EQUITY WATCH : Right Club

Golf is a notoriously slow game. Sometimes it’s so slow that while you’re waiting to tee up, the season changes.

Maybe that’s why social change takes forever to come to the country clubs of America.

Maybe.

In July, change dropped in on Shoal Creek Country Club like a summer squall. And by the time major advertisers had pulled out as sponsors of the PGA tournament there, the members of the all-white club must have felt as if they’d been hit by a hurricane. By August the club was making plans to admit its first black.

Last month another storm hit a prestigious American country club. It was generated by genteel Tom Watson, one of America’s preeminent golfers. He quit the ultra-restrictive Kansas City Country Club--where as a youngster he first learned to play golf--after it had rejected the application of the co-founder of H&R; Block, who is Jewish.

Earlier this month, Kansas City Country Club changed its mind about Henry Block and so is about to admit its first Jewish member.

Watson, a member for years, will never be mistaken for a civil-rights activist, but even for him enough is enough. “I would hope the club would sufficiently change so some good people of any religion, race or sex could become members,” he said.

He’s right. America has had its fill of discrimination in country clubs and social clubs. But how many country clubs still refuse to face up to the reality of their discrimination? How many still will have to be clubbed by public embarrassment into doing the right thing?