Johnson's hard line risks erosion of Masters legacy

Chairman of Augusta National would be wise to shift his ground on issue of women members with at least a gesture of appeasement

William "Hootie" Johnson, the chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club, which no doubt yesterday welcomed a series of cloudbursts which might have dampened even the spirit of Emily Pankhurst, has known many uncomfortable moments since he decided last year to take on the women's rights leader Martha Burk.

However, nothing in the maelstrom of protest so far involving Burk, the Reverend Jesse Jackson and the Grand Wizard of an off-shoot of the Ku Klux, has been quite so calculated to offend Hootie's Old South sensitivities as something that dropped through his letter box this last weekend.

It was a huge splash on the man and his position by Sports Illustrated, an organ of vast prestige in American sports which in the past has had a tendency to portray Augusta as the nation's recreational version of Shangri-La.

Even on this rather fraught occasion SI was less than lacerating on the confrontational approach of the chairman – whose first response to a reasonably couched letter from Burk on the absence of a single women member of the golf club was to say that a bayonet had been had been thrust at his throat.

The magazine, which has so often decorated its cover with images of the course and its greatest heroes, gave a basically positive review of both Johnson's stewardship of the Masters tournament, which starts on Thursday, and his career as a youthful gridiron star and then a highly successful banker.

It was also pointed out that despite his support of the old bedrock segregationist Strom Thurmond – which had him thrown out of the Democratic Party – Johnson is popular among black politicians in his home base of South Carolina.

So where lay the dagger? It was, at least for anyone who has read Tom Wolfe's searing account of the rise and fall of a Georgian redneck raised below the "gnat line" which separates the old money from the scufflings of the country folks, in the linking of Johnson with the central character in Wolfe's novel A Man in Full.

The story of Johnson is punctuated with quotes from the fictional Charlie Croker, a man who built a ruinous white elephant of a skyscraper in Atlanta and was systematically humiliated by vengeful bankers. The implication is that Croker, whose greatest passion apart from his young second wife was throwing stupendously extravagant weekend parties at his "quail-hunting" ranch, sowed his downfall by losing the plot, by believing too much in the world he had created and thinking it would go on for ever – and that, in the Masters' context at least, Hootie is running a similar risk.

While Johnson's own personal life and financial concerns are in good order, it just happens that apart from Augusta he threw himself into the refurbishing of an all-male quail-hunting club and that so far his unequivocal stand against female membership of Augusta has scared off the Masters' corporate sponsors.

This year the tournament will be broadcast without any commercial sponsorship – a devastating blow to Augusta's long-held, and up to now strongly supported belief, that it could sail through the ages as a vastly popular and profitable American institution on the one hand and a fiercely exclusive club on the other.

It is a position that has been swept away elsewhere in American, if not British, golf. The Royal & Ancient staged last year's Open in Muirfield and go this summer to Royal St George's – two all-male establishments. Cypress Point, one of the most beautiful courses in America, with a hole that juts out into the Pacific and might have been designed by a combination of Michelangelo and the Marquis de Sade, was struck off the big three-course AT and T Pro-Am tournament by the USPGA for its lack of black membership and Pine Valley in Pennsylvania, some people's idea of the best course in the United States, has been ruled out of staging the US Open by the USGA because of the club's insistence on all-male membership.

But Hootie hangs on, and when SI considered his stance they felt it relevant to quote Wolfe on the crumbling Croker, "Quail... the aristocrat of American wild game. It wasn't sufficient to be rich enough. No, this was the South. You had to be man enough to deserve a quail plantation. You had to be able to deal with man and beast, in every form they came in, with your wits, your bare hands, and your gun.'

That passage accompanied an account of how Charlie, like Johnson a former football star, had just wrestled down a huge rattlesnake.

Here this week the cool, behind-the-scenes appraisal is that soon enough Hootie, a devoted father of four daughters, will recognise that he is hanging on to a snake of an issue, and that when the heat dwindles he will be wise to to shift his ground with a gesture of appeasement, however token.

Certainly, he has not been helped by the feeble stance of the tournament's heroes, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, who won 10 Green Jackets between them. While they were keen enough to argue the case for Johnson to rescind his ruling that there should be an age limit on automatic qualification, which he duly did – Palmer will be appearing again this week for his 49th Masters despite last year's rather mawkish final farewell – the merest mention of the current fight is enough to send them scurrying into the bushes. Both have said that they have said all they intend to say on the issue, which is precisely nothing, and has inspired the contempt of Burk and her followers.

Tiger Woods has also earned some criticism, but at least he agrees in the basic rightness of Burk's claims. His position, honestly filled with self-interest, is that he is simply happy to have the chance to make history in a place which so was reluctant to grant members of his own race the chance to play: Lee Elder became the first black competitor here as recently as 1975.

Gary Player, who also benefits from Johnson's about-turn on the champions' rights issue, may have tackled the root of the problem when he said that Johnson and his advisers have abandoned an old Masters principle of testing the wind and acting when the laws of reasonable compromise said it should. The founder of the Masters, with the great Bobby Jones, Clifford Roberts, a New York businessman, certainly had a refined ear for the rumble of his times. A racist out of personal conviction, Roberts eventually shot himself. But the way he established the Masters as a major tournament with an instant, and brilliantly created aura, helped hugely by his cultivation of the popular hero president "Ike" Eisenhower, was a work of entrepreneurial genius.

As lightning forks strafed the exquisite course yesterday – and ruled out Monday practice – that legacy was plainly at risk.

The solution is plain enough as protests planned for the weekend are likely to have their force dissipated by American preoccupation with the war in Iraq. It is for Hootie to take a deep breath and pick up a phone and call one of three exceptional candidates for membership of Augusta National – Nancy Lopez, the icon of women's golf, Sandra Day O'Connor, a member of the US Supreme Court and an enthusiastic golfer, and Judy Bell, a former president of the USGA.

All it would take is brief recognition that the world continues to change and that Augusta has to move along with it, and certainly beyond the point that gives Tiger the chance to win his third straight Green Jacket this week.

Is Hootie up to it? He better be – at least if the lessons of Charlie Croker mean anything. The master of the quail ranch and the lord of all he surveyed was quoted thus: "All I had to do was say the right things, but I won't do that. One of the few freedoms that we have as human beings that cannot be taken away from us is the freedom to assent to what is true and deny what is false."

That was Charlie's position before his world fell in, before he went off to be an evangelist. That might not entirely suit Hootie Johnson, who, for the moment at least, remains the master of Augusta, which even as the thunder growls on behalf of the womenfolk of American, is probably still worth more than the biggest quail ranch you ever saw.