STATE OF THE GAME | OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP
Opening
Doors
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In light of a recent announcement that may pave the way to allow women members of the R&A, Lewine Mair takes a look at the continuing saga of single-sex clubs on the Open Championship rota. 72
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he late Sir Henry Cotton would have given a hearty cheer at the news which emanated from the R&A in March. Namely, that R&A hierarchy were recommending their members to vote to allow women to join their ranks. Way back in 1946, it was Cotton who set the ball rolling – if ever so slowly – to make Royal Liverpool (otherwise known as Hoylake) the happily and wholly mixed club that it is in time for this 2014 Open Championship. The occasion was the 1946 News of the World Match Play championship where he would defeat a fellow Ryder Cup player in Jimmy Adams in the final. When Cotton had arrived at the start of the week and was advised that his wife, Toots, would not be allowed to use the clubhouse, he said that in such circumstances he would not be using it either. Instead, he went straight from his hotel to the first tee every day. People were intrigued by such goings-on and, as the already two-time Open champion survived one round after another, so the Secretary had no option but to face the press. HKGOLFER.COM
That was when he uttered the never-to-be forgotten words. “No woman ever has entered the clubhouse and, praise God, no woman ever will.” In the wake of the tournament, women were allowed to access a portion of the building, but it was only in 2012 that the final pieces of the jigsaw were slotted into place, with all the women elevated to full membership status.
“The R&A’s seat at golf’s top table is secured by one thing – our reputation.” Yet for Audrey Briggs, a longstanding member of this famous club, there was no more telling moment than when she realised that her days of trying to explain to the junior girls that they could not join the boys in the main room were over. “Even five years ago,” she said, “I would have to sit the girls down and tell them that it was just one of the club rules, but they didn’t get it.” This former GB&I international golfer says that she was not even vaguely surprised by their mingled astonishment and disbelief.
The R&A Clubhouse at St Andrews during the 2007 Women’s British Open (opposite); Muirfield (above), which hosted last year’s Open Championship, has yet to make an announcement regarding the possibility of permitting female members (top) HK GOLFER・MAY 2014
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Such influential Scottish professionals as Stephen Gallacher and Andrew Coltart are both convinced that “common sense will prevail” and that Muirfield will make the necessary changes to its constitution
AFP, Charles McLaughlin
Peter Dawson, the R&A’s CEO, admitted at the March conference that the scale of the newspaper attacks on Muirfield prior to last year’s Open had played its part in encouraging the various R&A committees to push for the same mixed membership as that at Hoylake, Lytham, Birkdale and Turnberry. The hostile publicity had been as awkward for them as it was for Muirfield, for the Open, of course, is owned by the R&A. Nothing, perhaps, was more poignant than the green-keepers’ plight. The men had prepared a course par excellence yet they scarcely got a mention. (In fairness, though, if any of the writers had been dispatching glowing reports about the greens while their competitors were grabbing headlines with their equality stories, they would have been out of a job.) 74
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The R&A were in no position to suggest that Muirfield should think about changing its allmale ways, largely because their own situation did not sit well with the world at large. However hard they tried to explain that their governance wing had the odd woman on board and that their all-male membership wing was something entirely different, outsiders were never going to get to grips with so complex a state of affairs. Wilson Sibbet, the R&A’s current captain, acknowledged all of the above in a letter sent to members ahead of the March conference: “It is true to say that the R&A Golf Club and the R&A remain widely perceived as a single organisation, despite extensive efforts to publicise our new structure. “Our seat at golf’s top table,” he continued elsewhere in his epistle, “is secured by one thing – our reputation. It is our great asset and it is a primary duty of the General Committee and indeed, of all members, to ensure that it is maintained and enhanced. “In recent years, however, the General Committee has noted with growing concern that in the modern era, the exclusion of women from membership of the Royal and HKGOLFER.COM
Ancient Golf club is becoming increasingly damaging to our reputation as a club and as a governing body.” Dawson insisted that the R&A are not trying to put pressure on the remaining all-male clubs to follow their lead. Yet Royal St George’s, Muirfield and Royal Troon were hardly going to ignore the R&A’s very public intentions. Royal St George’s and Muirfield have since confirmed that they are continuing to review their membership arrangements, though neither club has pinned down a date for a vote. Some think that St George’s may yet seize their hosting of this summer’s Ladies’ British Open Amateur Championship as a natural springboard to a new order but, at least so far, the club is denying as much. Muirfield members, meantime, were advised around Christmas that it might be two or even three years before they were asked to make up their minds. After the historic news from St Andrews, a club spokesman explained the lack of urgency this way: “We will be taking time to ensure that the plans we adopt will stand us in good stead for the next 270 years of our great club”. On the one hand, there are those Muirfield diehards who do not care if an on-going allmale membership policy could cost them the Open. On the other, there are those who cannot so much as contemplate departing the Open rota. They see Muirfield and the Open as synonymous and suggest that the seeming minority who want to stay with the status quo will notice a few women rather less than they will miss their week with the stars. Such influential Scottish professionals as Stephen Gallacher and Andrew Coltart are both convinced that “common sense will prevail” and that the club will make the necessary changes to its constitution. Neither man believes that Muirfield’s exceedingly impressive Open history – no Open venue has a finer list of champions to its name – could suddenly come to a full stop. Troon, who is staging the 2016 Open, is currently not budging from its present position. It is an all-male club which sees no reason to change at the moment. In a statement which will have had the tabloid press pricking up their ears anew, David Brown, the club Secretary, claims that their situation is different from that at Royal St George’s and Muirfield in that they have a ladies’ course and a clubhouse on their land. (This is roughly akin to the All England Club saying, which they never would, that their lady members were free to use the lodge and the outside courts. In fact, it is the lady members at Wimbledon who are called upon to ‘open’ the Centre Court and Court No 1 on the Saturday before Wimbledon.) The only Open Championship course not HKGOLFER.COM
mentioned about is Carnoustie. Up there, they are as St Andrews in having a number of private clubs around a public course, only in their case those all-male clubs hauled themselves into the 21st century some years ago. Today, only one club in the town remains single-sex – and that, would you believe, is Carnoustie Ladies’. Founded in 1875, it is the oldest functioning ladies’ club in the world and is far and away the most picturesque of Carnoustie’s links-side buildings. Indeed, the façade has never changed since the day the club opened its doors. There is no question of the women having decided to give the men a dose of the treatment which was meted out to them for the first hundred years and more. “To be honest,” laughs Pat Sawers, the first woman Chairman of Carnoustie Links, “I don’t think that we have had any male applicants. What we offer doesn’t really suit the men. We don’t do soup and rolls and we can’t offer a pint at the end of a round.” How Cotton, who won at Carnoustie in 1937, would have revelled in putting himself forward as the Ladies Club’s first man …
Former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was one of the first two women to be admitted as members of Augusta National Golf Club in 2012 (top); Peter Dawson, the CEO of the R&A, said that the scale of newspaper attacks on Muirfield prior to last year’s Open had played its part in encouraging the various R&A committees to push for mixed membership HK GOLFER・MAY 2014
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