Sorry Martha Burk, I won't fight in your stinkin' war

After much soul searching over this business of Augusta National not allowing women members, Jelisa Castrodale thinks that she has come to a conclusion. Those green jackets actually look ridiculous.
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By Jelisa Castrodale
After a long spine-freezing winter, we’re finally seeing signs of spring, from the thick blanket of pollen covering my car to the increasingly frantic calls to my accountant. This particular calendar page means it’s Masters week, so at dusk on Sunday, we’ll watch 2009 winner Angel Cabrera give the traditional green jacket to a new champion, rewarding him for his victory by dressing him like the night manager at Bennigan’s.
April also means that it’s time for womens’ rights crusader Martha Burk to climb on her estrogen-drenched soap box to protest Augusta National’s men-only membership policy. Burk has been rattling Augusta’s gates both physically and figuratively since her first major rally in 2003, and she’s all kinds of fired up this year since Tiger ended his exile on these particular manicured fairways. “I think [Augusta] is a safe haven,” she told the New York Daily News. “They’re all chauvinists themselves.”.

Is she right? With a median age of corpse, the Augusta members aren’t necessarily the most progressive group of gentlemen. Several of them are old enough to remember when women spontaneously turned to salt, while the rest are unnerved by newfangled technology like the cotton gin or the horseless carriage. But I’m not sure it’s chauvinism that makes them comfortable in a clubhouse that only has one symbol on the bathroom doors.
It’s probably not a popular opinion among those of us who ovulate once a month, but I’m OK with Augusta’s decision. I know. I should be outraged, shaking my tiny fist toward Amen Corner, demanding equality and the opportunity to shank an eight iron off the Eisenhower Pine … but I’m not. It probably melts Martha Burk’s mock turtlenecks, but Augusta is a private club and I appreciate their right to limit their membership to those with dangling genitals.
Although they might not have the political clout or the business acumen of Augusta’s membership list, there are plenty of other organizations restricted to one chromosomal pair or the other. I place Augusta in the same category with the Cub Scouts, the Curves chain of girls-only gyms, or the sixty-three single-sex universities scattered about the United States … though I am pissed that despite my love of both honor codes and Rhetoric exams, the closest I’ll get to Hampden-Sydney College is to swipe an alum’s embroidered belt.
As someone who makes an annual Foot Joy purchase, the part that bothers me is when the ongoing debate about a private club’s policies begin to affect the perception of the entire game. Augusta’s practices were brought up when golf was proposed as an Olympic sport, since some members of the Olympic committee thought that these types of restrictions were counter to the I.O.C.’s mission to “enhance women’s participation in sport at all levels.”
And here’s why I get squirmy: according to the always-reliable internet, there are around 17,000 golf courses in the United States, with less than 8,000 falling into the private or semi-private category. Roughly a dozen of these courses — including Augusta, Arizona’s Fred Couples-designed Southern Dunes, and New Jersey’s Pine Valley, currently ranked #1 on Golf Magazine’s list of the Top 100 Courses in the World — restrict their membership to men only.
How does being unable to join a handful of clubs (most allow women to play during certain hours or on certain days) prevent an XX-branded individual from teeing up a Top Flite or Titleist or other alliterative brand of golf ball? Is there a would-be Michelle Wie out there staring glumly at a sand wedge and wondering why she should play if she can’t do it at Augusta? That’s the equivalent of a preteen boy trashing his toothbrush since he won’t have the chance to flash his incisors during the Miss America pageant.
Frustratingly, I’m not sure that there’s a resolution to this issue. Augusta and its Testicles-Only twins don’t seem likely to open their rosters up to women, so Martha Burk isn’t going to back down. I’m going to try not to let it interfere with my enjoyment of the tournament; I plan to watch all four rounds, pull for sixtysomething Tom Watson and hope that the champion — whoever he is — eventually brings me that PubPourium burger I ordered.
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Jelisa Castrodale is a writer and comedian who has learned a lot about life by making a mess of her own. She chronicles her failures at The Typing Makes Me Sound Busy, covers music for London’s BitchBuzz and twitters while she waits at stoplights. Castrodale was featured in the book Twitter Wit and was named one of Mashable’s 10 Funniest Twitterers.
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