Debert Cook, CMP
Founder/Publisher/ Editor-In-Chief
African American Golfer’s Digest
“Teeing Up In The Publishing World”
From behind one of the bunkers, the golf gods had to be snickering at the radical paradigm shift along the PGA Tour landscape. In this historically homogenous sport, two dark-pigmented players, Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh, have a stranglehold on the top two slots in the professional world rankings.
Additionally, there has been an explosion in the sport’s popularity in the urban setting, with more minorities sprinkled liberally along the galleries. One thing was missing: there needed to be a publication that catered to this burgeoning and embryonic phenomenon. Debert Cook, founder of Event Planners Plus, filled this vacuum with the founding of the African American Golfer’s Digest.
In addition to exposing newcomers to the nuances of the sport, the quarterly-published AAGD provides the type of in-depth content so conspicuously vacant in other golf-based publications, Cook reveals.
“If you look at the other magazines, it’s not like the African American Golfer’s Digest magazine, where on every single page you’ll see a black face,” says the New York resident who was in Cleveland for the Frasernet conference. “And we’re 100 percent black owned. So we’re really committed to the black community.”
That commitment translates into comprehensive coverage on a multitude of previously omitted topics, such as pioneer Charlie Sifford’s induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame. The AAGD also pays scrupulous attentiveness to the average black golfer’s lifestyle, bestowing readers with executive profiles, business destinations, exotic golfing outposts around the world, including in Africa, and the contribution of black inventors.
“There are still so many black inventors that have great products that just need it launched into the market,” Cook says resolutely. In fact, it was Cook’s business interactions on the golf course via her Event Planners Plus business, where her love-affair with golf has its origin, that she became conscious of the need for a black golf magazine.
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–Terry Shropshire
Rolling Out Magazine
