A Step
| GOLF AND GENDER
in the
Right
Direction
While Augusta National’s decision to admit female members for the first time in its history should be applauded, the game has some way to go before gender equality is truly established, writes Lewine Mair
W
AFP
The small but perfectly formed clubhouse at Augusta National (opposite) will soon be familiar territory for Condoleezza Rice (above), who along with businesswoman Darla Moore became the first female member of the renowned Georgia club 46
HK Golfer・OCT 2012
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ith Augusta, the most famous of the all-male golfing bastions in the United States, having admitted two lady members in Condoleezza Rice and Darla Moore, kindred establishments in Europe will probably be shaken into following suit. If that is not just wistful thinking, we can look ahead to the day when future generations will listen, wide-eyed, to stories of the bad old days.Stories of how as great a golfer as Marley Spearman – a double British champion – once walked through the revolving doors of the clubhouse at Royal Liverpool and found herself ushered out on the same revolution; of how women were not allowed to play at certain clubs until after four o’clock on a Saturday or, to put it another way, when the best of the winter light was gone. And of how, in a particularly demeaning instance, a club in the English Midlands had a white line painted across the floor of the lounge. Men were free to go either side of it but women had to stay on their side of the court, with the barman serving as a somewhat ill-tempered umpire. At Little Aston, a fine parkland course near Birmingham, a terrace in front of the clubhouse was at one point the preserve of male members, while the same applied to a perfectly-positioned balcony above the 18th green at Royal Lytham. In the case of the latter, it was very definitely not a matter of a gallant male membership fearing for the women’s safety. Golf historians will further relate the tale of how Joyce Wethered, arguably the best British woman golfer of all time, used to warm her hands on the radiators of members’ cars at Prince’s Golf Club in Kent as she waited for her brother and his friends to emerge from the clubhouse. And never mind that this winner of five English Championships in a row had probably thrashed every one of her companions on the course that day. For an example of a member of the fairer sex getting her own back, there was an account of an American lady flouting the rules at Royal Troon by fooling the then secretary – it could have been Colin Montgomerie’s father, who held the HK Golfer・OCT 2012
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Getty Images (Joyce Wethered); AFP (Se Ri Pak/Annika Sorenstam)
The great male amateurs of the Victorian era advised that women should stick to putting and, when the women rebelled and started to play for real, they were warned that to swing above shoulder height could only have an adverse effect on their reputations.
Clockwise from top left: Joyce Wethered, arguably the finest British woman golfer of all time, was denied access to the clubhouse at Prince’s Golf Club on England’s Kentish coast; Se Ri Pak’s brilliant career was undoubtedly helped in the early years by being brought up in an environment where women are seen as equals; Annika Sorenstam believes the Augusta announcement is a “very important step for women across the entire sports spectrum” 48
HK Golfer・OCT 2012
position for many years – into thinking she was a man. She dressed in men’s clothing and topped off her outfit with a handsome tweed cap. If there are wholesale changes, golfers of the future will almost certainly want to know how such discrimination ever came about. Some at least will be regaled with the story of the Fishwives of Musselburgh in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These good women would play along with everyone else on the Links of Musselburgh and, since the fish baskets they used to carry would weigh three times as much as a tour professional’s golf bag, it is not unreasonable to speculate that they hit the ball as far as the men. True or false, the subject would have been bound to get a mention as the men defected to their all-male clubs, starting with Bruntsfield and Muirfield, which hosts next year’s Open Championship. The great male amateurs of the Victorian era advised that women should stick to putting and, when the women rebelled and started to play for real, they were warned that to swing above shoulder height could only have an adverse effect on their reputations. On much the same tack,
