1960, almost didn’t have a scorer. Collette looked around the room before that first round and realized nobody had volunteered to keep score. The 30-year-old Bacoate — decades away from becoming the association’s own president — spoke up and was tasked with keeping the books for Skyview’s first two tournaments. It was the start of an involvement with the tournament that would stretch over more than 60 years.

Getting a gallery that wasn’t familiar with golf to come watch a tournament took more work, and the association asked Bacoate to make signs and post them around Asheville’s Black neighborhoods. Bacoate developed a decidedly grassroots solution: He cut apart cardboard milk cartons from a local grocery store and lettered them with crayons: “Come one, come all, come out.” And it worked — more than 200 people showed up for the first tournament.

Ralph Alexander won that first event. Will Mays won the second, in 1961 — the same year in which two white golfers entered the field. Organizers had realized that shutting others out was the very thing they had been fighting against. The Skyview Golf Association still points to that second-year decision to integrate as part of the tournament’s lasting character.

What happened next put Skyview on the map. Lee Elder, a young Black golfer working his way up through the segregation-era tournament circuit, won four straight Skyview titles from 1962 through 1965 — a streak nobody has matched since — before heading to the PGA Tour. A decade later, Elder became the first Black golfer to play the Masters. Four years after that, he became the first on a U.S. Ryder Cup team.

Elder was not the only big name Bacoate remembers finding Skyview. Jim Dent came back nearly every year. Brothers Chuck and Jim Thorpe played too, along with Charlie Owens, James Black, Nate Starks, Carl Seldon, and many others. World heavyweight champion Joe Louis showed up as well. Even Earl Woods, Tiger Woods’ father, teed it up at Skyview. More recently, Harold Varner III entered the junior division before coming back as a pro in 2015. All told, Bacoate says, 29 Skyview alumni have gone on to the PGA Tour, cutting their teeth in Asheville before moving up. Recent fields have included several HBCU golfers competing in the pro division, and Bacoate spoke about them with obvious pride: “Those guys look beautiful — not only could they play golf, [they are] just good people. They had tremendous mannerisms. They dressed impeccably.”

Not every notable name who showed up at Skyview came to play golf, a detail Bacoate shared, chuckling as he told it. “Calvin was a hustler,” he said of Calvin Peete, who would go on to become one of the PGA Tour’s most consistent players. Peete turned up at Skyview two years running not to compete, but to run a different kind of game. He’d park his car by the clubhouse, pop the trunk, and sell jewelry right there to players and spectators alike, working the crowd as easily as he’d later work a golf course.

Skyview also outlasted its entire generation of peers. By Bacoate’s count, more than 30 Black golf tournaments were founded across the Southeast around the same era as Skyview. Every other one has folded. “We are the only one left,” he said.

Collette led the tournament for its first years. Billy E.P. Gardenhight later ran it for decades. He was a big man with a big presence, Bacoate says, who could really play, and who seemed to promote the tournament just by being around it. The association runs an active scholarship fund in Gardenhight’s name for students continuing their education, not just golfers, alongside an elderly assistance program, both funded in part by tournament proceeds. Bacoate revealed a new honor debuting this year: The pro division will compete for the Billy E.P. Gardenhight Trophy for the first time in 2026.

Running Skyview has never been a one-man job. The association’s reach once went well beyond golf, too: A women’s auxiliary, a youth program that taught conflict resolution alongside the game, and decades of community events including the Golfer’s Ball, an annual gala that once drew hundreds. It also puts on two golf trips a year, shuttling 40 members to courses just outside of Asheville in the spring and fall, organized by Willie Robinson, Rev. Theodore Pea, and Alvin McGahee.

By 2012, Skyview was in real danger of disappearing. Membership had thinned without being replaced, and tournament participation and the purse had both thinned right along with it. Gardenhight’s son, Lee Shepard, who had taken over as president, asked Bacoate to step in and run the tournament before it was lost for good. Bacoate agreed, but on one condition, he recalled telling the board: “When I need you, I need for you all to be present. But when I don’t need you, I want y’all to stay the hell out of my way.”

Bacoate took the reins for the 2013 tournament and built the purse back up from there, year over year, toward the $6,500 top prize the tournament reached before Helene forced its most recent adjustments. (Editor’s note: This year’s top prize is $4,500.)

Sharp as ever, Bacoate, now in his 90s, is still running the show as president of the Skyview Golf Association. He flashes a grin often while he talks, especially when a story is about to get good. He is proud that the Skyview Open remains the oldest Black-owned and operated golf tournament in the country.

Skyview is only part of why Bacoate is something of an institution in Asheville. He got his start in golf by caddying at Biltmore Forest Country Club as a child, before five years in the Army and a career that would take him well beyond the course. He led AFRAM, a manufacturer that grew into the largest Black-owned business in the city’s history, lobbied to integrate Star Lanes Bowling Center, and advised two North Carolina governors and two U.S. presidents on Black job creation. Asheville honored him with the William A.V. Cecil Tourism Leadership Award in 2023. He was presented with a key to the city by the mayor and July 12th is known locally as “Matthew Bacoate Jr. Day.” This short film tells more of his story.

