Augusta National Slammed as "Secret Golf Club”

Augusta National Golf Club is a private club. It has 300 members, all of the male persuasion. It is a golf club which owns one of the lushest golf courses in America.

As a private club, it has the right to make its own rules. One of the rules states that Augusta National’s membership is limited to men. That’s the way it has always been and because it is, it irks one Martha Burk, who is chairwoman of the National Council of Women's Organizations.

It also appears to irk USA Today which reports that the Burk woman has fired off letters to six members of the club demanding that they explain how they dare to belong to a men only organization.

"Friday, USA Today reports, "Burk's newest letter will hit the desks of six club members: Rep. Amo [that’s Amory, boys] Houghton (R-N.Y.); Lloyd Ward, CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee; former U.S. senator turned Coca-Cola board member Sam Nunn; Citigroup CEO Sanford Weill; Motorola CEO Christopher Galvin; and JP Morgan Chase CEO William Harrison.

"We'll ask them for on-the-record statements reconciling their corporate policies with their memberships in Augusta," Burk told the paper.

In a lengthy story in today’s issue, Michael McCarthy and Eric Brady present this golf club as some kind of secret, conspiratorial organization akin to Yale’s infamous Skull and Bones coven.

Augusta National, you see includes among its 300 members some of the nation’s most important men - CEOs of major companies, top political figures and the scions of America’s financial aristocracy. Among the more illustrious members not mentioned by McCarthy and Brady, was one Dwight D. Eisenhower who occasionally lived in a cottage on the grounds. One has a picture of Ike reading this hit piece and hitting the ceiling as he was wont to do when encountering this kind of politically correct advocacy disguised as journalism.

The membership roster, loaded as it is with gentlemen of wealth and accomplishment automatically places the golf club under a cloud of suspicion in the eyes of USA Today which seems to find capitalist conspirators under every bed. What on earth do these people talk about when they get together in private, without a woman in sight. What kind of skullduggery do they plot?

Now it’s bad enough, it seems, that the members are rich, but many, USA Today tells us ominously, are old.

"USA TODAY” the reporters tell us, "has obtained a copy of the long-secret membership rolls for the club that hosts The Masters, one of golf's four major championships. The names on that list tell the tale of an old boys club, emphasis on old: The average age is 72. More than a third are retired. And they come mainly from the country's old-line industries: banking and finance, oil and gas, manufacturing and distributing.”

"The list is interesting as much for who is on it as for who isn't,” the paper tells us, noting that while Warren Buffett, Jack Welch and Arnold Palmer are there, " you won't find the likes of Bill Clinton, Donald Trump or any publicity-loving dot-com billionaires.”

The club, we are led to believe is not only undemocratic, it is also exclusive. You just can’t walk up to front door and apply for membership - you have to be invited! Bill Gates, allegedly yearned to get an invitation for years before he recently got one.

USA Today actually refers to Augusta National as "golf's secret society,” and goes on to list the membership as composed of "Statesmen and politicians. Several of Augusta's members have spent half their lives in the public arena. But when it comes to their membership, they say little.

"Among those who could not be reached for comment: former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas Brady, former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and former Georgia governor Carl Sanders. Nunn said in a statement: ‘As a member, I make my views known through the club's normal procedures, not in the public arena.’ "

Football’s legendary coach Lou Holtz, recently invited to join Augusta National, told the Atlanta Journal & Constitution: "I have played there many, many times over the years as a guest. My wife has played there and she loves it. We have stayed all night there at the course. She is as excited as I am."

Asked about the question of its absence of women members, Holtz said: "My wife has played there and so did a thousand other women last year. I don't know where the no-women policy is. . . . I don't want to hear 'no women,' because my wife has played there."

"This is a private club," member Ben S. Gilmer of Atlanta, a former president of AT&T told the Journal. "What they say among themselves is a private matter. Other people are trying to inject themselves into a private matter. . . . He [Augusta National chairman Hootie Johnson] speaks for the club, so if he speaks for the club on this issue, he speaks for me on it."

In 1934, the first golfer to win the Masters was Horton Smith, who just a happened to be married to Barbara Bourne, daughter of Singer Sewing Machine Company heir Alfred Severn Bourne who helped finance the complex.

