IN A DRAMATIC fashion, Tiger Woods won the Masters on Sunday. In so doing, Woods became the first professional golfer ever to win four consecutive "major" titles - the PGA Championship, the British Open, the U.S. Open and the Masters.
Standing in the Augusta National clubhouse with Johnson, Vijay Singh, last year's champion, gave the green jacket to Woods. Amazingly, the number of non-Caucasians in the clubhouse at that time - two - equaled the number of black members currently enrolled at Augusta.
The Masters is played at one of the most beautiful courses in America. Its field is usually one of the strongest in the country. For those who have any interest in golf, it is truly an event to watch. However, CBS's ignorance of the discriminatory history of the Augusta golf club and how that discrimination has continued until today insults the tournament's audience.
Like most private country clubs, Augusta had explicit segregationist policies in place throughout the first half of the 20th century. The exclusion of black golfers continued in practice beyond the Civil Rights era. In fact, no black golfer was invited to play in the Masters until 1974, when Lee Elder broke one of the last color lines in professional sports. Woods' victory in 1997 marked the first win by a minority golfer in a major championship.
One might think that, between Elder's entry into the tournament in 1974 and Woods' victory in 1997, the Augusta National golf club would have integrated its membership in some fashion. One would be quite wrong.
At present, the club has a list of over 300 members. A mere three of those members qualify as minorities: Ron Townsend, Bill Simms and the illustrious Tiger Woods. If you subtract the one whose membership rests on his ability to play great golf, that leaves two minority members of Augusta National that don't happen to be one of the best 10 golfers in the world. Also, Augusta National happens to lack any women on its membership roster.
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In short, Augusta has a horrifically segregationist past. It has continued that past by having all of 0.6 percent of its members be minorities and having none of them be women.
Admittedly, this kind of segregationist past is not unique among sports. Neither professional hockey, the coaching ranks of professional football, nor auto racing are pariahs of integration. However, in these areas, at least media scrutiny appears occasionally to question these sports' involvement with racial and sex-based issues.
In the case of Augusta National, CBS, the official broadcaster of the Masters, has pretended that God Almighty placed the fairways, the tree-lines, and the greens of this course.
CBS carries on this way for obvious reasons. It wants to keep its right to broadcast the tournament. As the first major tournament of the year, the Masters brings a substantial ratings draw to whichever network broadcasts it. Augusta National guards the television rights to the Masters jealously, and one may see its control over what happens in the tournament's broadcasts.
CBS constantly appeals to the beauty and the history of the Masters. It has run repeated montages of Jack Nickalus and Bobby Jones, two legends of golf. In one video package, Dick Enberg discussed how it was Bobby Jones' desire to make sure amateurs had an opportunity to play in the Masters. As Mr. Jones had these ideas in the 1930s, one may assume that he didn't necessarily think black amateurs qualified. At the least, Augusta National members wouldn't have thought as much. CBS, in its continuous appeals to the vaunted magic of Augusta and its supposedly educated crowds, has attempted to take the good things about past tournaments - exciting finishes, unbelievable putts and the like - without even acknowledging blatant past problems that continue to play a role in the way the club is managed.
By trying to have it both ways in terms of the tournament's history, CBS has implicitly put forward the idea that because something is historical, it's automatically a great thing. It has revised elements of the past by actively ignoring the segregationist nature of golf that has been in existence at Augusta National for decades.
The whole process is insulting, and CBS should be ashamed for its cowardice.
(Seth Wood's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at swood@cavalierdaily.com.)
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