Rice’s Augusta membership a green light for women
AUGUSTA, G A. Condoleezza Rice has been everywhere the past three days at Augusta National Golf Club, apparently making up for lost time, not just for herself, but for 51% of the U.S. population.
The former U.S. secretary of state played a round of golf Sunday with Phil Mickelson, then said a warm hello to Tiger Woods, who used the word “fantastic” twice Tuesday to describe the fact that the club that hosts the Masters finally has two women as members. On Monday morning, Rice was spotted in her new green jacket, greeting spectators at the club’s exclusive new hospitality center behind the fifth green, according to the Augusta Chronicle. Then, Tuesday afternoon, a security guard near the first tee was marveling about just how visible she was.
“Condi Rice was out here this morning, just walking around,” he excitedly told a few fans who were on the lookout for her during the day’s practice round.
It took Augusta National nearly 80 years to invite its first two female members into the club. It took one of them less than two days to become the most recognizable and popular member of the place. Now that is serious progress. Rice is letting her very significant presence at the club that was most associated with gender-based discrimination in American sports do her talking this week because she is not.
“Unfortunately, we are not doing any interviews around the Masters. Sorry,” e-mailed Georgia Godfrey, Rice’s chief of staff, in February.
Augusta National said basically the same thing. That’s no surprise. It’s
So much for the notion that having women as members was going to wreck the place.
what former Augusta National chairman Hootie Johnson told me in 1999 when, on my first trip to cover the Masters, I asked during his news conference if there were any female members of the club.
“That’s a club matter, ma’am, and all club matters are private.”
That wasn’t the case for long, however. As a private club that is known as the very public face of golf, Augusta National was about to find out that its business would become the nation’s business. In the summer of 2002, Johnson received a private letter from Martha Burk, chairwoman of the National Council of Women’s Organizations, and decided to make it public, using it as an excuse to say he wasn’t going to be pressured “at the point of a bayonet” into admitting women into his club.
After a comment like that, there was no turning back. It was exactly 10 years ago this week that the Hootie-and-Martha Masters took place, with as much news happening outside the club’s gates along Washington Road as occurred inside. Augusta National won that round, keeping it- self all male, but the issue never went away, and it reached another crescendo last year when current chairman Billy Payne found himself trying to explain the inexplicable at his Masters week news conference: how Augusta National was trying to help grow the game of golf while still discriminating against more than half of the population.
It was so unlike Payne to be in that position. The first Augusta chairman to be born after World War II, he ran the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, which were known as the women’s Olympics until the London Games assumed that mantle last summer. I’ve known Payne for 25 years, and when I heard he was becoming Augusta’s chairman in 2006, my first thought was that it wouldn’t be long before he brought women into the club.
That finally happened Aug. 20, 2012, just a little more than four months after his embarrassing Masters news conference. That was the day Payne announced that Rice and South Carolina financier Darla Moore, a good friend of Johnson’s, were becoming the club’s first two women members.
“I think it’s just fantastic,” Woods said Tuesday. “And the timing ’s right.”
“I had a great time with one of the new members on Sunday,” Mickelson said, “and (she) happens to be one of my favorite people to spend time with: fascinating, intelligent and I just think the world of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.”
So much for the notion that having women as members was going to wreck the place. Things are going so swimmingly this week that one Augusta National member who spoke on the condition of anonymity because club business is supposed to remain private said of Payne, “And he’s not done yet.”