when word reached the noted amateur and writer Horace Hutchinson that the women were planning to start a Ladies’ Golf Union, he decreed that it could never work and that women were neither temperamentally nor physically suited to the rigours of the game. There were clubs all over the world who copied the traditional British clubs and their male-dominant ways but, when it came to the 1960s, the Swedes, for one, saw sense. In deciding the best way ahead, they picked up on the good things that this traditional British game had to offer had to offer and eschewed the bad. They wanted golf to be a family affair and, very soon, their attitude was reflected in the success of golfers such as Liselotte Neumann and Annika Sorenstam. In terms of their youthful development, these players thrived on being brought up in an environment where women were seen as equals as opposed to second-best. Asia, by and large, has copied the Swedish way. There was a Japanese lady who, on being told a particularly grand club near Tokyo was only for men, purchased the establishment for herself and introduced another set of rules but, for the most part, women golfers in Asia get the encouragement they deserve. In Korea, in particular, they have been churning out major championship winners galore on the distaff side of the game and, as in Sweden, it is the men who are having to play catch-up. Of course it is about time the powers-that-be in the Western world admitted they got things wrong and accept that equality is the way ahead. Yet there will be a downside, not least for the media. No less than slow play and long putters, news on discriminatory issues has provided the Fourth Estate with an endless font of good material. Years ago, there was a delicious furore as Liz Kahn, a well-known writer-cum-women’s rights activist had the nerve to walk up to the bar at R&A headquarters. She asked for a drink, only for the men summarily to escort her from the premises. At Augusta, there were years when Martha Burke, an American version of Kahn but a rather more strident one, would organise rallies both outside the gates of the club and in the town. Every year, when the Open has been staged at HKGOLFER.COM
There was a Japanese lady who, on being told a particularly grand club near Tokyo was only for men, purchased the establishment for herself and introduced another set of rules but, for the most part, women golfers in Asia get the encouragement they deserve. an all-male venue, the tabloid press have seized the moment. Why would the R&A take their championship to a club where there are no lady members Are they not sending out all the wrong messages? At Royal St George’s last year, Peter Dawson, the chief executive of the R&A, hit on a more than adequate riposte. Whatever his inner feelings might be on the theme, he looked out across a room packed tight with media men and observed that he didn’t see too many women in their midst. He had a point. Sports editors and their staff have remained as stubbornly all-male as the most misogynistic of golf clubs. Personally, I have always seen the men who hold sway at the all-male clubs and sports editors as roughly on a par and, on one occasion, was faced with falling out with both species at once.
There was an amateur event over the Old Course at St Andrews and, since this was in the days before mobile phones and email, I needed a quiet telephone booth from which to ring through an article. The phone at the reception desk at the R&A had been declared in bounds for the day but, since that was busy – a member was going through his round to his long-suffering wife – I found another in a handsome booth down a corridor. And started to dictate. After 10 minutes, a heavily-tweeded gentleman, whisky glass in hand, appeared at the door. Since he was just about sober enough to consider that he might be seeing things, he rang for the stewardess for a second opinion. “Is this a woman in the phone-box?” he demanded. When she replied in the affirmative, he asked that something be done about it. When I explained to the stewardess that my sports’ editor was every bit as scary as the tweeded-one, she let me be. Having braced myself to face the music at the end, it came as a bit of a let-down when the old gentleman was nowhere to be seen. Presumably, he had gone up in a puff of smoke. Yet when it comes to the R&A becoming a mixed club – if and when they decide that they cannot hold out any longer – it will not be just the men who have their doubts. You have to worry if, amid the changes, this magnificent establishment might lose a touch of its magic and mystique. For the moment, there is nothing quite like the feeling of sneaking a look through the windows of the Big Room on a winter’s evening and getting a glimpse of the past: old men, some more alive than others, sitting in their leather chairs around the fire and discussing who knows what. Maybe, just maybe, the atmosphere will stay the same, but there is only one way to find out.
Sorenstam Heralds Augusta Decision Former World No 1 Annika Sorenstam was at Mission Hills Golf Club in late August hosting her ANNIKA Invitational event, Asia’s first junior girls-only tournament, at the time of the Augusta announcement and told HK Golfer she was full of praise for the club’s decision. “It’s a historic moment, something I very much welcome,” said the Floridabased Swede, who retired from competitive golf in late 2008. “Augusta National is a special place and hosts one of the best tournaments in the world. The two women in question [Condoleezza Rice and Darla Moore] are highly respected business leaders, and as a mum, golfer and entrepreneur myself, I think this is fantastic news for the game and certainly a step in the right direction. “The game has been struggling a little bit in the last few years for several reasons, and this will help get it back on track. It’s a very important step for women across the entire sports spectrum.”–Alex Jenkins
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HK Golfer・OCT 2012
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