IN THE world of golf, Augusta National Golf Club has stood as one of the great traditions of the game. Every year, it hosts The Masters, one of the four "major" golf tournaments of the season. Augusta has traditional, fundamental ties to the basics of golf. Nowadays, Augusta National has had to face new creatures that seek to intrude on its hallowed ground: women. While Augusta is not amused, the battle between the two groups should amuse the rest of us. We should also wonder about the state of the modern civil rights movement.
Augusta National has approximately 300 members. All of these members are male. Most of them are white. All who join pay a five-digit membership fee. Although thousands of very rich individuals have the means to join Augusta, few are chosen for the honor.
For whatever reason, the club's membership has not invited a single woman to join. It is possible that these folks just don't want to have to deal with being around women much. They want to drink, scratch themselves, and make awkward (probably obscene) jokes involving golf equipment and hole maintenance. As these people are Southern Gentlemen, they presumably do not want to behave in this manner in front of people of the opposite sex. The easy response is just not to let any women into the place. This attempt at reasoning obviously is lacking in a number of places.
If Augusta was just another two-bit golf club, strip joint or pet grooming facility, nobody would care. Augusta, however, likes the spotlight.
Each year, the club pretties itself to present The Masters tournament on CBS. The golf club, led by Hootie (yes, that is his real first name) Johnson (yes, that is his real last name), exercises tight control over CBS's ability to broadcast the tournament. Announcers who criticize the course (Gary McCord is the classic example) are banned from broadcasting it in the future. This past year, the club allowed only four minutes of commercials to be aired each hour. These measures present Augusta as a showcase of magic and wonder in which all (well, half of all) can delight.
It is these twofold desires, to maintain a boy's club and to showcase a national sport, that have brought Augusta into some recent trouble. The National Council of Women's Organizations, which sounds broad enough to include the
ber-conservative Ann Coulter and National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, has started a campaign to get Augusta to admit a woman into the club. After the NCWO wrote a letter asking that women be allowed to join, Johnson made two statements: "Discrimination policy? What discrimination policy?"; and "Get lost, sister." Actually, he wrote that the club's membership has the right to decide who will join the organization and that the membership would not be "bullied" by an outside group. By "outside group," he apparently means women.
Johnson has gone to great lengths to prove that Augusta won't be bullied. Rather than deal with a coordinated campaign aimed at the tournament's sponsors (something NCWO had begun), Augusta has dropped all of its sponsors for next year. Johnson has, in effect, created one of the greatest or worst things in television history: 12 hours of uninterrupted golf. Even more incredible, he's created 12 hours of uninterrupted golf aired on CBS.
The folks at NCWO have responded by trying to pressure CBS to drop the broadcast, something it has no interest in doing. Aside from trying to market wrestling-themed apparel, the NCWO has made a list of inappropriate verbal uses for the name "Hootie."
The greatest thing about the controversy surrounding Augusta National's desire to remain in the (18)70s is how it illustrates the benefit of the market and the fact that America has actually come a great distance in its social evolution. Certain women want entry into one prominent golf club. The golf club doesn't appear willing to admit women, to the point where it will sacrifice possible ad revenues. They are, in effect, willing to pay for the right to discriminate.
The women have now turned to Augusta's main moneymaker, CBS. More than likely, if ratings hit abysmal levels, CBS will walk away from the event, and Augusta will be faced with taking its gentlemanly tournament to Fox, which would probably put Bill O'Reilly on the 18th green. The viewers who will make these decisions are likely hard-core golf fans who enjoy talking about the angles on their sand wedges.
Such is the base of this argument and the current public frontier of civil rights: convincing a minute (relative to the American population) number of duffers that a golf club should admit women and to show their solidarity by not watching a golf tournament for one weekend. Surely something more important than this is perplexing modern feminists.
To those seeking to change the way Augusta National operates, I wish you good luck. I also wish you would turn your energies to something else of greater importance. The Hootie Johnsons of the world are likely not worth the time or the energy.
(Seth Wood's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at swood@cavalierdaily.com.)
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