Women at Muirfield: Our view
Muirfield golf club voted on Tuesday to admit women members, scrapping the all-male policy that led to the historic Scottish course being stripped of its eligibility to host the Open Championship. NICOLE LATEGAN comments.
YOU make a lady wait at your peril. In the year of our Lord 2017 the Muirfield gentry have deigned to vote ... again ... to allow women to be members of one of golf ’s finest venues. I repeat, it is the year of our Lord, 2017!
The second coming almost beat the first coming of the ladies to these fairways ... as members. Good lord.
It’s a few decades too late, some might feel; Simone de Beauvoir would say the finer sex have waited since the beginning of time. Let’s not even go there. It’s the wait that’s the problem.
Club captain Henry Fairweather welcomed the result of a second vote, because the first one, in May last year, did not come up to .. err ... scratch.
“This is a significant ... We look forward to welcoming women as members who will enjoy, and benefit from, the great traditions and friendly spirit of this remarkable club,” Fairweather said.
Well, thank you ever so kindly, our Fairweather friend.
I’m sure the tweed-clad, cigar-pluming gentlemen pat each other on the back as we speak, their groomed moustaches presumably a-twitch as they contemplate a new dawn of Victoria’s Secret and other foreign objects taking up permanent residency in the locker rooms, cloak rooms, cigar lounges and member’s only parking bays! Oh the thought.
Congratulations are not in order. Sixteen times has Muirfield hosted the esteemed Open Championship, the last of which came in 2013. For shame!
The R&A really could have “acted” sooner by removing Muirfield from the hosting list, so that the honourable company of Edinburgh golfers, the founders of this here establishment, could have recommended the vote sooner, albeit under duress.
In any case, now that membership is up for grabs, I won’t expect to see the she-folk to come running like they do at a shopping sale. Take your membership and your archaic traditions and put it where the Highlands fog doesn’t go. That’s just me.
Good things come to those who wait, but a lady in waiting will tell you, sometimes the good thing has the aftertaste of sloppy seconds.
It’s the game of thrones and woman is coming! Cue the nervous bark of a Scottish terrier.
Drinks all round! At least the Open’s back, lad.