GIRLS ALLOWED!
Muirfield says yes to women, but is it just an Open-door policy?
Less than a year after earning their club pariah status the world over, the Honourable Company of edinburgh Golfers backtracked yesterday and voted to change their rules to allow women members after all.
It ends a men-only policy stretching all the way back to the club’s foundation in 1744 and means there is now no longer a club in Britain with any ambitions to host high-profile tournaments that still believes in such an archaic tradition.
Barely a quarter of an hour after the club captain Henry Fairweather made the historic announcement, the R&A released a statement saying Muirfield, the course at which the Honourable Company play, was now back on The Open rota.
It was an interesting decision, to say the least, to release this news so soon. If the R&A were really dead-set on advancing the cause of women’s golf, wouldn’t it have been better to wait five years rather than 15 minutes to see if attitudes truly change at Muirfield and then, if they have, allow the club back on the rota?
Instead, the governing body left themselves wide open to the accusation that what they are most interested in is appearances.
The R&A announcement also robbed the Honourable Company of some credit, as well, in reversing their original decision.
Have the members really come around to thinking women are no longer second-class citizens and they’d like to play their part in ending decades of shameful discrimination? Or do we think they might have been persuaded to hold their noses out of vanity, knowing if they did so they’d get The Open back, with all the prestige it brings? The juxtaposition of the two announcements means precious few will be convinced it is the former.
To be fair, the few appeared to include scotland’s First Minister Nicola sturgeon, who picked up on the fact over 80 per cent of Muirfield members had voted for change.
With one eye, perhaps, on the huge economic benefits that come with an Open in scotland, she Tweeted: ‘Well done, Muirfield — decision to admit women members emphatic and the right one. Look forward to seeing you host the Open again in future.’
sports Minister Tracey Crouch was equally enthusiastic. ‘Golf has the potential to attract a more diverse audience to the game and this decision sends out an important message,’ she said.
‘It is vital that clubs and sports organisations play their part in promoting equality.’
For the Honourable Company, it is a small step towards restoring the damage done to the club’s reputation by blindly sticking to their previous men-only stance.
Back in May last year, poor Fairweather looked completely under the weather when, clearly dismayed, he revealed the membership had gone against the wishes of their own committee and elected to stay a men-only club. Cue pandemonium as politicians, never ones to miss an easy opportunity to grab a juicy headline, joined in the chorus of revulsion.
It would be nice to think the opprobrium has played a part in this change of heart, but the reality is it’s surely to do with losing the right to host The Open and the certain knowledge that all they needed to get it back was to agree to allowing one or two women to join.
Whether the general golfing populace fall for this obvious sleight of hand is another matter.
The last Open staged there in 2013 showed the course in all its glorious light. Won by Phil Mickelson with one of the greatest final rounds of all time, it was played under largely cloudless skies and should have generated an enormous audience. Yet it attracted little more than half the number of spectators expected to descend on Royal Birkdale this year. While the R&A, somewhat intriguingly, blamed the fabulous weather for golfers staying away, it was hard not to think the vast screeds of hostile publicity, when combined with the club’s unwelcoming reputation stretching back many years, had played a greater role. The earliest The Open can return to Muirfield is 2022, but the likelihood is it will be one or two more years after that before it returns. When it does go back, maybe the Honourable Company will have even got around to thinking about another class of golfer they’ve ignored for 273 years — juniors. Or is that just way too radical?