The Case for All-male Golf Clubs

Posted on May 21, 2016 by David Owen

Marion Hollins, the captain of the first American Curtis Cup team and the founder of Women’s National Golf & Tennis Club. (Photo by Puttnam/Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The men-only membership policy of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews was scandalous and indefensible, since the R & A is the main worldwide governing body for all of golf. But the men-only membership policy of Muirfield is not, since the tournament it will no longer be allowed to host, the British Open, is also men-only. Why shouldn’t a sports event whose participants are all of one sex be held at a sports club whose members are also all of that sex?

I wrote about this issue in Golf Digest thirteen years ago, when the controversy involved Augusta National and the Masters. The bitterest argument then was that the absence of women from the membership of any golf club is, ipso facto, the sexual equivalent of racism. At that time, the Rev. Jesse Jackson described men-only membership as “gender apartheid,” and said, “The gender bigotry is as offensive as racial bigotry or religious bigotry.” Others made essentially the same claim: that operating a social club whose membership includes no women is morally indistinguishable from operating a social club (or a society) that excludes blacks or Jews.

Yet Jackson’s accusation depended on a false analogy, and on his own (willful) muddling of the possible reasons for making distinctions between human beings. Racism is a belief in nonexistent racial differences, especially ones that imply the inferiority of one race in comparison with another. Sexism is more complicated, because genuine, non-prejudicial differences between men and women really do exist. (Maintaining separate restrooms for whites and blacks is morally repugnant; maintaining separate restrooms for males and females is not—and the current debate about restroom access for transgender people underscores that truth, since the one thing both sides agree about is that the differences are monumentally important.) Indeed, one of the transforming accomplishments of American feminism has been to foster a broader appreciation of the meaningful ways in which men and women are not the same. Women who prefer to be treated by female physicians, or to join women-only health clubs, or to be represented by female divorce attorneys aren’t guilty of “gender apartheid”; their preferences merely reflect the fact that they, like men, have needs and emotions and desires that are not sex blind.

If you aren’t tired of this issue already, you can read my entire argument here.

Marion Hollins and Maureen Orcutt, 1932.(Photo by J. Gaiger/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

Marion Hollins and Maureen Orcutt, in England for the first Curtis Cup, 1932. (Photo by J. Gaiger/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

Phil Mickelson’s Open Victory and the Difficulty of Mentally Influencing the Outcome of Recorded Sporting Events

Posted on July 21, 2013 by David Owen

Rick Hunt, a reader, was at the Open both days this weekend. He took this photo on Saturday

In 2006, my wife and our two children and I flew from New York to Las Vegas so that we could rent an R.V. and spend ten days visiting the remarkable national parks in southern Utah and northern Arizona, after first taking a guided tour of the greatest man-made object in the universe, the Hoover Dam.

Me, standing in awe before one of the many fascinating dioramas in the visitors’ center at the Hoover Dam, June, 2006.

Our flight coincided almost exactly with the final round of the 2006 U.S. Open, and because I am a good father I grumbled very little about having to spend the afternoon traveling with my loved ones rather than lying on the couch at home and staring at the TV. My saintly attitude was rewarded during the flight: there were video screens in the backs of the seats on our plane, and I got to watch the tournament anyway. In fact, the broadcast lasted almost exactly as long as the flight. The picture broke up as we were touching down at McCarran International Airport, in Vegas, but by then the tournament was all but over. Phil Mickelson had just pushed his tee shot on the final hole into the corporate tents to the left of the eighteenth fairway, but he had the thing sewn up, and, besides, the guy’s a magician. Good show, Phil!

The next morning, in my wife’s and my room at the Bellagio (or wherever), I turned on the TV to watch Open highlights. Weirdly, the guys on Golf Central weren’t talking about Mickelson; they were talking about Geoff Ogilvy, whom I scarcely remembered having noticed during my life, much less during the broadcast the day before. Suddenly, I worried that what I had watched on the plane had been not a live program but a videotape of some historical triumph of Mickelson’s. It took me five minutes of careful Golf Channel viewing to figure out what had happened.

Naturally, I blamed myself for Mickelson’s last-hole double-bogey, since I was mentally rooting for him toward the end of the tournament, and the in-flight broadcast cut out at the moment when he needed me most. And this week I blame myself for his victory, at Muirfield, because I wanted Tiger Woods to win but was unable to mentally undermine his opponents: instead of watching the golf tournament on TV, I was (selfishly) playing in a golf tournament of my own.

Rick Hunt, at the Open. If I'd been there myself, I might have had better luck influencing the outcome.

