Woods Should Step Up to the Tee for Equality

Tiger Woods could have made history this week before he even stepped to the first tee to take a swing at the third leg of the Grand Slam.

He could have made his mark by not playing in the British Open to protest host Muirfield golf club’s exclusion of women. Even if all he did was mention the possibility of not playing he would make a point.

Remember the commotion he caused two years ago when he hinted that he might sit out PGA Tour events because of clashes with Commissioner Tim Finchem, including use of Woods’ image in marketing campaigns?

He told Golf World in a November 2000 issue that it was “serious enough that if we don’t make everyone aware of it now, it could escalate into a bigger situation.”

Golf’s discrimination against women, while hardly new, has escalated into a bigger situation. First Augusta National Chairman Hootie Johnson went public with his rebuff of a women’s group leader’s request to add women members to the home of the Masters. Then the world’s best golfers arrived at Muirfield, which won’t even allow women in the clubhouse.

Woods looked back down the course at the Muirfield members, with their 2 1/2 centuries of exclusionary history, and he decided to let them play through.

“They’re entitled to set up their own rules the way they want them,” Woods said in a news conference this week. “It would be nice to see everyone have an equal chance to participate if they wanted to, but there’s nothing you can do about it.

“It’s unfortunate, but it’s just the way it is.”

Just the way it is? There was a time when all of Woods’ considerable talents and skills wouldn’t be enough to get him on the PGA Tour or into Augusta National because that’s just the way it was.

And things stay just the way they are unless someone or something acts on them.

The founder of Shoal Creek Country Club in Birmingham, Ala., once said that his club wouldn’t be pressured into admitting African American members because “that’s just not done in Birmingham.”

Then the Southern Christian Leadership Conference called for a boycott of the 1990 PGA Championship held at the course and TV sponsors threatened to pull out of the telecasts. Presto, the club gave an honorary membership to a local black businessman and the PGA revamped its guidelines to avoid playing at any other clubs with racially discriminatory policies. Later that year, Augusta National just happened to accept its first African American member. Progress.

It’s not fair to expect athletes to be any more politically active than you or me, just because they’re wealthier and more famous. But this issue happens to fall into Woods’ corner of the world. It’s a place where his views are valid, and where they can have direct impact. Equal access should be a top issue to this man of African and Asian descent.

Tiger Woods doesn’t have to be a Jackie Robinson or Muhammad Ali. Right now, I’d be happy if he were just more like Ken Reeves.

Yes, that Ken Reeves, the fictional basketball coach at Carver High on “The White Shadow” TV series. I just happened to watch a rerun on ESPN Classic Wednesday morning, and in that episode Reeves took Coolidge, Thorpe and Salami for a round of golf at a country club where his girlfriend’s father had a membership.

The starter took a look at Coolidge and Thorpe and told Reeves that they couldn’t play because the club had a no-minorities policy. Reeves told the starter to tell it to the towering Coolidge himself. The group then proceeded to their 9 a.m. tee time. Later, Reeves’ girlfriend’s father asked them to leave the clubhouse restaurant because they were violating the “rules.” They left, but not before Reeves took the father out to the balcony and called him a bigot.

Reeves showed a lot more principle than Woods. So did Arnold Palmer in 1990 when the Shoal Creek controversy raged.

“If you are doing a public golf tournament, you bring the issue to yourself,” Palmer said. “If you have a golf tournament, you have to let the general public in. Such a course must make memberships available, no matter race or gender.”

Woods could make a stand just like that. That’s all Martha Burk, the head of the National Council of Women’s Organizations, wants to see from him.

“We’re not asking Tiger Woods to file a lawsuit,” she told Bloomberg News. “We’d just like to see a strong moral statement out of him. If others before him hadn’t stepped across the line on the race issue, he would not be where he is today.”

There’s an unfair burden on Woods to carry the flag for social justice, because he has an unequal amount of clout on the golf scene. He’s fully aware of it, but he seems to flex on only the matters closest to him. He piped up about marketing, and he reportedly threatened to sit out one of those televised one-on-one showdowns a couple years ago unless his caddy was allowed to wear shorts on a hot day.

Yes, these are private clubs, free to select or reject whomever they want. It just isn’t fair to exclude people based on gender.

One of Woods’ first Nike commercials featured young boys and girls of all races proclaiming “I am Tiger Woods”--the message being that because of Tiger, everyone was welcome to play.

Earl Woods proclaimed that his son would be some combination of Gandhi, Mandela and the Messiah, spreading racial harmony throughout the world.

To be fair, Woods never said any of this himself. But he sure has profited from it. It’s time to show he has learned from it.

Two years ago, in that Golf World interview, Woods said: “I believe in what I believe in. I understand the whole picture.”

At the time I supported him. Now I’m not sure what he believes in

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J.A. Adande can be reached at: j.a.adande@latimes.com