Reid: Women’s golf needs a male advocate like Murray
British golfer Mel Reid has called for more male players to openly support the women’s game, saying the sport needs a leading advocate “like Kobe Bryant or Andy Murray”.
Reid came under fire online after criticising last weekend’s Taylormade Driving Relief charity event for failing to include women. Rory Mcilroy won against Americans Dustin Johnson, Rickie Fowler and Matthew Wolff in the first televised men’s tournament in more than two months.
“Of course, I felt the charity was great, the four guys are awesome guys,” Reid said. “All I was saying was it would have been pretty cool if you would have got a couple of the girls involved [to] really bring golf back to TV, and I think it was an opportunity missed.
“Golf just doesn’t get it. They do Soccer Aid where they bring in Kelly Smith [the former England footballer], I think that’s awesome, that’s how it should be. I couldn’t believe the comments I was getting. It was disgusting, people took [what I said] completely out of context.
“A couple of male pros – guys I’ve been friends with since I was 12 years old – said, ‘Of course the women have to pipe up in a charity event’. I’m sorry, but just because it was a charity event, it’s not going to take away my opinion – I still think women should have been involved. I was really disappointed.”
Reid said that if more major players on the men’s tour advocated for the women, they would be respected more widely, as in other sports. In February, former US Open champion Geoff Ogilvy spoke out for women’s golf at the Victoria Open, where men and women compete in simultaneous events for equal prize money, and Reid said that was a “huge” moment.
“When Geoff said, ‘Listen, these girls are really good and there’s more than just men’s golf in the world’, that was huge for us,” Reid said. “Me being here in America, I think that I’ve just seen what, for example, Kobe Bryant was doing for women’s basketball. The NBA players voluntarily choose to go with their families to WNBA games, wearing WNBA gear which is just so powerful, because it is a male-dominated world.
“Very rarely do we see any guys at our tournaments, or tweeting about it, or talking about it. And we always talk about the guys, because we love golf and we’re huge fans of the guys. But there’s just no talk about us. It would help us, from a respect point of view, if the boys just started to talk about us a little bit. If we just had a voice, like Andy Murray does for tennis.”
Other women in golf expressed disappointment with the Taylormade Driving Relief. American player Cheyenne Woods tweeted: “I’d love to see a match like this with mixed teams.”
Ex-player and broadcaster Henni Zuel posted: “Next time round I would LOVE to see more diversity both on the course and in the commentary team.”
British golfer Meghan Maclaren said that women being omitted from the conversation around golf’s return was a sign of a lack of respect, pointing out that competitive action returned three days before the Taylormade event, when the Korean LPGA Championship teed off last Thursday.
“It just reiterates the whole idea that women’s golf doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter,” Maclaren said. “South Korea is a really interesting case study because women’s golf is far more popular there than men’s golf. But that’s in part because of the visibility and investment that’s gone in over the years.
“If that level of investment and coverage was given across the board, all around the world, we’d be in a different situation now.”