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AUGUSTA, Ga., Nov. 16 — Dusty Avery has a big, beautiful house, but no one to party in it. By this point last year, Mrs. Avery, the wife of a rich dentist, had rented her home for thousands of dollars to Coca-Cola to use during the Masters golf tournament in April. Executives feasted in her dining room, smoked on her patio and, at the end of the night, crashed in her bedroom. But this year, there are no takers. No soft-drink suits. Nobody. "We don't need the money like a lot of people do," Mrs. Avery said as she passed...

Monday, November 11, 2002 Defiant Johnson says Masters will go on no matter what Associated Press AUGUSTA, Ga. -- Defiant as ever, Augusta National chairman Hootie Johnson declared that The Masters will be played next year, no matter what, and there is no chance a woman will be a member of the golf club by then. Should Augusta National have to admit a female member? Yes No ''We will prevail because we're right,'' the 71-year-old Johnson said. His comments were the first on the subject since he fueled the debate over the all-male membership at Augusta National by criticizing...

Hey Everyone, I'm not sure if you are familiar with what's going on at Augusta National Golf Club. But a feminist mob led by a woman named Martha Burk, desperate for attention, is demanding that the club open its doors to women...what's more, she's threatened to hold boycotts and go after the sponsors and the player's wives if she doesn't get her way... there's just one problem... the club is private and accepts no government money...therefore, it can invite anyone it pleases to join under the First Amendment of the Constitution's right to freedom of assembly. If you like Golf...

The Augusta National Golf Club, one of the bastions of American golf, has been closed all summer, as it traditionally is after playing host to the Masters Tournament in April. But a bitter dispute over the club's all-male membership has brought unwelcome attention to the members. Embarrassed and embattled, some of Augusta National's 300 or so members now say they plan to seek an internal compromise that would end the club's conflict with a coalition of women's groups. About a dozen members who were interviewed over the past three weeks said they had been distressed by the confrontational approach taken...

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...

Augusta National Golf Club's all-male membership is an eclectic who's who of the corporate, political and sports worlds. Its approximately 300 members range from former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to University of South Carolina football coach Lou Holtz; former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn and auto scion and Detroit Lions owner William Clay Ford; ex-General Electric CEO Jack Welch and Atlanta developer Tom Cousins. The club's roster includes race car builder Roger Penske; the director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Bruce Lilly, and beer baron Peter Coors. Also, investment genius Warren Buffett, former Secretary of State George Shultz,...

http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/opinion/tucker/index.html

Earning the "privilege" to smoke fine cigars, exchange dirty jokes and lie about your golf game, sexual exploits and how hard you worked to inherit your wealth with a group of mostly old white men isn't part of the cure for gender discrimination. Augusta National Golf Club, the home of the Masters, the chosen playground for Hootie (Johnson) & His Blowhards, isn't the proper battleground for the war on gender discrimination. It's the equivalent of President Bush sending ground troops to Dallas looking for Osama bin Laden. A hunt for bin Laden in Texas would draw a lot of attention...

"One of the early policy decisions was to take in as members only those who were acquainted with one or more members of our Organization Committee. In practice, this meant that Bob (Jones) and I were the ones who were active in the membership effort, nearly everyone who came being a friend of Bob's or mine, a circumstance which remained substantially true for the next twenty-five years. Fortunately, both Bob and I ahd rather large acquaintanceships for young men. Bob then being twenty-eight and I thirty-six years of age. Our contacts were located in a number of states. Bob's friendships...

<p>NEW YORK (AP) -- The Masters is going commercial-free, dropping its corporate sponsors to avoid pressure on them by a women's organization that challenged Augusta National's all-male membership.</p> <p>Club chairman Hootie Johnson on Friday notified the tournament's three sponsors -- IBM, Citigroup and Coca-Cola -- that the Masters "will not request their participation" in 2003.</p>

Augusta National Golf Club is putting its money where its mouth is in its fight with a women's group pressuring the club to admit a female member. Club chairman Hootie Johnson announced Friday that because corporate sponsors of the Masters' telecast are being pressured by the National Council of Women's Organizations, the 2003 tournament will be shown without sponsors or commercials. At least golf fans will benefit from the fight. The 2003 telecast would have contained its normal four commerical minutes per hour. With 12 1/2 hours of live programming, that's 50 minutes of commericials that will not take golf...

<p>GULLANE, Scotland - Tiger Woods, who champions himself as a man vehemently against exclusionary policies for reasons of race or anything else, should be ashamed at the gutless straddle-the-fence answer he delivered yesterday to a question about women not being allowed as members of Augusta National. "[Augusta National is] entitled to set up their own rules the way they want them," said Woods, whose early existence in golf was all about opening doors to those like himself who were excluded because of prejudice, emphasized by his first Nike TV commercial that blared against his exclusion from certain golf clubs because of the color of his skin.</p>

In a defiant statement about the privacy of Augusta National, chairman Hootie Johnson lashed out at a national women's group Tuesday for urging the club to have female members before next year's Masters. "Our membership alone decides our membership -- not any outside group with its own agenda,'' Johnson said in a surprisingly long and angry statement. The National Council of Women's Organizations, which has about 6 million members from 160 groups, sent a letter to Johnson on June 12 after chairwoman Martha Burk read reports about Augusta National not having women among its 300 members. Lloyd Ward, the first...