The things the popular press does not know about the Augusta
National Golf Club would fill a good-sized book. Let’s start with
only the most recent, Secretary of the Treasury designate John
Snow’s resignation of his membership from the club. Here’s the
mainstream, generally liberal, spin on that resignation, from a
December 10 USA Today editorial:
“As a private club, Augusta can be as pigheaded as it wants. But
that doesn’t erase or excuse its shameful bias (against having
women as members). Snow wasn’t sensitive enough as a corporate
chief to take a stand against it. But he was smooth enough in his
new role to recognize an important truth. Just because something is
legal doesn’t mean it’s right.”
And here’s the conservative reaction, from a New York
Post editorial the day before:
“The club’s men-only policy has made it a prime [New
York] Times target — and Snow could expect a lot of
grief from Democrats and other Times’ acolytes during his
confirmation hearings. If he’s so reluctant to risk offending the
Gray Lady on these grounds, whatever will happen when serious
business is under discussion? It’s a cause for concern.”
What both these newspapers miss is that the Augusta National
Golf Club has been created in the honor and image of revered
amateur golfer Bobby Jones, as a home for American gentlemen, and
as a shrine to golf. The club has always tried to be the most
wonderful place on earth for a certain kind of man, and it has
succeeded. You can’t buy your way in, or lobby your way in, or
elbow your way in. You can only be invited. The members honor by
emulation the refined example of Bob Jones’s life, as a sporting
champion and as an exemplary man who suffered most of his life,
without complaint, from an excruciating, crippling disease. Bob
Jones stood for something, something only dimly understood any
more. The club still stands for that.
Indeed, the Masters itself is an invitational tournament, unlike
any of the other three “major” golf tournaments throughout the
year.
The National Review’s Jay Nordlinger, writing only
semi-facetiously in NR’s “The Corner” on December 10, got closest
to the truth: “Anyone who would give up a membership in Augusta
National to be Treasury secretary is absurd. In fact, anyone who
would do so is too misguided to hold high public office.”
John Snow did not resign his Augusta National Golf Club
membership to spare himself grief in the confirmation process, or
to indicate agreement with the obsessive editorial stand of the
New York Times about the club’s not having women members.
He resigned to spare the club any difficulties his new job might
have caused. The club came first. That’s why he resigned so
promptly.
Keep this always in mind: The club is better than anyplace else.
The club is more polite, more refined, more educated, more
enlightened, than any vulgar newspaper or political organization or
television network. The club does not need money, does not need
anyone’s approval, does not worry about pop culture or intellectual
fashions.
It is quite literally untouchable.
Here’s how untouchable the Augusta National Golf Club is, in
contemporary terms. When the whole Martha Burk brouhaha blew up,
the club canceled commercials on its upcoming 2003 Masters
broadcast on the CBS television network. As reported, this was
widely interpreted as the Augusta giving up advertising revenue in
order to spare sponsors any difficulties.
Not so. The club didn’t give up anything. They compelled CBS —
without a by-your-leave — to give up CBS’s advertising revenue.
CBS sells the ad spots — not Augusta.
How can the club do that? For some 40 years, CBS has been
broadcasting the Masters, and has had to buy the rights to do so,
at the club’s insistence, one year at a time. Augusta has set that
fee ridiculously low — now in the $5-6 million range, when it’s
probably worth four times that much. That gives the club virtually
complete control over CBS, which gets the immense prestige and
power of delivering the Masters broadcast, and would die rather
than give it up.
N.B. Michael Bamberger, writing in the November issue of
Golf Magazine, said — without any source — that “it is
likely” that Augusta National would forego its CBS broadcast fee
and pay for the TV show. Writing a month later in the same
magazine, John Feinstein mentioned no such thing. I don’t believe
it.
So what else could Augusta National do, if the New York
Times persists in its silly obsession to use public pressure
to compel the club to admit women — and, more to the point, if the
club decided that the Times’s crusade might in some way
damage the club’s atmosphere or its members’ comfort?
Let’s see. They could hold the tournament in private, pretty
much the way it started back in 1934. The club has a waiting list
of ticket-holders a mile long; the same 30,000 or so patrons would
show up who always show up to eat pimento cheese sandwiches and
drink soft drinks from the Augusta National’s signature green paper
cups.
They could choose not to invite the press. If they wanted to,
they could make their own film of the tournament (they always do)
and then just release the film after the event.
They could, in short, do anything they wanted to. The Augusta
National Golf Club, most delightfully, can flip the bird to the
entire culture if it so chooses.
