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AIG Women’s Open: Muirfield’s long, bumpy and often tense road to hosting its first Women’s Open

Golf Digest Middle East — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 12:53:11 +0000

By John Huggan
For long enough — centuries even — it was easy to point and sneer at the body of men known as the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers. There they were in the stately clubhouse that sits directly behind the 18th green on the magnificent Muirfield links that has hosted 16 Open Championships, staring defiantly out at an ever-changing world seemingly beyond their ken — and one that could certainly never meet with their approval. The very idea of women members, by way of example, was typically greeted with cigar-fuelled guffaws. Dream on, brother.

Perceived misogyny was just one of their less-than-attractive traits. In so many other ways, the all-males of Muirfield lived down to just about every negative stereotype the wider populace, largely ignorant of the eclectic social mix golf encompasses across the globe, saw as the game’s elitist place in society. Not for nothing did Golf Digest once published a story calling the place “quite possibly the rudest club in the world”.

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And not always the most reputable. An entry in the club accounts from 1786 reads: “Cash for getting Dickson out of prison — five shillings and seven pence.” More recently, there was also plenty of evidence that the club was largely populated by those keen to preserve their elitist environment.

To wit, future King Edward VIII was once denied access to the course. On separate occasions, a brace of US Open champions, Payne Stewart and Geoff Ogilvy, ended up playing nearby Gullane No. 1 when told Muirfield was out of bounds. And both looked down from the seventh tee at Gullane to see a deserted Muirfield. Only hours after he had won the 1980 Open, Tom Watson, along with Ben Crenshaw and Tom Weiskopf, was asked to leave the premises.

For many, that well-established and imperious level of arrogance was further underlined on May 19, 2016. On that day Henry Fairweather, then captain of a clearly not-so Honourable Company, announced that the membership had voted against the admission of women into their midst. To be fair, most who did vote were in favour of the motion to allow female members, but the 64 to 36 per cent result fell short of the two-thirds majority required.

Retribution was swift. In addition to worldwide opprobrium that apparently came as a shock to even the hardest-liners within the club, within a day R&A chief executive Martin Slumbers announced that, as long as the HCEG’s reaffirmed status quo remained in place, the Open Championship would not return to the jewel in East Lothian’s “Golf Coast”. Bad dream, brother.

“The wider reaction to the result of the first vote was, I didn’t think, that surprising,” says Peter Arthur, a former HCEG club captain. “Once you’ve gone from back-page news to front-page news, it doesn’t really matter what the argument is, you’ve lost it. One of the reasons we had another vote so quickly was that everyone, including many of those who had voted ‘no’ initially, felt that it was really damaging to the club.”

That it was.

Ross Kinnaird

“I received two packages from primary schools in the wake of the vote,” says Stuart McEwen, the club secretary who arrived at Muirfield after working stints at Kingsbarns and Gleneagles. “There were hand-written letters from the kids, all asking why we hate women. We also got many messages and emails targeting the club, which was unpleasant and showed us how serious this had all become. It was not just a golf issue. And it was global. When we shared all that with the membership, they became nervous about what was next.”

Happily, what did come next was, as Arthur said, a second vote, one that saw 81 per cent of those who voted in favor of women members. It was the end of one journey for the HCEG and the continuation of another that actually began as far back as Muirfield’s most recent Open Championship in 2013. It was there that Peter Dawson, then chief executive of the R&A, was given a rough ride by a press core interested in why, in the 21st century, the Open was being played at a club where women were apparently not welcome.

“The gender issue was really gathering momentum then,” says McEwen, who attended that Open in the wake of his appointment but two months before he actually assumed his current role. “I wasn’t interviewed, but I was quoted in the Daily Telegraph. It was written that I was ‘widely regarded as a reformer’. Those were not my words. But I was reading it thinking ‘crikey’.

“So I was aware that the club was under pressure,” he continues. “I had a conversation with an official at IMG. They were running the Women’s Open then and he was asking if the club would be interested in hosting. My response was to ask how the sponsors would feel about the single-gender nature of the club. He came back and said they would not want to come here. We were creeping ever closer to untenable.”

But that was then.

Today, just over six years later, the HCEG numbers 20 females (a number that will soon enough rise to 25) within its 800-strong membership. And, this week, Muirfield will host the AIG Women’s Open for the first time. All of which is the result of swift action that was slowed only by the result of the infamous first vote.

“I’m not sure when we decided that our reaction had to be pretty much immediate, but it wasn’t long,” says Arthur, who is chairman of the Women’s Open championship committee. “We all felt it wasn’t the right outcome. And we had to do something about it. The club as a whole, whatever people’s personal opinions are, was hurt by the first vote. This place has a great history and certainly a great golf course, so none of us liked to see it being trashed.”

Indeed, not long after hearing that the chances of hosting a Women’s Open were virtually nil, a group — LTTF, “Looking to the future” — had been formed within the club.