When his daughter married Smith one of her aunts said "Imagine spending all that money to educate Barbara, bringing her up properly to bring distinction to the name of Bourne, then she marries a man named Smith.”

Women's group fails to realize Augusta answers to no one

September 5, 2002

It's clear by now that Martha Burk had no idea whom she was up against.

The head of the National Council of Women's Organizations has made adding female members at Augusta National her cause celebre , but she--and many in the national media--have shown an astonishing lack of understanding of the club, the Masters and the sport.

Unlike a PGA Tour or USGA event, the Masters and Augusta National are beholden to no one. Club chairman Hootie Johnson showed that last week by canceling the contracts with the tournament's few sponsors.

Now Burk plans to target the television partners. A club spokesman said Wed-nesday that CBS and USA remain firmly on board, but even if that were to change, there's nothing to stop Johnson from airing the Masters as a pay-per-view event or eliminating TV coverage completely.

Johnson certainly is not blameless in this increasingly and unnecessarily ugly battle. Is Augusta National behind the times in having an all-male membership? Absolutely. Did Johnson make a tactical public-relations error by responding to Burk's initial private letter with an angry press release? No question.

But what so many people fail to understand is that public opinion has no effect on Johnson and the Augusta National membership. Besides, Burk's words and actions since Johnson's press release have justified his response.

The first sign of Burk's naivete was her laughable suggestion that the Masters be played at another course. The Masters is an invitational tournament conducted solely by Augusta National, not the PGA Tour, which has no influence on the club. It's no different at its core than Pine Valley's Crump Cup or Seminole's Coleman Invitational, elite amateur events held at prestigious clubs with all-male memberships.

Yes, Augusta National makes scads of money on the Masters, but the club would survive just fine without sponsorship and television revenue. And don't think the best players in the world would stop coming, even if the tournament wasn't televised and the purse was decreased. Slipping on a green jacket means more than prize money to everyone in the Masters field, many of whom are millionaires several times over.

Speaking of millionaires, the biggest question about Burk's crusade is this: Whom is she trying to help? Sure, equality is a principle worth fighting for, but when Augusta National does admit female members--an inevitability, though this campaign surely has slowed the process--the beneficiaries will be a handful of wealthy corporate executives and dignitaries. Making the world safe for Sandra Day O'Connor or a $5 million-a-year female CEO to join an exclusive club is hardly the noblest women's cause, even in golf.

In fact, another falsehood frequently repeated in the media is that women cannot play at Augusta National. There are no tee-time restrictions for spouses or female guests, unlike at Pine Valley--the country's top-rated course, where women can play only on Sundays--or many other all-male clubs such as Old Elm in Highland Park and Black Sheep in Sugar Grove, where women aren't allowed on the property.

Even Johnson, a self-described liberal, wouldn't call Augusta National a progressive institution, but the depiction of the membership as a fraternity of narrow-minded Cro-Magnons is equally inaccurate. The fact is, there will be female members at Augusta National, but not on anyone else's timetable. And golf fans will continue to revere the Masters as the best event in sports long after the name of Martha Burk has faded from memory.

For Martha Burk, A Long Drive To Open Augusta National
By BOB DART / Cox Washington Bureau
09-15-02

WASHINGTON -- Growing up in Tyler, Texas, five decades ago, Martha Burk wanted to be a cheerleader.

"There were no organized sports for girls," she recalled. "I think all little girls wanted to be cheerleaders in those days because it was one of the few things we could do.

"My opinion has changed over the years, as you might imagine," she added with a smile. "I want to see girls doing sports, not cheering boys on who are doing sports."

As head of the National Council of Women's Organizations, Martha Burk has made enough noise lately to shake up the sports world.

Her highly publicized efforts to prod the all-male Augusta National Golf Club to accept women members has created an unwelcome buzz about the Masters, the most famous of tournaments. Hootie Johnson, chairman of Augusta National, relinquished any sponsorship of the 2003 Masters rather than subject the sponsors - Coca-Cola, Citigroup and IBM - to feminist pressure.

Now the controversy threatens to engulf CBS, which broadcasts the Masters, and the Fortune 500 corporations whose chairmen compose much of the membership of the secretive, prestigious golf club that hosts the tournament.

