Johnson, Augusta Stinking It Up

It rained this spring at the Masters, a hard, cleansing Southern shower that soaked the aging oaks, drenched the colorful azaleas and stripped the veneer off the most esteemed golf club in America.

Fragrant Augusta National was left basking in a different sort of smell.

Cow manure.

The grounds outside Butler Cabin stunk like a pasture. Amen Corner reeked like a county fair.

Those officials daring enough to even recognize the stench quietly blamed it on floating fertilizer.

I prefer to think of it as the house cologne.

Strip away tradition and legend, and Augusta National becomes just another overgrown Southern backyard patrolled by good ol’ boys in Wal-Mart blazers.

Take away the band of great golfers who occasionally drop in, and the chief residents are Hootie and the Blowhards.

This being a private club, its rules should be nobody’s business.

But because Augusta National chooses to step on a worldwide stage for one week a year, hosting a golf tournament that has become a public institution, those rules become everybody’s business.

So when Augusta boss-man Hootie Johnson responds to pressure to admit the club’s first female member by telling women’s groups to go suck on an apron, we should pay attention.

And when he tells the rest of the world to also leave his club alone, which is what happened when he incredibly canceled more than $7 million in sponsorships to avoid allowing women to pressure those companies, we should heed his call.

It’s time we leave him alone.

Those who truly care about diversity in society need to stop caring about the Masters.

The impetus for change is not with Augusta National, which, as a private club, is under no constitutional responsibility to have its members behave as humans.

The impetus for change is with us.

CBS should stop televising it. Golf fans should stop watching it. Golfers should stop playing it.

If Augusta National wants to behave like a private club, fine, then it should do so in private.

None of which will ever happen, of course.

The noses at CBS are browner than Augusta’s sand traps from years of pandering to the rich rednecks.

Many golf fans are men who feel that women shouldn’t be allowed more than three high-heeled steps from the beverage cart.

And the average golfer thinks equality means everybody gets the same size courtesy car.

Ignoring Augusta until it blends into the Georgia woods like every other private club still fighting the Civil War is as silly as trying to get Tiger Woods to even acknowledge the existence of a Civil War.

But the whole thing still stinks.

For years, public watchdogs have endured Augusta’s arrogance under the notion that if nudged, it would change.

The club didn’t allow blacks until 1990. But pressure was applied and today, of about 300 members, there are four African-Americans.

When there were complaints that the course was too short, they lengthened it.

When TV viewers asked that the front nine be televised, they televised it.

Women golfers are allowed on the course like any other invited guests, even reportedly playing more than 1,000 rounds there last year.

So what happened this summer when Martha Burk, chairman of the National Council of Women’s Organizations, sent a gentle letter to the club urging that it open its doors to women?

Hootie Johnson dismissed her with a three-paragraph letter that sounded as if he was ordering his wife into the kitchen.

Burk respectfully requested a meeting. Johnson described her request as “coercive.”

Burk urged that membership, while not officially closed to women, be realistically opened. Johnson termed her request “offensive.”

As the chairman of a private club, Johnson had every right to act so nasty.

But as the curator of what has become a public trust, he should have been ashamed.

Of course, he was not. Hootie was, in fact, quite proud.

Discussing his letter, he claimed he would not integrate the club “at the point of a bayonet.”

Didn’t they once use those at Antietam?

Then, on Friday, Johnson glowingly announced he was severing ties with all sponsors rather than deal with Burk’s pressures of Citigroup, Coca-Cola and IBM.

Didn’t some baseball teams once threaten to do the same thing if forced to host Jackie Robinson?

Oh, but because this is about gender and not race, it’s different, right?

The PGA Tour would not agree. Because of its policy of not sponsoring tournaments at clubs that discriminate, it could not stage an event at Augusta National, where the Masters is a privately run affair.

Some are celebrating that the tournament will now be televised without commercials.

It would be better to celebrate the day it is televised without viewers.

In banning women membership and obscenely gesturing to those who would fight that ban, Augusta National is exercising its right as a private club.

So when are we going to exercise our rights as a civilized society?

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.