“We talked about addressing issues … membership, equality,” McEwen says. “Things that could further damage the club. There was a lot of consultation over two years until we reached the point of proposing change to the membership. We thought we had done enough to convince them.”

Clearly, that was not the case.

“We had to do more work,” McEwen adds. “We had to identify who was hesitant or who wasn’t fully informed. One of the clear messages coming back was that they didn’t think the negative reaction from the R&A and the wider world would be what it had been, which left some feeling pressurised. Many felt that this should be a club decision and that we shouldn’t be told what to do. Within a year though, the second vote went our way. It wasn’t 100 per cent; 123 members still voted against women members. I’m not sure why; we haven’t asked. But I feel sure that, if we had another vote now, the percentage in favour would be higher again.”

Having passed that initial hurdle, further decisions were required. Exactly how were women to be introduced to the club? And how many was the correct number, at least initially? As things stood, it took (and continues to take) about seven years for a member to make his way through the process. When it came to the women though, such a time lag was clearly unacceptable.

In 2019, the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers invited its first 12 female members to join the club after changing its centuries-old membership policy.

In 2019, the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers invited its first 12 female members to join the club. Jeff J Mitchell

“You can’t apply to be a member,” McEwen says. “You must be proposed, seconded and have five referees. If we didn’t add 25 women and create a mixed list, it would be at least seven years before we had even one female member. That couldn’t happen. So we took it to a vote. And that was carried unanimously. But only for women. We guaranteed 25 relatively quickly. And that has come to pass. We’ll have 20 by the time the Women’s Open is played here. And five more after that.”

Once the 25 figure has been reached, as McEwen is quick to emphasise, male and female candidates will be treated the same. But now that the initial 12 female members have been part of the club for more than three years, they are free to propose others, male or female, of course. Happily, too, the signs are good that the transition has, so far, been smooth and uneventful.

“The best part of being a member is the course, followed by the suet pudding,” says Lindsey Garden, runner-up in the 1989 Scottish Ladies championship and another member of the Women’s Open championship committee. “But the real surprise has been the club and the friendliness and openness of the male members. They have embraced our presence. The dinner matches are competitive, but it is important not to take yourself or your golf too seriously. When you come off, no one wants to hear about the putts you missed. Or how unlucky you were. There’s plenty of banter.”

Ah yes, within the HCEG, the dinners and the matches that are set-up there are a huge part of the club’s culture. To “arrange” a match, a member must rise from his/her seat and make an announcement to the room. It goes like this:

“Mr Captain, sir, with your permission, on Wednesday April 7, Mr Smith and Miss Jones wish to make a match against Mrs X and Mr Y for club stakes plus 10.”

“That is quite daunting, with all those crusty old men listening,” Arthur says. “But the women have coped well. Everyone has enjoyed their entry. Nothing has changed for the worse. People are still having the same number of glasses of wine. They are still betting on the matches. It’s just great to see them as part of everything.”

‘I received two packages from primary schools in the wake of the vote. There were hand-written letters from the kids, all asking why we hate women. … It was not just a golf issue. And it was global.’

—Stuart McEwen, club secretary

“We have fitted in and been made welcome,” says Barbara Biggart, who will act as chief scorer at the Women’s Open. “At the first club dinner I went to, there was no welcome for the new ‘lady members’. It was: ‘We’d like to welcome our new members.’ It felt like I was welcomed as a member and not excluded. I’ve taken part in every competition I can. And every club dinner. I’ve played in the match against the R&A. And I’ve played here for fun with lots of people.”

“I’m not sure the atmosphere around the club has changed at all,” Arthur says. “I always used to ask my fellow members what they were frightened of? What did they think was going to happen? I can honestly say it has made no difference. Maybe the first couple of dinners where there were women members they were noticed as women. But now they are simply seen as members. So the culture and behaviuor is the same.”

Integration works both ways, of course. And the women, by all accounts, have played their part in that process.

“What is also great is that we haven’t seen a huddle of women members getting together to play a foursome,” adds Richard Summers, Arthur’s deputy on the Women’s Open championship committee. “I’ve never seen a table of only women members. They play with everyone. Hopefully, they are feeling welcome and part of the club. The signs are certainly good. I know people who were quite vehemently against women members. But now they are proposing women. They’ve seen that it works. It’s not the end of the world.”

No, just the beginning of a new one, at least as far as the HCEG is concerned. Already £7.5 million has been spent on clubhouse renovations that have made the place suitable for a mixed membership.

And, soon enough, the best women golfers on the planet.

For the Women’s Open, the course will be set-up much as it is for the members — male and female. The fairway widths will remain unchanged. The greens will run between 9 and 10.5 on the Stimpmeter. And the course will measure between 6,600 and 6,700 yards.

