Race and gender barriers in golf slowly starting to crumble
May 03, 2005 Edition 1
Mark Lamport-Stokes
London: Slowly but inevitably, the barriers of race and gender with which golf has long been associated are coming down.
Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh, the game's two leading players, are both non-white and their achievements have done much to spread golf to an audience far beyond its traditional image of male, white and middle-class.
Last week's landmark decision by the male-only Royal and Ancient Golf Club (R&A) to allow women to enter the 2006 British Open brings the tournament in line with the other three majors, which have no policy barring women.
Although the decision was roundly welcomed, it remains to be seen how many female players attempt to qualify for Hoylake next year.
The answer, almost certainly, will be very few as most accept they cannot compete on a level playing field with the men.
While several women golfers can putt at least as well as their male counterparts, they lack the power to generate booming drives off the tee and also to hit down on the ball to impart the required spin for shot control.
The one glaring exception is teenage American prodigy Michelle Wie, whose precocious talent and ability to hit the ball more than 300 yards prompted the R&A to review its male-only policy for the British Open.
Wie has a chance, albeit a very slim one, of qualifying for this year's Open at St Andrews if the week before she can finish as the leading player not already exempt at the John Deere Classic on the men's PGA Tour.
"We are not dragging our feet on this, it's just that we have never had cause to think about it before," said R&A chief executive Peter Dawson.
"I don't think there is any problem in principle with women playing in the Open, but this is new ground in sport as a whole.
"The only Olympic sport where the two sexes compete together is equestrianism and it is not surprising, therefore, it has taken us a long time."
By a quirk of fate, the R&A's about-turn came just one day after the British PGA, which looks after the interests of professional golfers in Britain, ended 104 years of tradition by appointing its first female captain.
For many, though, the pace of golf's progress has not been fast enough.
Renowned for its long-held traditions and stuffy private club mentality, the sport has a history of discrimination.
Although perhaps more fashionable now that it has ever been with world No 1 Woods appealing to a vast global audience, the game has been guilty of marginalising minorities, women and the less affluent.
Very few sports are as closely bound to money, politics and big business. It is, after all, the quintessential corporate game and golf establishment has frequently been taken to task for its elitist and narrow-minded approach.
Although golf's origins are shrouded in mystery, few would argue that the links courses of Scotland are the oldest patches of land in the world where the game has been continually played.
Partly for this reason the sport became a working man's pastime in Scotland, as distinct from what unfolded to the south in England and across the Atlantic in the United States where golf became the domain of the rich.
Clubs in England tended to be private, elite and male-only. They were renowned for their cliquishness and for putting up signs that baldly stated such phrases as: "No dogs, no women".
It was little different in the US. Golf there was known for excluding more people than it embraced and the game pandered to the privileged. Country clubs remained the exclusive preserve of affluent, white males.
"Golf has been labelled a snob sport, and it was," said seven-times major winner Arnold Palmer, who was brought up in the humble steel town of Latrobe, Pennsylvania.
Although Palmer almost single-handedly transformed golf into a game for the people with his cavalier style in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was very different for would-be black players.
By 1950, blacks were accepted in other sports in the US at the highest level. Golf, however, was the notable exception.
Blacks were barred from joining the PGA of America and black amateurs were not welcome at white-owned private clubs.
It was not until 1967 that Charlie Sifford made history by becoming the first black player to win a PGA Tour event at the Greater Hartford Open, paving the way for the likes of Lee Elder, Calvin Peete and Woods to follow.
Twenty-three years later, Ron Townsend was invited to become the first black member at Augusta National, permanent host venue of the US Masters and arguably the world's most exclusive club with an elite membership of around 300.
Progress has certainly been made in golf. It has just taken a very long time. - Reuters