Rick Hunt, at the Open. If I’d been there myself, I might have had better luck at influencing the outcome.

Influencing the outcome of televised sporting events is harder than many people believe, because a technique that brings victory today may have the opposite effect tomorrow. Mumbling obscenities, swaying hypnotically, and making hula-like hand motions in front of the screen will usually keep a long putt from going in—especially if the hole remains on camera and the putter is Lee Westwood—but the same method sometimes fails disastrously, perhaps by accidentally nudging an errant ball onto the correct line.

Curiously, the best method for salvaging victory when things are going poorly is to turn off the TV—a tactic whose effectiveness is explained by quantum mechanics: unless they are observed directly, athletic competitions, like muons and mesons, exist in all possible states simultaneously. Turning off the TV during a big tournament restores the universe’s indifference to the final score, thereby giving Tiger (let’s say) a chance to rediscover his swing. This quantum effect may also explain why viewers are able to influence even videotaped sporting events—as long as the viewers don’t know in advance how everything came out.

For that reason, I had planned to remain ignorant of the Open outcome so that I could watch a recording of the final round when I got home and bring in the winner I wanted. Sadly, though, as I was standing in line at the scorer’s table I overheard some guy telling some other guy that Mickelson had won.

I watched the recording anyway, but without much enthusiasm. I had to hit the mute button many times, because the announcers were so annoying, and I found myself wishing that someone would invent an app (or whatever) that would turn Curtis Strange’s accent into something less grating (converting nahn, fahn, and mahn into nine, fine, and mine, for example); would automatically bleep out the phrase “plenty of green to work with”; and would prevent Andy North from referring to Royal Birkdale, where the Senior Open Championship will be played next week, as a “links-style” golf course.

Hacker (real name), Royal Birkdale, May, 2010.

Four Miles From Muirfield is the Golf Course I Dream About

Posted on July 18, 2013 by David Owen

Four miles, as the golf ball flies.

If my wife ever throws me out of the house and they won’t let me move into the Crow’s Nest at Augusta National, I’m going to hide out in North Berwick, Scotland, just a few miles along the coast from Muirfield Golf Club. I’ve played North Berwick pretty many times over the years, and it’s probably the course I think about the most, except for my home course. Among the many permanently memorable holes is the thirteenth, a par-four, on which the green is on the far side of a very old stone wall:

Thirteenth green, North Berwick Golf Club, Scotland, May, 2008.

On a visit in 2004, I missed the green to the right and tried to chip through an opening:

I missed the gap, and then l was really in trouble. During two of my most recent visits to North Berwick, I stayed in a small hotel overlooking the course, called Blenheim House. Sad to say, the young couple who owned it, Milton and Ailsa, gave up last year and sold it to someone else. I don’t know if it’s back in business.

R.I.P.: Blenheim House Hotel, North Berwick, May, 2008.

One of the great things about that hotel was that you could get to the golf course simply by walking through a gate in the back garden:

Here’s the gate, viewed from the golf-course side. The people in the windows are eating breakfast:

During the relatively few daylight moments when I wasn’t playing golf, I gazed at the golf course from the window in my room. Here’s what I saw:

The cylindrical stone building at the far right is the starter’s shelter; the semi-subterranean white structure just to the left of it is the golf shop. The eighteenth green is at the far left, and the clubhouse is out of the picture to the left of that. The opening tee shot at North Berwick usually calls for something like a five-iron, and the second is essentially blind, and several of the other holes are almost as unusual. When I looked out my window one morning, before breakfast, I saw a guy walking a dachshund just east of the course:

Here’s what my room looked like. As you can see from the size of the suitcase, this was before I had realized I could cram all the clothes I need for an overseas golf trip into a carry-on bag:

One afternoon in 2007, when I was in Scotland on a Golf Digest assignment, I teed off at North Berwick by myself. After a few holes I was joined by an old man, who had come through a gate leading to one of the houses overlooking the course. He had lost his wife sixteen years before, he said. He walked along with me and asked me questions and held the flag while I putted, and I played really well for as long as he was there. He said that if someone offered him a plane ticket to New York he would go in five minutes, and I briefly considered trying to work out a temporary life swap. He said that he had once been to Chicago, and that while he was there a shoeshine man had asked him if he was French. He said no, Scottish, and the shoeshine man said, “You speak English very well.”

