It might be easy to be intimidated when you grow up singing in the same church choir that gave rise to a Motown legend, but Selina Johnson has never been one to back down from a challenge.
A member of the New Bethel Baptist Church where Aretha Franklin's father C.L. Franklin was pastor for more than 30 years, Johnson has led a life in which she has mingled with the rich and been humbled by decades of service introducing children of Detroit to golf.
For the past 50 years Johnson, 71, has brought golf and its many character-building benefits to more than 4,000 kids in Detroit through her Hollywood Golf Institute. Since 2021, she has incorporated golf course architecture and other facets of the game to teach kids the STEM skills needed to succeed in life.
"Many people don't like children on golf courses until they already know how to play golf," Johnson said. "I take them when they can't play. I speak up for these children, and we develop good, productive citizens."
This year, SiteOne Landscape Supply is partnering with Johnson to bring in experts from other areas of the golf industry to help her students learn the relationship between STEM skills, golf and life.
"Detroit metropolitan area schools don't offer golf course or agriculture science programs like they did years ago," said Dawn Hicks, Detroit area business manager at SiteOne. "So after speaking with Selina and hearing her vision for the project, we jumped at the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of the students of Hollywood Golf and influence the green industry with this STEM project."
Earlier this year, SiteOne organized sessions with its various business categories to talk with the students. They studied irrigation practices and the technology in smart controllers, spoke with the agronomics team to learn about turf seed and fertilizing practices and how to build and manage a golf course.
"They were so excited to learn about all the different roles in golf," Johnson said. "We owe so much to a corporation that has that kind of vision. The kids asked so many good questions. I was blown out of the water."
The inspiration for Johnson's journey comes from her family. A natural athlete who excelled in track and just about anything else she tried, including golf eventually, Johnson is the product of a close, tight-knit family that has supported every endeavor she has undertaken.
Her father worked two jobs to support the family, her mother coached kids from the neighborhood in many sports and her grandmothers were local business owners. Her siblings all excelled in the arts, one sister was a concert pianist and the other on violin, and a brother who played drums. A natural athlete, she excelled in many sports growing up on Detroit's north side.
Johnson has a lifetime of stories to tell, but one in particular sticks with her today as an example of how important it is to reach out to others in need.
As a child, Johnson helped out at her grandmother Sommora Turner's soul food restaurant in Detroit where she sat customers who came through the door. Johnson recalls a man who ate supper there every evening, but never was given a bill for his meal. When she asked her grandmother about it, Johnson learned the man's wife worked in the restaurant, and the price of a free meal meant the man's wife did not have to miss work to prepare supper for him at home. She didn't have to clock out and lose money, and Turner did not lose a valuable employee during the dinner rush.
"She told me that some things in life you can live with and some you can't. She could live with that," Johnson said. "I am a product of 20 people in my community.
"It was an enjoyable time in Detroit. Regardless of what you see now, back then it was people who wanted to make the playing field level."
To use a track analogy, Johnson took the baton from her family to speak for children in the community without a voice.
Since she began her Hollywood Golf Institute, Johnson has not only taught children how to play golf, she has taken them around the country to participate in tournaments from California to Florida. In 1995, she was able to get enough tickets to take 47 of her students to The Masters.
"When the kids see it, and see the players that close," Johnson said, "it changes you."
Johnson is the first African American woman to receive the Card Walker Award for outstanding contributions to junior golf. She also was in the inaugural class of the International Afro-American Sports Hall of Fame and was also inducted into the African American Golfers' Hall of Fame.
By teaching her students about golf course architecture, a task that includes designing miniature models of individual holes from tee to green, Johnson is able to teach her students not only about hole design, but how to play the game from a tactical standpoint and how to set up the next shot. Students must convert yardage down to inches and feet, a practice that helps them polish their math skills and also puts each hole into a context that makes more sense to them.
"We teach them about counting. Are these trees going to be trouble?" she said. "Why do you play a hole the way you play it? When it rains, where does it drain? We talk about evaporation and what happens to the water. And we talk about the different things that live on a golf course."
This summer, Johnson plans to bring her students to a course renovation site somewhere in Michigan so they can learn more about agronomics and course design from superintendents, irrigation specialists and architects.
"They're so excited to see the dirt being moved around, they don't know what to do," she said.
Johnson's success and that of her students did not occur by chance. Throughout her career teaching children, Johnson has enlisted help from professional golfers like Charlie Sifford, Lee Elder, Calvin Peete (pictured above with Johnson) and Jim Thorpe. She sang with Aretha Franklin and knows Muhammad Ali.
She recalls a day long ago when a young Tiger Woods attended a clinic at Detroit's Rackham Park Golf Course, and how overwhelmed clinic organizers were that day.
"Tiger has been the best thing to come along in golf," she said. "When he came to Detroit, 8,000 kids came out. He did more in 1 minute to convince kids to play golf than I did in all those years of hard work I put in."
Johnson's Hollywood Institute is a play off a nickname she earned when she worked for airport police at the Detroit-Wayne Airport. In those days, she moonlighted singing at funerals, retirement parties, wherever she was needed.
"I was always so busy singing, they called me Officer Hollywood," she said. "I'd never had a nickname before, but that one stuck."
After bringing the game to thousands of children in her hometown, Johnson is nowhere close to being finished. That's just how people of her generation are in her community.
When kids couldn't make it to the golf course, she'd give lessons in their yards. When Covid threatened to shut down her work, she took her instruction online.
"I had such a rich upbringing, and it made me a better person," she said. "I've had the opportunity to teach golf and elevate, educate and expose them to travel. When you love what you do, it's easy. I don't look at it as wear and tear on myself, because I'm so busy moving forward. I never knew I was going to do this. I just did it."