Talk Story
It’s high time
for Hootie to do
the right thingIN MANY quarters, Saddam Hussein is only marginally less popular than Hootie Johnson, chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club. After last Thursday's column, some of that unpopularity might well have rubbed off on me.
In the column I made the point that Augusta's all-male membership policy is legal. I didn't go a step further and point out it's also wrong. I should have.
Invading neighboring countries and discriminating against people on the basis of gender are both morally indefensible. The difference is that the discriminatory membership policy Johnson has doggedly defended isn't illegal.
That would not be the case if 38 states had ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, which Congress passed in 1972. According to the ERA, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex."
Thirty-five states ratified the ERA -- three short of the 75 percent required to become law. Hawaii and 18 other states have equal rights amendments or guarantees in their state constitutions. Georgia, one of the 15 states that have not ratified the ERA, isn't one of them.
The list of ERA holdouts reads like the old Confederacy: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. To these, add Arizona, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada, Oklahoma and Utah.
AUGUSTA National is an all-male institution insulated from time, like the Vatican or the Taliban religious police, who banned female foreign aid workers from driving motor vehicles because that would "damage Afghan society."
It isn't as insulated from the rest of American society, however. Take away the Masters tournament and Augusta National is just a nice golf course in a small Georgia city on the South Carolina border halfway between Macon and Columbia.
The Masters bills itself as "one of the premier stops on the PGA Tour." The PGA Tour is a business, a big business. This year, just its top 20 money winners took away $58.6 million in prize money. The 49 tour events scheduled for 2003 have a total purse of more than $220 million.
That's just the men's tour. There also are the PGA affiliates: the LPGA, the Senior Tour, the Buy.com Tour and the European Tour. The four U.S. professional tours also have contributed more than $778 million to charities since 1981. To raise that kind of money, the PGA has to reach out to everybody, including women, minorities and the corporate sponsors they run or are employed by.
Like the Masters, the U.S. Open is one of professional golf's four major tournaments. In 1990 the Open was held at Shoal Creek in Birmingham, Ala., a club that barred blacks from membership, and a scandal erupted.
The next year's Open venue, the all-white Hazeltine National Golf Club in Chaska, Minn., which already had female members, invited a black player to join to avoid similar embarrassment. Today, it has two.
In the scandal's wake, Augusta National that year also admitted a black member.
While Johnson says Augusta National can afford to drop sponsorships rather than submit to pressure from Martha Burk and the National Council of Women's Organizations, the PGA tour can't.
The PGA knows the value of inclusiveness. It knows what Tiger Woods has done to golf's worldwide popularity and that the United States is fast becoming a nation of minorities. It has an intern program to bring minority men and women into the golf business.
Doing what's legal but wrong, Johnson and Augusta have created a public-relations disaster for the PGA.
Saddam will let in the U.N. inspectors. It's time for Augusta to wise up and admit women -- assuming any women are willing to join.
John Flanagan is the Star-Bulletin's contributing editor.
He can be reached at: jflanagan@starbulletin.com.