On the fourteenth hole, the old man and I caught up to and joined three Swedes. He knew them already, because he had run into them the night before, in the bar at the Blenheim. They were part of a group of six, and they had played Muirfield the previous day, and they were going home in the morning. One of them said that the flight from Edinburgh to Stockholm was just an hour, and that he would be going straight from the airport to his office—a thought that made everyone temporarily adopt a grim facial expression. The old man walked along with us until he got back to his gate. It turned out that he was very interested in Swedish girls, and other girls.

That night, I stayed not at Blenheim House but at the Mallard Hotel, in Gullane. Incidentally, “Berwick” is pronounced BARE-ick, and “Gullane” us pronounced GILL-en. There are three golf courses in Gullane: No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3. Muirfield Golf Club is virtually next door and can be seen from the top of Gullane Hill, and a caddie at Gullane once described it to me as Gullane No. 4—although Muirfield members don’t think of themselves that way.

I ate dinner that night at a pub called the Old Clubhouse. Directly across the street from both the pub and my hotel was the Gullane Golf Club’s six-hole children’s course, which costs nothing to play, as long as you’re not an adult. As I walked to dinner, I saw a man and his nine- or ten-year-old daughter. He was teeing up balls for her, and she was hitting the most gorgeous draws with a driver. She was hitting from a tee toward a green, but she was using the hole as a driving range. What a swing! And beyond the children’s course I could see Gullane No. 1 and No. 2.

First green, Gullane No. 1, looking back toward town. The knobby thing at top right overlooks North Berwick and is visible in the photo with the rainbow, below.

First green, Gullane No. 1, looking back toward town. The knobby thing at top right overlooks North Berwick and is also visible in the photo with the rainbow, below.

The next year, I went back to Scotland with eight friends from home, and we spent the first two nights of the trip in North Berwick. On the second day, we saw this:

And that evening we saw this:

I almost feel picking a fight with my wife, to see if I can’t tempt her to give me the boot.

How to Get Properly Inebriated at the British Open

Posted on July 15, 2013 by David Owen

Muirfield Golf Club. Lunch, anyone?

In 1891, the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers—the world’s oldest golf organization, whose members created the game’s first written rules, in 1744—moved from Musselburgh to Muirfield, a short distance to the east, and hired Old Tom Morris to create a private course for them. Today, Muirfield Golf Club has a deserved reputation for being tough on Open competitors and an undeserved reputation for being hostile to visiting Americans. It’s true that outsiders are limited to specific tee times on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but the club actually welcomes thousands of unaccompanied non-members every year, and you can now make your reservations online. Once the Open crowd has cleared out (and the tournament rough has been harvested and fed to area livestock), you should go.

The modern Muirfield is mostly the work of Harry S. Colt, who reshaped and enlarged Morris’s layout in 1928, and Tom Simpson, who removed a hundred of Colt’s bunkers a few years later. (The first three holes follow the routing of Morris’s first four; the rest are different.) The course is every bit as good as people say it is, although the most appealing activity on the grounds may be not playing golf but hanging around the clubhouse. A few years ago, Alastair Brown, the secretary, described Muirfield to me (over lunch) as “a lunching club with a golf course attached to it,” and a playing partner at a course nearby described it to me as “a retirement place for men who like to get pissed and play golf.” An ideal day at Muirfield, Brown said, was once described as “two-and-a-half, two-and-a-half, two-and-a-half”: a brisk 18-hole foursomes match in the morning, followed by a two-and-a-half-hour lunch, followed by a brisk 18-hole foursomes match in the afternoon. George Pottinger, in a history of the club published in 1972, described one former captain as “a great post-lunch player”—a compliment that presumably had less to do with his skill as a golfer than with his ability to handle alcohol.

In the United States, foursomes is usually known as Scotch foursomes or alternate shot; it’s the signature game at Muirfield. Members play it fast: you walk up the fairway while your partner is hitting his drive, and you don’t wait for him or anyone else before playing the next shot. Hitting just half the shots gets the non-lunch portions of the day over faster, and ensures that someone always has a hand free to hold the kümmel, a clear, anise-and-fennel-flavored beverage, which is sometimes called the golfer’s liqueur. (It’s also a favorite at Prestwick and Troon, two other Scottish clubs where foursomes is a cherished game.)

The golfer’s liqueur.

Muirfield has its own handicapping system, named after C. J. Y. Dallmeyer, a club captain in the 1950s, who invented it: if you go three-up in a match, you give strokes to your opponents until you’re back to one-up. Dallmeyer also initiated a heavily lunch-oriented New Year’s Day tournament, called the Captain’s Frolic, in which serious drinking is virtually mandatory. (The rules of the competition, Pottinger wrote, are “as hilarious as possible.”) Brown told me, “The way the members play golf is the antithesis of championship golf.” The paradox, of course, is that championship golf is also a club specialty, and has been for more than a century.

