PC BULLIES WON'T WIN AUGUSTA

Ian Wooldridge

Last updated at 00:00 20 November 2002

EVERY spring for the past 19 years I have had the luck to cover the United States Masters Golf Championship at the Augusta National Club in Georgia.

On the three occasions she accompanied me, my wife was treated like a duchess.

She could breakfast in the clubhouse, lunch on the privileged enclosure of the lawn and drink champagne all evening if she wished at the Saturday reception always thrown for British journalists plus our wives, partners or some cocktail waitress we'd picked up in a bar.

What she couldn't do, if such a notion ever entered her head, was to become a member. The Augusta National doesn't have women members.

This is not good enough for Ms Martha Burk, who couldn't distinguish a golf ball from a gull's egg. It is not good enough for Reverend Jesse Jackson, a selfconfessed adulterer.

It is certainly not good enough for the New York Times, that organ of political correctness, which ran an editorial on Monday with the preposterous insistence that Tiger Woods, the world's greatest golfer, should withdraw from next April's Masters tournament in protest.

Woods, being black in a predominantly white game, knows a thing or two about discrimination and is keeping out of this one. 'A private organisation,' he says, 'can make its own rules.' Down the years, this column has been none too polite about the Augusta National's autocracy but on this occasion stands squarely behind a club who allow women to stay with their husbands on the premises, play one of the most demanding courses on Earth, provided it is with a member, yet are being attacked by a pack of professional liberals who threaten trouble.

Take Martha Burk, who describes herself as 'a political psychologist and women's equity expert' and as such became chairman of the National Council of Women's Organisations.

Not only does she threaten the Augusta National with shrill invective next year but she has warned that she will stir up trouble for any of the major companies that pay big money to advertise in the commercial breaks during the tournament's telecasts.

Take the saintly priest, Jesse Jackson, who promises to line up protesters at the Augusta National's gates.

Frankly, these two don't seem quite au fait with the immense power and enormous wealth of this Georgia club. 'The Augusta National will not be bullied, threatened or intimidated,' said its chairman, William Johnson.

'Yes, some day it might invite women into membership but not at the point of a bayonet.' THEN, to scupper Ms Burk's plan to embarrass the television advertisers, he added: 'Next year there won't be any commercial breaks, we'll pay for the whole thing ourselves.' Let the argument about women and golf clubs commence but let's have none of this New York Times drivel about women being treated disrespectfully at the Augusta National. As I trust I have indicated, they are not.

And what a cheap shot it was to drag Tiger Woods into it. Maybe they're envious at his huge income and the fact that all his girlfriends have been gorgeous and white. But I expect they'd interpret that as a racist remark.

i.wooldridge@dailymail.co.uk

Hail the mad millionaires SO ANOTHER Pounds 22million goes sloshing into the briny as yet one more British yacht fails even to reach the finals of the America's Cup. It was ever thus since August 22, 1851, when the New York Yacht Club's America beat 14 British boats in a one-lap race round the Isle of Wight.

Queen Victoria, holidaying at Osborne House at the time, was at the finish line in Cowes.'Who came second?' she asked. 'Ma'am,' replied an aide, peering into the distance, 'there doesn't seem to be a second.' Disaster? Not at all.The America's Cup has generated some of sport's most enthralling literature: tales of reckless extravagance, treachery, skulduggery, industrial espionage, mysterious keels, high living, crazed eccentrics and even crazier entrepreneurs.

The line is long: Sir Thomas Lipton, Tommy Sopwith, Peter de Savary, right down to Peter Harrison, the internet tycoon who put Pounds 22m of his own money into this latest campaign off Auckland.

It failed.That's nothing new. But let's hoist a pennant and sound a gun salute for the man who put Britain back into the America's Cup after 15 years and swears he will have another try.

Mad they are, the lot of them, and our country is richer for it.

LEEDS UNITED won their first two matches under the managership of Terry Venables, the saviour from the south. Now, after a bad trot, he's being booed and disparaged by the same fans as some Cockney fly-boy and being urged to get on his bike.

Last week I received a courteous phone call from a Sportsmail reader who believed I had been unnecessarily carping about the abusive and occasionally violent conduct of a small section of football supporters.

It is because they are brainless, offensive and have not the faintest understanding of the concept of sport. Some you win, some you lose. Dispute that and they will go to their graves as morons.

FROM his first match there in 1931 (114 as captain of London Elementary Schools) until his last Lord's Test innings in 1955 (69 against South Africa), no batsman illuminated the ground with more glorious, if occasionally eccentric, stroke-play than Denis Compton.

To find the most appropriate memorial to the great entertainer, you'll have to travel a few miles west of London to Denham Golf Club where Denis, who died in 1997, enjoyed the course and bar for many years.

Brilliant idea. Some 200 square yards of the very turf on which he played have been carefully shovelled from the Lord's arena, now under massive reconstruction, and been re-laid in front of the Denham clubhouse, courtesy of the Marylebone Cricket Club.

The Denis Compton Lawn is to be officially opened next summer, followed by a dinner to raise funds for MCC's Youth Foundation programme.

IN THE later years of his oligarchic reign, my old friend Juan Antonio Samarach, president of the International Olympic Committee, preached that for survival the Olympics had to be cut down in size. Understandably.

There were 5,283 athletes and 21 disciplines at the 1980 Games, 10,960 athletes and 28 sports in Sydney in 2000.

Yet, paradoxically, he simultaneously kept adding sports to the programme because they appealed to his great cash cow, the television networks.

Next week his successor, Jacques Rogge, is confronted with the same problem. He is being urged to eject equestrianism and the modern pentathlon in favour of golf and rugby.

Mercifully it won't happen. Golf has its own four major championships per year and rugby has its own World Cup and could never generate the intensity at the Olympics that we have experienced, say, at Twickenham these past two weekends.

The best we can hope for, I fear, is the status quo.