HOOTIE Johnson is an old fool who doesn’t realize he can’t win. No amount of boiling water this feudal lord hurls down from his castle against half the population of the planet battering at the doors of Augusta National will save the human race from improving itself, or even his own little fiefdom from becoming a better place.
Discrimination already has one foot in the grave where the 71-year-old chairman of the noted and notorious golf club will someday spin when women inevitably become members. Injustice won’t die out with his generation, nor with mine, but African Americans have come a long way since 1863 and women a significant distance since 1920 so that each newborn now never knows a nation where minorities and females tamely accept second-class status.
Bigots who blocked schoolhouse steps in the ’50s and ’60s couldn’t hold the tide against opportunity and neither will Johnson, a good ‘ol boy who stands for nothing but bad ‘ol days.
The rights of a private institution to choose its members? If an organization demands a level of performance, like a club of serious golfers setting a qualifying handicap or a university accepting only top percentile students, those kinds of exclusivities are incentives to make the world try harder. Privacy for the purpose of exclusion by gender only drags us backwards, Johnson’s specious rationalizations and examples further exposing his ignorance.
You don’t have to be voted into the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, who remain separate for the common sense reason that males and females of the eligible ages generally have vastly different interests. Such does not apply to adults in a golf club.
Fraternities and sororities are organizations with wretched histories of discrimination by color, religion and social status. Yet, this green-coated captive of a chain gang of ignorance considers institutions formed largely to keep inferior people out as “the fabric of America.”
Never mind Augusta National has a few black members, and that Johnson has four daughters and has given business opportunities to minorities. Some of the worst people I know forgive themselves by donating generously.
The admission of women to Ivy League schools, a concept horrifying in its infancy to sexists disguising themselves as traditionists, kept those universities from falling to second-class status behind the best of the co-ed schools. As times change, only institutions that change with them can grow.
I confess to once having suffered a Hootie moment, when one of the militant women pioneers of sports writing said to me: “If I can’t go in the locker room, you can’t either.” Hey, I had always gone in, and besides, in her unassailable right to equal access was lost a fundamental issue of modesty. I wouldn’t want to dress in front of women.
But, over time, the use of towels by the athletes and discretion by the female journalists turned this mountain into a molehill, except of course, for the fools with libidos to match their star power who believe women reporters must be in there primarily to gawk at them.
Most of us grow up, however reluctantly. I entered the business basically at the same time women did, and have seen the presence of many help elevate my profession, much like a woman at Augusta might add something.
It would be unacceptable to stop at one, of course, but institutions dragged kicking and screaming into sensitivity have to be made to start somewhere. Discrimination in housing and jobs are the big fights, of course, but the issue that most gives us our grade as a society is hardly trivialized by forcing one of the most famous golf clubs in the world to become an example of tolerance.
Come April, Johnson may congratulate himself for pulling off a Masters without sponsors, or despite a boycott-compromised field, or even turn the green grounds infiltrated by protestors into a bloodless Tiannamen Square. He doesn’t realize his stand has already been lost by his demonstration of how much better off we will be when people who think like Hootie Johnson are gone.
