The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Dawson misunderstood
IT’S NEVER too late to do the right thing. No, not even after 260 years. If — and it’s still if — the R&A admit women members in September, continuing to debate how they got there will seem a little pointless.
However, it’s worth correcting a key misconception. Peter Dawson, the chief executive of the R&A and the public face of the club, has been personified as the bulwark which prevented change. This was a complete misunderstanding of Dawson’s position, however.
He is not a director of the club, he is a servant of the membership. He could advise and use words some of us have been writing for 20 years like indefensible, untenable and all the rest.
Yet the members, largely comfortable with the policy and rather defiant when being told what to do, did not have to pay any attention.
A clue to what was happening behind the doors of the Big House all these years came in Dawson’s admission last week that the all-male issue was discussed at every strategy meeting of the club hierarchy since he became chief executive in 2000.
It could be that every two years they discussed how to counter the detrimental publicity the membership policy attracted.
Just last August I heard a senior R&A official admit privately that, after the nightmare week at Muirfield, “we need a new argument”.
However, this was not a personal approval of the policy but an understanding that getting change through the R&A membership was incredibly difficult because they’d been trying for years.
Dawson is no crusader for equal rights but he’s a practical man and while publicly representing the club and stalwartly defending the indefensible all this time, there seems little doubt in private he was chipping away at the edifice.
What changed? Well, they got the new argument they wanted but it wasn’t for keeping the policy, it was for ending it.
Despite Dawson’s comments, the influence of the Open’s commercial partners was key.
Giles Morgan, the head of sponsorship and events for one of the Open’s major backers HSBC, went public in January saying the bank were “uneasy” with the allmale policy.
That’s been taken as the tipping point but Giles, a canny operator in his days dealing with that other Scottish sporting dinosaur, the SRU, was pushing at an open door, maybe with the acquiescence of R&A officialdom.
The R&A had already sounded out the commercial world in the review they had announced at Muirfield, probably knowing here was the lever to finally force change.
The money that pours in from the Open, through TV and commercial partners, is crucial to the R&A.
It allows the club to develop and promote golf globally and maintain their role as the guardians of the game.
It’s been built over two centuries and is unique in any major sport and means more to the R&A than just about anything.
A choice between the all-male policy and sustaining that cherished role is a nobrainer, even for the most stubborn R&A member.