Seventy years ago, the first major battle in the integration of professional golf was ignited at the Richmond Country Club.

Bill Spiller, a short, slight and stylish African American golfer, came to the Bay Area in 1948 to compete in the Richmond Open, a PGA tournament. Instead, he wound up leading what NYU history Professor Dr. Calvin Sinnette told The Chronicle was “a Marine-type action. Bill stormed the beachhead.”

Spiller’s support troops included a Bay Area lawyer and several local media people, but it was Spiller who led the charge. And it was Spiller who paid the price.

Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball in 1947 and is still widely celebrated and honored. Spiller’s reward for his long fight for equality, which began in January 1948, was to be branded a troublemaker and a dangerous character, and to be denied all but the most menial jobs in golf. He died in 1988, an angry and heartbroken man largely forgotten by history.

The Richmond Open saga starts in Los Angeles. Only a few months after Robinson ended his first season by playing in baseball’s World Series, Spiller qualified to play in the Los Angeles Open in January 1948.

At age 34, Spiller was working as a “redcap” (baggage handler) at L.A.’s Union Station. He had turned pro a year earlier on the circuit for black golfers, which, ironically, was open to white golfers. All but two PGA tournaments — the L.A. Open and the Tam O’Shanter in Chicago — were closed to blacks, due to a “Caucasians only” membership clause, inserted into PGA bylaws in 1943.

Spiller finished his shift at the train station, grabbed his clubs and took a city bus to Riviera Country Club. It’s almost comedic how much of a longshot Spiller was against the greats of golf. He had been playing golf for just five years, and never on this kind of stage. Yet Spiller shot 68 that day, tied for second place with the legendary Ben Hogan.

Spiller faded, but still finished 34th, which automatically qualified him for the following week’s Richmond Open, a PGA event. (It was a Professional Golfers of America tournament, which is not the same as today’s PGA Tour.)

He and fellow black pro Teddy Rhodes, who also qualified at L.A., headed to the Bay Area. Following their second practice rounds, a PGA official informed them they could not play in the tournament.

In those days, the unwritten rule for those wanting to integrate sports was to be patient and calm. Spiller never got the memo. He’d started carrying a gun at the age of 9, after being slapped by a white shopkeeper in Oklahoma.

“Jackie (Robinson) had to be low-key and quietly accept abuse,” Spiller’s son, Bill Jr., said in a recent interview with The Chronicle. “Bill made noise. He didn’t follow Gandhi or Martin Luther King, let’s put it that way.”

Spiller’s more confrontational tactics put him at great personal and professional risk, which he accepted.

“My father had grown up (in Oklahoma and Texas) through lynchings and extreme discrimination,” said Spiller Jr., an attorney in Los Angeles, “so it’s not that he was fearless, but he certainly thought that his cause was greater than the value of his life.”

In Richmond, Rhodes was going to leave town quietly. Not Spiller, who connected with a white, progressive Redwood City attorney. On behalf of Spiller, Rhodes and a local black golfer named Madison Gunther, attorney John Rowell sued the PGA for $315,000 for denying the men the opportunity to obtain employment in their chosen profession. They also sued the Richmond Country Club for $5,000 each in damages. The suits were filed in Contra Costa Superior Court.

Alerted to Spiller’s situation, Ira Blue, host of a nationally syndicated radio program, angrily blasted the PGA. The Oakland Tribune called the PGA “un-American and unsportsmanlike.” Chronicle columnist Darrell Wilson wrote that regardless of how the lawsuit went, “What counts is that the spotlight is now on golf’s racial problem ... that colored players are actually deprived of a chance to make a living.”

Just before the trial was to begin, a PGA attorney met with Rowell and offered a deal. If the golfers would drop the suit, the PGA would promise not to discriminate against black golfers. Spiller, deeply distrustful, was reluctant to settle but finally agreed. The PGA, however, did not agree to drop its Caucasians-only clause for PGA membership.

The PGA managed to find a way around their agreement with Spiller and friends. It began calling its tournaments “Open Invitationals,” meaning at any tournament co-sponsored by the PGA, participating golfers now had to be invited. If a black golfer protested being excluded, the PGA could say, “It’s not our call. The host club controls the invitations.”

Also, since black golfers couldn’t be PGA members, they could not be hired as club pros or assistant pros. Spiller had a college degree in education and was a keen student and teacher of the game, but the only golf job he could get was caddying.

Spiller, though, never stopped fighting. At a tournament in San Diego in 1953, yanked from the field, Spiller challenged a high-ranking PGA official to a fistfight, then held up the tourney by blocking the first tee, either by lying down or standing in front of it. (There are conflicting accounts.)

Spiller told author Al Barkow, who wrote “Gettin’ To The Dance Floor,” an oral history of golf’s integration, that one year at the L.A. Open, he asked the starter on the first tee why all three black players in the field were in the same group. The starter said, “You know how it is, we got some Texas guys (pros) to deal with.”

Spiller angrily retorted, “I thought this was the L.A. Open, not the Texas Open. If they don’t want to play with us, tell ’em to go the hell back to Texas.”

The starter’s microphone for announcing the players was on, so the gallery heard the exchange, and whooped and roared in support of Spiller.

Spiller’s long fight finally paid off in 1960. He caddied for a man who heard his story and contacted state Attorney General Stanley Mosk. Mosk put a legal team to work and threatened to bar the PGA from holding tournaments in California. Mosk also reached out to other states. The PGA, squeezed by legal threats, dropped its Caucasians-only clause.

That came too late for Spiller, who was too old to compete on the tour, and whose reputation as a troublemaker caused doors now legally open to slam in his face. He wound up his golf “career” giving lessons at a driving range near Long Beach.

“I stuck my neck out, and it destroyed my career,” Spiller told Barkow.

Spiller did get to one dance floor. Frank Snow, another black golfer, tells a story in “A Course of Their Own,” by John H. Kennedy, about an incident at the Bakersfield Open, where black golfers were not permitted to even change their shoes inside the clubhouse.

Spiller finished his last round, then “went into the clubhouse and asked the (club) president’s wife to dance with him. He said she got up to dance with him.”

Long after his death, Spiller was admitted to the PGA. But he lived and died a tragic figure.

“I couldn’t get a job in a pro shop,” Spiller told Barkow. “I was the one who spoke up.”

Scott Ostler is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: sostler@sfchronicle.com

Twitter: @scottostler