It’s expected that Muirfield will produce a top-class champion, just as it has nearly always done at the Open. All-time greats Harry Vardon, James Braid, Ted Ray, Walter Hagen, Henry Cotton, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Tom Watson, Nick Faldo, Ernie Els and Phil Mickelson have all lifted the Claret Jug there.

Peter Arthur, Lindsey Garden and Stuart McEwen stand outside the Muirfield clubhouse, excited to host the Women’s British Open for the first time this week.

“I think the women will play the course a bit more strategically than the men,” Arthur says. “They will not necessarily be going for everything. In other words, they will play Muirfield as it was designed to be played.”

Perhaps more importantly, competitors at the Women’s Open will also experience the club as it is today, a place to be enjoyed by all, regardless of gender.

“None of what we have done is tokenism,” McEwen says. “We purposely avoided setting up a ladies section. This is a club. All are members and all are in this together. One day, eight of the ladies had arranged to play a game. Great. They had a table of eight in the dining room. The wine was flowing. They were having a great time, just like eight men would. I enjoyed that moment. They clearly felt comfortable enough to come in and do exactly what the men do.”

“The rudest golf club in the world?” concludes Arthur in response to this new, more enlightened and more welcoming reality. “We used to joke about it. But only until we started to think about it. Why did we have that reputation? Because we deserved it.”

Not any more though. Not the truly Honourable Company.

The post AIG Women’s Open: Muirfield’s long, bumpy and often tense road to hosting its first Women’s Open appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

What’s it like to be a female golfer in Scotland? It ain’t pretty

Golf Digest Middle East — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 06:49:40 +0000

Six months since Muirfield opened its membership to women, the attitude in Scotlamd toward female play is slowly evolving (emphasis on slowly).

By John Huggan
Golf in Scotland has much to be proud of. Having invented the stick-and-ball sport that has travelled the world and been adopted across the globe, the game in sunny Caledonia remains, in important ways, the model for what goes on elsewhere. There are, for example, 18 holes in a standard round because that is how many there are at St. Andrews. And the size of the hole, 4¼ inches across, was determined in the 19th century by the diameter of the tool the “keeper of the greens” used at Musselburgh in East Lothian.

But some of the attitudes and practices exported from Scotland are a lot less praiseworthy, with the long-term separation of the sexes within clubs high on that list. Whether or not such a state of affairs would have developed elsewhere in the world without Scotland’s example is debatable, but there is no doubt that the first single-gender clubs sprang up there.

Things are changing on that front. In 2014, only 260 years after its inception, the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews voted to allow female members. And earlier this year, the Muirfield-based Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers announced they would do the same, albeit only after a second poll overturned a first in which an insufficient percentage of the membership voted for change. The famous East Lothian links was then immediately restored to the 10-strong rota of Open Championship courses. “Unseemly haste” was the phrase used by some who felt a period of exile from hosting the game’s oldest championship, and any income derived from it, might have been more appropriate from the R&A.

But outside of these long-established “elite” establishments, it’s been hard to get a good fix on what it is it really like to be a female member of a more typical Scottish club. Here, speaking under the cloak of anonymity, Holly (not her real name), a single-digit handicap player and a long-time member of two Scottish clubs, shares just a few of her experiences.

JEFF PACHOUD

ANNUAL DUES AND TEE TIMES
Some would argue we are actually getting a very good deal, as women in Scotland tend to pay less for their golf than men. That is an issue going forward in clubs looking to eliminate discriminatory membership practices. Women will be asked to increase what they pay, but will they agree to it? I’m not sure. I don’t have a problem with it personally, but I fear that financial equality could lead to a lot of women giving up the game.

In many ways, women who are currently golfers are content with the status quo. But they tend not to have full-time jobs and can play at times when the courses are not so busy. It’s a selfish attitude, but that’s the way it is. And the end result is that there hasn’t been any real push for change from women inside the game.

In contrast, working women in my experience want equality. They need to play at the same time as men who have jobs. Instead, because so many clubs still reserve prime tee times on weekends for men (the traditional view for a long time now), these working women are forced to squeeze in a few holes at the end of a full work day. Some clubs are making efforts to introduce joint tee times, but the process has been infuriatingly slow.

Then again, I do know that women’s competitions can sometimes suffer from similar insularity and “cliquey-ness.” One lady of my acquaintance gave up the game after a year of being drawn to play in the last group in every competition.

WHY WOMEN AND MEN PLAY
A lot of women see golf as more of a social thing. I’m talking in general terms. But men do tend to be more competitive in my experience. Women play golf for different reasons: friendship, community, belonging. Women will get together and organise charity events. And many men find it hard to have a game without money being involved. They need wagers.

