Teed Off at Hootie and His Boys

“Order is back,” said Hootie.

The chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club wasn’t predicting the resurgence of Tiger Woods at his Masters Tournament when he uttered those words last week. No, Hootie Johnson was referring to the return of corporate sponsors to a golf classic played at a club that discriminates against women.

Three years ago, you’ll recall, Martha Burk and her National Council of Women’s Organizations campaigned against the Georgia club’s we-only-like-boys policy and its embrace by the titans of industry, who sponsor the Masters and who belong as members. She pushed boycotts. Then, playing the Confederate martyr role, Stonewall Hootie decided the tournament could be played two years without corporate sponsors (other than CBS, Hootie’s chief enabler, of course) to spare his buddies the heat.

And now, the fuss over with, ExxonMobil, SBC Communications and IBM must have felt that the country had moved sufficiently backward that they stood to lose nothing by sponsoring the tournament again. Companies used to claim, disingenuously, that their sponsorship dollars only supported the Masters Tournament, not the club that puts it on. Hootie himself undermined that fiction last week when he pathetically conceded that the return of corporate sponsors would speed up some needed improvements around Augusta National, including the conversion of parking space to a training facility.

So there you have it -- publicly traded companies with strong anti-discriminatory codes of conduct are spending their money shoring up a bastion of gender discrimination, mainly because it’s a playground for CEOs. Talk about a stupid move in the age of Sarbanes-Oxley. Where are the directors of these companies who take their fiduciary duties seriously? The NCWO and lawyers who have brought discrimination cases against Wall Street firms rightly point out that a CEO’s membership at Augusta (not to mention his company sponsoring the tournament) is evidence of a corporate culture hostile to women.

Many sportswriters, understandably eager to focus on the game, like to write that this was a ridiculous controversy all along, that we shouldn’t get too exercised about who gets to be a member at one hyper-exclusive golf club because it’s not really an issue for the rest of us mortals anyway, male or female. Surely working women have more pressing concerns.

The same could be said about the aspirations of women or racial minorities to join other elite institutions, an Ivy League university, say, or a corporate boardroom, and it would be equally wrong. Even though most people will never become a CEO or golf with CEOs, it’s essential to the health of our meritocratic society that entire categories of people not be written off as unworthy of these sinecures. Indeed, the companies willing to underwrite Hootie’s antebellum boys club wouldn’t dare do so if it still excluded blacks.

(And here I must tip my hat to a legendary sportswriter from the Los Angeles Times, the late Jim Murray, who didn’t just want to focus on the game; he repeatedly mocked Augusta’s racism until he shamed the club into admitting Lee Elder in 1975.)

What is the appeal of admitting only men to a golf club, anyway? Doesn’t the urge of these CEO types -- including the likes of such progressive billionaires as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett -- to surround themselves with men betray a boyish insecurity? Is it that they want to be able to frolic naked in the clubhouse, or unapologetically fart and swear?

Whatever the case, it’s OK if a private club wants to encourage all this, but it’s not appropriate for corporations to use shareholder funds to underwrite it. And CBS’ reverential coverage of the Masters over the weekend was a national embarrassment. Jim Nantz practically kissed Hootie’s ring on Sunday.

As for the sponsors, it’s particularly disappointing that IBM, once a forward-looking innovator, signed up. In 1990, the company pulled its sponsorship from another golf tournament solely on the grounds that it was being played at a club that discriminated against blacks. How does a company with a policy against sex discrimination justify doing less in the case of Augusta and the Masters?

Martha Burk asked the company that question in August 2002, before Hootie gave his sponsors a two-year timeout, and never got a satisfactory answer. Twice yesterday I called IBM, which prides itself on its long-standing commitment to diversity, to pose the same question. The company website has a lot of rhetoric about holding itself to a higher standard and states that its diversity policy covers all its business activities, including promotions, “IBM-sponsored recreational activity” and presumably marketing.

But IBM’s corporate communications people never called me back. They could have at least chimed in with Hootie and intoned “order is back.”