He also has a habit that reveals something bigger: For decades, he’s handed out Kennedy half-dollar coins as keepsakes to anyone who makes an impression on him, sometimes over 20 a day, telling each recipient they’re now part of a club. Bringing people together has always been part of who Bacoate is, and the coins are one small, steady expression of it. Proof of that showed up almost on cue during our interview in the lobby of The Radical: A man walking by recognized Bacoate, stopped to shake his hand, and mentioned he still carries the half-dollar Bacoate had given him years prior.

Matthew has other ways of connecting with people, too. At the 2023 tournament, sensing the gallery needed some energy, he made a supply run to a convenience store and came back with 55 scratch-off lottery tickets to hand out on the spot. Another year, he bought printed shopping bags for the women in attendance, seeding a few with small prizes tied to a trivia quiz he ran himself.

The largest field in Skyview’s history to date, 274 golfers, showed up in 1975. Over the decades, the tournament has drawn players from at least 19 states plus Canada and Bermuda. For most of that time, Skyview was played in July, but Bacoate says that was not always the plan. The tournament was originally held each September, until consistently heavy rain around tournament time pushed it to July in the mid-1970s. It stayed there for decades, becoming a fixture on the calendars of players who returned year after year.

The tournament has survived everything thrown at it, Bacoate says. It skipped 2020 for the pandemic, the only year in its history it was not played. Then came Helene. The storm tore up the Muni’s front nine, and Skyview could not go home. The 2025 edition relocated to the Country Club of Asheville (CCA), forcing a move to September. Bacoate has described the current September dates as temporary, tied to CCA’s own availability rather than a permanent shift. This year will be the second straight staging away from the Muni.

Asked what he’s proudest of after more than 60 years with the tournament, Bacoate didn’t focus on a single moment. He pointed to the golfers who kept showing up in the early years — arriving by bus from as far as California and Chicago because they had no cars, carrying their own cooking utensils and canned food because Asheville didn’t yet have the tourism infrastructure it has today. Families in the local Black community opened their own homes to house visiting players, alongside a handful of Black-owned rooming houses and small hotels, the Savoy Hotel and the James Key among them. To Bacoate, that combination is what has kept Skyview alive for 66 years: “The resiliency of the [founding] Negroes,” he said, “and the open-mindedness of the white people who chose to help,” including, he noted, members of CCA now hosting Skyview’s return to competition.

Looking ahead, Bacoate is watching two long-term projects at once. One is the pro purse, which he wants to grow toward $10,000 as sponsorships build back up. “It’s doable in a short period of time,” he said. The other, and the one he kept returning to, is the Muni itself. A rebuild is planned for the front nine, targeting completion in 2028. For Bacoate, going home isn’t a someday hope — it’s the goal, stated plainly and repeated: When Skyview returns to the Muni, it returns whole, back to the three-day tournament in July that it was before Helene.

Bacoate wanted to add one more thing before we finished: A thank-you to the Skyview volunteers who keep the tournament running at a high level every year, and to the golfers, families, and friends who travel to Asheville and Buncombe County to be part of it — enjoying a few days of good weather alongside the area’s restaurants, coffee shops, art galleries, and breweries, and attractions like the River Arts District, Biltmore Estate, and downtown Asheville.

It was an honor to spend a morning with Matthew Bacoate Jr. — a man who is still, decades in, thinking about how to make Skyview better. I left with a Kennedy half-dollar coin of my own — now part of Bacoate’s club.

The 66th Annual Skyview Open tees off September 21 and 22 at the Country Club of Asheville, with amateurs starting at 9 a.m. and professionals at 2:30 p.m. each day; early-pay registration closes September 11.

The Country Club of Asheville’s support for Skyview goes back to the tournament’s earliest days. Five Skyview members once worked at the club, and CCA members became some of the tournament’s most consistent backers in return, raising money and donating clubs and equipment, including for Skyview’s youth program, year after year. When the Muni’s front nine went down, Bacoate considered splitting the relocated tournament across two Asheville-area courses rather than asking one club to host both days. The Country Club of Asheville stepped up to take on the full event itself. “They became very supportive of Skyview getting off the ground,” Bacoate said, a connection he points to as part of why, more than 60 years later, the hosting arrangement came together so naturally.

The tournament runs on more than registration fees, too. Bacoate says it relies on a small, steady group of sponsors and a lot of community goodwill. Callaway Golf has partnered with the tournament since 2021, contributing prize money, branded golf balls, and the full amateur prize package; PepsiCola supplies beverages for players and guests, a relationship Bacoate traces to a decades-long friendship with a longtime contact there, John Teeter; Explore Asheville sponsors a meal for competitors. Growing the pro purse depends on locking in more partners like these.

Looking past this year, Bacoate is already thinking about what it takes to keep Skyview growing. If you’re a local business interested in supporting the tournament, the association offers both advertising space in the printed tournament program and broader sponsorship opportunities. It’s a good starting point for anyone who wants to be part of getting Skyview back to full strength once it returns to the Muni.

Special thanks to Matthew Bacoate Jr. for agreeing to be interviewed for this article.