"Our next step is to contact CBS," said Burk. "We will point out to them. . .that we think that their consumers and their stockholders and their employees will applaud a move not to underwrite discrimination, even indirectly."

And she will widen the focus on what she terms "a basic issue of discrimination" by Augusta National.

"I know many CEOs of America's largest corporations are members," she said. "We will certainly be asking those individuals for an explanation of who underwrites the membership. Are the stockholders paying for it?"

Is this blackmail?

"Absolutely not," Burk said in an interview this past week. "This is the power of the marketplace."

Burk's group, the NCWO, is composed of more than one hundred women's organizations representing more than 6 million members. Its member institutions are mostly liberal - including Planned Parenthood, the National Association for Woman (NOW) and the Fund for a Feminist Majority.

A mother of two sons - who live in Texas and play golf recreationally - and a grandmother, the graying, 60-year-old Burk rejects any stereotyping.

"The media portrays feminists as either airheads who really just want to get a man or as militant man-haters," she said. "I am neither."

Indeed, she was once a homemaker in Arlington, Texas.

"Oh yes, I was a soccer mom. I was a regular housewife type person for a long time," she said.

But, during the 1970s, she was also working on a doctorate in psychology at the University of Texas at Arlington and becoming increasingly active in the feminist movement.

"I was involved in a program for women who had degrees who were underemployed or out of the workforce - to get jobs relevant to their degrees," she said. "I became aware of difficulty women were having at that time."

She experienced job bias herself.

"The first interview I went for after I got my Ph.D., I was asked to take a typing test," she recalled. She enlisted in the women's movement, becoming a leader in NOW. After a divorce, she married Ralph Estes, former president of the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Together, they moved to Washington in 1990 and founded the Center for Advancement of Public Policy before Burk joined the NCWO.

An activist for decades, Burk is a bit surprised by the outcry that has arisen about the Masters. Her mother was an avid golfer, she said, but she has rarely played. The controversy began with a private letter that she wrote to Hootie Johnson asking Augusta National to "open your membership to women now, so that this is not an issue when the tournament is staged next year."

In reply, she said, "I expected a private 'We're working on it' type letter."

She said she thought her letter would help the efforts of members of the club who were working on the issue from the inside. Instead, she said, Johnson "went ballistic" and cut loose the sponsors.

While most feminist groups and many golfers have supported Burk's efforts, there are also detractors.

"The main reason they're doing this is to garner publicity for themselves," said Christine Stolba, senior fellow for the conservative Independent Women's Forum. "This is not an issue of great concern to most American women."

"Augusta National is a private organization and has every right to make its own determination about members," said Stolba. She said Burk's "strange form of extortion" may have backfired on the quiet movement inside Augusta National to admit women members.

"The misguided efforts of Martha Burk and her organization might have thwarted progress already achieved," said Stolba.

There are more pressing gender issues in golf than Hootie Johnson and the Augusta National members, asserts Melanie Hauser, a veteran sportswriter and collaborator on Ben Crenshaw's autobiography "A Feel for the Game."

Women can and do play the Augusta National course as wives and guests of members, she said. That is not the case at all-male golf clubs such as Lochinvar in Houston or Preston Trail in Dallas, said Hauser, an online columnist for GolfWeb and PGATOUR.com.

"There are more important things out there in the golf community" for feminists to tackle, said Hauser. She cited the weak women's junior golf programs.

"I don't know if having one female member at Augusta National is going to help with the fact that we're just not producing many good young female golfers in this country," said Hauser.

Burk said the criticism that her group is taking on a minor feminist cause instead of major ones is not valid.

"We do talk about the women in Afghanistan and many other issues," she said.

It's just that the Masters fight has created such a surprising stir.

"I had no idea that some people are so passionate about golf," she said. "I'm getting crank calls in the middle of the night - people you can tell who have had a few too many telling me where I should go with this cause."

On the other hand, she said, the issue is "resonating with women who are not golfers. It reminds them of things like the glass ceiling and pay gap."

"It is a business issue," she explained. "Any time that you can spend four hours with a client on the golf course and I can't and I've got to wait outside the gate and say 'Hey, can I talk to you now,' that's an issue.. . .

"It's emblematic of the way women are being left out and unfortunately it's emblematic of the way women are still treated in golf."

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