CLUB LIFE
The shift towards more equality has been received differently in different clubs. In the so-called “regular” clubs, I don’t see much of a problem. But in the more historic and entrenched clubs there is still a resistance. At those, I am regularly asked why I’m not home doing the cooking and the cleaning. That would be funny if those men were joking. However, most times they are not. There is a tolerance more than anything when it comes to women getting more involved at clubs.

Worse yet, that tolerance is rarely evidenced out on the course. There remains a lot of patronising going on. I put up a bit of a shield and just try to ignore it. In part, it definitely appears to be a generational thing. I recognise what I’ve seen throughout my career. The older generation is dominated by dyed-in-the-wool misogynists. They don’t understand gender equality and, even if they did, wouldn’t give pay much attention to it. The sad part is they don’t actually understand what they are saying. Quite often I get compliments that are patronising. Things like, “Wow, you hit the ball really well…for a woman.”

Then there is this thing about not letting women play through on the course. That is still a lingering issue. Letting women who are playing faster play through still seems to be a huge blow to the male ego. I see this with visitors, too. If you have a pack of men on a golfing holiday, you still see plenty of faux machismo and testosterone going on. (All of the above is exacerbated by the undeniable fact that the vast majority of men should actually be playing from what they sneeringly refer to as the “ladies tees.”)

There was a time when I would have agreed with the notion that things will change as the next generation of men will be more enlightened. But it depends on how younger men are trained by their fathers and the people they play with. They will be influenced by those they play golf with. Disappointingly, albeit from a small number, I still see chauvinism in younger male golfers. Mostly though, the juniors and younger boys are far more advanced when it comes to gender equality. They are certainly better than men of my generation.

MUIRFIELD
The Muirfield case was interesting, if only because I don’t know of one woman who would want to be a member of the Honourable Company. The course is great, but the club not so much. That it required the second vote to allow female members hints to what women are walking into. However, there is a principle at stake. Here we have a group of men who are occupying one of the best courses in the world and they exclude people like me because of my gender. If I was black, they wouldn’t be able to enforce such rules. That is disgusting, and thankfully they’re trying to move on. Mind you their idea of equality is putting women on the waiting list for membership, meaning it will be three-to-five years before anything really happens. That seems similarly disgraceful.

Jane Barlow/PA Images
Sign inside the clubhouse at Muirfield after it was announced in March 2017 that women will be admitted as members following a ballot by The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers

I look at clubs like the Honourable Company with some amusement. Whatever rituals they want to keep secret, I would find it difficult to associate myself with such people. Still, it is accessibility that is the real problem. There is a club local to me, all male, where I have been prevented from walking through the front door. I was told to enter the clubhouse by the back door. There was a minimalist women’s changing area. But why have that if it is an all-male club?

I had first-hand experience at another all-male club local to me where I was invited to go for a drink. I was the only woman in the group. When we got to the front door of the clubhouse I stopped and pulled back. One lad, who was Swedish, told me to “carry on.” But I told him I couldn’t. Just then a window opened and I was told that I was “OK today.” So I went in. But when it was explained to the Swedish boy what was going on, he insisted we leave. So we went for a drink somewhere else.

All this said, I don’t want to diminish how really important it was that clubs like the R&A or HCEG did not get to run or host public events like the Open Championship in their previous forms. All that stuff cannot have done Scotland’s reputation any good internationally. We were figures of fun for a while, our image ruined. But if the HCEG owned an ordinary course and wanted to be all male I wouldn’t be averse to that. Their problem is the preeminence of the course and that only enhances their inability to leave the 19th century, never mind the 20th. There really was no rhyme nor reason for their continuing attitudes. They did it because they could, I guess. The good news is everybody is moving on.

PROGRESS
Some clubs are doing well because they are adapting to the new model. They offer a big proposition to members and guests, based on the American model. You can wander anywhere wearing jeans, golf shoes, rain wear. In the more traditional model there has been little change. I haven’t seen any.

Jane Barlow/PA Images

What I can’t understand is why golf clubs sit empty when members will get in their cars and drive miles to sit in coffee houses. I don’t subscribe to the notion that members have stopped using the clubhouse because of changes to local breathalyser laws. It is just outmoded and outdated. I increasingly tend to just play and go, but for me that is a time issue. Even so, for many reasons I just don’t see people going into the clubhouse any more, certainly not at weekends.

The best part of golf-club membership is the feeling of community. Everyone has the same passion for the game, so there is great opportunity to make new friends. There have always been people within clubs who would go out of their way to make that happen. They give selflessly of their time to make new members welcome. But that is also the worst of golf. There are lots of people who give their time but they are also rules fascists or “can’t doers.” They are as big an obstacle as any when it comes to golf moving forward.

Sad to say, I’ve almost given up trying to make a difference in golf. I feel like I’ve been banging my head off a brick wall. Golf trundles on in the same old direction. And to make it turn would take an enormous amount of effort, coordinated effort. There are too many people with too many conflicting interests. I’m not sure we will ever see complete equality.

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