Augusta invite to women came too late
AUGUSTA, Ga. – The logical question to ask after the smashing success of the inaugural Augusta National Women’s Amateur is, simply, what’s next?
Will the club expand the number of rounds played on the revered grounds of Augusta National? Will it allow all three rounds to be played on the course, rather than just the final round? Or at least the last two rounds?
Will it ever bring a professional event here, a Women’s Masters, to give the LPGA a stage the likes of which it has never had but certainly would covet? The timing and logistics look prohibitive right now, but if tournament schedules were rearranged and such an opportunity opened up, one would think the LPGA and its sponsors would jump at the chance to make it work.
But as I watched elite amateurs Jennifer Kupcho and Maria Fassi stage a glorious match-play-style duel that was the epitome of class and sportsmanship, I couldn’t help but think of another question: What if Augusta National had done this 20 years ago?
What might the demographics of golf look like today if Augusta National, the most famous golf course in the country, had earnestly welcomed women as competitors and (dare I say it?) equals in the late 1990s rather than so publicly and angrily denying membership to women until 2012?
At a time when Title IX was (and of course still is) pumping hundreds of thousands of sports-playing young women out into the world every year — successful women who will have the resources and the will to play sports for the rest of their lives — the game of golf defiantly held up a menacing stop sign, essentially telling them they were not wanted.
So they went elsewhere. This wasn’t the 1950s, where the choices for female athletes were tennis and golf. These young women could take their pick of all kinds of sports — among them soccer, basketball, volleyball, softball and lacrosse — and as they grew into adulthood, the options expanded to include marathons, triathlons, after-work sports leagues, extreme sports, yoga, spinning and everything else women you know do now.
Oh, the message that would have been sent to girls and women who might have become golfers had Augusta National, the public face of the sport, taken the symbolic step of inviting a woman or two to join while putting on a women’s tournament in 1999. Imagine the headlines. Imagine the fathers and mothers reading those headlines. Imagine the girls who might have picked up a golf club for the first time.
Instead, it was war — the men against the women — and the loser was golf’s future.
In 2002, then-club chairman Hootie Johnson received a private letter about the club’s lack of female members from Martha Burk, then-chair of the National Council of Women’s Organizations. Instead of ignoring the letter, which he definitely should have done, Johnson issued a public statement including the now-infamous assertion that the club would not be pressured into inviting women members “at the point of a bayonet.”
In the national battle that ensued, the leaders of golf (read: men) fell in line with their buddies at Augusta, and that was that.
The very definition of golf ’s future — girls and women, the game’s untapped market, 51% of our population — was blithely shoved aside. The greatest capitalists among us, the men who love to play golf, willingly chose sexism over capitalism.
You would have thought the golf industry would have wanted to sell more golf balls, more golf equipment, more golf clothes. But no. It wanted to keep girls and women away.
And now?
“There are disturbing signs that golf and the golf business are in a rather precipitous decline in the United States,” former LPGA Commissioner Charlie Mechem said in an April 2017 news release.
Golf courses have been plowed under. Country clubs have dropped their membership fees, hoping to entice almost anyone to join. Augusta National even held a women’s amateur tournament.
As the old-school sport of golf desperately tries to figure out how to attract new participants, people come up with all kinds of excuses: golf is too expensive, too time consuming, too difficult to learn.
All true, but when it comes to girls and women, there’s something else.
It’s also too late.