You have to wear a jacket and tie in the Muirfield dining room, but the atmosphere in the entire club is seductively informal. The gate looks imposing, but there’s no bag drop and there are no guys standing around waiting to wipe off your clubs. You change your shoes in the locker room and get on with it, and even visitors are encouraged to linger. In the dining room, no table has fewer than six chairs, an arrangement that forces groups of golfers to mix, and the food is served cafeteria-style. And diners who don’t live in fear of their cardiologists sometimes bypass lunch itself and move straight from the bar to the dessert table, where the specialties include rhubarb crumble, sticky toffee pudding, and ice cream from S. Luca of Musselburgh, a locally famous dairy—which might be a good place to stop on your way back to your hotel, assuming you’re still in a condition to find it.

S. Luca’s original location.

More About Foursomes: Muirfield, Troon, Prestwick, and Kümmel

Posted on May 31, 2012 by David Owen

The golfer's liqueur.

In 2009, I played a round at Muirfield, in eastern Scotland, where the Open Championship will be held in 2013. Alastair Brown, the secretary, described it to me (over lunch) as “a lunching club with a golf course attached to it.” A member, he said, once described an ideal day at Muirfield as “two-and-a-half, two-and-a-half, two-and-a-half”: a two-and-a-half-hour 18-hole foursomes match in the morning, followed by a two-and-a-half-hour lunch, followed by a two-and-a-half-hour 18-hole foursomes match in the afternoon.

In the United States, foursomes is usually known as Scotch foursomes or alternate shot, and it’s often a prelude to divorce; at Muirfield, it’s the signature game. Hitting just half the shots gets the non-lunch portions of the day over faster, and ensures that someone always has a hand free to hold the kümmel, a clear, anise-and-fennel-flavored beverage, which is sometimes called the golfer’s liqueur. “The way the club’s members play golf is the antithesis of championship golf,” Brown told me—and he meant that as praise. Muirfield has its own foursomes handicapping system, named after C. J. Y. Dallmeyer, a club captain in the 1950s, who invented it: if you go three-up in a match, you give strokes to your opponents until you’re back to one-up. Dallmeyer also initiated a heavily lunch-oriented New Year’s Day tournament, called the Captain’s Frolic.

Foursomes is also a historically significant game at Royal Troon and Prestwick, two other courses on the Open Rota, on Scotland’s west coast. Every year, members of the two clubs play a cross-country foursomes match over both courses, which abut each other. Half the field starts on the first tee at Prestwick, and half starts on the first tee at Troon. Everyone plays to the eighteenth green on the other course, breaks for lunch, and then plays all the way back. The two members I played with at Troon told me that, usually, a team scores better if it starts at Prestwick, because a typical Prestwick lunch includes so much alcohol that golfers who make the turn there sometimes have trouble finding their way home.

Before lunch, Royal Troon, May, 2009. I'm standing on the tee of the famous Postage Stamp. That's the green by my right arm.

Muirfield has an undeserved reputation for hostility to outsiders. It’s true that visitors are limited to specific tee times on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but the club actually welcomes thousands of unaccompanied non-members every year, and you can make reservations online. You have to wear a jacket and tie in the dining room, but the atmosphere is seductively informal, and even visitors are encouraged to linger. No table has fewer than six chairs, an arrangement that forces groups of golfers to mix, and the food is served cafeteria-style. Diners who don’t live in fear of their cardiologists sometimes bypass lunch itself and move straight from the bar to the dessert table, where the specialties include rhubarb crumble, sticky toffee pudding, and ice cream from S. Luca of Musselburgh, a locally famous dairy.

Muirfield’s locker room has modern, car-wash-caliber showers, like the ones at Merion and Pine Valley, but the other amenities are distinctly old-school, among them a pair of wooden dressing tables, each furnished with a shaving mirror, a nail file on a chain, and a single hairbrush and comb (and no beaker of blue Barbicide). And the members’ locker room at Prestwick is even cooler. Ninety of the lockers there date back to 1877. They look like Queequeg’s coffin.

My Usual Game: David Owen

ADVENTURES IN GOLF

Tag Archives: Muirfield

The Case for All-male Golf Clubs

Phil Mickelson’s Open Victory and the Difficulty of Mentally Influencing the Outcome of Recorded Sporting Events

Four Miles From Muirfield is the Golf Course I Dream About

How to Get Properly Inebriated at the British Open

More About Foursomes: Muirfield, Troon, Prestwick, and Kümmel