Only a golfing trainspotter will recognise the name Hord Hardin, but it doesn’t take a subscription to Golf Digest magazine to comprehend the mindset that led Hardin, a former chairperson of Augusta National Golf Club, to respond to a question about his organisation’s no-women membership policy by saying: ‘Don’t misunderstand me. We love our women — we just don’t want any fussin’ with ’em.”
Hardin died in 1996. And his spirit lives on at his beloved Augusta, Georgia, which continues its misogynistic ways to this day. It lives on, too, at some of the more historic golf clubs in the United Kingdom, including the men-only Royal & Ancient (R&A).
As the organisation charged with running the game from its St Andrews headquarters, one would have thought the R&A’s paramount interest would be to attract as many people to the sport as possible, regardless of sex. Far from it. Here’s a story you won’t find in the R&A’s official history but is recounted in Marcia Chambers’s book The Unplayable Lie: The Untold Story of Women and Discrimination in American Golf.
‘The following incident is believed to have occurred at St Andrews during one of the Ladies’ British Open Amateur Championships. During a cloudburst, the officials of the Ladies’ Golf Union huddled together at the side of the clubhouse, because they were barred from entering. They were standing under their umbrellas when a club lackey appeared round the corner. The women golf officials … thought to themselves that the men inside had at last taken pity and were going to invite them inside.
”Ladies,’ said the lackey, ‘I have a request from some of the members. Would you mind putting down your umbrellas? They are obscuring the view of the course from the smoking room windows.”’
There were echoes of Hardin and the chaps in the smoking room when Greg Norman denounced Laura Davies’s invitation to take part in this week’s ANZ Championship in Australia, the first appearance by a woman in a European PGA Tour event. Opinions on how she might perform against the men are divided. Norman, however, was in no doubt.
‘It’s nothing but a marketing gimmick and I don’t think it should happen,” he said. ‘We can’t go play on their tour because we are not female. That’s the wording they have in their bylaws. I think we should have something similar.”
Norman has a point, though not the point he and his supporters seem so desperate to make. Davies playing in the ANZ Open is indeed a ‘gimmick”. Some bright soul in the marketing department at Australian bank ANZ came up with the idea as a means of generating publicity for an event that otherwise would get little attention, even on the sports pages.
One might have expected Norman, a sharp businessman as well as a champion golfer, to extend his congratulations to ANZ for their savvy, but he and his ilk couldn’t care less about marketing strategy, or even Davies.
No, what’s bothering Norman and the rest of the boys is they are losing the battle that is now taking place for the soul of golf.
About 10% of those who play golf worldwide are women. This is a favourite statitistic of the men who have controlled the sport for decades, who argue there’s no point in meddling with the game to placate the 10% minority.
Why bother, indeed, when the status quo means that men are able to keep their age-old privileges? This is especially true at many of the game’s best courses, which were founded as private members’ clubs for wealthy businessmen in the first half of the 20th century. The sexism that pervades the game still is a hangover from those days.
While other sports such as tennis and athletics reflected the changes in the representation of women in wider society, the private status of golf clubs gave them legal immunity from such progress. And it wasn’t just women who were discriminated against. In the US there are still some clubs that don’t accept black or Jewish members. Given this backdrop, the wonder is not that only 10% of golfers are women, but that so many women are willing to take up the sport at all.
There have been a number of great players down the years — Glenna Collett, Babe Didricksen, Amy Alcott, Nancy Lopez, Annika Sorenstam — but 2004 might have marked the arrival of the greatest woman player of all.
Last month, 14-year-old schoolgirl Michelle Wie took part in the Sony Open, a men’s event in Hawaii. She didn’t win, but she did beat 47 men. Her performance was astonishing.
Nothing is certain in sport, but Wie is on course to become one of the best golfers in the world. That certainly appears to be what both Wie and her father, BJ, have as a goal.
Recently BJ contemplated entering his daughter into the Open Championship.
‘I couldn’t believe it when I started doing some research and discovered that the rules specifically state it is a men-only event,” he said.
Even by the inglorious standards of the R&A, this was taking discrimination to ridiculous levels. Not even Augusta has a rule explicitly stating the sex of those who are allowed to take part in the Masters tournament.
You would have thought that having taken the trouble to institutionalise their misogyny, the R&A would at least have the intellectual honesty to defend it. But no. When the R&A’s secretary Peter Dawson was asked if Wie would never be allowed to take part in the Open he replied: ‘Never say never, and we would be unwise not to review our entry criteria in the years ahead.”
This is often the way of golf’s male ruling class. Challenged to defend the indefensible, they crumble. On January 1 this year, the R&A announced changes to its structure. In short, the organisation is now split in two: a private golf club, and a limited company that will run the Open Championship and R&A’s other commercial interests.
The golf club will remain exclusively for men, while the limited company will have women on its committees who will actually be allowed to vote on issues presented before them.
The R&A’s mindset is firmly in the 19th century but, believe it or not, it has a 21st-century PR machine that somehow managed to spin this minuscule concession into the modern-day equivalent of the Equal Franchise Act. Of course, it was nothing of the sort, although the mere fact that golf’s ruling body felt it had to give a little ground is significant.
Dawson may not be Emmeline Pankhurst in a grey suit, but he isn’t a fool either. He will have seen what happened when Martha Burk, a Washington-based activist, started campaigning against Augusta National’s no-women policy in the run-up to last year’s Masters.
Burk conducted a brilliant media campaign against Augusta, reducing the club’s buffoonish president Hootie Johnson to a national joke and its precious tournament to a circus. The R&A, which has made a habit of staging the Open Championship at clubs that won’t countenance women members, is terrified that it will suffer the same fate as Johnson and his friends.
Burk didn’t get what she wanted — a woman member at Augusta — but she did expose the assumption that has sustained the likes of Hord Hardin, Hootie Johnson and Greg Norman: that golf is a game of tradition, and to mess with tradition is to mess with the integrity of the game.
For tradition, read the chauvinism that has excluded women from the best golf clubs, restricted their chances to play on the best courses, left them shivering outside the clubhouse and that wants to stop them playing in the best tournament, where, perish the thought, they might actually beat the men.
The late, great Guardian golf writer Peter Dobereiner once said: ‘Golf has been soaking in male chauvinist piggery for 500 years and so it cannot be eradicated overnight.”
Maybe so, but thanks to the likes of Martha Burk, Wie and Davies, the long, dark night might be coming to an end. —